In this Bit... a friend sends you a page from a 95-year-old copy of Variety and tells you to look in the lower-left corner.

The friend is , burlesque writer, director, performer & historian. “The Burlesque Mayor of New York City” currently researching the crusade against striptease in 1937. The message he sends is short and right to the point: “Lower left seemed like it was up your alley.”

Curious, I take a peek…

And tucked at the bottom of page 45 of the June 2, 1931 issue of Variety, is a tiny headline: GASSED VET CONFESSES KILLING BLANCHE SOMERS

Well, shit…

Jonny was right.

But it wasn’t the gassed vet who caught my attention... It was Blanche.

Okay, who the hell was Blanche Somers?

Turns out, that’s a much better story. Because before she became a name buried in the lower-left corner of an old trade magazine, Blanche Somers had been billed as the “Baltimore Blues Singer,” worked the vaudeville stage, and by 1931 was working the Bowery as a burlesque soubrette at the People’s Theatre. And the man whose murder confession put her name in Variety?

He was a burlesque comic.

So... let’s go to the Bowery.

Not Broadway…

This was April 1931. The country was two years into the Great Depression, and the Bowery was already becoming synonymous with cheap lodging houses, missions, breadlines, and unemployed men with nowhere else to go.

But it was STILL a show-business street.

Beneath the elevated trains, theaters carried on an entertainment tradition that stretched back decades. At 199–201 Bowery, between Spring and Delancey Streets, stood the People’s Theatre.

It had seen different kinds of entertainment come and go.

Now it was burlesque.

And in the spring of 1931, one of the women working there was Blanche Somers.

Before Blanche Became a Headline

If you try, like me, to meet Blanche Somers through the newspaper archives, you’re going to have one helluva time figuring out exactly who you’re meeting…

She’s 21…

Nevermind, she’s 23.

oh wait, no, she’s 26.

28?!?

Another article: she’s 30…

She’s an actress, a vaudeville actress…. a blues singer…. a burlesque soubrette.

She’s Leander G. Stepp’s wife… No, his common-law wife.

Wait, his sweetheart… His lover… His …inamorata? (Look it up, I certainly did! Inamorato for the male.) It’s today's word of the day! *Bonus points if you work it into casual conversation before midnight.

Basically, depending on which newspaper you pick up, Blanche Somers seems to change identities before you even reach the bottom of the column.

But, go back thirty-one years and things get quieter... On June 19, 1900, a census taker made his way through Somerset County, Maryland, and recorded a three-month-old baby girl born that March. Her name on the page is Blanch Ward.

There’s just one problem. Her last name wasn’t Ward, or, at least, the other records don’t suggest that it was. Blanche’s father was Augustus Somers, or Sommers, depending on the record, and we can trace him in Somerset County before Blanche was born, already under the Somers/Sommers name. Her mother was Julia Frances Ward. Yet somehow, on the 1900 census, Julia’s surname appears to have swallowed the entire damn household. Father Augustus is Ward. Mother Julia is Ward and their children are Ward.

Whether the census-taker misunderstood the family, and copied Julia’s surname across the whole household, or was told something we no longer understand, I can’t say.

But there she is: ‘Lil baby Blanch, three months old, born in Maryland in March 1900…
A Pisces… an artistic sign, the empathetic-to-a-fault sign, the go-with-the-flow sign, the gets-associated-with-dreams sign. (If you believe in that stuff)

But most importantly that little census entry gives us something the newspapers couldn’t seem to manage: her age.

Blanche Somers was thirty-one when she died.

There’s also a Baltimore marriage-license notice: Maurice O. Stewart Jr., 22, of 1017 Compton Street, intending to marry one Blanche Sommers, 19; a marriage that would last roughly eleven years before they separated.

We also know Maurice Stewart was real. Blanche’s obituary would still identify him as her husband, saying the two had separated about three years before her death… separated, not divorced.

Blanche was also a mother...

Her own mother, Julia Somers, told a reporter there were two children: Maurice Jr., 10, and Ancel, 8, being cared for back home at 1209 Wall Street while Blanche was in New York. The same interview places Blanche leaving Baltimore around April 1, just over three weeks before she died.

Somewhere between being a young bride in Baltimore, a wife and mother, and the woman who arrived in New York in 1931, something else happened:

Blanche Somers became a performer.

And onstage, Blanche became Goldie.

Her Baltimore funeral notice would later identify her plainly as “Blanche Stewart, known on the stage as Goldie Somers.”

The “Baltimore Blues” Singer

Exactly when and how Goldie found her way onto the stage is the part of Blanche’s story we’ll probably never know...

The newspapers give us fragments. They call her a vaudeville actress. They call her a blues singer. And again and again they give her a wonderfully specific billing: the Baltimore Blues Singer. One account puts her in the chorus of Baltimore’s Clover Theatre, a combination movie-and-vaudeville house… for seven years.

The Clover Theatre wasn’t subtle about what that work looked like.

Its own classified ads asked for chorus girls with no experience necessary "We instruct you. Salary $18 week" the kind of recruitment that filled a stage with untrained labor and called it entertainment. The theater also had a habit of ending up in court. Its owner, Benjamin Livingston, was fined more than once for "producing an indecent performance," alongside performers hauled in after police attended a show on citizen complaints. It was, in other words, an ordinary Baltimore vaudeville house of its kind… cheap, precarious, occasionally raided, and never quite respectable enough to stay out of the papers for the right reasons.

One document backs up the newspapers’ billing, at least.

In April 1930, a census taker found Blanche living in her sister Lillian’s household in Baltimore, her two young sons listed as nephews under their aunt’s roof. Her occupation, recorded plainly by a stranger with a clipboard: Actress. Industry: Theater.

It’s the only government document in this whole file that records, OFFICIALLY, what Blanche did for a living.

According to that account, Blanche had spent seven years at the Clover. Her old colleagues remembered her as hardworking, someone who took her pay home rather than spending it, someone with two kids waiting. Nobody there could explain why she’d left with Stepp. They’d tried to warn her about him.

And by April 1931, Blanche was in New York and appearing at the People’s Theatre, 199–201 Bowery. One account describes her more specifically as a “featured soubrette.”

That’s a pretty important word.

In burlesque, a soubrette wasn’t simply another synonym for what we’d now call a stripper. The soubrette belonged to the show’s comic and musical machinery… a lively performer expected to sing, dance, act, and play within the comedy. In the trade’s own vernacular, she was also a “grinder,” the term for a performer who worked the runway wiggle dances that were burlesque’s other main draw.

Twenty days before she died, Blanche walked into the People’s Theatre.

“Didn’t come from an agency,” the manager said afterward. “Just dropped by and asked for work.”

She got the job. And at the People’s Theatre, Blanche had a comedian…

His name was Leander G. Stepp.

A surviving Army transport record places Private Leander Gustavious Stepp departing New York on March 16, 1918, assigned to the Medical Department of the 54th Coast Artillery. The newspapers would later repeatedly describe him as having been gassed during the war… I haven’t found a military medical record that independently confirms that part. But the transport record confirms something more basic:

He went. Seven months of war still lay ahead of him.

After the war, the papers pick up his story somewhere very different: burlesque actor, burlesque comedian, a fixture at the People’s Theatre on the Bowery donning a red wig, greasepaint, the resident clown pulling laughs out of an audience that really didn’t have much else to laugh about.

By 1931, Blanche Somers and Leander Stepp weren’t merely a couple caught up in some story adjacent to burlesque.

They were burlesque people.

And in early April, she came to New York. One account says Blanche had been appearing at the People’s Theatre since April 8. She had fellow performers there: Elaine Novak, Vera Franklin, Cookie Lee. She also had a dressing room, a show.

And on April 24, 1931, that exact show was waiting for its Baltimore Blues Singer.

But Blanche didn’t arrive.

“Whatsamatter?”

This may be the detail that stopped me more than any of the lurid headlines that followed…

The telephone rang at the St. George Hotel. Someone from the People’s Burlesque Theatre was calling. It was curtain time. Their star hadn’t shown up.

So where was Blanche?

The hotel already knew… Blanche Somers was dead. She had been killed in the room she shared with Leander Stepp. And the reason anyone knew that, was because Stepp had walked into a police station and told them.

There was a version before that one, though… a version only one paper I’ve found bothered to record what had happened. And what had happened was…She’d been standing at her own mirror, applying makeup, when he wound the bathrobe cord around her neck. Afterward, Stepp arrived at the station, exhausted from running, a police sergeant looked at him and asked a simple question: “What’s your business?”

“Oh… I’m a comedian,” Stepp said.

The sergeant laughed.

The newspapers spent the following days giving Stepp plenty of room to explain himself. There had been an argument over money, he said. He claimed he'd accumulated $22,000 over the last five years, before, he said, “the Depression caught up with the stage” and that “Blanche had spent it, all of it, in six weeks.” Money that, according to police, he'd kept in his socks, mainly because he didn't trust banks.

The details shifted paper to paper: one version had her “demanding more,” another had her threatening to leave him, another said they'd argued over how much each had loaned the other, another had him growing suspicious she was giving the money to another man.

By the end, he said, the two of them were living on the $30-a-week salary she earned singing blues songs in a burlesque theater, in a run-down hotel room where the rent itself was already overdue.

Those were Leander Gustavus Stepp’s explanations.

Blanche wasn’t around to give hers.

And that distinction matters, because the further the story traveled, the more the newspapers turned a murdered woman into some character in the killer’s story. She nagged… She squandered his money... She wanted another man.... She was leaving him. And those headlines went to work:

And then, because apparently even murder required theatrical billing:

The Baltimore Blues Singer had become copy.

The Women in the Dressing Room

One newspaper photograph from the aftermath doesn’t show Blanche at all. I think that’s why I keep coming back to it.

Three women are gathered in the dressing room at the People’s Theatre. The caption identifies Elaine Novak and Vera Franklin, and Cookie Lee. They’re looking over a note Blanche had left. They’re dressed in her dressing room: feathers… costumes… makeup. The show-business machinery that had surrounded Blanche was still sitting there after Blanche was gone.

Nobody wrote down what the note said. WHAT’S IN THAT NOTE???

Suddenly the names in the newspaper aren’t abstractions anymore. These were women who knew her. Women who shared a backstage with her. Women who expected Blanche Somers to walk through the door.

She never did.

Blanche Goes Home

Within days, Blanche’s brother came to New York. His name was Arza and he came to claim his baby sister.

Back in Baltimore, at the family home on Wall Street, Blanche’s mother was reportedly on the verge of collapse. “Goldie is the first of my children to be taken from me,” Julia Somers told a reporter, between sobs. “It is too much. I cannot talk about it.”

Her grandsons: Maurice and Ancel, 10 and 8, knew only that “something bad has happened to mother.”

Blanche’s body was returned to Maryland. Her obituary stripped away some of the contradictory labels that had accumulated around her in the New York press and gave us pieces of the woman underneath.

Blanche was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Augustus Somers. She had a sister, Lillian, at whose home the funeral was held. She was separated from her husband, Maurice Stewart. She had family waiting for her in Maryland.

She was buried back home.

What Happened to Leander?

The papers covered Stepp hard for six weeks…. Then they stopped.

The same brief in Variety that started this whole Bit reports a grand jury indictment for murder in the second degree and Stepp’s commitment to the Tombs. After that, the newspaper trail I’ve found goes quiet. No verdict, no sentence.

What tells us at least part of what happened afterward isn’t another screaming headline.

It’s another census.

By 1940, Leander Stepp was an inmate at Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, New York's institution for people found unfit to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity.

He’s there again in the 1950 census, his surname apparently mis-transcribed in the index as “Sepp.” Whatever legal proceedings carried Stepp from the Tombs to Matteawan still need to be found, but the records put him there across at least a decade.

Stepp eventually died in 1971, at seventy-six, and was buried in Paris, Tennessee, under a family headstone with his parents and brother.

Someone, at some point, brought him home.

Blanche had gone home in 1931. By the time Leander finally did too, forty years had passed. But her story hadn't gone anywhere at all.

Ninety-five years later, Blanche was still there.

Lower left…
Page 45.

A few small paragraphs underneath a headline about the man who killed her.

But now there was more.

The three-month-old on a 1900 census page. The teenage bride. The mother of two. Goldie Somers. The chorus girl who spent seven years at the Clover Theatre. The Baltimore Blues Singer. The soubrette whose fellow performers waited for her at the People’s Theatre on the Bowery.

All of that life behind two words buried in somebody else’s headline:

BLANCHE SOMERS.

95 years later, my phone buzzed from a notification... Jonny Porkpie had sent me an old copy of Variety.

“Lower left seemed like it was up your alley.”

Well, Jonny... You were right. Thank you. And now? Blanche Somers has a little more of her story back.

Burlesque Bits is inspired by the legacy of Charlie Uno’s original Billboard column (1930–1959), documenting the working conditions, economic realities, and forgotten performers of American burlesque. Using primary sources, trade publications, newspaper archives, census and vital records, and court documents where they exist, these stories look beyond performer mythology to the documented record, and at an industry shaped by labor exploitation, selective enforcement, and the people who actually worked inside it.

If you have additional information about any performers, venues, or incidents mentioned in these pieces, reach out. These stories deserve to be told right, and that only happens with more eyes on the record than mine.

On this one specifically: there are still holes. I still don’t know why Augustus Somers and his entire household were recorded under his wife Julia’s maiden name, Ward, in the 1900 census. I still haven’t found much of Blanche’s seven years at Baltimore’s Clover Theatre, or anything that puts Goldie Somers onstage while she was alive.

Whatever legal proceedings carried Stepp from the Tombs to Matteawan still need to be found. Maybe someday I’ll find them. But honestly? Leander had his press.

This one is about finding Blanche.

So if you’ve got something that helps me find more of Blanche / Goldie, that’s what I really want to see. That’s how this works. Thanks for reading.

Burlesque Bits… Stripped down.

Sources

Newspaper coverage, April–June 1931

• The Evening Sun (Baltimore, MD), “Blues Singer Is Murdered,” Apr. 24, 1931.

• Brooklyn Eagle (Brooklyn, NY), “Baltimore Singer Choked To Death,” Apr. 24, 1931.

• The Brooklyn Daily Times (Brooklyn, NY), “Blues Singer Murdered,” Apr. 24, 1931.

• Daily News (New York, NY), “Vaudeville Actor Strangles Actress in Room at Hotel,” Apr. 25, 1931.

• Evening Courier (Camden, NJ), “Guard Actress’ Strangler to Balk Suicide Attempt by Cell Noose,” Apr. 25, 1931.

• Times Herald (Washington, DC), “Actor in Court as Strangler,” Apr. 25, 1931.

• The Star Press (Muncie, IN), “Actor Kills Wife and Surrenders,” Apr. 25, 1931.

• Evening Star (Washington, DC), “Actor Kills Wife and Surrenders,” Apr. 25, 1931.

• Jacksonville Journal (Jacksonville, FL), “Lover Explains Strangle Death,” Apr. 25, 1931.

• Daily News (New York, NY), “Strangles Lover; Then Tells Police,” Apr. 26, 1931.

• The Fresno Bee (Fresno, CA), “Strangler Makes New Confession,” Apr. 26, 1931.

• The News (Paterson, NJ), follow-up coverage, Apr. 27, 1931.

• The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), Blanche Somers obituary, Apr. 27, 1931, p. 5.

• Daily News (New York, NY), follow-up coverage, Apr. 28, 1931.

• The Spokane Press (Spokane, WA), “Sweetie Strangles Soubrette In Row Over $18 Hotel Bill,” May 8, 1931.

• The Bee (Danville, VA), Gee Cohn, “Bowery Pagliacci Confronted By Shadow of Electric Chair,” May 11, 1931.

• Variety (New York, NY), “Gassed Vet Confesses Killing Blanche Somers,” June 2, 1931. (Thank you Jonny!!)

• Unidentified Baltimore newspaper, “Has Two Children Here, Mother of Victim Says,” c. Apr. 1931.

• The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), marriage-license notice, “STEWART/SOMMERS.”

Blanche Somers and family: genealogical records

• 1870 U.S. Federal Census, Lawson’s District, Somerset County, Maryland: Augustus Somers/Sommers family.

• 1880 U.S. Federal Census, Lawson’s District, Somerset County, Maryland: Augustus Somers/Sommers.

• 1900 U.S. Federal Census, Lawsons District, Somerset County, Maryland: Augustus Ward household; Blanche recorded as “Blanch,” born March 1900, age 3/12.

• U.S. City Directories, Baltimore, Maryland: Augustus Somers/Sommers, various years.

• Find a Grave records: Somers family burials.

• Ancestry.com: family tree, “Somers & Browne Family Tree” (mclund): profiles for Blanche Somers, Arza Augustus Somers, Augustus Sommers and Julia Frances Ward. Used as a research lead and cross-reference rather than as primary evidence.

Leander G. Stepp: military and genealogical records

• 1900 U.S. Federal Census, Calloway County, Kentucky: Leander Stepp household.

• 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Lincoln County, Idaho: Stepp family.

• U.S. Army Transport Service, Arriving and Departing Passenger Lists, 1910–1939: Private Leander Gustavious Stepp, Medical Department, 54th Coast Artillery; departure from New York, Mar. 16, 1918.

• U.S. Veterans Bureau Index Card: Leander Gustavious Stepp.

• Maine Marriage Record, Nov. 8, 1921: Leander G. Stepp and Manola Gertrude Blenis. (Removed from piece)

• 1940 U.S. Federal Census, Matteawan State Hospital, Dutchess County, New York: Leander Stepp.

• 1950 U.S. Federal Census, Matteawan State Hospital, Dutchess County, New York: Leander Stepp, indexed/mistranscribed as “Sepp.”

• Find a Grave Memorial #33118435: Leander Gustavious Stepp.

Other

• Humboldt Park Friends WWI Memorial: troop-transport material relating to numbered WWI transports. Contextual/corroborating source only; no evidence identifying Stepp’s vessel #506.

I opened my YouTube app and this was staring right at me... And all the feelings hit hard again. There are people who perform... and then, there are people who leave a mark on everyone lucky enough to share a stage with them.

Melissa "Bang Bang" Forgione was one of those people. Like a magical unicorn.

She was fearless, WILDLY creative, endlessly funny, and ALWAYS LATE TO REHEARSALS, MELISSA! LOL Yet somehow she made the impossible look... effortless. Whether she was choreographing, sewing costumes until the last minute, or stepping into the spotlight herself, she gave everything she had. EVERYTHING. As one of the co-founders, she helped shape the Peek-A-Boo Revue into what it became, and so much of her creativity still echoes through everyone who worked with her.

I still catch myself thinking, "Melissa would have loved this," or wondering what wonderfully ridiculous idea she'd have come up with next.

Time has a way of moving forward, but it doesn't erase the people who helped make us who we are. In that way, Melissa lives on... in the memories we share, the laughter we still hear, and the pieces of her that remain in all of us. I miss you, Bang Bang.

More than words in this post can say.

At barely eighty pages, I figured it would be a quick afternoon read. More than anything, I found myself wondering a simple question: Who was Libby Jones?

I expected a curious period artifact, instead, I stumbled onto one of the most intellectually surprising books in my entire collection, and down a rabbit hole that led far beyond the stage… so let's dig in.

In This Bit... a theater critic thought he was reviewing a striptease manual. What he was actually holding was a college course in performance, psychology, and survival written by one of burlesque’s greatest scholars.

In November of 1967, a theater critic for the Philadelphia Daily News sat down with a newly published, sexy slim paperback book titled Striptease and completely missed the point… Written by Libby Jones, one of the most prominent headliners of the mid-century American variety circuit, the volume was aggressively marketed by its publisher as an instructional guide to release the “sleeping seductress in your soul”. (Please and Thank you!) Well, the critic, expecting a cheap thrill or a salacious piece of pulp fiction, publicly grumbled that the book was nothing more than a “dull trifle,” completely devoid of titillation.

What he failed to realize is that he was not reading a piece of lowbrow smut, he was looking at a meticulously drafted curriculum.

Behind the stage name “Libby Jones” stood a scholar who had spent her entire career treating the “runway of joy” not as a site of exploitation, but as a masterclass in economic independence, performance psychology, and theatrical geometry. For nearly two decades, the public demanded a spectacle, while the woman on the marquee was quietly running the school.

Act I:
From Thomas Wolfe to Tempest Storm

Long before she was standard marquee copy for Minsky’s World Famous Burlesque, she was Adlyn Morris, a brilliant student who completed a grueling five-year honors program in English literature at the University of Washington. In the spring of 1953, she graduated magna cum laude, having successfully defended an academic thesis explicitly titled “On the effect of the autobiographical influence with special reference to Thomas Wolfe”.

But an Ivy-Tower intellect didn’t quite pay the bills in mid-century America…

Following graduation, Adlyn found herself trapped in the monotony of the secretarial pool, punching a typewriter as a stenographer at a West Coast aircraft plant. The work was a financial dead end. As an orphan, Adlyn was the sole anchor of her family, entirely responsible for supporting her thirteen-year-old sister, Susie. Facing a meager corporate wage of just $67.50 a week, she quickly realized that standard respectable labor would never allow her to provide for her sister’s education.

The turning point arrived on a dare over a Thanksgiving weekend…

Adlyn and a few office friends went to a local theater where the legendary Tempest Storm was headlining. Captivated by the power, showmanship, and staggering financial autonomy of the performers, Adlyn applied for a job on the spot.

She stepped onto the runway the very next night.

It was a calculated leap of economic survival. Her starting pay instantly jumped to $100 a week, a sum that allowed her to pull her little sister out of financial precarity and fund her tuition at a private Catholic girls’ boarding school. Adlyn Morris stepped back into the shadows and “Libby Jones, The Park Avenue Playgirl,” was born.

Act II: Walter Pater in the Dressing Room

By 1956, Libby was a bonafide star, commanding top billing at Minsky’s in Newark, where she weathered the brutal, continuous loops of the variety circuit from 11:00 AM until midnight. Within a few short years, she rose to become the fifth highest-paid exotic artiste in North America, pulling in a staggering $750 a week. She purchased a Steinway concert grand piano and filled a bulky personal scrapbook that perfectly captured her dual existence: the opening pages featured her fully gowned in her 1953 cap and gown, which gradually gave way to glamorous, increasingly unclothed promotional layouts.

Yet… she consistently baffled the entertainment reporters sent to profile her. In 1958, a correspondent for The Toronto Star observed her in her Manhattan dressing room between sets. While other dancers relaxed, Libby was slipping out to local bookstores to pick up custom-ordered volumes of essays by Walter Pater, the 19th-century Victorian aesthetician and purist who pioneered the concept of “art for art’s sake.”

Journalists openly struggled to reconcile the high-literary ivory tower with a woman who took off her clothes for a living. They failed to see that Libby viewed the entire apparatus of the striptease as a “glorious spoof”. She deliberately injected choreography, classical ballet training, and absolute restraint into her acts specifically to satirize the very audiences paying to look at her.

Act III: Invading the Lions’ Den

As the 1950s drew to a close, Libby took her intellectual defense of burlesque directly to the public square, launching a calculated lecture series before civic organizations across the country. In June of 1959, she stood before a sweltering, 90-degree room packed with the Royal Oak Lions Club in Michigan, wearing a modest white dress and delivering a psychological defense of the runway.

Two months later, in August of 1959, she took the rostrum at the Hotel Carter in Cleveland. Facing the local Lions Club, she wore a high-fashion Ceil Chapman frock, removing absolutely nothing but her elegant gloves. While the women in the audience admired her styling, Libby took direct aim at the elitism of the cultural gatekeepers.

“There’s a lot of talk these days about how the legitimate theater is dying—and ballet and opera and the concert hall, too,” Libby told the room. “These art forms, in many cases, exist only because they’re subsidized. Well, no one is subsidizing my profession.” To Libby, burlesque wasn’t a degraded or low form of art; it was honest, raw, unsubsidized commercial survival fueled entirely by public demand.

Act IV: The Voice of the Instructor

By the time Striptease reached bookstores in late 1967, America was in the midst of a cultural upheaval. The sexual revolution was reshaping conversations about femininity, liberation, and desire, while publishers eagerly packaged books that promised to unlock the "new woman." It was thee perfect moment to market Libby Jones' manual as another provocative bedside guide. But beneath the suggestive cover was something far less sensational… and far more enduring.

The publication was part of a broader expansion of her platform across print and audio. In 1962, Strand Records featured her on the cover of their LP Strip Along With Us, and her 1967 manual proved popular enough to be retitled and reissued internationally the following year as How to Undress in Front of Your Husband.

When Libby finally committed her decades of performance expertise to paper in her 1967 textbook, her natural voice as an educator completely dissolved the publisher’s sensationalized marketing. Flip past the introduction, and Striptease reveals itself as a highly structured, 80-page technical manual.

In these pages, Libby writes not as a siren, but as a pragmatist, a stage director, and a sports medicine coach.

In her “Do’s and Don’ts” section, she lectures her reader on audience psychology and room design, advising them to perform while a partner is still in their street clothes to avoid a “ho-hum-into-my-pajamas-end-of-another-day attitude.”

She acts as a technical director, commanding the reader to handle lighting intensity so that it flatters the skin without glaring in the eyes, and to always keep a stiff drink handy.

When detailing the mechanics of “The Lunge,” her sharp literary wit takes center stage. She instructs her student to master the physical transition seamlessly, warning that a routine must be “free of grunts and cricks” and “tempered with feminine sensuality.” She adds with a dry, unmistakable wink: “Your goal, after all, is not the Olympics.”

Her visual breakdowns further illustrate this clinical, pedagogical approach. In her beauty chapters, she rejects generic glamour in favor of geometric facial mapping. She drafts custom illustrations by Abigail Maucotel for The Trapezoid, The Circle, and The Rectangle face shapes, giving strict instructions on dark shadowing lines and jawline management. Upon reaching The Oval, she cannot resist an academic quip: “THE OVAL is perfect! Now the only thing for The Oval to avoid is a swelled head!”

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Professor

For decades, mainstream mid-century critics dismissed Libby Jones' work because they lacked the framework to actually understand it. They saw the marquee, the body measurements, and the theatrical billing, completely blinding themselves to the sharp, analytical mind directing the show.

The ultimate vindication of Adlyn Morris’ curriculum did not arrive from the critics of her own era, but from the iconic artists of the next century.

In November of 2012, Jo Weldon-author, historian, and founder of the modern New York School of Burlesque, unearthed a rare copy of Libby’s 1967 manual.

Weldon didn’t find a dated joke. She found a flawless, foundational textbook.

Flipping to page 53, Weldon recognized the exact pasties pattern, the highly specific buckram-and-cone measurement method, that she had independently spent years refining in her own contemporary studio. She found her own advanced earring-removal stage tricks already mapped out.

Nearly fifty years after a disappointed male critic sneered at Libby Jones’ instructional manual for being too “dull” and analytical, a modern headmistress validated her lesson plan.

Adlyn Morris had never turned her back on academia when she stepped onto the stage…

She had simply taken her podium with her.

Every theater became a lecture hall. Every audience became a classroom. And every performance was another lesson in psychology, economics, choreography, and survival.

Sources & Reference Notes

• Primary Newspaper Archives: Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph (1956), New York Daily News (1957), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1957), The Toronto Star (1958), Longview Daily News (1959), Post-Bulletin (1959), Buffalo Courier-Express (1959), The Cleveland Press (1959), Press of Atlantic City (1959), Philadelphia Daily News (1962).

• Primary Instructional Text: Jones, Libby. Striptease: The One How-To Book No Woman Should Be Without. Parallax / Simon & Schuster, 1967.

• Historical Analysis & Rediscovery: Weldon, Jo. “Recommended Reading: Striptease by Libby Jones.” Burlesque Daily, November 2012.

• Modern Curriculum & Further Reading: Weldon, Jo. The Burlesque Handbook. HarperCollins / It Books, 2010.

This is Burlesque Bits, continuing Charles Uno’s Billboard column legacy (1930-1959). We document American burlesque through primary sources, focusing on labor organizing, workplace conditions, and recovering stories of almost forgotten performers.

If you have photos, programs, clippings, family stories, or anything else connected to the performers and venues documented here, please reach out.

These histories survive because someone kept something.

Burlesque Bits. Stripped down.

At the time, I was celebrating what felt like a minor miracle: Episode 88 of The Peek-a-Boo Revue Podcast. When I launched the show on April Fool’s Day in 2009, I never imagined I’d still be recording six years later, much less wondering whether we’d someday make it all the way to Episode 89.

Listening to it now is a reminder of how different things felt. I always talked about shaking up the format, adding more interviews, recording more stories from the road, and finding new ways to tell burlesque history. Some of those ideas happened.

Some didn’t.

Others evolved into things I couldn’t have predicted at the time.

What strikes me most is how open-ended it all felt. In late 2015, I had no idea where the next decade would lead. I certainly didn’t know that I’d still be digging through burlesque history in 2026, chasing stories, collecting artifacts, and building Burlesque Bits into something far bigger than a podcast episode.

But here’s the funny part: listening back to these old recordings has reminded me how much I miss it.

The music. The interviews. The feeling of pulling up a chair and sharing a story.

So consider this a little audio time capsule, and maybe something else. Let’s call it a test balloon. Ecery song I added had some sort of root in burlesque, or just songs that I thought would be a good fit into an act.

Because if you’ve been wishing Burlesque Bits would find its way back into your headphones (don't lie), you might want to stay tuned. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about microphones again and bringing along a Peek-a-Boo Revue alum Christa D’Agger.

For now, enjoy… as it originally aired at the close of 2015. Ten years later, it feels less like an ending and more like the opening act.

Track List

• “Blue Tip” — The Cars

• “Friends of P” — The Rentals

• “Let’s Find Out” — Armando Trovajoli

• Burlesque Bit from Burlesque, With the Nuts Inside

• “Drum Brakes” — Hal Blaine

• “Midsummer Night Blues” — Waldeck

• “On the Road” — Interview with Sherry Britton

• “How About Us?” — from How to Stuff a Wild Bikini

• “You Turn Me On” — Ian Whitcomb

• “Medication” — The Standells

• “Intoxica” — The Revels

• “Hold It, Mary” — The Axcents

• “Shirley” — John Fred and His Playboys

• “Shakin’” — Eddie Money

• “On the Road” — Interview with Sherry Britton

• “Retrograde” — James Blake

• “Let’s Kill Ourselves” — The Ponys

• “Shake Your Hips” — Big Town Playboys

• “Mojo Workout” — Bill Cosby

• “Percussive Women” — Honey West

• “Fried Onions” — Lord Rockingham’s XI

B.O.O.B.S. CASE FILE:#50-PT-10:3

The packaging jacket promises a miracle. Not a photograph. Not a print.

A guaranteed miracle.

"You develop them!" That is the hook.

According to the instructions, the process requires no darkroom, no chemicals, and no light. The purchaser merely wets a sheet of enclosed crepe paper, presses it against a blank cardboard surface, and waits. A "Hollywood Lovelie" is then expected to appear…. not printed by a press, but somehow SUMMONED across the veil through the crude application of moisture, crepe paper, friction, and human intent.

THE CONJURING MEDIUM

The graphic design of the front cover betrays a deeper, more unsettling subtext. To the left of the bold, blood red text of "Pic-Tease," a heavy arrow points directly AWAY from the crystal ball. As if to be released from being trapped inside the sphere. Her arms raised in a perpetual, static performance. It is labeled “Miracle Fotos.”

The Bureau notes the choice of iconography. A crystal ball is not a tool of documentation; it is a tool of scrying. It is a window used to peer into another realm, or to trap a subject within a glass orbit. By placing the dancer inside the glass, the manufacturer explicitly frames the product not as a printing novelty, but… as a miniature seance.

Three graphic stars float completely unanchored in the white space to the right. They serve no promotional purpose. They offer no instructions.

THE RITUAL AND THE GAMBLE

The reverse of the card reveals that this summoning was sold as a parlor game.

Participants are instructed to "Guess how many fingers the Hollywood Cutie on the reverse side will show when Miracle Picture is developed." Below the prompt lies a stark ledger of numbers, 1 through 10, with blank lines to the right of each number.

Why this information is withheld until after development is a matter of administrative concern. What happens to the participant if the guess is incorrect is omitted entirely.

The surviving developed example reveals the definitive answer to the riddle. The "Lovelie" emerges from the sepia grime of the paper, smiling, with both hands raised and palms facing forward. She is splaying exactly ten fingers.

In the lower left-hand corner, a cold, typeset block contains the number 10. Whether this box acts as the final judgment of the game, or indicates that this subject was merely the tenth captive in a larger, unrecovered series of cards, remains unverified.

THE REDACTION ANOMALY

The development process was designed to unfold in two distinct stages: concealment and revelation. However, the product documents a third stage, entirely unmentioned by the manufacturer's directions and absent from the blank card.

A heavy, absolute bar of black ink lies directly across the figure's chest.

Initial Bureau analysis assumed this was a post-production stamp to satisfy postal obscenity laws. Close physical inspection disproves this. The line is uneven, applied by an unsteady, deliberate human hand. More critically, a microscopic gap near the center reveals a terrifying detail: there is lettering beneath the ink.

The black bar was not applied to hide the woman's anatomy. It was applied to hide a message.

When the consumer performed the ritual, rubbing the wet crepe paper to call the "Lovelie" out of the crystal ball, the image did not manifest alone. Written directly onto the skin of her chest was a string of characters. A large ascender can be seen. A piece of information that was never supposed to leave the glass.

The Bureau has identified two operational theories for the black bar's existence:

1. The Interception: An agent, handler, or manufacturer realized what the card was manifesting after development and rushed to manually deface the artifact, intercepting the information before it could be read by the public.

2. The Delayed Manifestation: The black bar itself is part of the actual miracle. It was not painted on the cardboard by a person, but rather appeared magically during the damp development process; a secondary reaction designed by an unknown hand specifically to hide the message the moment it tried to materialize in our world.

BUREAU FINDINGS

Questions surrounding the chemical transfer remain difficult to answer. Wet crepe paper rubbed against a standard cardboard substrate is far more likely to produce a ruinous, bleeding stain than a photographic likeness. If the procedure worked as advertised, the science has been lost. If it failed, no consumer complaints have been located in the trade rags of the era.

Only this single triad of evidence is known to exist. Whatever was written on her chest remains sealed beneath the ink, just out of reach.

The significance of the three stars remains under review.

The woman pictured remains unaccounted for. Looking through missing persons files.

The miracle remains unverified.

Just look at you…. Newspaper clippings, scanned ads, browser tabs, a half-cold cup of coffee that gave up on warmth an hour ago…

You’ve been down a Bubbles Cash rabbit hole for forty minutes. Bubbles Cash the Texas burlesque dancer who, by your working theory, had an outsized hand in reshaping what the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders eventually became. Legitimately wild. TOTALLY worth pursuing.

And you have notes…

But magpies don’t finish things. They spot something that glints and they go.

And then you see something very glinty…

One line from an old Globe Theatre ad, Atlantic City, 1939.

Amy Fong: In her Exclusive Oriental Dance of Shame.

And you can’t stop pulling the thread.

Amy Fong: In her Exclusive Oriental Dance of Shame.

You read it again.

Oriental. Dance of Shame.

The words sit there in black and white, printed as casually as a dinner special. Seven words of ad copy that reduce a woman’s body to a racial category and a moral verdict at the same time. You stare at the way the language works; the exoticizing, the judging, all of it collapsed into a single billing line nobody was supposed to look at too hard.

But YOUR ass does.

Sorry, Bubbles Cash, you’re gonna have to wait.

So, back to that billing ad copy… Was that a thing? Like a standard gimmick, a “Dance of Shame?” But it says “Exclusive” …which means someone thought it was some sort of a selling point specific to her. You search. You dig. You spend longer going down a rabbit hole than you should chasing that phrase through theater ads across the circuit.

You find it exactly once.

One ad. One theater. One week. And then nothing…

That’s your answer. And somehow it’s worse than if you’d found a hundred of ‘em.

So let’s chase Amy…

The Young Girl at the Church Hall

Before the headliner marquees and those damn cherry blossoms, before she was tagged “China’s Most Beautiful Girl,” Amy Fong was twelve years old in a church hall in Oakland. The year was 1926, and the Methodist Episcopal Chinese Mission was raising funds for a new building; a place for belonging in a city that rarely offered it freely.

The mid-1920s, no big surprise, is a strange and cruel time to be Chinese in America.

The Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to ban immigration based on race, had been in effect for forty-four years. Chinese immigrants couldn’t own property in most of the 48 states, couldn’t testify against white people in court, and anti-miscegenation statutes in California made it illegal for Chinese Americans to marry white people. The Immigration Act of 1924 had slashed Asian immigration to almost nothing, closing the door behind families like the Fongs who had already made it through.

Amy was born on American soil on June 27, 1914 and was the ninth of thirteen children whose parents had fled China’s collapsing empire in 1912 and her parents made sure all thirteen children spoke both Chinese and English.

Her birthright made her a US citizen, a status that her parents could never claim. But citizenship didn’t mean belonging... It meant navigating a country that wanted her labor, her taxes, her performance of patriotism, while questioning her place at every turn.

The Methodist Episcopal Chinese Mission wasn’t just raising money for a building, it was asserting a presence, creating a space, insisting on community in a country that barely tolerated their existence.

So that night, the program listed the Misses Jane Fong, Ella Lee, Maimie Lee, Florence Kow, Helen Hing, Gertrude Lee, Helen Lee, and Rose Lee. Amy was among them, listed separately at the end: “Miss Amy Fong will offer a military dance.” Her sister Jane was on that same small stage.

No spotlight… no razzle-dazzle. Just a flag, a hymn, and a room full of people insisting they were here to stay.

In the years that followed, Amy appears in community pageants and playground programs, doing “highland flings” and “oriental impressions” alongside other young Chinese American performers. She seems to already be learning to perform prescribed ethnic identities the audiences expected, while living in a country that saw her as perpetually foreign despite her US citizenship.

Amy was part of a network of Chinese American performers navigating between worlds, performing patriotism and assimilation they could never fully embody in the eyes of white America.

But the hardest part of dancing would turn out not to be the movement…

But being seen.

The Highest Compliment They Knew How to Give

Okay, by 1936, Amy was dancing with what critics called “sinuous grace” in Beauty Parade at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, performing alongside an ensemble of fifty models. The orchestra blared, the chorus girls kicked, and Amy moved through the cigar smoke and stage lights with precision that seemed effortless. Critics praised her “Beautiful Oriental of Exotic Charm,” language printed without irony or even a second thought.

This is her burlesque debut, and the Depression was still casting very long shadows. So burlesque offered both spectacle and survival.

Amy had studied ballet as a child. After high school she headed to the University of Minnesota intending to earn a degree in arts, but financial hardship forced her out after two years. She finds work as a dancer in Atlantic City, then moved into burlesque. The Trocadero brought her back…

“Returned by Insistent Demand!” the ad read, and billed her as something new: The Chinese Gypsy Rose Lee.

That billing is worth sitting with. Gypsy Rose Lee by 1937 was arguably the most famous name in American burlesque. The woman who had turned strip-tease into a brand, a persona, a cultural event. To call Amy Fong “the Chinese Gypsy Rose Lee” was to hand her the highest available compliment while simultaneously making sure she couldn’t fully claim it. This comparison feels like it elevates her and also constrains her in the same breath.

When a reporter asked about her abbreviated college career, she said with characteristic deflection that she remembered “very little” what she was supposed to learn there. She liked dancing better than school, she claimed. What she didn’t say was that she’d had no choice BUT to leave.

“A beautiful body is a subject of art,” she explained carefully in a 1938 Cincinnati interview. “But to exhibit a beautiful body in the strip-tease manner is just a business.”

This comment was a precise distinction… acknowledging the form while protecting herself from its judgment. The mechanics of strip-tease didn’t bother her, she insisted. She preferred it to professional posing, which was “embarrassing.” The barrier of lights between herself and the audience made strip-tease easier. The absence of that barrier made posing difficult.

Amy's strip-tease costume was distinctive: a yellow silk Mandarin coat over a yellow chiffon dress. And I'm the burlesque world, yellow was considered to be bad luck in burlesque. Some say it's based on a superstition; others insisted it was simply that yellow was difficult to light and left dancers looking all washed out. Either way, Amy wore it. She chose the color that made lighting technicians work harder, that required audiences to see her through difficulty, rather than ease. Whether she knew it or not, the yellow silk was a form of control.

Not defiance exactly. But maybe a refusal to make herself easy to consume.

The Anatomy of the Wheel

Under Izzy Hirst’s Independent Burlesque Circuit, the dominant “Hirst Wheel” of the East Coast, shows were structured just like assembly lines. A producer packaged a complete production and sent it rolling on down a pre-set track of dozens of cities for hopefully a 40-week season. For the machine to make a predictable profit, identity had to be a “plug-and-play” component. The wheel needed a performer’s identity to function exactly like a piece of stock scenery: easily packed into a trunk, immediately recognized by a theater manager in Toledo or Baltimore, and just simple enough to summarize in a single line of local newspaper text.

The wheel system commodified identity by reducing it to fixed, invariant slots, cycling names through the advertisements like a rotation of costumes.

“China’s Gift to Burlesque.” Not a performer… but a “gift” bestowed.

“The Teas of China.” A cynical marquee pun, simultaneously winking at her nightly job as a striptease artist while wrapping her in an exotic, STEEPED in mystique.

“Sensational Chinese Dancer,” “China’s Most Beautiful Girl” …each title narrowing the frame a snatch further.

If Amy headlined a traveling revue like Modes and Models, Sunkist Vanities, or Moonlight Maids, her identity was the designated “exotic variety” box. Amy's act featured two distinct parts: first, a specialty dance called “Jade,” performed to a medley of Chinese songs; then, as one review noted, “her second appearance is thoroughly Americanized.” She moved between identities within the same show, giving audiences the exotic fantasy they expected… and the assimilation they demanded.

But while the billing promised a collective fantasy, later headlining her own China Dolls revue, the reality of the circuit was deep isolation. On those touring sheets, Amy was almost always the only Asian performer on the entire bill. The illusion of a vast, exotic collective was carried entirely on the shoulders of one woman standing alone in the spotlight, flanked by a white chorus line.

In Atlantic City, a car dealership even used her image to draw crowds to their lot. The ad showed her perched atop a vehicle, her name above a pitch for a 1935 Ford Tudor Sedan: Miss Fong Will Appear On Our Lot Today. Come and Meet Her.

One advertisement showed her in an athletic pose headlined “Likes A High Ball,” described as “symbolizing China’s participation in the Olympiad,” 1936, the year of the Berlin Games. Her body was being used to represent both national pride and exotic entertainment simultaneously, and no one in the room seems to have noticed the contradiction.

She noticed…. She said nothing.

She kept working.

The Robot Girl

The industrial wheel demanded a standardized, consumable asset, and reviewers in the early 1940s thought they were paying Amy a compliment when they noticed how she adapted to it.

“Amy Fong, China Doll, Becomes Robot On Stage,” one Harrisburg headline declared in 1941. Critics marveled at her mechanical precision, her ability to “dismiss thought” while performing, to transform herself into something perfectly controlled.

“The ability to assume the attitude of a robot, dismissing thoughts of her body when it is on display, is responsible for the success built up by Amy Fong,” wrote C. Curtiss in 1941.

What they mistook for artistry was armor.

“When I go on the stage, I make myself feel the same as I do when I am in street clothes,” she explained. “I follow my routine like habit, and until I am back in the dressing room, I do not think of what I am on the stage.”

That! Right there… The detachment critics marveled at wasn’t technique, it was a survival mechanism she’d learned to articulate. The stillness wasn’t obedience; it was protection. Every graceful rotation was a calculation, every smile timed to last juuust long enough before it became pain. She had found that the best way to survive the gaze was to become unreachable inside it. Amy gave the machine exactly what it paid for, while keeping 100% of her actual humanity locked safely away in the dressing room where the syndicate couldn’t touch it.

The Refusal

But even the robot had a breaking point…

At a second-run house in Harrisburg in the spring of 1941, she found herself dancing before a backdrop of cherry blossoms. An imagined Japan, conjured by someone who had never seen the real thing.

Let's summarize… her country of birth called her exotic.

Her country of ancestry was bleeding under Japanese invasion.

And now, as war drummed closer, a producer wanted her to undress before a Japanese spring.

“I was insulted,” she told the Cincinnati reporter. …three words of refusal, delivered flat, in a diner interview, to a reporter who probably wrote it down without understanding what he’d just been handed.

“They asked me to dance before cherry blossoms.”

That’s the whole quote about it.

Before and after that billboard rotation, the corporate titles tried out on her, this is the one moment in the record where she pushed back. Not against the strip-tease, not against the circuit, but against a cherry blossom backdrop.

In 1942, the trade papers recorded her retirement. She walked away just as the United States plunged into World War II and the Pacific theater turned Asian identity on American stages into a hyper-politicized minefield.

Post-War Rhythm

But the machine wasn’t done with her, and she wasn’t done with survival. When she returned to the Hirst circuit after the war, she wasn’t alone.

Around this time she married Bob Winkler.

Bob was an ex-GI who had served in Army counter-intelligence in the Pacific, but before the war, he had been a crime reporter and a trained opera singer who had performed at the Metropolitan Opera. He had dreamed of European operatic tours before what he called “the engulfing catastrophe in Europe” evaporated those plans.

Amy & Bob... They seem to be a fascinating pair: a woman who had traded childhood ballet steps for the survival of the chorus line, and a Met opera tenor, both chewed up and reshaped by the commercial demands of the independent circuit. They worked the road together, his name appearing alongside hers in ads for the Roxy, the Casino, the familiar houses along the eastern corridor. By 1951, The Billboard noted they were working the summer season at Coney Island in Tria’s Wine Bath Show… Bob working the boardwalk as the show’s outside talker, barking pitches to the crowd, while Amy performed inside.

He always called her a lady.

“Burlesque women aren’t dull-witted,” he told one reporter, defending both her intelligence and their choices. They understood each other’s adjustments: the way dreams reshape themselves into something more practical, more survivable.

Offstage, Amy wrote poetry, listened to classical music, and taught herself to play the xylophone. The papers never asked about any of this. They wanted to know about the mechanics of strip-tease, about her “Oriental” mystique, about whether she considered it art or business. They didn’t ask what she read or wrote or played when the lights went down.

“Ha-ha…”

By the early 1950s, the circuit was shrinking. Theaters changed names or just closed entirely. Amy and Bob continued touring: Chicago, Toronto, New York. Chicago actually had become her favorite American city, a place she returned to whenever bookings allowed.

A reporter found them in a diner that year, coffee cooling in chipped cups. Amy spoke carefully, economically, the way someone does who has learned that every word will be rewritten anyway.

“Business women are durable,” she said, stirring her coffee. “Burlesque taught me that.”

The interview ended with a joke.

“There’s no business like show business,” the reporter wrote, adding Amy’s response: “Ha-ha…”

Flat. Two syllables. The script delivered one more time.

The reporter never asked about her degree, her fluency, her siblings, her poetry, her xylophone. He never asked what she thought about, in the dressing room, when the routine stopped, and Amy began again. He saw what the marquees had always promised: an Oriental beauty, a China doll, a woman who existed to be watched and then forgotten.

He simply wrote Ha-ha and moved on.

You go back to that Globe Theatre ad. Amy Fong: In her Exclusive Oriental Dance of Shame. You found it once. One ad. One theater. One week. Then nothing… no repeat bookings of that billing, no other theater using that phrase, no mention of it in any review.

It appeared and then it disappeared… like, whoever wrote that copy tried it, and even the burlesque circuit, not exactly known for its restraint, thought better of it.

Or Amy did...

You’ll never know which. The record doesn’t say. What the record DOES say is that she kept working… before and after that ad, before and after the cherry blossoms, before and after the “Chinese Gypsy Rose Lee” and the “Teas of China” and every other name they tried to pin on her. The “Dance of Shame” were words some ad man wrote. Amy performed her act, then moved on to the next house.

And that's the whole trick.

The routine ran like habit. The dressing room was where she temporarily lived.

The “robot” clocked out every night, and Amy Fong went the fuck home.

Burlesque Bits continues the legacy of Charlie Uno’s Billboard column, which ran from 1930 to 1959. If you found this useful, consider subscribing at burlesquebits.substack.com.

Burlesque Bits. Stripped down.

Sources

“Chinese Mission Will Present Play For Building Fund,” Sacramento Union, June 19, 1926.

“First Entertainment At Playground Planned,” Sacramento Union, August 29, 1924.

“Gorgeous Amy Fong, Chinese Film Star,” advertisement for Princess Wana’s Bare Facts of 1936, French Casino, Atlantic City, Press of Atlantic City, August 6, 1936.

E. James Peters’ Gala Used Car Jubilee advertisement featuring Amy Fong, Atlantic City, 1936.

“Likes A High Ball,” advertisement for Bare Facts at French Casino, Press of Atlantic City, 1936.

Trocadero Theatre advertisements, Philadelphia Inquirer, October 18, 1936; January 10, 1937.

“Just A Business—Not An Art, Dancer Says Of ‘Strip-Tease,’” Cincinnati newspaper, 1938.

Globe Theatre advertisement, Press of Atlantic City, July 21, 1939.

“’China Dolls’ Billed For Garrick Theatre For Week,” Lebanon Daily News, October 13, 1939.

“Chinese ‘Oomph,’” Detroit Free Press, October 11, 1939.

Police Gazette, April 1941.

“Amy Fong, China Doll, Becomes Robot On Stage,” by C. Curtiss, Harrisburg Telegraph, 1941.

Gayety Theater advertisement, Baltimore Sun, December 27, 1939.

“’Arts And Models’ At Gayety Theater,” featuring Amy Fong’s specialty dance “Jade,” Baltimore Sun, 1940s.

Amy Fong and Bob Winkler profile, Press of Atlantic City, July 5, 1946.

“Embassy to Present Amy Fong Again,” Republican and Herald, August 3, 1949.

“Straight Burlesque Returns to Casino,” Pittsburgh Press, August 1951.

Pulp International archives: pulpinternational.com/pulp/keyword/amy-fong

The winter of 1976–77 didn’t arrive so much as it effin invaded. Temperatures shattered records almost daily. The Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers froze solid… no barges meant no fuel. PGW’s pipelines cracked beneath the frost. Governor Milton Shapp shuttered schools statewide. President Carter signed the Emergency Natural Gas Act. Mayor Frank Rizzo ordered nonessential gas-heated establishments to shut down.

In this bit… you are Tammy.

Second big week headlining the Trocadero.

But Tammy wasn’t being advertised as a dancer exactly...

The newspaper ads promised:

“HALF MALE–HALF FEMALE!”

“You Have to See It… to Believe It!”

By 1977, the Trocadero was selling shock, novelty, adult films, live nudity… anything that might keep the lights on another week.

Then the city declared an energy emergency.

The Associated Press sent a reporter…

He wrote about the cold.

To be fair, the thermostat was a story...

Manager Bob Stephens had set it as low as he dared. A reporter’s thermometer read 59 degrees at the end of the runway, right where the performers peeled, chillingly bare.

The lobby clocks in at 56 degrees.

The main dressing room? That was situated above the Troc’s boiler and it managed a comparatively tropical 74.

Virgo Lamont, who danced and also managed the dressing room, told the AP: “I caught a really bad cold the first two days they turned the heat down. I came off after my act and I was sweating. Then I felt the chill. I started sniffling, then sneezing. I missed a show and had to go to the doctor’s to get a shot.”

On stage, she and the rest of the company had adapted. “You’re hesitant about taking the first piece off,” she said, “then we’re just shakin’ a little bit more. When we come off the stage, we just zoom into the dressing rooms.”

Lee Ann, 27, had shown up the previous week with a quilted bathrobe and furry slippers.

Nobody was laughing at her now.

She had some ideas: “Maybe we could dance to ‘Frosty the Snowman.’” Also: “Somebody ought to go out there in a set of thermal underwear with a drop seat and strip out of them.”

She’d noticed something about the crowd… “I knew there was a good size crowd on hand,” she said, “but I couldn’t see anybody. Then I saw they were all in the back gathered around the radiators.”

The AP photographer caught Lady Stardust slipping into a fur-trimmed coat after her performance.

She became the face of the story.

Photographically.

The wire gave her an image and no voice.

The audience, what there was of it, kept their overcoats on. Business had dropped 30 to 40 percent; neighborhood restaurants whose patrons often came to the Troc afterward had all shut down. The estimated crowd for an evening show that week: about 20 people.

The gas company had called. Stephens told them he’d close “pretty soon.”

He didn’t close…

“I’m depending on the audience to provide their own heat,” he said.

Closing would have meant going dark. “Dark,” for a burlesque house that was already bleeding audiences to home video and adult theaters, had a way of becoming permanent.

So you keep the lights on.

You keep the company onstage. You let the audience provide whatever heat they can.

“I think you can tell this isn’t the warmest place in Philadelphia,” Stephens told the Courier-Post. “I think after they lift this energy crisis, we’re going to have a pneumonia crisis.”

In Philadelphia in February 1977, that word carried specific weight. Only six months earlier, 29 people had died of a mystery respiratory illness contracted at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel during the Bicentennial convention. The CDC had only just identified the culprit one month before.

The city knew EXACTLY what a “pneumonia crisis” looked like.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s weather column, the next day, noted the situation with appropriate economy: thermal pasties go just so far in keeping a girl warm, you know.

Outside, the city’s conservation theater played out on television, newscasters in heavy coats urging sacrifice for the good of all. Inside 10th and Arch, Tammy was on stage, second big week, live and nude, while Philadelphia froze around them.

The AP reporter walked right past their headline to write about the cold.

The newspapers remembered the thermostat.

They remembered the novelty of nude performers freezing onstage.

They remembered the jokes.

What they almost missed was the labor:

a theater refusing to go dark, and a line of performers dancing through the cold to keep it alive.

Because heat, in a place like the Troc?

Heat was never just about the thermostat.

Notes on sources: The AP wire, bylined James Robins, ran February 3, 1977 in both the Asbury Park Press and the Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, NJ edition). The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a weather column item February 4 drawing on the same reporting. Manager's name appears as "Bob Stephens" in AP wire copy and "Bob Stevens" in the Inquirer column; Stephens is used here per the wire byline. Tammy's headlining run is documented in Inquirer display advertisements February 3 and 4, 1977.

For a broader picture of Philadelphia in 1976 — the Bicentennial hangover, the near-bankruptcy, the Save Chinatown movement active in the neighborhood surrounding the Trocadero — Thomas Devaney’s 2019 documentary “Bicentennial City” is worth your time.

Clip:

Burlesque Bits is the continuing work of Charlie Uno’s Billboard column, which ran from 1930 to 1959. If you have photos, programs, clippings, family stories, or anything else connected to the performers and venues documented here — please reach out. These histories survive because someone kept something.

Burlesque Bits. Stripped down.

In this bit…

A burlesque impresario hires an overdressed stripper as a practical joke... A vice crusader takes the bait and raids her debut performance. The morning-after arrest produces headlines, marriage proposals, and a humiliating courtroom admission: “I saw no nudity on stage.”

This is the story of how Billy Minsky deliberately exposed the arbitrariness of moral enforcement, and forced the anti-burlesque movement to abandon the Society for the Suppression of Vice’s failed model and rebuild around bureaucratic power instead.

Okay… let’s go.

On May 7, 1931, John S. Sumner stood in West Side Magistrate’s Court and admitted something that would haunt the anti-vice movement for the next eighteen months: he saw no nudity on stage at Minsky’s Republic Theatre.

Twenty-five dramatic players in blue brassieres and brass buttons who hadn’t been paid, a sextet of thespians Sumner thought were too sexy and salacious for their own good, all walked free.

The case against the show “Ada Onion from Bermuda” collapsed… not because the law changed, but because the longtime secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice just couldn’t prove the most basic element of his complaint.

But this wasn’t just a failed prosecution. This was a trap… And Sumner had walked RIGHT into it.

The April 10th raid at the Republic arrested seven people, including a 19-year-old performer making her big burlesque debut: Gypsy Rose Lee.

Along with Gladys Clark, Minnie Fitzgerald, and four men, she was held on $500 bond and paraded through the courts. Sumner had raided Gypsy the morning after her first featured performance as a stripper; a performer Billy Minsky had deliberately positioned as TOO overdressed, TOO theatrical & TOO obviously legal to arrest.

“Who would arrest an overdressed stripper?” Billy Minsky had reportedly asked, clearly exhausted from his repertoire of practical jokes designed to deflect reformers wearing top hats… tired of advertising in The New Yorker… tired of costuming ushers in French maid outfits, etc. He was looking for a way to expose how arbitrary vice enforcement had become. So he gave Gypsy Rose Lee her debut in a show with a Yiddish-inflected title that mocked the Ziegfeld Follies… and he waited.

Sumner arrested her anyway. The morning after her premiere.

The Daily News ran a photo of the performers sitting demurely, fully clothed, with the caption: “RUN ALONG, LITTLE GIRLS! — On admission of John S. Sumner that he had seen no nudity on stage, Gypsy Rose Lee (left) and Minnie Fitzgerald, arrested in burlesque show raid, were freed in court yesterday.”

This wasn’t just a “case dismissed.” This was a public humiliation of the private censorship apparatus that had policed New York entertainment for decades.

And Billy Minsky had orchestrated it.

The infrastructure of control that Sumner represented was extensive, powerful, and until 1930, largely unquestioned. Sumner had succeeded the legendary Anthony Comstock as secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1915, inheriting decades of moral authority built on federal obscenity law. Since 1925, the “play-jury” system gave secret censors the power to visit shows and vote on whether they were obscene, with Sumner holding the right to exercise peremptory challenges against any juror whose judgment he questioned. He had veto power over who judged morality in New York theater.

More insidiously, Sumner’s authority was written directly INTO real estate. When District Attorney Thomas C.T. Crain leased the Irving Place Theatre in 1930, the contract named “the district attorney, the captain of the police precinct and the president of the Society for the Suppression of Vice as the final judges of the propriety of any show staged therein.” Sumner wasn’t just a complainant, he was a structural arbiter of content, embedded in the economic framework of theater operation itself!

In practice, his enforcement worked quietly. As one profile noted just months before the “Ada Onion” raid, Sumner “has a season pass and attends about once a month. If he sees anything that he believes is immoral he sends word backstage to have the number modified.” The raids, in other words, were the EXCEPTION; the backstage note was the RULE. Which meant that to force a formal arrest, Minsky had to give Sumner something he couldn’t quietly manage away.

He needed to make Sumner commit.

But by 1930, courts were growing skeptical of Sumner’s judgment across multiple fronts. In March 1930, Magistrate Simpson humiliated him when he raided a Broadway art gallery showing Rembrandt and Goya nude reproductions. The judge ruled art was art and sent Sumner packing after “an uncomfortable 40 minutes” in court.

Sumner was simultaneously losing literary censorship battles.

Publishers and defense attorneys had learned to challenge his authority in court, demanding actual evidence rather than accepting his moral pronouncements. Simon & Schuster had turned his attack on Arthur Schnitzler’s “Casanova’s Homecoming” into free advertising, quoting Sumner’s own denunciation; “not only obscene, but constructively obscene” in their ads. The prosecutions backfired, generating publicity rather than suppression.

By 1931, Sumner’s model, where his judgment alone determined obscenity, was failing across books, art galleries, and theaters. Courts wanted proof, not just proclamations. And Sumner, still attending Minsky shows on his season pass, still sending backstage notes, had not yet learned to stop showing up.

Billy Minsky clearly understood this. And in April 1931, he decided to force the issue.

The show was “Ada Onion from Bermuda,” running at the Republic Theatre at 42nd and 7th. Matinee tickets cost 25 cents to $1. Evening shows ran 35 cents to $1.50. There was a midnight show on Fridays. It was a standard Minsky operation, the Republic had become the company’s flagship theater just two months earlier when Billy moved burlesque from the Lower East Side to Broadway.

But the star was anything but standard. Gypsy Rose Lee was overdressed, theatrical, & ironic. She “kidded the lacy underpants off the more earnest of strippers,” as one critic later put it. She did not strip “to the altogether.” She stayed covered… technically, legally & deliberately. As historian Rachel Shteir documents, reformers and politicians were targeting the Minsky brothers as evidence of the Depression era’s depravity. Minsky needed to prove that their enforcement was arbitrary, that they’d arrest anyone, regardless of what actually happened on stage. So he showcased Gypsy Rose Lee in her debut performance, advertised with a phrase mocking the Ziegfeld Follies’ respectable tagline: “Gypsie Rose Lee: The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.”

Sumner raided the show on April 10, 1931. Seven people were arrested: Gypsy Rose Lee (19, 245 West 51st St.), Gladys Clark (22, 117 West 107th St.), Minnie Fitzgerald (23, 149 West 49th St.), Harry Clex (31, 1157 West 47th St.), James Dugan (27, Forest Hills), Morris Posner (27, 226 West 96th St.), and Edward Rowland (47, Sunnyside, Queens). They were held on $500 bonds. Their hearing was set for April 23 before Magistrate August Dreyer.

The arrest produced EXACTLY what Minsky wanted: publicity. According to tabloid coverage, Gypsy received “six proposals of marriage, numberless boxes of candy, forty-four mash notes and a case of ginger ale.” (MmmmmMmm!~ oh you BOYS!) One paper reported that she made the detective wait outside while she dressed, then rode to the precinct in a limo. The New York Evening Graphic put her on the cover in a body suit with flowers over her private parts.

“My baby is innocent and pure,” Gypsy’s mother Rose told the press.

But before the Ada Onion case could be heard, the Morris Posner case exploded everything.

Morris Posner was arrested April 7, three days before the main Ada Onion raid, for selling “art studies” in the Republic Theatre. When Charles Bamberger, described as “naughtiness sleuth for the Society for the Suppression of Vice,” brought Posner to court on April 25, Posner’s lawyer Jacob Goodstein demolished the case with brutal simplicity.

“Then let me see you buy them at a newsstand,” Goodstein told Bamberger.

They left the courthouse. They walked to 54th Street and 8th Avenue. They bought three magazines containing the exact same “art studies” Posner was arrested for selling. They brought them back to Magistrate James E. McDonald.

Case dismissed.

This. was. catastrophic. Sumner’s agents couldn’t distinguish between illegal theater sales and legal newsstand purchases. His judgment, the foundation of his authority, was exposed as arbitrary and unenforceable.

When the Ada Onion case came back before the court on May 7, Sumner had no choice. He admitted he saw no nudity.

The performers walked.

“The detectives who arrested Gypsy admitted that she had not flashed anything obscene.”

Billy Minsky’s trap had worked perfectly. He hired an overdressed stripper who stayed technically legal. Sumner arrested her anyway. And then had to admit in court that she’d done nothing wrong.

For performers like Gypsy, Gladys Clark, and Minnie Fitzgerald, arrests were just overhead; publicity that increased their value. You paid the bail, you showed up in court, you walked when the case collapsed, and you went back to work with better name recognition than you had before. Gypsy Rose Lee would be arrested numerous times in subsequent Minsky raids over the next several years.

None of them stuck.

The press coverage for the “Ada Onion from Bermuda” raid was characteristically sloppy. I mean, REAL sloppy: The Daily News initially ran a photo identifying Joan Jerome as one of the arrested performers.

She wasn’t.

Joan Jerome was the winner of a Grace Methodist Episcopal church beauty contest, and the paper had to run a correction on April 15: “JOAN JEROME was erroneously published as that of one of the girls who had appeared in the show. The fact is that MISS JEROME was the winner of the Grace Methodist Episcopal church beauty contest and, of course, was not connected in any way with the show, ‘Ada Onion from Bermuda.’”

The correction tells you everything about how these raids worked: sensational arrests, sloppy reporting, reputational damage that spread beyond the actual performers. Being associated with burlesque could ruin a respectable woman’s life, not because of what she’d done, but because the papers needed photos of pretty women to sell copies and didn’t particularly care if they had the right ones. The legal system produced a record. The tabloids produced a reputation. Only one of those could be corrected in court.

By December 1931, the tone of coverage had shifted entirely. Grace Robinson of the Daily News wrote a massive piece treating burlesque not as a vice problem but as an economic story.

Robinson documented the labor economics: $45/week for most chorus girls, $300/week for top performers like Ann Corio. She described Sunday shows “salting away admission fees garnered from thousands of patrons” while legitimate theater starved during the Depression. She noted that the Minsky brothers were making money hand over fist while Broadway hemorrhaged audiences.

And then she mentioned the April raid almost as an afterthought: “Last May several performers were arrested at the Republic Theatre on complaint of John S. Sumner, this town’s most famous vice suppressor. They included Minnie Fitzgerald and a Seattle beauty contest winner named Gypsy Rose Lee. The show was then altered slightly, and the charge against the girls ultimately dismissed. That is the extent of recent intervention by the law.”

The mockery was complete.

The raid had accomplished nothing except proving Minsky’s point. Sumner’s authority was shattered.

Billy Minsky had won. But he wouldn’t live long enough to see what he’d actually taught his opponents.

The anti-burlesque forces were already regrouping…

On October 19, 1931, six months after the Ada Onion dismissal, the Daily News reported that theater guilds were mobilizing. Gerald Griffin, president of the Catholic Actors Guild, issued invitations to the Jewish Theatrical Guild, the Episcopalian Actors Guild, and other stage groups to join him in a campaign against burlesque on Broadway.

This wasn’t morality crusading. This was economic protectionism. Legitimate theater actors were organizing against cheaper burlesque competitors who were taking their audiences and their jobs. The article noted that John S. Sumner was “expected to be one of the complainants.”

But this time, Sumner wouldn’t be leading the charge. He’d been publicly outsmarted. The opposition needed a new strategy that didn’t depend on his discredited judgment.

By April 1932, they’d found one.

At license renewal hearings, they abandoned Sumner’s failed morality arguments and pivoted to property values. Father William M. Burke of Holy Cross Church testified that he used the 41st Street subway exit to avoid seeing burlesque advertisements, and claimed he’d been “accosted by evil women who did not see my clerical collar under the heavy muffler I wore.”

But the key testimony came from property owners and real estate interests. Commissioner James F. Geraghty heard detailed arguments that burlesque houses “attracted a class of disorderly persons” and depressed property values in the Times Square area. This wasn’t about nudity or morality, it was about economics, framed as blight and disorder.

The strategy worked. But Billy Minsky wouldn’t see it succeed. On June 13, 1932, just two months after the license hearings deployed their new economic arguments, he dies at his home at 201 Eastern Parkway from a bone ailment.

He was 45 years old.

The obituary noted that “just before his death he was negotiating for the acquisition of two other houses” still expanding his burlesque empire even as the opposition was building the machinery to destroy it.

On September 21, 1932, three months after Billy’s death and eighteen months after the Ada Onion dismissal, Commissioner Geraghty refused to renew licenses for the Republic and Eltinge theaters. When the Minskys appealed, Supreme Court Justice Bernard L. Shienstag upheld the denial on September 30.

This was the first successful burlesque closure in New York since the failed raids of 1931. It worked not because the shows got dirtier… but because the opposition changed tactics. They stopped trying to prove obscenity in court and started denying licenses based on vague claims about disorder and property depreciation. They replaced Sumner’s discredited judgment with economic arguments that didn’t require proof of nudity or specific violations.

When Fiorello LaGuardia became mayor in 1934 and appointed Paul Moss as License Commissioner, they used the same template:

• deny licenses

• claim disorder

• ignore the question of whether the shows were actually obscene.

By May 1, 1937, fourteen burlesque theaters were closed permanently. LaGuardia declared: “This is the beginning of the end of incorporated filth.”

Billy Minsky had exposed how arbitrary moral enforcement was. The reformers learned to hide their arbitrariness behind bureaucracy.

Minsky died still negotiating to acquire more theaters, confident in his business model. Three months later, his brothers watched as the Republic’s license was denied; not because anyone could prove the shows were obscene, but because the reformers had learned not to even try.

They’d learned from Billy’s trap. And they’d built a better one.

The performers kept working until the licenses ran out… What Minsky couldn't have known, what NOBODY could have known in 1931, was that Billy personally handed his opponents something more valuable than a legal victory...

He'd shown them that the courts were the wrong battlefield entirely. The pattern that closed New York's burlesque houses didn't just stay in New York. Administrative licensing power, vague disorder claims, property value arguments… THAT playbook got used on nightclubs, on gay bars, on any entertainment that made the wrong people uncomfortable.

You don't need to prove vice if you control the license.

Billy Minsky figured out how to beat the old system. The new one didn't need to be beaten in court.

Gypsy Rose Lee, arrested at 19 on the morning after her debut, eventually offered the most accurate summary of the whole affair: “I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.”

Burlesque Bits continues the work of Charlie Uno's original Billboard column, which ran from 1930 to 1959. If you have photos, programs, clippings, family stories, or anything else connected to the performers and venues documented here, please reach out. These histories survive because someone kept something.

Burlesque Bits. Stripped down.

The primary sources for this piece were gathered via Newspapers.com. Newspaper clippings are reproduced throughout. The Sidney Skolsky "Tintypes" profile (Daily News, March 23, 1932) was a key discovery reframing Sumner's relationship with Minsky's. Rachel Shteir's Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show was consulted as secondary source. The clippings are the argument.

In this bit…. It’s the First Saturday of the month of June 2001. If you spent any time at The Five Spot in Old City Philadelphia in the early 2000s, you might remember, or at least have heard about, the night the SWAT team showed up.

Or maybe you didn’t…

For most of us, the night felt finished by the time anything went wrong.

The birthplace of Philadelphia’s multi-award winning neo-burlesque show, The Peek-a-Boo Revue, was a place called “The Five Spot” in Old City Philadelphia. The Five Spot wasn’t just a bar…. It was a shape shifter. It really was. The ground floor pulsed with DJs and dancing. The second floor transformed into a supper club for The Peek-a-Boo Revue, with cabaret tables and chairs, adding in a loose 1950s lounge vibe, with a dinner and a show for something like ten dollars a ticket. The third floor, that wasn’t accessible to the general public, opened onto a roof area where we went to store our burlesque props too big or lazy to take home. Great place to smoke grass and brainstorm ideas after a show.

The Peek-a-Boo Revue had started there in the late 1990s and by 2001, all the rhythms felt familiar… The troupe had carte blanche there and several members were also on staff so we held keys to the venue. We rehearsed every Monday night when the bar was dark, moving through the empty building like it was our own living room. There was only one real house rule: don’t drink the Red Bull. Otherwise, the place was ours.

It felt earned.

It felt safe.

So the show that night, Saturday, June 2nd 2001, was one of those over-ambitious supersized “Peek-a-Boo Revue” productions we loved putting together. Twenty-two numbers (total guess but there was a lot, I know that), eleven in each act, running close to midnight. Our stage-area was six inches off the floor, with a small runway that was at the front extending about four feet into the audience in a cabaret style seating.

We worked that show. We worked that audience. We worked that room…

And the room worked us right back.

When the show ended, nobody rushed out. Staff started breaking down the cabaret seating, tables and chairs scraping and stacking as the room slowly shifted back into a bar/nightclub upstairs piping in the amazing music from downstairs.

That transition/shift always meant “the hang.”

Closing time for us all was flexible. Conversations finished themselves…

Nights like this had a rhythm… someone will eventually get up on the bar at some point (Melissa Bang Bang likely), not performing, just… exhaling. Socializing. Still working the room. Lulu Lollipop joins Bang-Bang around 2002 on that bar. It was part of the language of that room. Part of the vibe. The night was ours.

I left around 2:30 a.m. that morning. It felt like the natural end of the night.

It wasn’t...

After many of us had gone, the night turned. Three armed men entered and announced a robbery. People were herded into the bathrooms. Some were already on the 3rd floor roof version of “the hang.” At first there was only confusion, because confusion was, at times, normal at the Five Spot. Motion was normal here. Noise was normal here.

But one critical thing didn’t happen. They didn’t take the mobile phones... Back in 2001, that wasn’t yet the first thing anyone thought to control.

In the middle of that moment, Peek-a-Boo Revue’s Tracey Todd Superstar called 911.

She makes the call, clear, direct, and decisive. Then, because performers are wired a certain way and adrenaline needs a place to go, she did the most human thing she could think of…

She rolled a joint.

Not as a joke or bravado, but as instinct. Something grounding while the uncertain night unraveled.

Downstairs in the basement office, a troupe member, who I’ll leave respectfully unnamed, was held at gunpoint to open the safe. That space wasn’t just an office. It was where we all got ready for the show. Costumes. Makeup. The smell of hairspray and the sound of duct tape being pulled off the roll. So to have a gun drawn and pointed at a loved one ordered to that room felt wrong in a way I still to this day can’t fully explain.

Police arrived quickly, followed by SWAT. During the sweep, one of the men tried to hide up inside the OLD elevator shaft, as if the building itself might swallow him. He was found and arrested.

The other suspect got away.

No one was physically hurt, and that matters. Most of us learned about it later the next day or in Monday’s rehearsal for the new upcoming July show in 4 weeks in fragments, in that sentence that always starts the same way:

“You’re not going to believe what happened after you left.”

There was a rumor afterward that a doorman might have let them in, or at least looked the other way. Nothing was ever confirmed, or maybe it was. It was 25 years ago. For awhile the story stayed in that gray space where stories live when everyone is replaying the night from different angles, trying to understand how our sanctuary could be punctured.

Whether it was true about the doorman almost became beside the point. The rumor spoke to how shaken we were, and how badly we wanted the night to make sense.

We joked later about making an entire show or maybe even a production number out of everything that went down.

The bathroom.

The phone call.

The elevator shaft.

Processing the un-processable by turning it into spectacle. I remember the song Bonnie Tyler's “Holding out for a Hero” was being tossed around.

It never became a show. Or a number… Not really.

The Five Spot kept going after that night, and so did The Peek-a-Boo Revue. But it was a reminder that places where people gather freely and blur the lines between performer and audience are really powerful, fragile, and always worth remembering in full.

I miss those days.

Not just for what went wrong… but for everything that went right before and after it did.

WHAT ROSE’S “DISCOVERY” ACTUALLY COST

By late 1936, Rose La Rose had been working the Hirst Circuit. Eight cities in eight weeks, then eight more. The name she hadn’t agreed to was showing up in Billboard routing reports, in theater advertisements and in gossip columns.

It was right around this time, Rose decided something… to actually find out if “Rose LaRose” was actually hers.

Okay, so a “traditional burlesque origin story” (fairytale) goes like this: a small-town girl, big-city theater, instant stardom. You get “discovered,” and you get a name, you get a career.

But being discovered in 1934-1935 came with some terms of agreement... Conditions buried in the exchange. Things you didn’t, or COULDN’T understand what you’d agreed to until it was too late to renegotiate.

The Minsky brothers (or the sign painter / stage-naming profit), …whoever actually came UP with the name “Rose LaRose” chose it because it was memorable, chose it because it was alliterative, chose it because it was vaguely French, and most importantly, chose it because it was was their idea. When Rose eventually left the Minsky orbit to work other circuits, she was still carrying their invention.

Until around August…

1936-1937: “THE MINSKY GRADUATE”

In August 1936, Rose switches her stage name to “Connie Ray” for what was widely documented as only a four-week engagement at Leon and Eddie’s nightclub in New York.

It’s a test. Could Rose be anyone other than the girl Minsky had named?

Malcolm Johnson of the New York Sun had an answer almost immediately: “Miss Connie Ray does a strip tease dance number at Leon and Eddie’s that makes the Minsky girls look like amateurs.”

Then the reveal: “Connie Ray is actually Rose La Rose, graduate of Minsky’s.”

The line was brutal and precise. Praise for her skill wrapped around proof that she couldn’t escape the association. Even under a new name, the whole point of the comparison was to reference where she’d come from.

Other gossip columns picked it up. Within days, she was being described everywhere as “Connie Ray (actually Rose La Rose)” or “Connie Ray, recent rave at Leon and Eddie’s, who lives up to the criticism given her by a famous columnist that ‘she makes all the Minsky girls look like amateurs.’”

But here’s the interesting part: she didn’t immediately drop the name when Connie was called out.

When Leon and Eddie’s closed for the season, Rose, still billed as “Connie Ray” moved down to Atlantic City, Charlie and Sy’s Club Nomad Hotel on Atlantic Avenue in September 1936. The advertisements announced her as a “Broadway favorite” and “stylist of languorous dance illusions” joining the “Bare-Evities of 1936” revue. The show was in its eleventh week. The venue was packed.

She kept performing as Connie Ray through September and possibly into October 1936, even though everyone knew.

The parenthetical had become part of the act.

The reveal hadn’t killed her experiment, it had just made clear that Rose La Rose was the name with value, and Connie Ray was window dressing.

After October 1936, she was back to “Rose La Rose” at Minsky’s Gaiety.

According to Seymour Rothman’s 1972 obituary, Rose learned the value of the name through that brief experiment. “From that time on,” Rothman wrote, “she demanded and received star money.”

The lesson was clear: the name Rose La Rose had value. It had Market recognition. It had Box office draw. And whether she’d liked it or not, the stage name was hers now… or rather, she was ITS.

1937: THE NEW YORK BAN

In 1937, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia banned burlesque in New York City.

The ban didn’t kill burlesque…burlesque was fuckin’ unkillable, just like a stubborn weed that grew back meaner every time someone tried to pull it up. It was hearty… like crabgrass. But what it DID kill was the illusion that there was a stable center to the industry. For performers working the Minsky circuit, it was a crisis.

So Rose, like many others, headed west.

By December 1937, she was working the Follies in Los Angeles.

By this point, three years and one month after she first appeared as “Rose LaRose, blonde charmer” in the Brooklyn Times Union, she’d worked the Supreme Circuit, gotten married, moved to the Hirst Circuit, tested a different stage name, learned its value, and was now starting over on the West Coast after the city that had made her, banned the industry that employed her.

She was twenty-one years old. Or nineteen. Or twenty-three…. pick any.

What wasn’t uncertain: the name.

By December 1937, “Rose La Rose” was established.

Documented… Marketable.

The question now was how far Rose could carry it?

NEXT: Three thousand miles from Minsky’s Brooklyn, the circuits are fracturing, the police are watching, and someone is about to steal a $700 bracelet from her dressing room. Part 3: “Working Strong” Through the Wheels, 1937-1945. (Coming soon)

In this bit: A funeral notice appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer on January 12, 1930.

It reads Hugh Peter Deady had died at age 32, (32?!) leaving behind two brothers well-known in Philadelphia’s sporting and theatrical circles.

Let's dig…

Robert E. Deady: at the time owned the Trocadero Theatre.
James F. Deady: had helped open the Ariel Club (a boxing venue where Young Griffo and Ike Weir once fought.)

But it was the youngest brother Pete, who’s theatrical connections mapped this particular stretch of Philadelphia’s entertainment geography: “In later years ‘Pete’ Deady devoted all of his time to theatrical affairs and was connected with the Trocadero, the Gayety and the Bijou theatres, in the order named. He was on the staff of the Bijou at the time of his death.”

Three theaters.

All connected. Two of ‘em housed burlesque on 8th Street between Race and Vine, in the heart of what Philadelphia at the time was called “Skid Row.”

This wasn't coincidence.

The Bijou at 209 North 8th Street and the Gayety formed the burlesque spine of the block… with Forepaugh's at 255 North 8th holding down the respectable end, a legitimate repertory house that happened to share a street with the bump-and-grind. All of them embedded on one block that housed the city's homeless population, its cheapest flophouses, its missions, its bars selling tokay wine for .15 cents a glass, and, at 8th and Vine, a cigar store that would eventually wind up killing 31 people by selling them industrial-strength Sterno as a cheap alcohol substitute.

The theaters are gone now. Demolished between 1953 and 1967, erased by the same urban renewal projects that paved over Skid Row itself. The Bijou’s site became part of Metropolitan Hospital, which opened in 1971 and collapsed into bankruptcy by 1993. The hospital building still stands, converted to condominiums, facing the empty Police Roundhouse across a parking lot wasteland.

When the wrecking crew demolished the “Bijou” (Bijou Theatre; Keith's Bijou; New Garden Theatre; Garden Theatre) on May 25, 1967, the Philadelphia Daily News wrote the obituary: “Citizens of Skid Row and New Jersey commuters have lost a shabby, old friend to ‘progress.’” The razing was part of the Independence Mall Urban Renewal Project, the paper noted, “but you’d have a tough time explaining that to the boys in Franklin Square.”

The boys in Franklin Square? This is the term that was given to the houseless who congregated in Franklin Square, these are the men (and women I would assume) who’d been following the sun around the fountain for decades, watching their neighborhood get condemned around them. The men (and women) who remembered when 8th & Vine was more than “a crusty, old billboard for vaudeville, circus, burlesque and carnival posters.”

And the performers who worked these venues? They’re practically gone from the records too. The police raids that reportedly plagued this area affectionately called “Philly’s Tenderloin” during its burlesque years, left no detailed archives. No arrest records. No performer names in accessible court documents that we can find. It's like the institutional memory got bulldozed along with the buildings.

What remains is the geography of erasure itself.

8th Street's Theater Cluster

The Bijou had the longest history of the three ladies. Built in 1889 as B.F. Keith’s Vaudeville Palace, it was “the birthplace of big-time vaudeville in Philadelphia,” as the Daily News noted at its demolition. The 1,200-seat theater was designed by New York architect John Baily McElfatrick and sat at the northeast corner of 8th and Race Streets… the gateway to what would eventually become Skid Row.

For three years starting in 1907, “the best of the old vaudeville circuits played the Bijou,” the paper recounted. Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, Elsie Janis, Nora Bayes - vaudeville greats trooped across its boards. The Bijou was also the first local theater to show motion pictures, premiering them on December 25, 1895.

Then in 1910, the Bijou introduced “Burlesk as you like it.”

The burlesque era would define the theater for the next several decades, interrupted only by a brief period starting in 1924 when it became the Garden Theatre presenting Yiddish plays. When Jules Mastbaum bought the Bijou from Keith’s estate in January 1922, he predicted the 8th Street Tenderloin district would improve significantly once the Benjamin Franklin Bridge opens up on July 1, 1926. Instead, Skid Row solidified.

By 1927, burlesque had returned.

That’s when the police raids intensified. A Cinema Treasures commenter notes “numerous police raids on the theatre” during the burlesque years, the shows “often closed by the police due to its lewd performances.” The specifics of these raids have been lost, but they ran through the 1940s until the theater shuttered as a performance venue in 1947.

For the next twenty years, the Bijou had what the Daily News called “declining years.” It served as a movie house showing B-movies under the name New Garden Theatre, its ornate 1889 facade visible to commuters approaching the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. One visitor, recalling the building from 1965, later described it as having “elegantly creepy elaboration” — a ghost building in a ghost neighborhood.

Actually, the Daily News noted in its demolition-day article, “the Bijou has been ‘dead’ for years.”

Forepaugh’s had a different trajectory…

It opened in 1877 as the first Bijou Theatre (not to be confused with Keith’s second Bijou that opened in 1889), designed by the Wilson Brothers. The theater was renamed Forepaugh’s (4 PAWS) in 1884 when John A. Forepaugh took it over from his uncle, circus owner Adam Forepaugh. John transformed it into a legitimate drama theater with a resident acting company.

When John died, his widow Luella continued as manager. She ran the 2,450-seat theater “quite very well,” according to later accounts, maintaining it as a repertory house for years. By 1941, it had become a movie theater. It closed in 1955 and was demolished in 1960.

Gayety is the REAL ghost... It appears in lists of Philadelphia’s Tenderloin-era burlesque houses, the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia mentions it alongside Dumont’s Theater, the 11th Street Opera House, the Empire, the Nixon and the Keystone. Hugh ‘Pete’ Deady worked there between his time at the Trocadero and the Bijou. The Gayety was demolished in 1953, the first of the three and left the least documentation.

But… what’s IS documented is the network. The Deadys moved between these theaters. Performers worked the row. These venues formed a little ecosystem, not isolated businesses but a concentrated strip of employment in a neighborhood defined by transience, poverty, and systematic neglect.

To understand what it meant to work these theaters, you have to understand the neighborhood performers walked through to get to that stage door.

Philly’s Skid Row occupied roughly twenty square blocks between 6th and 11th Streets, Arch and Callowhill.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Philly’s Tenderloin housed approximately 3,000 homeless men in what sociologist Leonard Blumberg called the intersection of “liquor & poverty.” The area contained at least seventeen flophouse hotels charging .35 to .60 cents per night for cubicles measuring six and a half feet by four and a half feet, separated by seven-foot partitions. Above the cubicles, wide open space allowed for ventilation.

Privacy was… theoretical.

The hotels had names: the Central, the Prospect, the Royal, the Palace, the Golden, the Highway, the Darien, the Francis, the Clover and the Gem. Some even doubled as polling places. The Golden Hotel at 730 Race Street and the Highway Hotel at 812 Vine Street served as voting locations in the 1953 election. Hotel owners like the Weingrad brothers and Abe Manoff held positions as Republican ward committee members. This phantom voter operation was systematic; men registered at flophouses, moved on, and their names stayed on the rolls.

In the 1950 Third Congressional District race, investigators found 1,299 names registered at Skid Row hotels that only had records of only 635 actual residents.

Between the flophouses sat the bars. Brady’s Grill on the 800 block of Vine. The Green Lantern at 248 North 9th Street, described by one reporter as a place where “the brightest item in the place is the owner’s liquor license.” Sociologist Earl Rubington counted 23 liquor outlets in Skid Row in 1958, a per capita rate about four times that of the overall city!

“Sneaky Pete” was another wine of choice selling for 15 cents a glass.

In December 1963, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled one regular customer...

But the most notorious alcohol? Well, that came from the cigar store at the opposite corner of 8th and Vine.

Max Feinberg operated a variety store at the northeast corner, right where performers entering the Bijou would have passed every shift. Max sold newspapers, tobacco, household goods.

He also sold Sterno.

Sterno is a jellied cooking fuel in small cans, meant for heating chafing dishes and camp stoves… Customers would walk in, greet Max, then ask him to “make one” ...Feinberg would reach under the counter for the “shoe polish” but instead whip out two cans of Sterno for .29 cents. He advised customers to hide them under their coats when leaving…

The practice was called drinking “canned heat” or “squeeze.” Users strained the gelatinous fuel through cloth to extract the liquid: a pinkish methanol they’d mix with water or soda to create what was called the “pink lady.”

Let’s just note for the obvious reasons… Sterno is a cooking fuel, NOT meant for human consumption.

The regular formula contained 3.5% methanol (wood alcohol). Even THAT concentration was dangerous, methanol destroys the optic nerves, causing blindness. And in sufficient doses—it kills.

In December 1963, Mr. Feinberg’s restocks the Sterno but his supplier sends him industrial-strength Sterno containing 54% methanol.

At that concentration, a tablespoon could kill.

Lesser amounts caused convulsions and permanent blindness.

The bodies start appearing two days before Christmas… Wayne Williams, 33, and his wife Juanita lived at 461 North 7th Street (just around the corner from where the Bijou still stood, not yet demolished.) On Christmas Eve, they borrowed money and went to Max’s store at 8th and Vine. “We bought three cans of Sterno,” Williams testified later. “We went back home. She squeezed it and made the preparations, while I went out on an errand. When I came back, she drank some, and so did I.”

Juanita died the next morning. Wayne Williams went blind.

By New Year’s Day, thirty-one people were dead. Four of them had been staying at the Darien Hotel at 323 North Darien Street: William McTide, Thomas Burns, Nathan Stevens, and Robert Lance. “The emaciated little man, clad in an old Army jacket, wearing dark glasses and carrying a cane, sat quietly in the courtroom,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported about Williams’s preliminary hearing. Derelicts in the courtroom “gave a murmur of sympathy as Williams was led to the bar.”

Max Feinberg was convicted of four counts of involuntary manslaughter. He served four years.

This was the neighborhood. This was 8th Street in the 1960s.

The Workers

What’s documented is the national crackdown that shaped the landscape these performers navigated.

On April 23, 1937, police raided Minsky’s flagship burlesque theater in New York, shutting it down under public decency laws. The arrest was sensationalized. New York quickly passed a law banning burlesque entirely. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia led the charge, and other cities followed. By 1942, burlesque had been effectively banned in every major American city.

Philadelphia’s version of this crackdown left traces without many details. What remains is a cultural residue... When the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about the future construction of Metropolitan Hospital in 1969, the site was remembered as “the home of Philadelphia bump-and-grind.” THAT’S what stuck. Not the vaudeville greats... Not the first films shown in Philadelphia… Not the Yiddish theater era... Not the women & entertainers who made their living there…

The bump-and-grind.

Burlesque Bits is the continuing work of Charlie Uno’s Billboard column, which ran from 1930 to 1959. If you have photos, programs, clippings, family stories, or anything else connected to the performers and venues documented here — please reach out. These histories survive because someone kept something.

In this bit: It’s 1934… and while the country struggles through the Depression, a fifteen-year-old girl from Little Italy leaves school to work as a cashier at Minsky's Republic Theatre. She sees a stripper's paycheck and does the math.

By November, she's headlining as "Rose LaRose" …a name she didn't choose and reportedly hated... HATED.

By December, she's married at sixteen. By September 1935, she's touring the Hirst Circuit in a show called "Nudie Cuties." Through it all, she's learning what it means when men own your name… your bookings… and, your labor.

This is the story of how an identity gets constructed through necessity, calculation, and imposition… and how one performer spent thirty-seven years learning to reclaim what was taken.

IT’S 1934…

The United States was five years into the Great Depression. Unemployment hovered around 22 percent, down from its 1933 peak of 25 percent, but is still very catastrophic.

One in five American workers couldn’t find a job. Those who had jobs were working for whatever wages they could get. In New York City’s Little Italy, where Italian immigrant families crowded into tenement buildings on the Lower East Side, economic necessity meant everyone worked. Fathers, mothers, older children, younger children. You worked in factories, in shops, in restaurants, in laundries, on street corners. You worked whatever job would have you, for whatever money they’d pay.

Don’t get me wrong, child labor laws existed… the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act would eventually establish federal minimums. But in 1934, the enforcement was spotty, especially for “service work” like retail and entertainment. Fifteen-year-olds working wasn’t unusual… It was survival.

Li’l Rosina DePella walks into Minsky’s Republic Theatre at 42nd Street and Broadway looking for work. Lies about her age and gets hired as a cashier.

One day, she was processing payments, counting receipts, handling the books, seeing EXACTLY how money moved through the theater. (remember this note right here-it comes into play later)

While doing the “cashier thang” Rosina got her first look at a stripper’s payroll check. The number was probably three or four times what she was making in the box office. Maybe more…

Rosina DePella did some quick 15 year old math.

According to Seymour Rothman, who would later write her obituary, Rose “was wise beyond her years (which she lied about), and after her first look at a stripper’s check decided that she didn’t belong in a box office.” So she demanded an opportunity to perform.

And she got it!

This wasn’t a “discovery” discovery mind you. This wasn’t some talent scout spotting raw potential. This wasn’t even the fairy tale version where beauty and natural charisma open doors... This was some fifteen-year-old working-class girl from Little Italy looking at the economics of burlesque labor and making a calculated decision: if she could do what the strippers were doing, she could make what they were making. The math wasn’t hard at all.

But the work was… different. The exposure was different... The risks were different.

But the money was real… and Rosina was willing to take all those risks for all that money.

So Rosina demanded the opportunity to make that money, henny. And Minsky, or whoever was managing talent for the Republic in 1934, actually gave it to her.

What happens next would define the next thirty-seven years of her life:

FUCK “ROSE LA ROSE”

Somewhere between the conversation where she demanded to perform and her first appearance on stage, Rosina DePella stopped existing.

According to Rothman’s account, a sign painter was told to prepare a stage sign for Rose. He looked at “Rosina DePella” and decided it wasn’t a good stripping name.

So he painted something else: Rose La Rose.

Alliterative... Memorable... Vaguely French.. exotic, without being TOO specific. The kind of name that suggested elegance and sexuality and just a SNATCH of mystery.

By the time anyone noticed what the sign painter had done, the sign was finished. And Minsky’s Republic Theatre wasn’t about to pay for a new one.

Rosina DePella, who had demanded an opportunity to perform based on cold economic calculation, found herself performing under a name she hadn’t chosen and felt very indifferent to.

But the sign was done. (Sorry kid, them’s the rules) The name was painted. The performance was scheduled. 2 Choices appear before Rosina: One, she could accept the name and perform, or she could refuse the name and go back to the box office.

She performed.

“PRETTY FACES” ROSE’S FIRST APPEARANCE

The caption read: “Rose LaRose, blonde charmer headlining the program at Billy Minsky’s Brooklyn Theatre.”

The caption said “headlining.”

But the advertisement that ran the same day tells a more specific story: Rose La Rose was sharing the bill at Minsky’s Brooklyn with Margie Hart.

Margie Hart, who by November 1934 was already one of THEE biggest names in burlesque, a performer who’d been working professionally since the late 1920s and commanded top billing wherever she went.

Also on the bill: Betty Rowland (who would later become famous as “The Ball of Fire”) and Zuleika “the dancer.”

This wasn’t a solo showcase. This wasn’t Rose getting star treatment at some second-tier venue. This was a sixteen-year-old girl, eight months removed from working the box office, performing as a featured act alongside some of the most established names in the business.

Not chorus. Not “also appearing.” Not background…

Featured.

Rosina DePella had left school at fifteen (approx.), lied about her age to get a cashier job, seen a stripper’s check, done the math, demanded an opportunity, accepted a name she didn’t choose, and within approximately eight months was working Minsky’s Brooklyn alongside Margie Hart. She was sixteen years old.

The photograph shows a young blonde woman with styled hair, professional makeup, and a practiced smile. She looks confident. She looks like someone who knew how to work for a camera. She looks like someone who’d made a deliberate choice to be exactly where she was.

Because she absolutely had.

The November 4 photograph, and the lineup she’d broken into, proved she was right. Featured performers at Minsky’s Brooklyn made real money. Maybe not Margie Hart money yet, but significantly more than what Li’l Rosina DePella would have made counting receipts.

But the cost was becoming clear: the name “Rose La Rose/LaRose” wasn’t hers. The image wasn’t entirely hers. The billing, the photographs, the public identity of “Rose LaRose, blonde charmer” …all of that existed in a space controlled by Minsky, by theater managers, by the male-dominated infrastructure of burlesque.

What Rose was just beginning to learn was that the extra money came with terms: you perform under the name THEY give you, you work the schedule THEY set, you accept the contracts THEY offer, and you do it all while maintaining the lie about your age because if anyone asks too many questions about whether the sixteen-year-old performing alongside Margie Hart is actually old enough to be doing this, the whole arrangement falls apart.

Rose will spend the next thirty-seven years learning to renegotiate those terms...

DECEMBER 2, 1934: ANOTHER CONTRACT

Less than a month after that November 4th photograph ran, Rose gets married J. Harrington Price (toy manufacturer) in New York. Rose was or was about sixteen years old.

In 1930s New York, marriage at sixteen was legal but typically required parental consent for anyone under eighteen. Did Rose get that consent? Did her mother sign off? Or did Rose, who’d already lied about her age to get the cashier job, lie about her age again?

We don’t have the marriage certificate. We don’t know what age she claimed. We don’t know what Price knew or didn’t know about her real age. What we DO know is that the marriage would fall apart spectacularly.

By April 1938, Rose would file for annulment, claiming Price had “misrepresented his financial situation” and was “still married to a common-law wife in New York state.” The case would drag on for four and a half years. The divorce wouldn’t be finalized until October 1942, after what Billboard called “over a year of contentious news publicity.”

Let’s not get TOO far ahead of ourselves. The marriage was just one more thing that would eventually need to be renegotiated, contested, fought over, and finally dissolved.

DECEMBER 1934: BACK TO WORK

Rose married on December 2, 1934. By December 20, 1934, eighteen days later,she was back on stage at Minsky’s Brooklyn Theatre performing in “Tic-Toc Follies.”

She got married and barely missed any shows. The marriage wasn’t a “settling down” moment. It wasn’t retirement. It wasn’t even a break from work. Sixteen years old, newly married, and back on stage less than three weeks later as “Rose LaRose” in a Supreme Burlesque Circuit production. The work continued. The bookings continued. The lie about her age continued.

The calculation she’d made months earlier—that stripping paid better than cashiering, was proving correct. But she was also learning that the industry didn’t care about her marriage, her age, her actual name, or anything else about Rosina DePella.

What mattered was “Rose LaRose” showing up, performing on schedule, filling seats, making money for the theater… Everything else was HER problem to manage.

WINTER 1934-1935: CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE

The local Brooklyn papers tracked her movements through that winter:

November 4-10, 1934: Minsky’s Brooklyn Theatre, “Pretty Faces” (Supreme Burlesque Circuit). Featured alongside Margie Hart, Betty Rowland, and Zuleika “the dancer.”

December 16-22, 1934: Minsky’s Brooklyn Theatre, “Tic-Toc Follies” (Supreme Burlesque Circuit). The Daily News advertisement lists her name prominently: “ROSE LAROSE.” Two big shows scheduled for New Year’s Eve.

December 29-30, 1934: Minsky’s Brooklyn Theatre, “Times Square Follies.” The Brooklyn Citizen announces the show opening “tomorrow” (December 30), with “Rose La Rose, dancer” listed among a cast that includes comedians Herby Faye and Frank Smith, along with other performers. Peaches Strange makes a “return engagement.”

February 3, 1935: Minsky’s Brooklyn Theatre, “Three Cheers” (Supreme Burlesque Circuit). The Times Union describes the Supreme Circuit roster as including “Diane Logan, singing ingenue; exotic Rose LaRose, dancer; Marie Voe, comedienne; Dolores Leland, Oriental dancer; Diane Johnson, vocal charmer; Elsa Lang, prima donna, and others.”

The marketing language is notable: “exotic Rose LaRose, dancer.” By February 1935, she’s being sold as “exotic”—a term that suggests foreign mystery, sensuality, otherness. Rose LaRose from Brooklyn’s Little Italy, born Rosina DePella, repackaged as “exotic” for audiences who wanted fantasy.

February 26, 1935: Minsky’s Republic Theatre, “Sweet and Pretty” (Supreme Circuit). This is the date Elizabeth Wellman’s 2015 dissertation identifies as Rose’s first documented appearance, likely because it’s where Billboard (the national industry trade paper) first picked up her name. But the local Brooklyn papers had been tracking her for four months by then.

By February 1935, Rose La Rose had been performing professionally for at least four months, had gotten married, and was working continuously through the Minsky circuit rotation while maintaining the lie about her age and carrying a name she hadn’t chosen.

April 1935:

May 1935:

October 1935:

The “discovery” narrative “the innocent girl who gets spotted and becomes a star” doesn’t match the documentary evidence. Rose didn't get discovered. Rose fuckin’ hustled.

CHAOS & HUSTLE

The burlesque industry in 1934-1935 was in chaos.

The Columbia Wheel, which had operated as a virtual monopoly through the 1920s—had collapsed. Multiple competing circuits were fighting for control: the Supreme Circuit (Minsky), the Hirst Circuit, the Mutual Wheel, Jack Kane’s Midwest operations, independent theaters booking their own shows. No standardization of pay. No job security. No protection against theater owners who would fire an entire company mid-week and replace them with cheaper talent.

For theater owners, this chaos meant opportunity: lower labor costs, more desperate performers, more control.

For performers, this chaos meant constant calculation: which circuit paid better, which managers were reliable, which bookings would actually honor their contracts, which theaters would try to short your wages.

Rose was learning to hustle through this chaos.

She’d already demonstrated she knew how to calculate: she’d seen a stripper’s check and demanded an opportunity. Now she was learning to calculate constantly: which shows to take, which circuits to work, how to negotiate bookings…

By February 1935, while Billboard was documenting theater closures and salary disputes across every major circuit, Rose La Rose was working… Continuously. Three different shows in three months (Tic-Toc Follies, Times Square Follies, Three Cheers). Different venues. Different casts. Same hustle.

This was survival in an industry designed to extract everything while offering NOTHING in return. The chaos wasn’t an accident. The chaos was the business model. The fragmented circuits, the lack of standardization, the constant turnover… all of it benefited theater owners who could play performers against each other, who could threaten to fire anyone who demanded better terms, who could rely on the Depression to ensure there was always someone more desperate willing to take your spot.

SEPTEMBER 1935: THE HIRST CIRCUIT

On September 15, 1935, Rose La Rose left Minsky’s Supreme Circuit and started working the Hirst Circuit.

Her first documented Hirst engagement was at the Gayety Theatre in Baltimore in a show called “Nudie Cuties.”

Not “oriental mystery.” Not “exotic revue.” Not “Bagdad to Broadway” (as Wellman’s dissertation would later claim, likely based on incomplete records).

Just “Nudie Cuties.”

The Baltimore Sun advertisement was blunt: GAYETY TRAVELING BURLESK 3 SHOWS DAILY HERBY FAYE—FRANK SMITH NUDIE CUTIES ROSE LaROSE—MARIE GUNDEL CONDO AND ALLEN.

The show featured comedians Herby Faye and Frank “Tangle-Talk” Smith, fellow performer Marie Gundel, and the dancing team Condo and Allen. Forty entertainers made up the cast.

The title said everything about where burlesque was heading in 1935: no pretense to legitimacy, no exotic packaging, no artistic claims. Just the promise of nudity delivered with maximum efficiency to audiences who knew exactly what they were paying for.

This was Rose’s entry into the Hirst Circuit, one of the major touring wheels that would define her career for the next two decades.

And this is where the real work began. From Baltimore, she would begin the rotation that defined burlesque labor: a different city every week, the same dressing room fights, the same boarding houses, the same race to make the train.

The Hirst Circuit rotation, Fall 1935:

• September 22: Gayety, Washington DC

• September 29: Howard, Boston

• October 6: Trocadero, Philadelphia

• October 13: Empire, Newark

• October 20: Werba’s, Brooklyn

• October 27: Republic, New York

• November 3: Orpheum, Paterson, NJ

• November 10: Hudson, Union City, NJ

Eight cities in eight weeks. This was “making it.”

This was the circuit that separated professional burlesque performers from local stock shows or the smaller wheels where theaters booked independently and performers scrambled for single-week engagements.

Rose’s mother, Jennie “Mother La Rose” DePella was traveling with her. This detail, buried in interviews Rose would give decades later, really matters. Because while male theater owners and circuit managers controlled the bookings, the money, and the infrastructure, the women built their own support systems. Mothers, sisters, friends, other performers. They shared dressing rooms, shared costumes when trunks went missing, shared information about which theater managers would try to short your pay and which stagehands you could trust.

NEXT IN THIS SERIES: Rose spends the winter of 1936 testing whether she can escape the name Minsky gave her.

She can't.

Part 2: What Discovery Cost.

SOURCES FOR PART 1:

• Brooklyn Times Union, November 4, 1934 (Rose LaRose photo, Republic Theatre)

• Daily News, December 20, 1934 (Minsky’s Brooklyn, “Tic-Toc Follies”)

• Brooklyn Citizen, December 29, 1934 (Minsky’s Brooklyn, “Times Square Follies”)

• Times Union (Brooklyn), February 3, 1935 (Minsky’s Brooklyn, “Three Cheers”)

• Baltimore Sun, September 15, 1935 (Gayety Theatre, “Nudie Cuties”)

• Charles H. McCaghy Collection of Exotic Dance from Burlesque to Clubs, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University

• Billboard (Archive: 1894-1960), 1934-1937

• Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)

• Seymour Rothman, “Ex-Ecdysiast Rose La Rose Follows Burlesque In Death,” Toledo Blade, July 28, 1972 (source for the stripper’s check detail, cashier job, age 15, demanding opportunity to perform, sign painter story)

• Brooklyn Times Union, November 4, 1934 (Rose LaRose photo, “blonde charmer headlining”)

• Daily News, December 20, 1934 (Minsky’s Brooklyn, “Tic-Toc Follies”)

• Brooklyn Citizen, December 29, 1934 (Minsky’s Brooklyn, “Times Square Follies”)

• Times Union (Brooklyn), February 3, 1935 (Minsky’s Brooklyn, “Three Cheers,” “exotic” descriptor)

• Elizabeth Wellman, “Taught It to the Trade: Rose La Rose and the Re-Ownership of American Burlesque, 1935-1972” (PhD diss., The Ohio State University, 2015)

This is Part 1 of an ongoing series documenting the 37-year career of Rose La Rose, from her first documented appearance in November 1934 to her death as a theater owner in Toledo in 1972.

In this bit… You are a stockbroker on Wall Street.

It is September 1968… You are supposed to be working.

You, are NOT working.

What you are doing is… standing. In New York even! That’s right... You are standing on the steps of the “House of Morgan” with four hundred men in suits, craning your neck toward the BMT (Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit) subway entrance at Broad and Wall.

You have been here every day for two weeks.

You are waiting for a girl…

Her name was Francine Gottfried… she was twenty-one years old and she earned $92.50 a week operating an IBM 1260 machine for Chemical Bank’s data processing center several blocks away. Here she is…

Francine took the BMT from her home in Williamsburg every morning, emerged from the subway at 1:28 p.m. sharp, and walked briskly to her office building.

She’s been doing this for four months before anyone ever noticed.

Then… someone noticed.

Francine’s reported measurements were 43-25-37. She usually wore tight sweaters. Story goes: A few brokers mentioned her to a few colleagues who, in turn, mentioned her to a few more, and by the third week of September the crowd waiting at the Broad Street subway entrance had grown from several hundred to several thousand to something the wire services were calling a phenomenon.The Daily News ran the headline: A Bust Panics Wall Street as the Tape Says 43.

The New York Times ran: 10,000 Wait in Vain for Reappearance of Wall Street’s Sweater Girl.

Gray-haired executives at the House of Morgan peered out anxiously from behind oversized windows. Armored car guards deserted their vehicles for a better look. On the days Francine appeared, the crowd surged forward and shoved men and women against walls and windows and damaged three automobiles and kicked shoes off the feet of passersby. Police had to escort her through the mob and out the back door and down five streets to reach her office.

On the days she didn’t appear? She stayed home. Or she took a different route entirely. She simply declined to perform leaving fifteen thousand people standing on the financial district’s most storied corner, waiting for nothing.

The AP ran it nationally. The wire copy translated the whole thing into the language of the exchange: boom and bust, bulls and bears, figures, forward acreage, not to be sold short …winking at itself the entire time.

What’s strange is that nobody in the financial press asked why fifteen thousand men in suits were rioting over a woman walking to work.

It was treated as weather… A natural phenomenon.

A market correction.

Francine herself was breathless and incredulous. She told reporters she hadn’t done anything. She was just an ordinary girl. There were thousands of girls on Wall Street and they acted as though she was the only one.

Then she did the math…

This is the biggest thing to hit Wall Street since the Crash of ‘29, she said. And I should be compensated!

She wasn’t.

Her boss was angry she was consistently late. A Miami nightclub offered her $100,000 to take off her sweater and perform as a topless dancer. She turned it down. She eventually just started taking a different route to work.

The machinery, however, was already running.

Within days, other women arrived to compete for the crowd’s attention. Geri Stotts, 36, a bookkeeper from Burbank, California, who measured 47-29-38, flew to New York, stepped out of a limousine in a flaming fuchsia minidress and black boots, and was immediately mobbed and taken away by police. Two women from Cleveland caused a near-riot. A third woman was whisked away before anyone got her name or measurements.

The press agent Sam Gutwirth watched all of this and saw an opportunity.

He had a client. Twenty-two years old. A striptease artist at a midtown burlesque house. He took her downtown on a Friday in October and she emerged from a building on Broad Street in a miniskirt and white turtleneck.

The crowd of five thousand went FERAL immediately.

Men in neatly pressed business suits began pushing and shoving for a better view.

Fist fights broke out… Two men climbed to the roof of a truck and fell off when it moved. Sam Gutwirth just happened to know his client’s measurements: 50-22-37 and made damn sure the reporters wrote them down.

After she and her agent were knocked off their feet twice, police moved in, commandeered a passing car, and got them out of there.

The whole episode lasted less than ten minutes.

She was laughing the whole time.

Her name was Ronnie Bell…

And she already knew EXACTLY what she was doing. By 1971, she had somewhere to do it.

So Who the Hell Was Ronnie Bell?

The building behind her (Front of? Let’s not split hairs here…) was the Mayfair Theatre and it had been a LOT of things…. Billy Rose ran showgirls in the basement while the city was still at war.

Betty Grable filmed a musical here in 1945. (Julie London stood in the chorus, uncredited at eighteen years old.)

Julian Eltinge performed here… one of the highest-paid performers of his era, a female impersonator so convincing he had a Broadway theatre named after him. Offstage he performed a different role entirely: relentlessly, EXHAUSTINGLY masculine, because the alternative in 1940? Well, THAT was not survivable. He collapsed during the run and died ten days later, never finishing the run.

The building held that too.

Oh, and the men who wrote the musical Hair stood on this stage in 1964.

235 West 46th Street. Between Broadway and 8th. It had been the Diamond Horseshoe. Now it was the Mayfair. And in the summer of 1971 the city was broke and loud and running out of patience with itself. Down the block, a grindhouse ran a triple feature. Up the block, somebody sold something. A cab leaned on its horn for no particular reason and every reason at once.

Inside, a play called Fear of Love promised audiences something modern. Critics called it art.

Outside, Ronnie Bell held a sign that read: BUMPING & GRINDING IS BETTER THAN GRUNTING & GROANING.

She knew this block. She knew this building.

This building is where she was made.

Al Baker Jr. had run the Mayfair as a burlesque house: four stage shows daily, midnight show Saturdays, continuous from ten in the morning.

Baker was building something… The Mayfair was his flagship.

Across the Hudson he ran the Capitol Burlesk in Atlantic City, possibly assembled with money shaken loose when the Globe Theatre fell to urban renewal.

The clippings first place Ronnie Bell at the Mayfair in January 1967: billed as Burlesque’s Youngest Brightest Star, playing Baker’s own house.

By March she’s at the Trocadero in Philadelphia under previous ownership, advertised as Pretty and Young. Go Go Brunette. “Twin Liberty Belle Girl & Her Ding Dong Revue.” 45-22-32 — NOT GUNS!!!

Nobody had standardized her measurements yet. No press agent. Just a young woman working whatever houses would book her, moving up and down the eastern seaboard on her own damn momentum.

Then around 1968 Baker made two moves simultaneously. He sold the Mayfair to Leroy Griffith and acquired the Trocadero in Philadelphia, the last historic live burlesque house in the city. He immediately fired the orchestra. Five musicians out. A strike followed.

Baker didn’t blink.

Ronnie Bell worked both sides of that transaction.

The trade clipping from that season calls her a nineteen-year-old brunette from Kentucky’s tobacco belt. The youngest exotic in burlesque. She had already played Korea and Japan. Whether Kentucky is true or promotional copy invented by someone who thought it made a better story is a question the clippings can’t answer; her origin shifts as reliably as her measurements. What the clippings DO confirm is that by 1967 she was headlining at Baker’s houses, which means she was working his circuit before he owned the Trocadero, and when he acquired it, she came with the territory.

Somewhere along the way she picked up a press agent named Sam Gutwirth.

Then came Wall Street.

Then came the national wire.

By 1971 Ronnie Bell had played the Troc and the Mayfair and the Capitol and Baltimore and Buffalo and Niagara Falls and Staten Island. She had done Korea and Japan before she was twenty. She had been measured in newsprint in city after city, the numbers shifting depending on who was writing the ad. She had been knocked flat on Wall Street by a crowd of stockbrokers and gotten back up laughing.

She knew exactly what her labor was worth.

Which brings us back to the protest. And to Leroy Griffith.

Griffith was not an outsider. He was a burlesque millionaire, his money built on exactly the kind of work Ronnie Bell and every woman beside her had spent their careers doing. He had bought the Mayfair from Baker. It was his house now. And “Fear of Love” was his decision, a temporary swap, pulling the burlesque bill and replacing it with adult theatre rebranded as legitimate drama. Nude performers doing in front of a paying audience what burlesque performers had always done, except now it came with a playwright’s credit and a critic’s blessing.

The cast was cutting an album for Griffith Records. Questions and answers from the audience. Human sexuality as enlightenment, pressed to vinyl.

The women outside had a specific objection, and they wrote it on cardboard so nobody could miss it.

“SAVE THE G-STRING! KEEP STRIPPERS WORKING.”
”SEX ACTS UNFAIR TO BURLESQUE PERFORMERS.”
“BURLESQUE MILLIONAIRE LEROY GRIFFITH IS UNFAIR TO STRIPPERS.”

They knew their man. Griffith wasn’t abandoning burlesque. He was running an experiment, pulling his own performers OFF the bill (temporarily) to chase a different audience and a different kind of press. The distinction wasn’t moral.

It was economic.

Inside, it was Art, and Art got protection. Outside, on the same block, it was obscenity, and obscenity got arrested.

Ronnie Bell told the reporter what she thought in plain language.

“Nude men and women simulating sex acts on stage ruins my dignity.”

Not the nudity. Not the act.

The wrapper.

She posed for the cameras the way she’d work a stage… sign tilted just ever so, turned to show them exactly what she thought of the whole arrangement. She had been doing this since Wall Street. She knew how a camera worked. She knew how a crowd worked. She knew how a building worked.

She had worked this one.

By August, the sign was gone.

Ann Howe was headlining the Mayfair. Old time burlesk with the spice of ‘71. Baggy pants comedians. A chorus line of gorgeous girls on the illuminated runway.

Griffith got his press. Got his album. Got his audience Q&A about human sexuality pressed to vinyl on Griffith Records.

The burlesque bill was back…

Same stage. Same address. Same work. 48-24-36…

Just don’t call it art.

Al Baker Jr., the circuit he built. The musicians he fired. What happened to the houses after he got done with them. That’s a longer story… another bit, another day.

Some stories arrive clean. Ronnie Bell’s didn’t. If you have clippings, programs, photos, names, or even rumors, please reach out. Every fragment matters.

On April 8, 1971, WFIL-TV in Philadelphia aired a burlesque bit called “Assignment,” a little documentary examining the collapse of American burlesque. The show featured interviews with Legendary Maxie Furman, a longtime burlesque comic and stage manager at the Trocadero Theatre at the time, and some footage of “an exotic dancer billed as Miss Wow Wow.” (Would this still be archived at WFIL? This needs to be seen) And by the time the broadcast aired… the writing was already on the wall.

And 8 months later… Maxie Furman gets in hot water over Pearl Harbor.

Miss Wow Wow… real name/secret identity: Jeanne Cairoli (born Eugenie Fernandez somewhere in Argentina around 1942.)

Jeanne was in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time when she arrives on the American burlesque circuit around 1966 just as the legitimate business model was collapsing, spending about five years working every effin’ regional house that would still book live strippers, vanishing from the archival record by mid-1971.

What survives is a snatch of newspaper ads, a few promotional photos, one substantial press interview, and a lot of measurements confusion.

It’s a Numbers Game

In trying to flesh Wow-Wow out, it seems like the ads couldn’t quite agree on her dimensions (because at that time, it mattered).

Here are the findings:

• Most commonly: 58-24-36.

• Sometimes 50-26-38.

• One Toledo booker apparently just blindly threw darts at a board and came up with 48-22-36.

• A wire service photo from October 1968 (above) splits the difference, identifying “Baltimore dancer Jeanne Cairoli” as possessing a “50-26-38 figure she thinks tops the other attractions in the Wall Street girl-watching craze.” (She wasn’t even from Baltimore, she was from Argentina, and the 'Wall Street girl-watching craze' that is being referenced? Oh that WAS a thing and it’s CRAZY! The news-clipping above feels like they were more interested in the “visual pun” than in getting her fuckin’ hometown right. But maybe that was the intention all along?

At the end of the day, the “measurement wars” weren’t about accuracy, they were about bookings. And in 1968, burlesque houses were competing with everything from go-go bars to adult cinema, and the marquee had MAYBE three seconds to sell a potential customer on venturing inside.

“Miss Wow Wow 58-24-36” communicated something very specific: this was a “big-bust” specialty act, the kind of performer who’d been the industry’s bread and butter since the 1950s. The exact numbers mattered less than the proportional statement being made.

Other promotional taglines included “College Campus Sweetheart of 1968” (no documentation exists of how this title was determined or even by whom), “The Canadian Gem” (again, not Canadian), “Wowowonder Woman” (a superhero-themed act that probably involved a lot of star-spangled pasties-or I just WANT it to be), and the more straightforward “The Form Divine.” All of this was standard operating procedure. The stage name, the measurements, the superlatives? All tools of the trade.

The Burlesque Circuit: 1966-1971

Cairoli’s documented American career begins in October 1966 at the Gayety Theatre in Washington, DC, where she headlined alongside comics Tom Scurvey Miller, Artie Lloyd, and Buddy Bryant. From there, the trail goes oddly cold until early 1968, when she resurfaces on a much wider circuit:

New York City became her apparent base of operations. She worked the Hudson Theatre on West 44th Street and the Burlesque Arena on West 46th; both Times Square area houses running the standard format of live strippers, film shorts, and comedy bits. The Arena advertised “HUGE DOUBLE SHOW” with “Miss French Chantel Capri” and a “BIG STRIP TEASE BIG CONTEST” where audience applause determined the winner. These were not prestige bookings… This was hustle. These were grinding it out gigs, with four or five shows a day, and matinees starting at 1:00 PM.

Philadelphia meant the Trocadero at 10th and Arch, the last major burlesque house in the city. She appeared there multiple times between 1968 and 1971, working with Maxie Furman and sharing bills with performers like Pearl Diva. The Troc ran continuous shows from 11 AM to midnight, with a late Saturday show and “gala midnite show every Friday night.” The theater advertised itself as “Traveling Burlesque,” which was TECHNICALLY accurate, but also deeply sad… the reason being that the shows traveled because there weren’t enough houses left to justify staying put.

Atlantic City meant the Capitol Theatre, operated by Al Baker Jr. The Capitol advertised itself as “The New Home of the Globe,” referencing the historic Globe Burlesque Theatre at 801 Boardwalk… and Baker meant it literally.

In 1966, the Atlantic City Housing Authority purchased the Globe for $300,000 as part of an urban renewal project. The Globe was demolished at the end of the 1966 season, and by 1967, Baker had purchased a Cadillac courtesy car to pick up passengers “at the site of the old Globe at Delaware and the Walk” and drive them the two blocks to the Capitol. Where the Globe had stood for nearly four decades, there was now just a vacant lot and a limousine pickup point.

This wasn’t just market consolidation, this was municipal government actively erasing burlesque infrastructure through redevelopment. The cleared land, later nicknamed “Pauline’s Prairie” after Housing Authority director Pauline Hill, let it sit vacant for decades before becoming part of the Showboat Casino site in 1987.

Philadelphia follows the same pattern: the Tenderloin’s 8th Street theater corridor saw three to four old timey theatres (2 were burlesque houses) demolished between 1953 and 1967 as urban renewal projects carved up the district.

The regional swing took Wow Wow through Buffalo (Palace Burlesque, “First Buffalo Appearance,” July 1968), Cleveland (Roxy Burlesk, October 1968, with Charley Abbott and Bert Gehan), Toledo (Folies de Burlesque, August 1968), and even Toronto (Victory Burlesk, “Canada’s Only Burlesk,” October 1968). These were week-long bookings, maybe two weeks if business was good. Then takes off to the next town.

Working Conditions

A 1968 Atlantic City Press interview, the only substantial piece of journalism about Cairoli that survives… offers a glimpse of what this life actually looked like. At 26, she was working four shows a night at the Capitol, changing between acts in cramped dressing rooms, sharing the bill with other “exotic dancers” whose stage names have since been lost to history (…or not, we’ll see). She tells reporter M.L. Blumenthal that she’d gained “quite a few pounds” since her last publicity agent weighed her, and that she frequently thought about retirement but kept coming back because “I have to be in show business.”

The piece positioned her as optimistic about burlesque’s future… ”We are alive,” she insisted, claiming that audiences would return once they tired of “filthy movies,” but the subtext was pure desperation. Business had “gone down in the last five years,” she admitted. Not every house she worked had comedy acts anymore. The Capitol had five-piece bands; other venues made do with tape recorders or record players. She emphasized that burlesque performers were “professionals” who took pride in their work, which was true but also the kind of thing people say when they’re watching their industry die in real time.

The article noted that she came “to the US in 1961 with her family.” No details about that family or why they left Argentina. The circus background mentioned in passing ”the circus had been their business” never gets elaborated.

Wait—What kind of circus? Performing or managing? Was the Fernandez family part of the South American circus tradition that produced multi-generational performer dynasties? We don’t know, because Blumenthal was more interested in her damn bust measurements than any sort of family history.

The Disappearance

After that July 1971 appearance at El Caribe nightclub in Brooklyn, billed alongside singers Shawn Lewis and Cookie Lee, the trail goes cold… No more ads. No more clippings. She would have been 29 years old, still young enough to transition to other performance work if she’d wanted to. But the burlesque circuit that had sustained her career for five years was effectively dead, and El Caribe represented a different kind of hustle: nightclubs, solo exotic dance acts, working without comics or chorus girls or the infrastructure that had defined burlesque since the 1920s.

Maybe she stayed in New York. Maybe she moved to Los Angeles, where some burlesque entertainers found work in adult films. Maybe she left the industry entirely, got married, changed her name again, and just never looked back.

The archival record doesn’t tell us anything. What it DOES preserve is a snapshot of someone working their ass off in an industry that was already collapsing, traveling from Buffalo to Toledo to Toronto, taking whatever bookings came through, doing four shows a night at theaters that would be closed within a decade.

So What’s Left?

The ads that survive in newspaper archives are weirdly haunting in their repetitiveness. “MISS WOW WOW 58-24-36” in massive block letters. “THE FORM DIVINE.” “ON STAGE IN PERSON.” The same promotional photo showing up in Cleveland and Buffalo and Philadelphia, slightly blurred from being reproduced too many times. The measurements changing from city to city like someone was just making them up as they went along.

This is what we have instead of a life: evidence of labor. Proof that she showed up, that she worked the circuit, that she was good enough to headline and get held over at the Troc and make all those “first appearances” in new markets. The 1971 WFIL documentary positioned her as illustration of a dying art form, but really she was evidence of a dying economic model. The theaters closed not because the performers weren’t skilled, but because the infrastructure couldn’t compete with cheaper, more explicit alternatives.

Jeanne Cairoli/Eugenie Fernandez/Miss Wow Wow disappeared into whatever comes after the circus, after burlesque, after the circuit shuts down and the theaters go dark. The archival record preserves her measurements—maybe 58-24-36, maybe 50-26-38—and a five-year paper trail of bookings at houses that no longer exist.

That’s what’s left…

That and the knowledge that someone kept showing up, kept working, kept performing even as the whole industry crumbled underneath her feet.

This is Burlesque Bits, continuing Charlie Uno’s Billboard column legacy (1930-1959). We document American burlesque through primary sources, focusing on labor organizing, workplace conditions, and recovering stories of forgotten performers.

If you have information about Miss “58” WOW-WOW or even that WFIL footage, contact me.

I already wrote about the ghost once without knowing it.

In a piece about two performers at the Trocadero Theatre in the summer of 1974, I noted it in passing… “thirty-eight men, two women, a cat, and a rumor of a resident ghost.” I didn’t investigate it. It was just atmosphere, local color as it were… the kind of detail old buildings accumulate without explanation. I moved on…

I’d heard the ghost comment before, somewhere in the vague drunken-high, general circulation of Philadelphia fringy brilliant performance culture i orbited in for a snatch of 20 years time. So, long story short: The Trocadero has been around since 1870… it collects stories the way old buildings do, but this one just floats beyond, right?

When the Peek-a-Boo Revue performed the Troc, I half-mentioned it in the dressing room to fellow emcee Scotchula whom I shared a dressing room together right behind the main stage. He wasn’t surprised. It’s usually something at the top of the stairs, seen sideways. A vibe of something in one of the dressing rooms... A trick of the light, probably.

Probably…

Right?

So I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I was searching some newspaper archives for Trocadero research and a clipping from December 27, 1902 stopped me cold…

In this bit, you are a rumor…

That’s right, a rumor...Not a ghost. Ghosts have weight, presence, cold spots in hallways... (allegedly) YOU are lighter than that. You are the thing a person, or me, says to another while pinning his/her hair in a mirror: “You know, someone died here once...”

You are the weird pause before the show… that particular silence after the applause in the five seconds before the lights change and everything begins. You are the wafting hint of perfume in the upstairs hallway that nobody can place, that doesn’t belong to anyone currently in the troupe or building. A perfume that is simply there and then… not there.

You travel mouth to ear. You have been traveling for 120+ years.

You were born on a Saturday evening in late December 1902… The Trocadero Theatre… “The Naughty Lady of Arch Street” …right there at 10th and Arch, Philadelphia.

Dollie Earle was a woman named Dorothy Allen. (some records give her name as Deborah Bauerschmidt, the discrepancy unresolved…) Either way, the name you now carry is the stage-name, because that’s the only name the company knew… “swallowed carbolic acid in her dressing room before The Merry Widows could take the stage.”

Five minutes to curtain, maybe. A courtesy knock, then the handle. What was found instead of a performer ready to go on was a woman dying on the floor. Groaning loudly.

On the wall she had written: Forgive me all. I cannot stand my troubles any longer.

The show did not go up that night…

That’s where you start. That’s the night you are born.

Here is what you carry, because rumors carry facts whether they mean to or not.

Her name was Dorothy Allen, daughter of T.J. Allen, granddaughter of John Tallinger, one of the best-known merchants in Rochester, New York. When her father T.J. died he left an estate valued at $40,000 to his daughter Dollie… it’s a fortune, held in trust.

Before she came of age she had already run away from home to go on the stage, against the wishes of her mother, her guardian, and her pappy J.F. Tallinger (who was named executor.) When Dorothy came of age and the money should have become hers, Tallinger goes to court. He obtained a legal order to keep the principal invested, OUT of her hands, on the grounds that she might spend it foolishly.

What does Dorothy get from her own inheritance?

Approximately $500 a year.

This was not informality. This was not a family disagreement. This was a legal mechanism specifically designed to keep a woman who wanted to work in entertainment from controlling her own life. And It worked.

Dorothy/Dollie had a fine contralto voice. She sang with leading comic opera companies as a principal, named in the program, even reviewed by name. About eight years before she passes, her voice fails...

Not through negligence. Not through any of the things the papers would later imply. It just simply failed… the way voices do.

She moved from comic opera into burlesque.

A note, because the word “burlesque” carries assumptions it shouldn’t: in 1902, burlesque was not stripping. It was variety entertainment… like sketch comedy, musical numbers, parody, specialty acts organized into an “olio” format. It looked, from the outside, something like vaudeville would have looked. But… they were distinct industries. Vaudeville: the Keith-Albee circuit, the family matinee, the clean stage, marketed itself aggressively as respectable entertainment and policed its performers accordingly. Burlesque played rougher houses, charged lower prices, allowed the material vaudeville banned, and carried the stigma of that latitude even before “undressed performance” became central to the form. What the papers called Dollie’s fall from grace was a working performer moving between variety formats.

The move was also a demotion. In comic opera she had been a principal. In burlesque she was a soubrette: the pert, flirtatious, comedic type, one of several acts in the olio, reviewed briefly when and IF reviewed at all.

The craft was real.

The position in the hierarchy was not equivalent. Her contralto voice suited the warmer, character-driven material: popular parlor songs, Tin Pan Alley numbers the audience already knew, comic novelty pieces with a punchline built in. She worked the stage rather than planted herself on it… direct address, gesture, personality as much as voice.

The reviews confirm this. Not spectacular…. Clever. “A clever little soubrette with some good songs.”

She was with the Bijou Burlesquers in the spring. The Gay Girls of Gotham in the fall. By December she was in Philadelphia with the Runaway Girl company… until it stranded her in Philly, collapsed mid-engagement, about two weeks before she died. She only picked up work with the Merry Widows locally.

She didn't come to Philadelphia with a plan.

She was already stuck here when the curtain didn't go up.

But nearly everything we know about Dollie’s story comes from people who controlled her, …failed her, or had reason to discredit her. Like the newspapers quoting her sister-in-law… Grand Papa Tallinger speaking to the coroner... We are working almost entirely from hostile witnesses.

Even the note on the wall exists in competing versions. The wire report filed the night she died gives it as: Forgive me all; can't stand trouble. The sister-in-law's account, published days later, gives a longer and more literary version. Which one is accurate, or whether EITHER is, cannot be confirmed. We are left with fragments that don't quite fit together, reported by people with interests of their own.

In May 1902, seven months before you were born, Dorothy/Dollie cut her wrists in a Rochester hotel room. She sent for her Grandfather. Expecting to die, she told him she wanted to be cremated.

He came. She survived. Nothing changed.

The Merry Widows didn’t know about Dorothy/Dollie. The Trocadero certainly didn’t know. A traveling company doesn’t carry that kind of information about its performers… there was no mechanism for it, no language for it, no framework in 1902 for what a previous attempt meant about the future. She went back out on the road and showed up for work while nobody on that stage knew what she was carrying.

December finds her in Philadelphia, two days after Christmas, with the Merry Widows at the Trocadero. The Philadelphia Inquirer had run the advertisement six days earlier with holly borders, Christmas copy, A Great Yuletide Bill. The woman in the portrait at the center of that advertisement? Not Dollie.

Grandpa Tallinger finally came to Philadelphia again, this time for the body.
The coroner asked about instructions. She had left them to him back in May:

cremation.

Tallinger said she hadn’t made a formal second request. The same man who had used the courts to keep her from her own money in life used a procedural argument to override her wishes in death.

Her body went back to Rochester by train. The funeral was the following Thursday.

Floyd Lauman, the proprietor who ran the Trocadero the night the Merry Widows show didn’t go up, a former trapeze performer himself who had once worked the same traveling company circuits Dollie worked, is LONG gone. The show that replaced the Merry Widows that week was called Wine, Woman and Song.

The building didn’t pause long. And it seems to have dropped the word burlesque from its ad.

By the time the Trocadero reinvents itself as a concert venue you have migrated from the dressing rooms entirely. Robert Drake: DJ, WXPN radio personality, producer of Philadelphia’s long-running Sex Dwarf dance party, a man who had worked the Trocadero for a decade and knew the building the way you know a place you’ve loved, stood alone on stage after an event one night. The staff were cleaning up. He looked out from the stage toward the upper balcony, to an area one cannot easily access (perhaps third floor balcony above the balcony bar-this is the only inaccessible area that I remember), and saw a silhouette. Clear as day. Just watching...

He focused his stare and it vanished before his eyes.

“I always felt the Troc was haunted,” he said later, “considering its long history.”

He wasn’t wrong about the history.

Her name was Dorothy Allen. She called herself Dollie Earle. She was a vocalist, a soubrette, a member of the Merry Widows burlesque company. She died at the Trocadero Theatre on December 27, 1902, before the curtain went up, in a building that had been, at the time, accumulating stories for about 30 years.

Fast forward 120+ years, working performers have been passing her forward without knowing her name. Through every incarnation of that building: burlesque house, cinema, dance club, concert venue… something of that Saturday evening has persisted in the walls, in the dressing rooms, in the instinct that makes you glance twice at the top of the stairs.

You are not a ghost story.

You are a woman that a building refuses to forget.

Dollie Earle, born Deborah Allen, Rochester, New York. Died December 27, 1902, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She asked to be cremated….

They buried her anyway.

Burlesque Bits continues the legacy of Charlie Uno's Billboard magazine column (1930–1959), documenting the history of American burlesque through primary sources.

The summer of 1951 was a strange moment to be working the North Las Vegas circuit...

Just renamed from “Las Vegas Army Air Field” the year before, Nellis Air Force Base was in the middle of massive expansion; new runways for jets, concrete barracks replacing wartime wooden structures, thousands of Korean War trainees cycling through gunnery school. The servicemen had money in their pockets and nowhere to spend it except the clubs just outside the base gates. For performers, that meant steady work. It also meant the kind of pressure-cooker conditions where twenty dollars could be worth bleeding for.

Christine Marlow, whose real name was Juanita Hardy, 32 years old, working under a stage name like most of us do, had been alternating shows with another performer at the Embassy Club. Her counterpart was Doreen Manos, 28, red-haired, and by Friday night, according to court records, was thoroughly done with whatever had been building between her & Christine all week.

The newspapers would call this the “Battle of the Strippers” and joke about “the fury of the atom” being nothing compared to a disrespected burlesque dancer. What they wouldn’t talk about much was what twenty dollars actually meant in 1951.

Back then, twenty dollars had over 12 times the purchasing power of $20 today. That’s NOT tip money. That’s not even pocket change. For a performer working a week-long engagement at a North Las Vegas club, twenty dollars missing from your key case meant you might not be able to afford gas back to Los Angeles, let alone eat while you looked for the next gig. The money disappeared while Christine was on stage and when she came back to the dressing room to pack up her costumes, it was gone. She decided to wait until after Doreen’s set to ask about it.

What Doreen found when she returned from HER final performance was her own set of problems: expensive gowns and underthings slashed to ribbons, strewn across the dressing room floor. The two women were the only ones using that space. The math was not very complicated.

The accounts of what happened next depend on who you ask, but the basic facts aren’t in dispute. Christine confronted Doreen about the money. Doreen confronted Christine about the costumes. The confrontation escalated, the prosecution would later claim Doreen threw the first punch, Christine said Doreen came at her with a gin bottle. What’s documented is that Christine, who was four inches taller and twenty pounds heavier according to Doreen’s complaint, bit down on Doreen Manos’s ear in the tussle and didn’t let go until the club owner stormed in and separated them.

Here’s where it gets grotesque… grotesque in that particular way the criminal justice system can be grotesque: Las Vegas prosecutor Roger Foley had the severed piece of Doreen’s ear, “too badly mangled to reattach,” preserved in formaldehyde as evidence. Fifteen stitches to close what was left of Doreen’s ear. The charge was “mayhem” under Nevada Revised Statute 200.280, a Category B felony carrying two to ten years in prison. The statute specifically lists “slitting the ear” as an example of the crime. This wasn’t a bar fight getting charged as simple battery. This was the state of Nevada attempting to send a working performer to prison, potentially for up to a decade, over a backstage dispute about stolen money and destroyed costumes.

The newspaper coverage is its own document of how the press treated working performers in 1951. The Daily News called Christine a “platinum-tressed ecdysiast.” The Register described her as a “blonde beauty.” When she was arrested at her home at 2958 Hillcrest Drive in Los Angeles on August 4th, they photographed her in what they called a “classic cheesecake pose” the caption making sure to note she’d been “charged with biting off the ear of another entertainer in a night club brawl.” One headline read “Hell Hath No Fury Like A—!” Another went with “Strip-Teasers in Brawl: Redhead’s Ear Chewed, Blonde Arrested.” The language does a lot of work: it makes the incident “scandalous” and “titillating” while simultaneously diminishing both women as catty, temperamental, & violent. It’s spectacular violence performed by spectacular women… nothing to see here except the spectacular spectacle.

What gets buried in that minimal coverage is the material reality. These were two ladies were working performers/entertainers sharing a dressing room at a club catering primarily to servicemen from Nellis. Neither of them owned the venue. Neither of them had job security beyond the current week’s engagement. Both of them depended on their costumes, which could cost hundreds of dollars, to work. Both of them depended on the cash they earned to make it to the next job. The missing twenty dollars and the slashed gowns weren’t provocations in some personal drama. They were direct attacks on each woman’s ability to keep working.

Christine told investigators she’d been hustling champagne and whisky all week. The “bit “ is called being a “B-Girl.” A “B-Girl” will hustle drinks and pretend to drink while the bartender serves her non-alcoholic drinks; a standard club scam where the performer splits the drink markup with the house. Christine wasn’t being coy about this in court. She explained it matter-of-factly: because this was how the job worked. After her contract ended that night, the club owner told her to leave immediately because there might be trouble. She drove four hours back to Los Angeles, and only when she got home and started unpacking did she discover one of her own gowns had been cut to slivers, apparently with a razor blade.

When investigators arrived at the Embassy Club after 4 a.m., Doreen told them she’d been “helpless” against Christine because Christine was four inches taller and twenty pounds heavier. One detail the newspapers made sure to include: Doreen was wearing only her bra and panties when she gave her statement to police. The press noted this with that particular mix of prurience they brought to covering burlesque performers, documenting her state of undress while treating it as both scandalous and somehow proof she wasn’t a serious victim.

The case went to trial with a jury of seven men and five women. Christine’s defense was straightforward: self-defense. Doreen came at her with a weapon (the gin bottle), she defended herself with what she had (her teeth). The prosecution had to prove mayhem required malicious intent to permanently disfigure. The jury looked at the evidence: two women, a dressing room they both used, missing money, destroyed costumes, an escalating confrontation, and acquitted Christine Marlow on all charges.

The newspapers framed this as Christine “winning her freedom” and joked about the “no-holds-barred battle.” What they didn’t examine was the deeper question: what creates the conditions where twenty dollars and some slashed fabric lead to permanent disfigurement? The Embassy Club in North Las Vegas was, by all accounts, a working venue. Not glamorous. Not a showplace. Tempest Storm performed there in 1951, the same year as this incident, early in her career before she became the highest-paid stripper in the business. These were spaces where performers hustled for tips, split drink revenue with the house, and lived gig-to-gig. The proximity to Nellis meant steady work but also meant working for audiences who saw you as entertainment purchased alongside their alcohol.

Doreen Manos, despite taking the loss in court and being permanently scarred, apparently took her career to Europe where she “dazzled audiences with tales of her resilience and strength,” according to later retrospective accounts. Christine Marlow, according to those same accounts, adopted “Savage Beauty” as a tagline and capitalized on the notoriety. I can’t independently verify either of those outcomes—they smell like the kind of narrative tidying-up that happens when people write about burlesque decades later. Or I just made this part up. What I CAN verify is that both women kept working, which tells you everything you need to know about burlesque economics. You didn’t stop performing because you got your ear bitten off or because you got charged with mayhem. You kept working because working was the only option.

The preserved ear in formaldehyde, the cheesecake arrest photo, the jury deliberating over whether biting constitutes malicious disfigurement… all of it is grotesque. But the real violence isn’t the bite… The real violence is the system that puts two working performers in a shared dressing room with no job security, no protection from theft, no recourse when your tools get destroyed, and then turns their survival strategies into criminal spectacle.

It's baffling…

Sources: Los Angeles Daily News, August 4, 1951; Santa Ana Register, August 5, 1951; Kellogg Evening News, August 13, 1951; El Paso Times, November 1951; multiple wire service reports August-November 1951. Research from newspaper archives via Newspapers.com, Nevada Revised Statutes historical records, and Nellis AFB historical documentation.

In this Bit… You love Aunt Esther. Of course you do. Bible raised, lip curled, words sharp enough to slice through the screen and leave a mark. Every time she squared up against Fred Sanford, you laughed, you winced, you cheered. She was righteous. She was ridiculous. She was exactly who she needed to be.

But here’s what the credits never told you…

Before she was Aunt Esther, before television even knew her name, she was working smoke-filled rooms under a different kind of gospel. She was La Wanda, the Bronze Goddess of Fire. She ate flames. She controlled them. She stood in front of audiences who hadn’t come to be saved and held their absolute attention anyway.

La Wanda didn’t stumble into performing. She built it — night by night, city by city, in the clubs and on the circuits where Black entertainers worked because the other doors weren’t open. The fire wasn’t a trick. It was a statement.

Aunt Esther got the laughs. La Wanda earned them first.

From Alberta to La Wanda

She was born Alberta Richmond in Cleveland in 1920, raised in the Holiness Church before her family moved to St. Louis. At the Friendly Inn Settlement she danced as a girl, and by her teens she was sneaking into taverns to shake fringe skirts to pounding rhythms. Alberta, the girl from the pews, became La Wanda, a stage name that gave her license to breathe fire, literally and figuratively.

Irvin C. Miller and the Brown Skin Models

Her early touring break came with Irvin C. Miller’s Brown Skin Models, a revue that was billed as a "sepia Ziegfeld Follies," the Brown Skin Models toured theaters throughout the East and South, featuring elaborate specialty acts, vocalists, Lindy hoppers, a fire dancer, punctuating the poses of beautiful chorus women in revealing costumes. Their lobby card was once arrested in Alabama on suspicion of lewdness. The same show advertised itself as having "nothing the most perfect lady will object to." Into this world of contradictions and spectacle stepped La Wanda, ready to claim her place.

“The Bronze Goddess of Fire”

A club owner wanted something new… something dangerous. La Wanda turned to “Taboo,” a female impersonator whose own name has since vanished from the record, and was taught the secrets of fire: how to hold it, how to swallow it, how to make an audience believe you were something other than human. Soon she was swallowing flames, lighting cigarettes or matches with her fingertips, and walking over burning stages. The crowds roared, some recoiled, and the danger itself became her calling card. That’s when she crowned herself: The Bronze Goddess of Fire.

She often burned herself in those early years, “frequently, though never badly,” she recalled. But she also discovered the truth: audiences were not just thrilled by the flames, they were terrified by them.

And in that fear, she held power.

Her fire act carried her across the Chitlin Circuit, into clubs in Canada, Brazil, and Japan, under neon signs like Vancouver’s Smilin’ Buddha. Wherever she travelled, she learned the same lesson: command attention, intimidate, never back down.

That flame would follow her for life.

From Flames to Jokes

By the 1960s, her bosses at Los Angeles’s Brass Rail Club noticed that her backstage banter drew as many laughs as the comics on stage. “If you do not do comedy, you cannot work here,” members of the Skillet & Leroy team told her.

La Wanda stepped to the mic.

She recorded five solo albums for Laff Records, mixing raunch, insult, and streetwise wit. Watch It, Sucker! was her most acclaimed release, riding the wave of her Sanford & Son fame and later sampled widely in hip-hop… its title borrowed straight from Aunt Esther's arsenal. What had begun as fire in her hands became fire in her tongue.

Aunt Esther

When Sanford & Son (1972 to 1977) was casting, producers doubted she could handle television.

Redd Foxx knew better.

He had watched her swallow fire and hold a crowd in terrified awe. He knew that same force could be wielded without torches, through glare, voice, and presence. Foxx threatened to walk if she was cut. She stayed. Aunt Esther was born, sanctified, sharp-tongued, and unrelenting. She was fire disguised as scripture, and audiences felt that heat every time she appeared.

The Circle of Faith and Flame

Her life never really strayed far from the church pews. Raised in the Holiness Church, she carried gospel rhythms in her cadence even when the jokes turned blue. After losing three husbands, raising a daughter, and mourning an infant son, she turned back fully in 1981, becoming an evangelist preacher.

Her daughter Clara would also preach. It was not a contradiction but a circle. Alberta began in pews, La Wanda ruled the stage with fire, Aunt Esther carried that flame into American living rooms, and finally she returned to the pulpit.

Sacred and profane, joined in one life.

Legacy

Alberta Page passes in 2002 in Hollywood from complications of diabetes, buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery.

But her legacy burns on.

She stood in the line from Moms Mabley to today’s Black women comedians: fearless, raunchy, observant, and unflinching. Her career spanned nightclubs, revues, fire-eating, comedy albums, sitcoms, and sermons.

From Alberta to LaWanda to Aunt Esther, she carried the flame. The Bronze Goddess of Fire may have put down the torch, but this Legend never stopped burning.

more

• The Chitlin Circuit: A Stage for Black Performers

• Fire Dancing in Burlesque: A Tradition of Daring

• Comedians of Burlesque: From the Stage to Television

Burlesque Bits is a publication continuing the legacy of Charlie Uno's original Billboard magazine column (1930–1959), documenting the working conditions, economic realities, and forgotten performers of American burlesque from 1910–1978. Using primary sources including trade publications, newspaper archives, and court records, this research examines an industry built on labor exploitation, selective enforcement, and the gap between performer mythology and documented fact. If you have additional information about LaWanda Page, Taboo (ESPECIALLY), or any other performers mentioned in this research, please reach out, these stories deserve to be told. Written by Joey Martini, self-proclaimed burlesque historian and co-founder of Philadelphia's Peek-a-Boo Revue.

The industry did not announce collapse this week.

It buried it in the phrase “due to.”

In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Comerford Amusement Company, operator of “a large number of local theatres,” will close the Gaiety “for the remainder of the season.”

But the receipts tell a different story... And so does the Irving Theatre, which the company initially announced would close alongside the Gaiety, then quietly corrected: the Irving will remain open, continuing with legitimate stock drama. Only the GAIETY, which has been playing Mutual burlesque shows this season, will go dark... The gaiety had tried to survive by hosting boxing benefits for the striker’s relief fund “in conjunction with the regular burlesque show,” but even community solidarity couldn’t keep the doors open.

The official explanation is respectable: prolonged coal strike, arrival of Lent, seasonal factors, external pressures… nothing to see here.

The coal-region houses have been running at around 60% of normal box-office business for months, kept alive “at all costs” with cheaper shows, trapped by advance bookings for pictures and acts that couldn’t be canceled.

This is not a sudden closure precipitated by Ash Wednesday.

This is a slow bleed finally acknowledged.

The Gaiety detail is important because it has been playing Mutual burlesque shows this season.

So when the Gaiety goes dark… this isn’t a theater closing.

It’s a circuit losing a working outlet in an already-weakened region that has been limping along on 60% gross, trapped by its own advance commitments. The coal strike becomes a convenient cover. Lent provides a moral permission.

But the actual problem is structural: the territory cannot support the product at the price the circuit needs to charge. And then, elsewhere in the same issue, the circuit admits it in different language.

Like this:

Lou Real’s “Pleasure” Company will close in Brooklyn, but the phrase that matters comes after: closing “due to the loss of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre.”

Read that again.

Not “due to poor business in Brooklyn.” Not “due to routing conflicts.”

“Due to the loss of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre.”

The company is closing in Brooklyn because two other cities dropped out of the route entirely. That is contraction written to read like scheduling. The coal region isn’t “having a moral season.” It is dropping out of the route. The geography no longer works. The economics no longer close.

Mutual responds the way failing infrastructure always responds: not with reinvention, but with patchwork…. Frankenstein-ing. The route: Lou Real’s “Pleasure” is KEPT on the circuit through a rerouting arrangement… then JUMPS Brooklyn entirely, lands in Buffalo, and picks up a route that had already been redrawn.

This is presented as problem-solving.

My opinion: this is actually crisis management.

Rerouting is not efficiency. It’s “salvage” … it’s the admission that the original route no longer exists. Admission that the territory …broke. And map gets redrawn in real time. Shows that were supposed to land in Scranton now bypass entire regions. Companies jump 250 miles because the intermediate stops no longer exist. This is… chaos.

But not chaos announced… It is chaos routed… forced into new paths, redirected around missing territory and disguised as normal scheduling.

The same week, (if you're following at home) “Broadway Belles” is ordered to JUMP Washington to a new “stand” in Pawtucket, 250 miles north; then to over to Passaic, where the company will close its season unless granted additional time.

“Additional time” is the phrase of a show that cannot land where it was supposed to land, either because the territory is failing, the bookings collapsed, or the receipts can’t justify the move. It is the language of a company being kept alive week by week, not because the season makes sense anymore, but because closing mid-route creates complications the circuit cannot afford to acknowledge.

Let’s google this shit: Washington to Pawtucket (give or take 100 years)

Pawtucket to Passaic?

CLEARLY, these are not carefully planned routing decisions made months in advance. These are desperate geographic leaps made in real time as the infrastructure collapses underneath the performers still working it.

And then comes the official voice...

When I. H. Herk (Isidore H. Herk) is shown a wire suggesting Cleveland may change from circuit shows to stock, he calls it “propaganda,” then pivots to a story about a manager who wants “girls and more girls.”

The joke is cover.
The denial is signal.
The feel or need to deny at all is the evidence.

Cities lost, routes stitched back together mid-season, companies ordered to keep working past the point where the season makes sense. But Herk will not admit that Cleveland might be considering abandoning circuit burlesque. Instead, he deflects with humor, pivots to safer topics, and dismisses the wire as baseless rumor.

This is how infrastructure collapse gets managed in real time: through jokes, through denials, through pivots that redirect attention away from the structural reality and toward individual anecdotes about managers and girls.

The 3rd week in February is not about morality.

It is regional revenue collapse being laundered into “strike and Lent,” and circuit contraction being disguised as routine routing. The coal region drops out. The circuit reroutes around the gaps. Companies jump hundreds of miles mid-season. And all of it is presented as normal operations.

The words “due to” does some create some really pointed vibes... It creates causation where there is only correlation. It provides respectable explanations for economic failure. It allows the industry to close houses without admitting that the audience will no longer pay to see the product.

The Wilkes-Barre closures are not caused by the coal strike. They are enabled by it. The strike provides cover for a decision already made by the box office.

The Chaos Factor (structural): ROUTE FAILURE
Coal-region houses at ~60% receipts for months; Comerford closes Gaiety (burlesque) while keeping Irving open with legitimate stock… displacement, NOT closure; Mutual loses Scranton and Wilkes-Barre entirely; circuit deploys emergency rerouting as standard practice; companies jump 250+ miles mid-season.

The Hustle Factor (adaptation): ROUTE PATCHING
New stands negotiated on the fly (Pawtucket); geographic leaps (Washington to Pawtucket to Passaic); “additional time” bargaining to avoid mid-route closures; denial management through humor and deflection; boxing benefits “in conjunction with” regular burlesque shows.

Key Quote to weaponize: “around 60 per cent… kept going at all costs… cheaper shows… inability to close due to pictures and acts booked ahead.”

Burlesque isn’t being shut down by virtue.

It’s being starved by territory, then forced to smile about it.

SOURCES

Primary Sources:

Billboard Magazine (New York), February 20, 1926:

• Comerford Theaters closure announcement (Wilkes-Barre: Irving and Gaiety)

• Lou Real’s Pleasure Company Brooklyn closing “due to loss of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre”

• Broadway Belles rerouting (Washington to Pawtucket to Passaic)

• I. H. Herk response to Cleveland stock-change wire

• Coal-region theater business statistics (60% of normal receipts)

Methodology Note: All evidence for this series is drawn from primary sources dated January-February 1926. Circuit contractions, emergency reroutings, and territorial losses tracked through contemporaneous Billboard routes pages and manager statements. No reliance on retrospective explanation.

Burlesque Bits continues the legacy of Charlie Uno’s Billboard magazine column (1930-1959), bringing rigorous archival research to American burlesque history from 1910-1978. Working from primary sources: Billboard, Variety, newspaper microfilm, court documents, and trade publications… the column focuses is sights on labor organizing, economic exploitation, scandals, theatres, and the recovery of forgotten performers’ stories.

In this bit, we’re talking about that poster. You know the one, the woman’s upper torso emerging from pink and black spiral, the psychedelic typography screaming SOMETHING WEIRD. If you’ve ever watched obscure burlesque footage on YouTube, bought a dodgy exploitation DVD, or dug through archive compilations looking for 1950s strippers, you’ve seen this logo.

That image became the unlikely brand identity for one of burlesque history’s most important, and least respected, archives. But that story starts decades earlier, with a teenage comic book dealer who just couldn’t stop organizing conventions for things nobody else cared about…

THE TEENAGE ARCHIVIST

In November 1976, Mike Vraney was 18 years old and running “SEA CON ‘76” …a Star Trek, comic book, and film festival convention at Seattle’s Sherwood Inn. The festival featured “continuous showings of full-length films (’Young Frankenstein,’ ‘Enter the Dragon’ and others), as well as vintage cartoons, original Superman reels and Star Trek blooper reels.”

He told the press he was looking for “lost childhoods” …people seeking the pop culture artifacts that meant something to them growing up.

“Moms always threw out your comic books, which were part of your childhood society,” Vraney explained. “They were important parts of being young. We live in a very transient society where roots are hard to find. Now people in their 40s come in to see the things that meant a lot to them growing up.”

Feels like Mike was already doing the work that would define his life: finding, preserving, and exhibiting cultural artifacts that “respectable” institutions threw away.

By 1981, Vraney had shifted from comics to music. As Modern Productions, he was booking punk and new wave bands at Seattle’s Showbox Theater… bands like the Blackouts, whose release party he promoted that year.

The Showbox was a former bingo hall that didn’t serve alcohol. This was deliberate. As Vraney told The Rocket in August 1981: “We don’t need alcohol to get an audience. Most of the music is new, for a subculture, for young people. [An age restriction] would cut out a lot of the audience.”

Same philosophy he’d bring to exploitation films a decade later: find audiences for overlooked subcultures, champion work that mainstream venues won’t touch, make it accessible.

That same year, another mention in The Rocket’s scene notes: “MIKE VRANEY will manage the DEAD KENNEDYS.”

By early 1982, Vraney and his then wife Cindy had moved to San Francisco and started Warscare, a band management and promotion company. The Rocket reported: “Mike Vraney was part of Modern Productions in Seattle, and he and Cindy recently moved down to the Bay Area. Warscare is representing the DEAD KENNEDYS, FLIPPER and MINIMAL MAN, all from SF, and T.S.O.L., a hardcore band from the L.A. area.”

Somewhere between 1982 and 1990, Vraney moves back to Seattle. The exact timeline is murky, but what happened next wasn’t: he applied everything he’d learned from organizing conventions and promoting underground music to a new obsession: exploitation films.

THE FILM THAT NAMED A COMPANY

Something Weird, is a 1967 Herschell Gordon Lewis film about a guy who gets electrocuted, gains ESP powers, makes a deal with a witch, and helps police solve murders all while tripping on LSD.

When Vraney founded Something Weird Video in Seattle in 1990, he named his company after Lewis’s film and lifted the logo straight from the poster. This wasn’t nostalgia. It was a declaration: the stuff we’re preserving is supposed to be weird, lurid, and off-limits to respectable culture.

Vraney was a high school dropout who’d worked as a drive-in projectionist. He fell into “a large collection of 16mm girlie arcade loops” and realized there was a market for cultural detritus nobody else wanted… nudie cuties… sexploitation reels… roadshow rarities… burlesque shows… horror films… adult stags… educational scare shorts.

“In my mind, the last great genre to be scavenged were the exploitation / sexploitation films of the 1920s through the 1970s,” Vraney explained. “After looking into this further, I realized that there were nearly 2,000 movies out there yet to be discovered.”

Then came the crucial phone call: David F. Friedman, the legendary exploitation producer and H.G. Lewis’s longtime collaborator. Friedman’s films became the foundation of Something Weird’s catalog.

Through him, Vraney connected with the entire network of exploitation pioneers… Harry Novak, Doris Wishman, Joe Sarno, and even Lewis himself.

Among those 2,000 discoveries: burlesque. Filmed performances from the 1940s-1970s. There was Bettie Page in Varietease (1954) and Teaserama (1955). A visual documentation of working performers whose names never made it into mainstream histories because they were considered too “low” for institutional collection.

Something Weird didn’t curate with an academic’s eye. They released everything… the good, the bad, the REALLY bad, the boring, and the historically crucial. The catalog was messy, overwhelming, and exactly what researchers and fans needed: primary sources, unfiltered.

BRINGING EXPLOITATION TO PRIME TIME

By 1995, Vraney wasn’t content with mail-order. He co-created Reel Wild Cinema with producers Jimmy Maslon and Martin Sokol, serving as executive producer for the USA Network show hosted by Sandra Bernhard.

Dayton Daily News, August 1995 :

“SWV’s Vraney, 37, is working with the USA Network on the pilot for a one-hour series, Reel Wild Cinema, that combines vintage exploitation footage with newly taped live action. Hosted by Sandra Bernhard, the pilot will air on USA and the Sci-Fi Channel in October and November. ‘I’ll know by Nov. 1 if I’m picked up for 13 episodes in 1996,’ Vraney said. ‘My main goal is to get a satellite or cable channel from 11:30 at night to 4:30 in the morning.’ Vraney still is looking for burlesque movies from the 1940s and 1950s, and 16mm shorts from 1930 to 1969.”

This was Vraney doing what he’d always done, creating a platform for culture that mainstream venues ignored. The show featured clips from Something Weird’s catalog, condensed versions of exploitation films edited to “the good 15 minutes,” and interviews with the actual filmmakers: Russ Meyer, David F. Friedman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Doris Wishman, Tura Satana, Roger Corman.

The May 12, 1996 episode: “Burlesque Beauties” …featured highlights from Teaserama, Deadly Weapons, and Souls in Pawn, with special guest Russ Meyer. Here was burlesque history getting late-night cable exposure, introduced to audiences who’d never heard of these films. Including myself.

I would get home from Rocky Horror and beeline right to my VCR when I would record each episode each week. I was OBSESSED. Same with NIGHT FLIGHT. This show had my number and I was HOOKED.

The show walks a careful line between mockery and genuine appreciation, treating these films as both ridiculous and worthy of attention. Reel Wild Cinema ran on USA Network from 1996-1997, essentially functioning as an hour-long advertisement for Something Weird’s catalog while introducing a new generation to exploitation history.

It worked.

By the mid-1990s, Something Weird was getting feature coverage everywhere from the Seattle Times to the Boston Sunday Globe. The company that started as mail-order VHS tapes had become the go-to source for exploitation cinema.

THE BRANDING WAS THE MISSION

The covers used original film artwork, maintaining the aesthetic of grindhouse theater posters. This wasn’t camp. It was truth in advertising. Something Weird’s products looked exactly like what they were: documentation of working-class entertainment that respectable culture had thrown away.

The catalog organized films into categories like “Sci-Fi Late Night Creature Feature Show,” “Spies Thighs & Private Eyes,” and “Kooky Kiddie Karnival” …browsable, welcoming, organized by a fan rather than a librarian.

WHAT WE OWE MIKE VRANEY

Mike Vraney died in 2014 at 56. But the archive survived.

His widow and business partner, Lisa Petrucci, kept Something Weird going and crucially partnered with the Burlesque Hall of Fame, which acquired Something Weird’s massive burlesque film collection. The BHoF now holds footage of countless performers from burlesque’s Golden Era—Tempest Storm and dozens whose names are still being recovered. They’re digitizing it, making it available to researchers, and planning reissues.

Here’s what needs to be said: Mike Vraney deserves a place in the Burlesque Hall of Fame.

Not as a performer. As a preservationist. As the person who saved what nobody else thought was worth saving.

The Burlesque Hall of Fame honors “those individuals who have made significant contributions to the art of burlesque.” Vraney did exactly that. He found the reels rotting in basements. He transferred them to tape before they turned to dust. He cataloged them when nobody else cared. He made them available when research institutions wouldn’t acknowledge they existed.

Without Something Weird Video, hundreds… maybe thousands, of burlesque performances would be lost. Performers whose names we’re still recovering would have vanished completely. The visual record of working burlesque from the 1940s-1970s would have massive gaps.

This is how cultural memory works: not through institutional gatekeepers deciding what’s “important enough” to save, but through obsessive fans who preserve everything because they love it.

Mike Vraney spent 38 years: from age 18 to 56, finding and championing cultural artifacts that respectable institutions ignored. Vintage comics and Star Trek blooper reels at 18. Punk bands that couldn’t get booked at venues with liquor licenses at 23. Exploitation films and burlesque shows that film archives wouldn’t touch at 33. And at 38, creating a TV show to bring it all it to mainstream cable audiences.

He did it without grants, without institutional support, without academic credentials. He did it with campy catalog covers, mail-order VHS tapes, and an absolute commitment to the idea that working-class entertainment deserves to be remembered.

The stuff respectable archives ignored became the primary sources that historians depend on. The VHS covers that looked like jokes became finding aids for serious research. The company named after a psychedelic LSD film became one of burlesque history’s most important repositories.

So thank you, Mike Vraney. Thank you for seeing value where others saw trash. Thank you for spending decades preserving what everyone else threw away. Thank you for making burlesque history accessible to researchers, students, performers, and fans who needed to see it.

And thank you, Lisa Petrucci, for continuing that work and for trusting the Burlesque Hall of Fame with the collection. You’re ensuring that Mike’s life’s work continues to serve the community that needs it.

Every time someone researches a forgotten performer, every time a neo-burlesque artist discovers a classic routine, every time a student writes about burlesque history…they’re standing on the foundation Mike Vraney built.

That deserves recognition.

Sources & Links:

• Burlesque Hall of Fame: burlesquehall.com

• Something Weird Video website: somethingweird.com

• Reel Wild Cinema full episodes on YouTube:

• Night Flight Plus (streaming Something Weird catalog): nightflightplus.com

Something Weird Video continues under Lisa Petrucci’s leadership, partnering with AGFA (American Genre Film Archive), Vinegar Syndrome, Severin Films, and other restoration labels. The YouTube channel offers hundreds of free titles from the archive.

Primary sources for this article include contemporary coverage from The Rocket (Seattle, 1976-1982), Seattle Daily News (1992), Seattle Times (1992), Tulsa newspapers (1993), and Boston Sunday Globe (1996).

In this bit… burlesque will be the DEATH of you.

On July 9, 1935, boys from a Carmelite orphanage found Ervin Lang in a ditch outside Hammond, Indiana. Or half of him, anyway.

What these little orphan Andys found was a torso that was wrapped in towels and women’s pajama trousers. Rope remained around his neck. The legs? Yeah, they turn up about seven miles away in Munster, still wearing socks and shoes…

Our victim Ervin Lang was twenty-eight years old... He was employed as a grocery clerk near Waveland Avenue in Chicago. Three years earlier, he’d just married Mallie Dunkel. Beautiful Woman with a weak heart and a six-year-old son named Bobby from her first marriage.

Mallie’s mother, Blanche Dunkel, was blonde, attractive, early forties and with four marriages behind her, had moved into the newlywed household in early 1934 to help care for her daughter. The weirdness begins as she begins to stand a little too close to Ervin from time to time whenever the chance arose. Touching his arm when she poured coffee. Not breaking eye contact eating bananas. So suggestive. LOL I made that last banana part up. But… one time, at a card party, she forcibly begins kissing Ervin in full view of guests and her dying daughter. (Which I'm sure was fine in 1934)

Sadly, and suspiciously, Mallie dies just before Christmas 1934. Time moves on and Ervin keeps up the progressing “affair” with Blanche for a little bit after Mallie’s death. Ervin even keeps raising Mallie’s son Bobby: breakfast every morning, the walk to school, no legal obligation... Ervin wanted to still be a father to Bobby.

Flash-forward, Spring 1935 (anyday):

Ervin has met someone new and has already proposed to one Josephine McKinley, a pretty twenty-one-year-old typist at Sears. It's right about here that Blanche’s obsession turned to “hell hath no fury” kind of rage.

“I made up my mind,” she would confess later, “that if I couldn’t have Ervin, no other woman should.”

Problem is… Blanche just doesn't have the nerve to do it herself.

Months pass…and Blanche finally arranges a meeting in the city with her friend from work one night…

Enter Mrs. Evelyn Smith: She’s forty-six, slim, bespectacled & prim. Evelyn was a former burlesque dancer who’d performed as “Pearl Johnson” or “Trixie” in west side burlesque houses. She is originally born in Germany, raised in China where she meets her future husband, Harry Jung. By the mid-1930s, she's not on stage anymore and has activated her “plan B” and is working with her husband. Evelyn knows Blanche from doing laundry at Passavant Hospital on top of assisting her husband Harry with his laundry business. Money was money, baby. And Evelyn had hustle.

The meeting in the city wasn’t just a transaction, it was Blanche hiring a professional… someone who understood what she never could: that timing is everything, that precision matters, that the reveal must be controlled. The plan was actually simple: liquor, ether, strangulation, Lake Michigan. Clean. Simple. No mess.

“I got tired of hearing her nag until I was sap enough to do it” …Evelyn Smith has now become the headliner in this murderous show.

Blanche & Evelyn come to an agreement: one hundred dollars up front. Four hundred more when the job was finished.

FRIDAY, July 5, 1935 (morning of):

Blanche forces her brother William to accompany her to the bank. She told him she needed papers from her safety deposit box. Instead, she withdrew five twenty-dollar bills, from a sizable roll of cash inside. Over his vehement objections, she delivered the money to Evelyn Smith… The down payment.

Blanche believes paying promptly was the same as having integrity.

FRIDAY, July 5, 1935 (evening):

Ervin leaves Josephine’s house to go to a card party with Blanche. They confirm arrangements to see each other the next day for their customary Saturday date. And Ervin leaves… But Blanche had already set the weekend’s events in motion. Blanche has already hired a chauffeur named Harry Blanche to drive her to Evelyn’s husband; Harry Jung’s laundry at 2341 Armitage Avenue to deliver a message that Evelyn needed to see him later that night.

Then she heads to Evelyn’s place…

At 731 Barry Avenue, the atmosphere was relaxed. Everyone playing cards having fun. Four highballs later, Ervin was drowsing. Evelyn whispers Blanche to leave: “I’ll take care of everything else” as she pretends to fix another drink.

She grabs the ether... then the rope.

The last thing Ervin saw was Evelyn’s smile… that practiced burlesque smile beneath tortoise-shell glasses. Cold. Fixed. Professional.

Ervin’s world goes black…

After the murder Evelyn moved Ervin, still seated upright in the chair, into her closet right by the front door… rope still around his neck. The newspapers would later call it a “death chair,” a phrase that came close to poetry.

Then Evelyn does something… she opens her apartment door, walks out into the hallway and joins a party already underway elsewhere in the building. But before we understand why that matters, we need to understand who Evelyn Smith was… and who she wasn’t.

The press would call Evelyn Smith “The Enigma Woman.” Some called her “The Woman Without Nerves,” or “Chicago’s Mona Lisa.” Chicago reporters in 1935 couldn’t QUITE figure out the forty-six-year-old former dancer who murdered a man for five hundred dollars, who smiled for cameras, and asked, “Am I still front page?”

Evelyn Smith was not enigmatic. She was a retired burlesque dancer doing what burlesque performers are trained to do: hustle for gigs and control one’s reveal.

The noise of laughter and music spilled through the stairwell. Whiskey, bathtub gin, and cheap tobacco hung in the air. Evelyn stepped into the party easily, laughed when she needed to, accepted a drink when it was offered.

No one watching her move through the party would have guessed that one floor below, behind a closed door, in a closet, the most important part of the evening was already finished… Ervin’s body has stopped being a person and has now become a problem of physics.

Saturday, July 6, 1935 (morning)

4th of July celebrations continue… Evelyn realizes people would still be coming and going in that building... She decided to wait until early Sunday morning… A professional knows when to wait.

Blanche Dunkel never learned that “waiting” skill. Untrained, she performed her obsessions loudly, crassly, without subtlety or craft: kissing her son-in-law at card parties while her daughter’s heart was failing, public declarations of unreturned love, hiring nephews to follow cars, even follow Josephine… desperate attempts to borrow money.

She could not manage her reveal because she could not see past her own narrative. Blanche believed her story was about a spurned woman, a rejected lover, a victim of broken promises. She was so trapped in that melodrama that she destroyed the one person still caring for her daughter’s child.

But she hired someone to kill him anyway.

Saturday, July 6, 1935 (Afternoon)

When Josephine arrives to see Ervin Saturday afternoon, she’s frantic. Worried because Ervin had missed their date for the first time ever. Blanche waves her off: “He goes on drunken binges,” she said.

Josephine knows this was a lie. Ervin hardly drank. Josephine immediately files a missing person report with Captain Patrick O’Connell. Josephine is alert… she notices that a mysterious car has been loitering around her house. She even thinks she remembers the car following her earlier. She notes the license plate.

Sunday, July 7, 1935 (early morning)

The city was quiet… Quiet in the way only Chicago on a Sunday can be. Factories dormant. Bars closed. Streets holding the debris of Saturday night.

Evelyn Smith rolls up her proverbial sleeves and goes to town on Ervin. She did not approach the body with malice. She approached it like a seamstress approaching a difficult bolt of fabric or a burlesque dancer with a fussy costume.

“It wasn’t much of a job to remove the legs,” she would later tell detectives, her voice flat as a sidewalk. “I cut through the flesh with a butcher’s knife and sawed the bones with a hacksaw.”

The butcher’s knife for flesh.

The hacksaw for bone.

She worked with the efficiency born of years changing costumes in under three minutes between sets. You do not panic when the zipper jams. You make the reveal work. You do not flinch at the blood. You just make sure it does not ruin the carpet.

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

Husband Harry Jung helps load everything into his brother Willie Quan’s borrowed Ford sedan. (Willie had no idea his car was being borrowed.)

Evelyn drives to Indiana.

The torso was left in a ditch near Hammond. The legs were placed in the brush outside Munster, seven miles away. She returned to Chicago, washed her hands, and went back to work.

Tuesday, July 9:

Young boys from the Carmelite orphanage find the torso in a ditch outside Hammond.

Wednesday, July 10:

O’Connell noticed the “found torso” newspaper report. He rushed Josephine to the Hammond morgue. An attendant flicked a sheet from a slab, and Josephine’s hands flew to her face. Her knees buckled. Josephine formally identified the body.

O’Connell traced Josephine’s shadowing car that has been loitering around to Blanche’s nephew. He then discovers Blanche is currently at Passavant Hospital, recovering from a tonsil operation. Her throat swathed in bandages. A perfectly ready-made alibi: around the time someone wrapped rope around Ervin’s neck, Blanche was going under the knife.

But witnesses still came forward: Blanche’s niece saw her washing what looked like blood-stained clothing Saturday morning. Her brother William heard her express hatred of Ervin. Her nephew said she’d tried to borrow four hundred dollars to leave town.

And then there was the money from the safety deposit box.

When O’Connell questioned Blanche about the $100, she said she’d needed to make a payment on furniture. But she could not produce a receipt or even name the piece of furniture.

He listed his evidence, looked at Blanche, then quietly accused: “You killed Ervin Lang.”

Blanche hysterically denies everything… O’Connell plays his trump card:

“When Josephine came to you Saturday saying Ervin was missing, you told her he often disappeared for days on drunken binges. That was a lie, Mrs. Dunkel. Ervin Lang was never missing for a day in his life and he hardly ever drank. You lied because you had killed Ervin the night before.”

Blanche quieted… lips trembling… “You’re wrong,” she told him. “I didn’t kill Ervin… But I know who did.”

She told him everything. The meeting in the city at Ashland & Division. The five-hundred-dollar agreement. The plan: strangle him, throw him in the lake, no mess.

What she wanted everyone in the room to understand was this:

“The way we talked it over, Evelyn was only supposed to strangle Ervin and throw his body in the lake. There wasn’t to be any mess!”

She was genuinely aggrieved.

“When she told me how she cut him up,” Blanche said, “it made me sick.”

They finally locate Evelyn in a rooming house on West Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan. When detectives arrested her, she adjusted her glasses and said calmly, “Well, I guess I’m heading for the last roundup.”

Harry Jung had vanished. For over a week, police tore through Chicago’s Chinese community in a racist dragnet, arresting nine Chinese men, holding thirteen total. They raided Willie Quan’s laundry, seized his trunk, ruined his reputation. His only crime was owning the car his brother borrowed without asking.

Harry Jung was never found. He disappeared completely… back to China perhaps, or just hiding in plain sight under a new name. He is a ghost. What is known is that Evelyn went to New York alone. On the plane back to Chicago, reporters crowded around her. They commented on her voice, her posture, the way she smiled behind those glasses.

“Oh well,” she said. “I might as well get it over with. Sure, I killed him.”

That’s a fuckin’ reveal, kids… delivered without so much of a flourish. And when asked if she thought she was still front page, she just smiled… “Make me look good boys.”

Wednesday, August 7 (The Trial):

Both women pleaded guilty. Judge Cornelius J. Harrington sentenced each to 180 years.

“Death would be too easy,” he said. “You will atone for the rest of your lives.” So every July 6, both would spend the day in solitary confinement.

Blanche wept.

Evelyn remarked on how nice the prison cottages looked.

EPILOGUE: AFTERMATH

Bobby Meyers was six years old when his stepfather was murdered.

After the murder, Ervin’s elderly mother took Bobby in. When his biological father filed for custody, she refused to give him up. She had grown to love Bobby like her own child.

Bobby tells the judge he wants to stay with the Langs.

On Friday, September 6, 1935, the judge ruled he would live with his biological father in Dayton. Blanche Dunkel orphaned the boy twice. Once when her daughter’s heart gave out. Once when her own jealousy demanded a price.

She served 26 years out of 180. On July 6, 1961, at age sixty-nine, she walked out of prison shouting with joy.

Blanche already had a job waiting: housekeeper for Father James F. Jones at St. Leonard’s House, a transition center for parolees. Between thirty-five and fifty dollars in cash and a complete outfit of clothing.

No one recorded whether she ever tried to see Bobby again.

Evelyn’s release followed in 1962. She said nothing. She gave no interviews. She walked out and disappeared.

She made her exit… stage left, even.