My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page A

hours.
    The crusades carried on by sin-haters and license commissioners have given people a low opinion of the character of the burlesque girl, an opinion at variance with the facts. The girls work too hard for tabloid orgies. A girl who has jumped up and down astage for twelve or fourteen hours a day does not want an orgy; all she wants is a quiet place to sleep.
    When a burlesque producer is asked in court about the morals of his workers, the answer always is, “Some virgins, no professionals.” You would probably find that the private lives of any twenty stenographers who work in Wall Street and live in Greenwich Village are more lurid than the private lives of a similar number of burlesque girls. You would undoubtedly find that the kids at the Apollo would be shocked by the private lives of some society girls.
    “Working in burlesque isn’t so awful for a girl,” said Miss Lilly Berg, an elegant showgirl who doesn’t have to grind and bump like the chorus. “I used to work in one of the biggest department stores in this city, and I prefer this. I make more dough, and I’m not so exhausted at night. You can’t even sit down in a department store. It’s also better than working in a cabaret or a dance hall. The customers here are so far away you can’t smell the garlic. In a store a cranky old woman can come in and get fresh, and you have to stand there and take it. But if a customer gets fresh here he gets a sock on the puss.”
    The burlesque producer looks upon the censor as one of the persistent evils of his business, like damage suits and comedians who show up drunk. Noperson in the world can grow as angry as a producer who opens his newspaper and sees the headline “Burlesque Told to End Obscenity; Commissioner Gives Houses One Day to Clean Up Shows or Lose Their Licenses.” The producer feels that he is being made the goat, and he shouts that his girls wear as much as the girls in the expensive cabarets.
    He knows that the comedy on his stage is about as low as comedy can be, but he says Dwight Fiske sings about the same things at the Savoy Plaza, and the cops don’t try to pull him away from his piano, do they? He shouts that the poor man is entitled to his depravity as well as the rich. He feels that he is being persecuted, and most of the time his feelings are justified.
    He says the strip act is a work of art. He says a citizen ought to realize that a burlesque show is not Sunday school and abstain from buying tickets if it shocks him.
    “We don’t compel the customers to buy tickets,” said Mr. Callahan. “This is a free country. I’d like to run burlesque as a cheap revue, but I’m in Rome and I got to be a Roman. I can’t go Presbyterian when every burlesque show and every night club in town is working naked.”
    The burlesque girl sweats for her money.
    “The kids in the chorus pull down $25.70 a week, including extra compensation for the Saturday midnight,”said Mr. Callahan. “On the road it runs to $28.30 for the girls in the line, and the same for showgirls. That’s the minimum. We’ve paid showgirls as high as $32.50. A straight woman gets $75. The strippers are the backbone of the show, and most of them get paid from $60 to $125. That is, the large majority of strippers range between these figures, but some get paid a lot more. A few work for a percentage of the profits. A good salary for a stripper in this city is $125. Margie Hart is a $125 girl. Sometimes the girls get paid more out of town.”
    There are three general styles of stripping—“fast,” “hot,” and “sweet.”
    Miss Corio works sweet and slow. She wears a lot more than most strippers when she begins and when she ends, and she is more feminine than tigerish in her strut across the stage. She is not addicted to the bump, a movement in which the knees are bent and the hips are thrown backward and forward with, in some girls, an almost startling rapidity. Nor is she expert with the grind, which is, of course,