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

a rotary motion of the hips something like the hootchy-kootchy. All burlesque girls must know how to bump and grind. Except for the minstrel show, the strip act is probably America’s only original contribution to the theater, and the bump and grind are integral parts of the orthodox strip.
    Most strippers have some little trick or other, awriggle or a distinctive manner of loosening shoulder straps, which distinguishes them from their colleagues. Carrie Finnell, a fat girl, has a comedy strip in which she does what she calls “a control dance.” Unfortunately, it cannot be described here. Evelyn Myers, another headliner, has an unusual wriggle; only a snake could copy it.
    Peaches Strange is celebrated for blending the shimmy with the strip. Gypsy Rose Lee, like Ann Corio, is fond of working with a lot of clothes. At the Irving Place, she used to come out dressed in a big white fur coat, a coat with a lot of buttons on it. She would glide languidly across the stage, a sort of bound-for-the-opera walk. On her way back into the wings she would twitch the coat open with a negligent gesture, and the customers would go crazy, the bums.
    The most dynamic of the strippers is Georgia Sothern, who has the kind of red hair usually described as “flaming.” Miss Sothern works hot. She bounds across a stage, flinging her red head up and down, bumping, grinding. Sometimes at a wild Saturday midnight she will go through all the chorus-girl routines in one strip—the Texas Tommy, the fly-away, walking the dog, the toe punch, falling off a log. All the time she will be taking off her filmy clothes and putting them back on again. She will even do all the kicks if she is feeling good, the muscle kick, the hitchkick and the fan kick. Between the kicks she will shout, “Let’s go, boys.” After a blackout on a Sothern strip the customers fall back into their seats, exhausted.
    “She’s going to drop dead on the stage one of these nights,” said Mr. Callahan. “She’s got too much fire in her for her own good. She strips like she just had dynamite for lunch.”
    The burlesque girl is proud of her tricks. A girl who can accomplish an unusual grind is respected. Dressing-room conversation is largely shop talk although they gab a lot about men and clothes, like all women. If Margie Hart comes out with a new way of wearing her red hair the kids will crowd into the wings, whispering, “Look at Margie’s hair. Do you like it that way? She’s a fool to change.”
    The girls hang out together; they are overworked and underpaid, but they like the life and they are companions in misery. In this respect they resemble nurses and newspaper reporters. They frequent the same restaurants. If they don’t have boyfriends waiting to buy their dinners, a mob of them goes to the same restaurant or delicatessen. Just before the finale on the 3:30 show they begin talking about where they will eat.
    “Where you going to eat?” one will yell.
    “Anywhere but the fish place. I’m sick of that joint.”
    “Let’s go to the chow mein place tonight.”
    “Okie doke, baby. Hey, Woodsy, you wanna get some chow mein?”
    At the restaurant they talk about the business. If a comedian stuck a new line into his bit during the last show they appraise it. For example, if the comic judge in the court scene says “We got to take this to a higher court” and puts his chair on the bench and sits up there during the rest of the scene, the girls decide whether it is O.K. or lousy. What they really love, however, is a comedian who makes cracks about a rival burlesque house during a show. Most of these cracks have to do with the antiquity of the girls in the other show.
    “Geeze,” said one the other night, over her bowl of chicken chow mein, “Joey Fay got off a good one last week in Philly. He took Rosemary out to the lights and he introduced her. He said, ‘I want all you nice people to give this little girl a big hand because her mother just had a terrible