Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition by Josh Alan Friedman Read Free Book Online Page B

Glories” to be the typical American stripper of his rather superficial visits. Unlike the state-of-the-art performance set down later by Gypsy, the low-caliber Miss June Glories was not graceful, entering the stage in a backward lean. Her knees remained unflexed as she walked in a goosestep, arms held away from her body. New York State, Gorer assumed, considered it immoral to undress to any light except green or blue; thus spotlights onstage darkened to these colors as garments began to lower.
    “Give the little lady a hand,” repeated each theater’s emcee as Miss June walked off in her undergarments, having given a sexless, impersonal performance, like a military drill. The girls of burlesque often came from pious Catholic families and earned only $20 a week for a fourteen-hour day. The show’s comedian would often marry one.
    Some of the primitive burlesque houses existed in the Bowery, a quarter that was virtually without women. The elevated subway ran down the middle of Third Avenue, which was made up entirely of rooming houses and hotels “For Men Only,” where beds cost thirty cents. Here was a melting pot of transient workers—Italians, Poles, Germans, who spoke little English and were too poor to marry. Only at burlesque theaters could they fully view a woman. Every week these lonely guys, hideous with drink, managed to spare twenty-five cents for this sad and solitary female-viewing pleasure, never able to cross the barrier of the footlights.
    The Olympic on 14th Street offered your basic low burlesque—installments of sidewalk conversation alternating with the appearance of girls. “I’m in love!” one of the cuties would cry, “I’m in love! I’m gonta jump off the Brooklyn Bridge!”
    “Don’t do that,” said the straight man, “you’ll get the water dirty!” The strippers rippled their bellies and peeled to their pasties and G-strings. The forefathers of today’s old lobsters watched this sexual exhibition with mute, unsmiling impassivity, only to applaud when they left the stage. Contact with the girls was unthinkable.
    In Slight contrast to this was the Minsky Brothers’ Republic Theater on 42nd, which cost a dollar during the Depression, while Ziegfeld charged six dollars across the street. Laughter echoed through the aisles at sexual “dubble entenders.” The Minskys hired buxom girls, not skinny flappers, who earned $25 in the chorus, and betrayed their roles by laughing inappropriately at the jokes. One perennial Minsky routine, “Anthony & Cleopatra,” had Caesar in a tin helmet smoking a fat cigar catching Anthony (the Jewish comic) on a divan with Cleopatra (the leading striptease girl).
    “Not for Your Aunt from Dubuque,” read the New Yorker ads for Minskys’ in the 1930s. The Republic discovered comics like Red Skelton, Phil Silvers; they had thirty-two chorus girls, rolling across the stage, posing in silhouette behind a male singer. But the Minsky performers couldn’t remove their pasties or point a finger crotchward. Once again, physical contact between audience and strippers was unthinkable.
    This thriving, giddy Minsky chain was put to death by Mayor La Guardia, who outlawed burlesque in 1940, closing thirteen theaters in New York. “There was no question it was politically motivated,” said surviving brother Morton Minsky during a public conversation at Lincoln Center. “Without this cause célèbre he would not have been reelected. We were denied the use of our name Minsky,” said the bald, aging former owner, with a high-pitched Wally Cox-type voice. “If there were no statute of limitations, I for one would sue the city of New York for millions,” he declared, forty-four years after the loss of his business. “I am of the opinion that burlesque will return in some form, if young, talented people develop the tradition.... What they call ‘burlesque’ today is something we would have no part of.”
    The ringing rebuke to Morton Minsky and the booking