Gotta Get a Gimmick

In the second year of my exotic dancing career, my agent in Rochester decided it was time for me to experience working on the road, and booked me into the Ohio theater circuit. In 1975 I was twenty-one years old, sophisticated, and mature, thinking I'd seen it all.

Four cities, one week each in Akron, Columbus, Cleveland, and Youngstown. The big times. I packed up my new music and costumes and, wishing me luck, a friend of mine, who I was staying with, dropped me off at the Greyhound Station on a gray, drizzly Sunday afternoon, which will forever be my traveling day for the next Thirteen years whenever I was on the road.

The once-infamous Astor Theater in Akron, Ohio was where I made my touring debut. Having changed hands several times over the years since its grand opening in 1920, the Astor landed on hard times in the 1950s and, after several decades of fumbling, began showing X-rated films in the late 1960s. By the 1970s films weren’t quite enough to fill up the 1,000-seat auditorium. Live strippers were needed to keep the doors open. Which, I suppose was better than dead strippers, who would smell and probably required a lot of paperwork.

I didn’t care about its history back then. All I knew was this was an adventure that I was going to enjoy every moment of. Even though it was a theater and they insisted on nudity, the management seemed to be agreeable to my modest nudity at the very last minute of my shows. Whew. No nasty exposure needed. Just truth in advertising: strippers who were alive.

Armed with my new shows and an audience full of people who had never seen me perform, I was free to experiment with new moves and styles. If I didn’t get my fishnets stuck together or slide off the stage onto a fellow’s lap it was all good. The floor was wood parquet; glossy, clean, and beautiful. My favorite.

The dressing room was bare bones unfinished wood, with a long, plywood makeup counter and cracked smoky mirrors. It was situated behind the stage with just enough room for three strippers to change in if we all turned sideways.

Because I was new to the road and had no promo photos my shows were first. The feature went last, so I had to figure out what kind of show was acceptable on my own. It would have been nice to know that the feature was going to be playing pudenda pong with the audience's drink cups before I went onstage.

While I twirled and whirled, kicked and drop split, giving them a prim and proper burlesque performance that Gypsy Rose Lee and Dita Von Teese would have been proud of, nothing was going to make the audience beg me for an encore after catching Anna Sparkle’s balls in their soda pop. The other stripper and I were horrified when we saw Anna’s show. Ping-pong balls flew furiously into the crowd, shooting out of her exposed genitalia accentuated by the blinding spotlight trained on it.

No wonder the audience was double its normal size and soda pop was selling out like donuts at a policemen’s ball. The concession stand finally gave up about midway through the week and just started ordering bottled pop because they ran through the carbonation canisters twice before Wednesday.

The other stripper and I were curious as to why this Anna chick was the feature when we saw her unpack her huge costume trunk. Both Joanie and I had hauled in a couple of suitcases of our own, filled to the brim with costumes and music. We just assumed a huge costume trunk meant the star stripper would have had all kinds of fancy, expensive costumes. However, Anna had only three items in her steamer trunk: one weird, wrinkled, hill Billy ruffled, floral jumper with a floppy hat that resembled a maid’s duster; her knitting bag; and a gross of ping pong balls (pun intended). What? How is this the feature? She had wild, curly red hair and big boobs. That didn’t make you a star.

Apparently, the thing that made Anna Sparkles a star was her ability to fling ping-pong balls five rows into an audience from between her legs. I’ve read that since her rise to stardom in Burlesque, Anna has become an avid environmentalist. I wonder how many little plastic balls she littered the earth with before becoming environmentally conscious and if her act now involves the audience depositing their recyclable paper cups into her nether regions.

That’s OK. I was getting an education in marketing and self-promotion that week. This talentless woman was making a fortune traveling the country with this tasteless gymnastic trick, being interviewed by porn magazines, and appearing in theaters and clubs as a superstar because she knew how to get the limelight right on her only attribute.

It was time to kick it up a notch and work on my new shows- without ping-pong balls, of course. As Gypsy Rose Lee once said, “If you want to be a star, you got to get a gimmick.”

My gimmick was going to be mini-musicals with coordinating music, costumes, and makeup. Over the next twelve years, I would accumulate over two dozen specialty shows with themes ranging from fairy tales, musicals, and outrageous comedies to artist tributes, and shows based on cultures from around the world.

The clubs I worked at in the future were never sure who was going to end up on stage. I’ve been chased off the stage by more than one bouncer, who thought I was some errant psycho off the street trying out for a gig. That was fine when the club’s personnel spoke English- but when neither of us could understand the other I would occasionally find myself tossed out on the street, having to find a way to sneak back into the club to do my show.

However, during my first road trip in Ohio, the only real themed shows I had were my White Satin show and the not yet released Doll show. I had much more work to do on that show. Between sets that week I worked on the new costume, which consisted of a corset with a ballet-type tutu and matching bra. I covered the corset and bra with a satiny green and black striped fabric and attached the ruffled, tulle skirt with snaps, so it could be removed in one fell swoop.

I also made a little lace collarette to attach around my neck and matching leg garters to hold up my black stockings. The sound and light man was very friendly and liked the other stripper, Joanie, and me, so he let us search through his stacks of records for our shows. My co-worker was looking mainly for recent top forty hits, but I dug deeper for future show ideas. For my doll show, I rummaged around and found forty-fives of Elvis’ song, I Don't Have a Wooden Heart . What a treat. In the bottom of one pile, I found an old copy of the Purity Brothers’ I’m Your Puppet, which had been redone by half a dozen other singers, but this rendition was my favorite. To end the show with a blazing finale the sound guy steered me to the theme song for Valley of the Dolls. It would be perfect for my floor routine. I started out the show with the record I scooped up in Rochester of Hello Dolly. We tallied up the total dance time and it passed the test. I had my first official themed show and couldn’t wait to finish last-minute alterations on my costume and introduce this act as soon as I perfected my robotic moves.

My style was usually non-stop movement and very fluid. Doing a slow, stiff robot dance with lots of jerks and stops was going to be a challenge that I was not yet ready for. It would take hours of practice after work in my hotel room.

The talent stayed next door in an abandoned hotel, which was luxurious in an earlier era. Now it was just a sorry, hollow shell of a hotel with the bare necessities. Picture the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Creepy, but usable. Anna spent most of her time with her stage door Johnnies, doing God only knew what with them. Maybe they were playing ping pong.

Joanie and I walked to an Italian restaurant nearby for most of our meals and spent some of our free time working on wardrobes between the evening shows. I loaned her my Bedazzler and she gave me a pattern for fool-proof G-strings. Joanie looked at stripping as purely an economical move. She liked dancing and didn’t really care what she was asked to expose but was far more interested in paying her rent and keeping her head above water financially. She only worked out of town two weeks a month and spent the rest of the month working on her oil paintings and attending art classes.

We had three shows a day, leaving hours to kill between the noon and seven o’clock shows. I hated spending time at the theater in the dressing room because the porn movies played non-stop between shows and the noises were so annoying. I’ve never been able to watch porn since because of the smacking, grunting, and obnoxious mouth noises. Ugh. It was like being at an all-you-can-eat buffet with no music playing in the background to drown out the sound of people slurping, burping, and chewing. Because the hotel was just next door, I preferred to hang out in my room and read, when I wasn't working on costumes or my new robot moves. Joanie worked on sketches to paint when she got back home.

The advantage of working with an artist that week was Joanie’s makeup application ability. She was brilliant at shading, highlighting, and bringing out the best in our features using dark and light shades. She totally revamped my makeup routine and made me feel almost pretty under the intense theater spotlights, which were much brighter than club lighting. Joanie also helped me design my doll makeup and made an easy-to-follow diagram for after we moved on. She was a genius.

The week ended uneventfully, except that a member of the audience had to be rushed to the hospital after a ping pong ball broke his glasses and sent slivers of glass into his eyeball. Ouch. No charges were filed. No lawsuits were engaged. The last thing he wanted was for his wife to find out where he’d been spending every afternoon after work the past week. Ah, the land before litigation.