Weekday
The weekly feature page of the University Daily Kansan
April 26,1978
"The energy you get from the audience is important." Heather Dawn says. She dreams of Vegas and her own private plane. "Most these guys you can't just win with a smile like in the old days," she says, "It's your body; you have to capture them. Most make each guy feel like you're dancing for him alone. Nobody ain't lookin' at your face anyway."
Strippers
KANSAS CITY, Mo. ~Wearing April night turning gray, Yellow neon blinks from a used car lot, flashing lights rising up before the stars. Couple of black men under a marquee at 31st and Main streets wondering why their cab has not showed.
"Fool, where you tell 'em we was anyway," a tall one in a stocking cap snarls.
"Avant,艺商, man." the guy in the cap kicks a beer can, spinning around and stopping to take a look at a window poster.
**Girls' Girls' Girls'** Featuring Galaxie, the statue that turns to life. Floor shows three times nimbly. Five fins. Five boots.
"look at these," *siren sounds* . . . dork bark. A black-hatened woman pulls up in a blazer with Kendra's claw and furries inside, up her leg. She flashes the number of her IDs.
Everybody else is already here even Henry Hogan, the ladies' favorite. He says he's 190 years old and claims to have thrown Buffalo Bill's
He broke into show business back in 1886 when he played Topsy in a minstrel troupe of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He waves off a fuming hand when he gets called back to the stage.
"No thanks, I can't dance loaded," she says in a syrupy Kentucky draw.
"Residents must sit on somebody."
"Grab a beer, Dawn," says Fred Hendrix, stage manager
She sits down on a crowded couch. There's a Barrett on the TV. Twenty minutes later Heatter Dawn is on stage in a black silver stained cowgirl costume.
Her hat falls off, somebody claps. In the Background Stevie Wonder singing, Golden Lady I'd sure like to go there.
There are about 30 men here tonight, clustered around the stage which comes up right to the seats. Moe are sitting in a seat apart, except for the
A man in a leisure suit gets to find a closer view. Dawn smiles, closed-liped. Everything will be revealed boys, everything except him.
A silver-blonde in a fur-trimmed coat, blue jeans and boots looking like a Babbie doll version of Doll Partan, bounces into the dressing room backstage. Galante, or Gloria Duda by 10, she glances behind her to make sure the man in the helt in the hat with the stuffed Easter bunny is still up.
"Critic," the man says, nodding in the direction of the stage where Heather burns is spreading a yellow rage across the floor, stage
"All these dames today know how to do is take their clothes off," he grips. "Not a one could made it in the old show."
He's Galante's manager, Bill Taylor who's been in show bib 45 of his 66 years. He owed the year of his car磨损 in the marking list.
Billy was once known as the "Boy with the Million Dollar Teeth." Nicolemee has yellowed those teeth, but it doesn't matter because she
Galates pulls a read-rolled reefer from her purse and lights it up. She asks Billy to go get her a pack of Kools.
"I get so tired of this sometimes," she says jokingly, reaching over to unfasten her bonds. "Dressing and dressing and dressing again, all the time."
She sits down in front of the hulb-lined makeup mirror and touches up a pair of big brown eyes. Billy calls them bedroom eyes. She sprays a stray spray on her eyes.
"That's pretty good smoke, isn't it?" she says. "Got it from a colored guy last week in Chattanooga. Old neat man."
"Mom doesn't mind the strip stuff cause to her that's show business.
But she can't stand the money I make."
She says she likes the road, like the money. Besides, she couldn't stand it in San Francisco, had to get away from her mother.
Billy comes in andisses the smokes on the table. Outside Heather's act is finishing up and the enceras can be heard on the stage." I hear a for Heath丹威. A very pretty young lady, 'I tell you that, and I'm ready.' My Fred did I ever tell you about the time I saw a bull outrush the tram."
"Hey billy, where's my cape?" Galatea says impatiently. He goes off hunting in a backroom.
Not much of a life set on the road she says, just town to town, her and Billy, East Coast, West Coast, Canada. The Sahara in Vegas once.
"I guess it's all of my way of revealing," she says. "It's kind of a trick, some sort of freedom, to get up there and take all your clothes off."
And then some other day, she says, she wants to get out of it. And live good, complaine space with trees and mountains and a mountain where the sun is shining.
She sucks a referrer down to the mug, and then says in a lowered voice, a cloud of smoke coming out with her words. "When you get down to it." I
"I found this gal in a theatre I used to run in Frisco," Billy says.
"Fresh off the farm,mv might say,16 years old."
Pushing her hair back over her skin she bared shoulders, she starts getting dressed for her act the statue that turns to life. She pula nylon skirt and trousers.
I said to her, hey, you wanna be a star, come with me, I'll make you a star in a show.
She raked in a thousand that first week. Now she can pull for three crand at the right places.
"I can tell if a dame's got it just by the way she walks through the door," Billy says, putting on his horn-iris mask, as he does whenever talking business. "I betcha I've put over 10,000 dames on the stage. Some big ones too, June Hell, Sally Rand."
Galatalea acts a begins in the red-carpeted box. She wails unseen while rhyms plays his tape of the story of Pymaton: the mythical sculptor who built the temple to Zeus.
"I've seen people cry with this illusion. Fully says, pulling the curtain of light off your eyes," she says in an orange cap, pink gown, and green elaborate underclothing. A couple of women wear blue and red gowns.
Gailes's act culminates on a makeshift bed she rolls to the front of the stage. Afterwards Billy goes on and scoops her clothes into a laundry basket.
"Hard core smart is what really did burlesque in." Billy says afterwards at the News Emergency terniture next door, where a couple of the staff were there.
"I used to run the old Burbank in LA, Christ the memories of that place. Al Jison, Mickey Johnson, Rinata, hundreds of girls."
The time I took the square, just before they tore it down, I cried.
*Last time I took the square, just before they tore it down, I cried.*
Everything was rattling and musty and full of dirt. The ratters from where I once had a girl ride the stage on a sand or mall, ad caving in. It
As for the Avanti, Fred Hendrix has "Lier plans."
Eventually I'd like to see us putzin, on mixed media science fiction films with laser light shows and nudity and a complete electronic
"We'd like to create things that have never been seen before," he says.
The last shop is on. Skin flikers for the straunlers.
It was a bad week, she picked up $500. She says Kansas City reminds her of her home town, Louisville. She keeps an apartment rented there, and it feels like her life is in trouble.
Heather Dawn asks for help to carry her trunk out to her car. She leaves town tomorrow.
"I'm a woman," she explains. "I like to make money, but I like to spend it too." She travels罕见的 except for her dog a toy terrier. He's not a mammal.
Outside a full moon will rise high above its sedentary cousins down in the city. The neons are still perilous, flashing off the tippers of cop
One by one what's left of the audience shuffle out and scatter in different directions into the night. A man with a Marine bucharch hair and a suitcase sleeps on the sidewalk and searches his pockets for a smoke. "Where will you be going from here?"
"Don't know yet," Dawn answers. "I got to call my agent. That's the way it always is, I never know where I'm going till it time to me."
At age 16 Gioria Dudley left home, tired of living with her show business mother in Hollywood. She became Galatae in a bursahee act; taking off her clothes the tune of $1,000 a week. Now, at age 19, she is making as much as $3,000 a week to pay for her education.
"... Ya gotta have a gimmick in this business," Billy Taylor, Gailatea manager, says.
Hecklers are a way of life for the dancers. "You just smoke some dope before you go out and you get to the point where one of the dancers said, 'You don't want to play back to them but you have your obligation to the audience,' another said, 'and you have a duty to the audience.'"
Backstage 106-year-old Henry Hogan visits with the backside. He's been working the vaudeville, burlesque and carnival circuits 97 years. "These are hard times for us old timers," he says. "But at least when I go, I oughta have it pretty good. Either way, upstairs or down, I got friends, I must."
Photos by Randy Olson Story by Timothy Tankard