when burlesque was queen

Gypsy Rose Lee in Vancouver, April 1955. (Bill Dennett, Vancouver Sun)

When burlesque was queen in Vancouver

An academic looks at the simpler, seedier times when as many as 35 clubs featured the bump-and-grind

The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 12, 2007

By Peter Birnie

Vancouver's seedy side has grown so shameful that we're gaining a worldwide reputation for turning a blind eye to the state of our Downtown Eastside. Just ask the thousands of tourists who, facing the perfect storm of our taxi shortage and traffic gridlock, recently went wandering into Hastings Street on the first full day of our cruise-ship season.

There was a time, however, when seediness had a simplicity to it, when a rough-and-tumble town with an almost charming lack of guile gasped in horror at the mere suggestion of such a thing as female nudity. Yet, despite the best efforts of police to keep a lid on it, burlesque was once queen in Vancouver.

As the musical Gypsy opens at the Stanley Theatre with its tuneful take on the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, who often bumped and ground in Vancouver, University of B.C. Prof. Becki Ross is completing almost a decade of research into the fascinating period from about 1945 to 1980 when bump-and-grind had a firm foothold here. Dozens of people agreed to talk to Ross, who has doctorates in sociology and women's studies, about their experiences for a book she plans to title The Shake, the Rattle and the Pole.

"It's quite a mix," Ross says, "of ex-dancers and club owners and booking agents and choreographers and musicians."

Notable by their absence are the men who watched.

"It's just a measure of the ongoing stigma," says Ross, "that men who were regulars at that time and may still be even now, at the shrinking number of clubs in the city, would hesitate to come forward."

Full nudity on stage was not decriminalized in Vancouver until 1972. Striptease, which up until then had been the fairly sedate domain of burlesque artists like Lili St. Cyr, Tempest Storm and Gypsy Rose Lee, shifted toward pornography and, as befits our patriarchal culture, exploded in popularity.

At its peak in the 1970s, Ross estimates as many as 35 clubs catered to the trade. Now just one of a handful is the pioneering Penthouse on Seymour, rumoured to soon make way for condos.

"Underneath all these glass towers and urban spas and doggie daycares and fancy coffee shops and bike-rental places," says Ross, "is the whole social history of Vancouver."

For decades the vice squad tried to keep a lid on things. Ross finds it ironic their efforts were made more difficult by well-meaning tourism boosters.

"Vancouver was being advertised as this playground of the north all over the continent, but I'm sure the civic boosters never thought about the playground as including the striptease venues that would never have been seen to be legitimate recreation or leisure."

Ross uncovered a deep divide between east and west.

"The affluent West End uptown clubs were those like the Palomar, the Cave, Isy's and the Penthouse," she notes. "On the east side were clubs like the Smilin' Buddha, Harlem Nocturne, Kubla Khan and New Delhi."

The east-end joints were rougher, downscale clubs, and racism meant that dancers of colour performed only there.

"For the most part," says Ross, "the dancers of colour did not make as much money as the white, blond headliners. They did not ever attain the same marquee status as those women did."

Despite the divide, bump and grind was a remarkably diverse business. Ross found that the names of club owners could be Indo-Canadian or Chinese-Canadian or African-Canadian.

"The clientele was mixed, the ownership was mixed and so were the dancers," she notes.

Ross maintains the scene was so robust from 1945 to 1980 that it oiled the postwar economic engine and greased the wheels of the city's economy.

"Thousands of workers were employed," she says. "Not just the dancers, but the bouncers and ticket sellers and hat-check girls and cigarette girls and promoters and the choreographers, photographers, costume designers, secretaries, bookkeepers, kitchen staff, the prop and set and lighting specialists, waiters, cleaners, bartenders, musicians and, of course, the lawyers who defended the clubs when they were busted by the vice squads."

Phew! But she's not done. What about those who sold hosiery and makeup and alcohol, or the retailer at the Pike Place Market in Seattle who sold many a Vancouver stripper her Springolators, those Barbie shoes with steel shafts so perfect for dancing?

"Not to mention," Ross continues, "the cab drivers, hair stylists, manicurists, security guards, wigmakers, tanning salon operators, fabric retailers, drug sellers, child care workers and media pundits."

Legendary Vancouver Sun nightlife columnist Jack Wasserman died in 1977, but Ross was able to interview the equally iconoclastic Denny Boyd before he died in 2006. Ross is keen to talk to anyone else who had a hand in the booming burlesque business. You can e-mail her at: becki@interchange.ubc.ca

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'The little book that could' chosen for library club

The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 12, 2007

By Rebecca Wigod

It's fitting that the Vancouver Public Library has chosen Ruth Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats, as the book it hopes all Vancouverites will read this year. The Japanese-American writer, who has a home in B.C., did the research for it in the library's central branch.

Speaking there this week, at the first event in the library's One Book, One Vancouver program, Ozeki said, "I know all of the little corners where you can set up a computer and a workstation and work, unmolested, for quite a period of time."

After writing the manuscript, she combed the library for books on finding an agent and getting published. My Year of Meats came out in 1998, won several prizes and continues to attract readers with its blend of serious issues -- food quality, the environment, cultural differences, corporate sponsorship of media production -- and wacky humour.

She calls it "the little book that could."

And Joan Andersen, chair of the library's board, says it's a great choice for the city-wide book club because it will stimulate discussion and create a sense of community.

Ozeki, 51, was a documentary filmmaker before she turned to writing. She was living on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside when she wrote My Year of Meats, which grew out of her experiences in film and TV production.

The protagonist, a Japanese-American woman named Jane Takagi-Little, is in Japan directing a show called My American Wife, which is sponsored by the powerful U.S. meat-industry lobby group BEEF-EX. The other lead character, a Tokyo housewife named Akiko Ueno, is a devoted viewer and tries all the show's recipes -- even when they call for dousing a rump roast in Coca-Cola.

Ozeki told fans at the library that Akiko is married to Jane's boss, "the PR rep for BEEF-EX in Japan. The women are connected by this television show, this rather oppressive man and this corporate umbilicus."

Originally, Ozeki considered exploring her ideas about corporate sponsorship of media with a story about Big Tobacco. But then she realized that "there's nothing funny about cigarettes, but there's something funny about meat."

The author, who divides her time between New York City and B.C.'s Cortes Island, said: "I do this hybridization thing. There's humour in it, but there's also pathos, as well."

The library has prepared a 10-page reader's guide to My Year of Meats that calls the novel "an entertaining and moving read."

The library's Janice Douglas, creator of One Book, One Vancouver, said the program will be shorter and punchier than in the previous five years. Instead of spanning four months, events have been planned for May and June.

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