Your irregularly scheduled column of commentary, clippings, curiosities, and cuttings from burlesque history. From forgotten figures to fabulous footnotes, we’re digging into what the headlines left behind.
In this bit… you are chasing Amy Fong, the woman behind the “Dance of Shame,” the Robot Girl, and the Quiet Revolution who outlasted every label they gave her. She never called it art. “A beautiful body may be art,” Amy Fong said, “but the strip-tease is a business.” For her, the stage was work—light, motion, and habit—the performance of survival, not seduction.
In 1938, American dancer Diane Kaye broke London’s strangest rule — “If you move, it’s rude.” Her striptease turned the city’s prim nude theatre tradition upside down, sparking a Parliamentary debate on art, morality, and motion itself. On the eve of war, she proved that one woman’s movement could shake more than a stage.
Braniff’s “Air Strip” ad turned 1960s air travel into a fashion tease at 30,000 feet.
Gypsy Rose Lee on Burke’s Law (1964) appears as Miss Bumpsy Cathcart, the striptease professor, in “Who Killed Vaudeville?” A nostalgic TV whodunit.
Burlesque, obscenity trials, and the illusion of Della Gates: go inside Philadelphia’s 1972 Trocadero Theatre.
Carney’s Burlesque – Burlesque Bits Gazette Carney’s Burlesque One Skull, One G-String, and a Mystery with Too Many Names In this bit, the year is