I remember once when I was about 2 years old, my father came home from work...( he worked nights in a dry cleaning plant named I.Wohl...it was one block over from where we lived in Long Island City and he worked there until the 1970's) I recall his telling my mother that someone came to the plant and asked him to clean large feathered fans....and they were used by Sally Rand in her striptease act. That was all new to me, that morning I learned that some one named Sally Rand danced with feathers, that she was famous and that my father was responsible for dry cleaning her fans...I really did not know what most of that meant but I never forgot it. Years later there was a story in the news paper about my old friend Sally, I showed my father as asked if he remembered cleaning her fans, he said yes but wanted to know how I knew about it....I told him I remembered the morning he told my mom....He said how could you that was over 10 years ago and you were a baby...I told him the entire story as I knew it and he laughed, still amazed that I could recall that......Thanks Sally for giving me a moment that I shared with my father.
4 comments:
Leave it to a Cianciaruso to dry clean the fans of a striptease star. But if you think about it, there was nothing else to dry clean (no clothes).
Here is a little Bio on dear Sally.. Grandpa had rubbed elbows with a star.. who had a lisp didnt do well when silvent films became a think of the past.
Birth Name
Helen Gould Beck
Mini Biography
She's considered an American icon in the world of entertainment although most contemporaries have no idea who she is until her legendary risque "fan dance" is brought up. Then they put two and two together. Burlesque star Sally Rand was born in the Ozark region (Missouri) in 1904, her father a corporal in the Spanish-American War and her mother a Pennsylvania Dutch Quaker. Inspired by Anna Pavlova, she became interested in dance at a young age and left home to join a carnival as a teen. She invariably became a cigarette girl, chorine, cafe dancer, artist's model and circus performer (Ringling) through a series of introductions. She later joined a repertory theater company and took acting seriously for the first time. During the 20s she appeared in a number of productions, playing Sadie Thompson in a production of "Rain" opposite Humphrey Bogart. Films came her way as she was able to score work (due to her agile background in the circus) from Mack Sennett and Hal Roach in a few of their daredevil slapstick shorts. She joined mentor Cecil B. DeMille's stock company and entered feature films with a new name that DeMille gave her -"Sally Rand." She decorated a number of silents, including westerns with Hoot Gibson and others, but a pronounced lisp hurt her career come the advent of sound. It was at this juncture that the shapely dame decided to work on incorporating her talent for dancing back into her career. With the right mixture of enticement, imagination and intricate feathery placement, Sally Rand came upon her secret formula to success. As an exotic burlesque performer, she not only winningly ignited male libidos but found a steady gig for the rest of her days. A long-standing job at the Paramount Club in 1932 is where the idea of her "fan dance" was created. Her "Lady Godiva" stunt at the Chicago's World's Fair had her arrested on lewd charges but she was eventually released. All the brouhaha just increased her notoriety. She later created the "bubble dance" in which she did a taunting dance with a huge five foot specially constructed translucent bubble to the delight of male audiences. She would appear in later years at various revues, expositions and fairs still teasing and playing "hide and peek" with the guys, her act seldom straying from its original concept. She was arrested a few more times than she was married (at least three). Her last appearance was in Kansas City in 1978. She died the following year.
Thanks Ron...I guess no one else is a Sally Fan....
Now if the artical was about Ayn Rand.. we'd have a whole new topic.
didn't Ayn Rand write a book about maps that shrugged ?
Post a Comment