Schlock teaser

The somewhat straightlaced theatre-going audiences of 1880s America, eager for performances by European artistes like Jenny Lind and solid, home-grown, classical actors such as Otis Skinner, were hardly prepared for the on-stage vulgarity that the (usually) Russian and Polish immigrant impressarios, with their particular nous for show-biz, were to unleash into the saloons and fleapits across the young nation.

Of the many weird acts that comprised Vaudeville — the bearded ladies, fiddling baboons, human cannonballs and, apparently, ‘comics wearing enormous rubber phalluses’ — none can have been so strange, have kicked against so many pricks, so to speak, than little Louise, the daughter of the echt pushy stage-mother of Vaudeville’s even more raucous baby, Burlesque.

Louise was a plain, puppet-like moppet referred to as Plug, whom Momma Hovick forged, with vulcanic tenacity, into . . . Miss — drum-roll — Gypsy — drum-roll — Rose — drum-roll — Lee. Such was the name by which the teenage breadwinner of this disturbingly functional family (lacking men, but including a jealousy-riven prettier younger sister who became the actress June Havoc) would eventually introduce her couture-clad bumps and grinds.