Five Poems by Charles Rammelkamp

 

The Night They Raided the Old Howard

 

I’m just another moke nobody
will particularly remember,
even my name, Kevin O’Shaughnessy,
ain’t that unusual, but I was there 
the night they raided the Old Howard,
just back from serving in Korea, 1953.

The Watch and Ward Society’d gone on a moral crusade,
denouncing the Howard Athenaeum as its shows 
got more and more risqué.
Me and my buddies had went out on the town,
letting off steam, wound up in Scollay Square.
Mary Goodneighbor, aka, Irma the Body, was dancing 
at the Old Howard that night when some Vice squad cops
showed up with a hidden 16 millimeter camera,
secretly filmed her doing her striptease,
from peeling off those long white gloves,
tossing them into the audience

while she did a bump and grind,
all the way to when she let her blouse drop,
flashed her tits for just the briefest second,
pranced off stage while we all hooted and howled.

The city shut the theater down for indecency,
then refused to renew its license.
That auditorium stayed dark almost a decade.
I was working in the warehouse in Quincy by that time.
Then in 1961 the Old Howard burned down,
right before the committee that raised a million bucks
to restore “Boston’s most celebrated theater”
could get her lights back on again.

So now I tell my grandkids –
and anyone else who’ll listen –
I was there the night they raided the Old Howard.

 

 

The Bad Girl of Burlesque



My background as a Phys.. Ed. teacher in Kentucky –
not to mention my rather substantial bosoms –
gave me the training to refine my stage act,
making one tassel spin like an airplane propeller
while the other remained perfectly still.
You see, mine were “educated breasts,”
chest muscles I’d coached like athletes.
Different speeds, different directions.
I even invented the nipple tassel;
I should have applied for a patent!
I even added bells and lights to my costume.
Carrie Finnell’s tits have a Ph.D.!

Some men claim I invented the striptease –
God knows I teased them!
Men came back night after night
as I shed only one article of clothing a performance.
Ticket prices and the audience grew and grew,
as my skimpy apparel shrank and shrank.
In Cleveland, I once took over a year to strip completely.

I don’t mean to brag,
but once I beat Mae West in a strip-off;
persuaded Gypsy Rose Lee to strip on stage.
Not bad for a girl
who started out in the Ziegfeld Follies chorus.
A trailblazer, that’s what I was!
No wonder I got my nickname,
the Bad Girl of Burlesque!

 

 

The TNT Girl

 

I always smiled that the name I was born with,

in Whigman, Georgia, Joy Pelletier, meant

happy fur trader,

but I changed my name to Tee Tee Red,

on account of my red hair.

Earl Long took a shine to me in New Orleans,

but of course his big affair was with

that other redhead, Blaze Starr.

 

But I traded on my fur and my curves, all right,

learned my chops from the best, Zorita,

who encouraged me in my acrobatics

at her club, Zorita’s Show-Bar, in Miami,

when I entered an amateur burlesque contest there.

Some people called me a contortionist,

but it was just yoga gave me my supple agility.

I could move in ways no other stripper could.

 

Soon enough I moved on to the Sho-Bar and 500 Club

on Bourbon Street in New Orleans,

where Governor Long got to know me,

appeared as a stripper named Rock Candy

in Jerry Lewis’s 1960 movie, The Bellboy.

I played the national circuit,

from the Aquarius Lounge and Jungle Club

to the famous Roxy Theater in Cleveland.

 

And just like Zorita taught me the ropes?

I passed my tips on to my buddy

Rita “the Champagne Girl” Alexander

when we both played the Sho-Bar

in the French Quarter.

Rita got her name from balancing

filled champagne glasses on her breasts.

I don’t even know why they also called me

The TNT Girl – but I can make a pretty good guess!

 

 

America’s Most Beautiful Dancer

 

Still in my teens when I became a dancer in Paris,

I starred in Maurice Chevalier’s revue in the 1920’s.

That’s where I invented the fan dance, but also

used flowers and bubbles to conceal my nudity.

They called me, Faith Bacon,

“America’s Most Beautiful Dancer.”

 

I sued Sally Rand for $375,000 after the bitch

stole my fan dance idea. We were in Chicago

performing at the 1933 World’s Fair.

Sally claimed I was just jealous;

the audience seemed to like her better.

“The fan idea is as old as Cleopatra,”

Sally sneered. I didn’t get the settlement.

 

That was just the first of my lawsuits.

When I was working the Lake Theater in Chicago,

in a show we called Temptations, 1936,

I fell through a glass drum

on which I was posing nude,

lacerated my thighs, leaving ugly scars.

I sued the Lake Theater Corporation for $100,000,

but I had to settle for five thousand,

which I spent on a ten carat diamond.

 

Though I preferred women to men,

I married Sanford Hunt, the songwriter.

When we separated in 1956, I came back to Chicago –

we’d been in Erie, Pennsylvania.

 

I was depressed as hell and broke.

All I had besides my clothes was a train ticket

back to Erie and eighty-five cents,

such a fall for America’s most beautiful dancer.

The window of our room at the Alan Hotel

on Lincoln Park West called my name.

 

My roommate, Ruth Bishop, a grocery clerk –

what a lovely woman Ruthie was! –

tried to grab my skirt as I went out the window.

It was a long way down, but it seemed like

I’d been falling for almost twenty years by then.

 

 

The Bazoom Girl



My act pretty much centered
on how fast I could get my propeller pasties
to spin, how dizzy I could make the audience.
My 42-D’s earned me the nickname “The Bazoom Girl,”
not to mention “the Burlesque Version of Jayne Mansfield”
and “Miss 44 and Plenty More”;
my stage name Jennie Lee short for Virginia Lee Hicks.

I did pinups, striptease, tried making it
in the movies but never got any good roles,
typecast for my tits in movies like Peek-A-Boo
and 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt with Mamie Van Doren.

But my proudest accomplishment?
Helping start a union for dancers,
The Exotic Dancers League of North America (EDL),
serving as its first president.
We pushed for higher wages and better working conditions.
We also collected memorabilia, which I displayed
at my LA nightclub, The Sassy Lassie.


I helped start the Exotic Dancers Hall of Fame, too.
It’s an art form, after all, and just as American
as Cowboys and Indians, inductees awarded
the Fanny, a plaster likeness of yours truly.
There’s even a photograph of me
immortalizing my boobs in cement,
outside the Mayan Theatre.

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His latest poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner and has just been published.Another poetry collection entitled Transcendence has also just been published by BlazeVOX Books. A collection of flash fiction, Presto!, will be published in 2023 by Bamboo Dart Press.