Charles Rammelkamp

Tit Town

I loved them all, a huge fan.
April March, Taffy O’Neil, Joan Arline,
not to mention the big names, 
Tempest Storm, Blaze Starr, and the rest.

In Dallas, they had to wear a net bra,
net pants, a big wide strip up the back.
So many laws! Three or four inches of cloth
on either side. Full bra lots of places.
Know what April March did?
Sewed tassels onto a flesh-colored bra!

Detroit was known as the Vatican.
My God, they had rules
for how the girls could bump!
You couldn’t do two bumps.
You couldn’t do a series. Geez Louise.
You had to have a two-inch piece
on the front panel. It had to show
you had like a bikini on.
If you were blonde, you had to wear
a brunette G-string.
Couldn’t wear black ever.

In Green Bay, you couldn’t even strip onstage.
You had to go to the dressing room
just to remove a glove!

But Indianapolis? Mmm-hmmm!
Indianapolis was known as Tit Town.
The audience was crazy over the boobs!
“Where you workin’ next?” somebody might ask.
“Tit town,” they’d say.
Everybody knew that was Indianapolis.
I loved the shows in Tit Town.

Springtime for April

Born Velma Fern Worden in Oklahoma City,
I got my stage name from Barney Weinstein,
my manager at The Theater Lounge in Dallas.
I’d been working as a cigarette girl at The Derby Club in OKC –
had to lie about my age to get the job –
when Barney discovered me. 
He and his brother Abe had me trained 
to be a stripper, gave me my name.
I was just seventeen.
Abe and Barney were training Candy Barr at the same time.

By the time I was eighteen?
I was touring clubs and theaters all across the country,
Mexico and Canada, too.
My act was the sophisticated debutante,
an elegant striptease with the accent on tease.

By the time I was old enough to vote,
I got the nickname “First Lady of Burlesque”
because I looked so much like Jackie Kennedy.
Didn’t hurt I was always so ladylike on stage.

Sure, there were some ugly scenes,
like the time at The Place Pigalle in Miami,
the crumb who started shooting up the club 
because he’d been charged for my drinks,
killed the singer, wounded the doorman and a dancer –
she’d later have to have the leg amputated –
even held the gun to my head!
Luckily, he was overpowered before he pulled the trigger.

But I also met two of King Saud’s sons at the Piccadilly Club,
had a private audience with the king himself.
Heffner offered me ten grand
to pose for Playboy magazine,
but you know what?
I would never appear fully nude in public.

Fanne Fox, the Tidal Basin Bombshell

I’d always planned to go to medical school,
become a doctor like my Argentinian dad,
but life has a way of shifting your goals,
like a never-ending bump-and-grind onstage.

I became a performer after I married Eduardo Batttistella,
dropping out of the University of Buenos Aires
to accompany his piano-playing as a dancer.
When we moved to America, I started stripping.

I was working at the Silver Slipper Club on 13th Street in DC
when April March introduced me to Wilbur Mills.
I always thought she couldn’t stand him,
pawned him off on me to get rid of him.

But I thought he was kind of cute.
Maybe April saw the Arkansas in him, an Oklahoman herself,
that hick charm a little too close for comfort.
Billed as “the Argentine Firecracker,” I fell for him, hard.

Wilbur knocked me up. I had an abortion
to protect his reputation, then our affair became public,
and I divorced Eduardo.
But then we had a big argument one night 
after we left the Silver Slipper. Wilbur hit me,
and I panicked when the police stopped us
near the Jefferson Memorial around 2:00 AM,
jumped into the Tidal Basin, trying to escape.
They took me to Saint Elizabeth’s for treatment.

I was working at the Pilgrim Theater in Boston,
the old Gordon’s Olympia Theater on Washington Street,
when Wilbur showed up and made an ass of himself.
I was already calling myself
The Tidal Basin Bombshell by then.
Poor Wilbur!  He’d barely won re-election that fall,
but after his rant in the Combat Zone club,
he resigned his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee,
didn’t run for re-election in 1976.

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. A full-length collection of poems, The Field of Happiness, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.