My First Pasties

I'm always treated to something unexpected when I go to author readings (hello, moonshine!); today it was a look at a pair of Gypsy Rose Lee's crooked-bow pasties. Hell, they're probably the first pasties I've seen up close, period.

This was at the Fountain Bookstore, a reliable place to hear interesting authors talk about their new books. The talk was delayed due to A/V difficulties (projector and screen having to be procured) only to end up using a new-fashioned computer instead. Hey, you make do with what you have.

Author Karen Abbott was accompanying the talk on her new book "American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare, The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee" with a slide show of photographs, some previously unpublished, of Gypsy and her life, which included a seriously deranged mother, a dancing prodigy sister, intimacy with various members of the mob and the attention of NYC's elite writing group.

Abbott, who took three years to write the book, said she was compelled to write the book after hearing Gypsy described as "the most private public woman in the world."

The description that captured my imagination, though, was of her "public body and private mind, both equally exciting."

A self-satirist who used witticisms and jokes onstage to titillate her audience, something that wasn't done at the time, Gypsy was also determined to be taken seriously as a writer.

At one point, according to Abbott, 11,000 people a week were coming to see her show, including members of the Algonquin Roundtable.

I found it interesting that she found zippers vulgar, preferring straight pins, which she tossed into the audience as she removed them. This woman truly was a trailblazer in a lot of ways.

After the talk, Abbott brought out the black pasties (with red tulle sewn around them by her own mother, for modesty's sake apparently), which unfortunately she did not put on for our amusement. She did show how Gypsy would attached the bows crookedly so that she could correct that during her performance.

I'm not complaining. I finally got to see pasties, even if I didn't get to see them in use. And they did belong to the stripper who changed burlesque from a hurried nudie show to a languorous tease.

Abbott quoted a man who claimed he'd watch Gypsy take fifteen minutes to remove a glove and said he'd have watched just as eagerly if it had taken her half an hour.

That's the "public body" part; I would have been curious to know what the "private mind" was thinking as she did it.

Cause, let's face it, it's all about the mind.