The golden age of exotic dancers remembered in a new documentary

The legendary Judith Stein in the Golden Age

Two weekends ago, I came down with a very nasty flu.

When I eventually got better, I opened an email from this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent Anna Smith. She was raving in glowing terms about a documentary she had seen called League of Exotique Dancers.

It was a documentary about burlesque dancers in what is described as ‘the Golden Age’.

“The film,” Anna told me, “includes much never-before-seen footage of exotic dancers (much of it from a private collection of over 300 rare early black and white films of exotic dancers), photos from the private collections of the dancers themselves and interviews with the dancers today.

“And Kitten Natividad is in the movie!!!” she added. “She is hilarious! AND Russ Meyer!”

“Ah,” I replied. “The beloved Russ…”

“Russ, Russ…” agreed Anna. “Very funny indeed. He is wearing a snazzy jacket. Maybe it could inspire David McGillivray to make a jacket film. I wasn’t cultured enough to appreciate Russ Meyer movies when I was young. I preferred porn films with exotic locales and bad translations.”

Anna is not someone without knowledge of the world of exotic dancing. She told me:

“When Beneath The Valley of The Ultravixens (starring Kitten) was released, I was dancing at The Metro Cinema in Toronto. We did shows between the films. It was a vast, echoey, run-down place, but the owner was a nice foreign man who paid us really well.

“He hired me to do voice recordings on the answering machine to announce the coming attractions. I would make up exciting announcements: Chesty Morgan has just arrived from New York and will be here until Friday, four shows a day, starting at noon! Next week, Nurse Annie is flying in from Argentina to attend to your needs….

Anna’s alter ego ‘Nurse Annie’ caused problems

“That one didn’t work out so well because a reporter from the local Spanish paper showed up wanting to interview Nurse Annie (who was me).

“The cashier was an old lady who was practically blind and often she would accidentally let small groups of twelve year old boys into the cinema. I would get out on stage and the twelve year olds would be sitting in the front row like idiots and I would storm off the stage and call the projectionist on the intercom to get them out of there.

“The League of Exotique Dancers also depicts how the dancers coped with the dramatic industry changes over the years, the hardships they overcame and then how they reacted when they were asked to return to the stage… after absences of thirty years!

“It also showed how we used to dance to live bands. And there were comedians too ! And funny strippers…

Camille 2000 from the League of Exotique Dancers

“I was laughing through most of the movie, and crying… The film was BRILLIANT… Plus I was at a writers’ workshop for hookers all afternoon…There were eleven of us…

“On opening night in Vancouver, 66 year old Judith Stein performed a comic striptease before the movie started…

“After seeing the film (and making myself known to all in the following Q&A session) I went out with a group of directors and editors including Exotique‘s amazingly intelligent (some might say wily) young female director Rama Rau,  producer Ed Barreveld and Judith Stein.

Judith Stein (left) with Anna Smith at the documentary’s Vancouver premiere

“When I asked Judith how to get into The Burlesque Hall of Fame show in Las Vegas, she asked me how old I was. I told her my age and she said: “You’re too young. You’re not allowed in until you’re sixty.“

“Don’t quote me on this, unless you can’t help it, but I have never seen a contemporary burlesque stripper move as well as the older ex-professional ones, (such as myself haha). One of the dancers in the movie noted that although she admires the efforts of contemporary burlesque dancers the fact is that, for most of them it is a hobby rather than a profession. She also admired the working strippers of today, lap dancers and pole dancers who make a lot of money and see glamorous, travel, etc. She said they work really hard for it though..

“When I see contemporary burlesque I find it usually looks a bit too contrived. Obviously, when we did the shows six and seven days a week for years on end, that experience became part of our stage presence and we became good at adapting and improvising according to the club and audience.

Anna Smith lives quietly in Canada

“Since I didn’t know anyone, but had been kindly invited along by Ed and Judith, I didn’t speak much, but sat there fascinated, listening to their astonishing and articulate discussion about film making,

“Editors are fuckers…they have to be… etc.

“Somehow, toward the end of the night, I found myself hearing two men (I have no idea who they were) talking very seriously about Mr Methane.

“Mr Methane?” I cried out. “I know Mr Methane!”

“The two men looked at me with surprise. One of them was Irish and he said in disbelief:

”You know Mr. Methane?

“Well,” I said. “I mean I know who he IS… We appear in the same blog, sometimes even on the same page… Sometimes it is a bit embarrassing.

Mr Methane – not a known exotic dancer

“I asked the Irishman who had shown an interest: “How do you know Mr Methane?”

“Oh,” he told me, a bit exhaustedly, “I have been trying to make a film about him for years… about eight years… What blog?”

“John Fleming’s blog,” I said.

“The man scrambled for a pen. After all, he was Irish.

“Just look for TheJohnFleming,” I said.

“Is he on Facebook?”

“He is on Facebook. He is on Twitter. He is on everything.”

“I promise to Skype you when I get a phone again. I keep hoping my old (lost) phone will appear and been trying to revive several old ones without success.

“My sister on Vancouver Island has a WordPress blog about dolls… “

Edinburgh Fringe: The trauma of a 5-star review & why I don’t like fauning

Extreme 4-star absurdism has now reached even The Times

Maybe absurdism and ‘outa left field’ comedians are starting to make inroads into mainstream media consciousness. Even if I have no idea what ‘outa left field’ actually specifically means.

This week, definitively absurd Mr Twonkey got a 4-star review and near double-page spread in The Times, which (like Martha McBrier’s 5-star review in The Scotsman) had an immediate effect on audience numbers.

Then, yesterday, Lewis Schaffer got a 5-star review in The Scotsman. This too had an immediate effect. He sent me a text saying: “Feeling bad about it.”

Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award judge Claire Smith, who wrote the review, told me: “Lewis is upset. He told me not to review him. I did it without telling him. So I said: Lewis, you’d better buy the paper. Now he’s in bits.”

5-star anguish for coffee-stealing Lewis Schaffer

I told her: “He is bound to be upset. Five stars! His reputation is in shreds!”

Critic Kate Copstick told me: “Lewis Schaffer stole my coffee today. I was sitting at the Community Centre. He came out of his show with an entourage and I told him: I’m terrible sorry. I’ve heard all about it. I don’t know what Claire Smith was thinking of. If it had been me, I would have been kinder and not have given you more than 3 stars.

“Although he was obviously emotionally devastated by the review, he managed to quickly get it up… on his mobile phone, I mean… and let everyone around him read the review. It’s a lovely review, but he was so upset he started sipping my coffee – Oh! This is delicious! Just like American coffee! – and, because he was so distraught, I let him drink it all. He was chuntering on about the star-chasers who just go and see anything that has 5-stars.”

The star system for reviews also came up as a subject at yesterday’s Grouchy Club. Co-host Kate Copstick was scathingly against it. Two members of the audience staunchly defend it, on the basis that it was just quicker than reading the reviews.

Not a compilation show – a compilation review

Abigoliah Schamaun (as mentioned in a blog last week) has taken to putting stars on her posters from fictional publications. And Peter Michael Marino, whose show precedes The Grouchy Club, yesterday started putting ‘compilation’ stars on his flyers. He proclaims a 6-star review from Fringe Guru/Broadway Baby – on the basis that Fringe Guru gave him 3 stars and Broadway Baby gave him 3 stars. The combined quote of the 6-star review is Outrageous! Hitler!

He told me Fringe Guru had used the word Outrageous! in its review. So presumably Broadway Baby reviewed him as Hitler! I thought it better not to ask for details of the full quote.

After The Grouchy Club, I bumped into my comedy chum Janey Godley on the pavement outside The Counting House. She started raving to me about the joys of Comics and Graphic Novels: the shop next to the venue.

“In the very first week of the Fringe,” she told me, “I got really sick. I went in there, didn’t know them, but they let me lie on their couch and they had a random dog called Bonnie who jumped on the couch with me – Why wouldn’t he? – Then they all went away to get drunk – they’re a wee bit hippie – and forgot I was there and locked me in.

Where do you find a comedian in Edinburgh? In a comic shop

“So I was locked in the comic shop with ten minutes to go before my show – at the window screaming – with a dog barking and folk passing by who thought it was a show – Why would it not be? It’s the Fringe. Eventually, I got out in time and did my show with Bonnie the Dog at my heels. So now I can go in to the shop whenever I want and have a nap and I have coffee and tea in the back, sandwiches in the fridge and I have a dog to stroke. Now piss off. I have people to see.”

And with that, as Kevin Spacey said in The Usual Suspects, she was gone.

So I went to see Pat Cahill’s show Panjandrum, a bizarrely endearing mix of something, something and something. Not quite sure what. I think it was probably echoes of English Music Hall, a bit of absurdism and something indefinably original. There was a metal hat and a large bomb involved along the way. He had built the bomb himself.

Then came my worst nightmare.

I had been invited to see the well-reviewed and much-touted Follow The Faun but I think, somewhere along the way, I had failed to read the small print.

Faun & games for everyone except maybe me

I cannot even begin to tell you how much I hate being part of anything where people do things in unison. I abhor community singing. I would have hated the Second World War. All that bleeding singing jaunty songs together. Anything where ‘bonding’ en masse is involved I loathe.

I hate dancing.

I am a fat slaphead of an unspeakable age. I am well past my prancing prime. But, even when I was in my teens and twenties, I hated dancing. I am not and never have been filled with any hint of an inkling of any desire to be joyful through moving in unison with other people and waving my arms and legs about. I would rather kneel in an orange jumpsuit for ISIS.

What I am saying is that, for me, Follow The Faun was an hour of torture. It involves going into a darkened basement room and following the dance moves of a satyr with large horns. It is a combination of 1960s/1970s hippie, trippy Glastonbury-type Acid-fuelled love-in, 1980s/1990s Ecstasy-fuelled Rave dancing and The Wicker Man with a lot of sexual miming and a bit of wannabe human sacrifice. You may think I am joking about that last bit. I am not.

I hated it. Though I am not averse to a bit of human sacrifice.

But…

I am not the target audience.

Everyone else – young, lively, outgoing people (mostly girls) in their twenties – LOVED it… They L-O-V-E-D it. Beaming faces, pogo-ing bodies, sweat pouring, occasional screams of joy.

This is not the figure of a graceful satyr used to joyful prancing

If you are an optimistic, outgoing, life-loving, youngish, Rave culture dance-loving lively person, go and take part in it.

If you are a grouchy fat male slaphead well over 35 who likes cynical endings to films and looks a bit like a bald, lightly-bearded Hattie Jacques… avoid.

More to my taste was the show I saw after that – the ever-dependable Frank Sanazi with his Iraq Pack – Saddami Davis Junior, Osama Bing Crosby and Dean Stalin. The full house at the Voodoo Rooms was packed tighter than a cattle truck and the audience was well-up for an hour of bad taste songs about mass murder and dictators in hiding – so much so that, when the subject of people on the run and in hiding came up, an audience member threw Madeleine McCann’s name into the mix.

You can’t beat a bit of continually-updated bad taste for a good Saturday night out in Edinburgh. And it is good to see ISIS and Tony Blair added in there among the Biggies of Badassness.

There is a Follow The Faun video on YouTube…

… and one of Frank Sanazi, solo, singing his signature tune.

Slugs having sex, dogs high on drugs, sawing-up cars & comedy in cemeteries

The Bo Diddlers last night via the comedian from Venus (Photograph by my eternally-un-named friend)

Strange things are happening.

No change there, then.

Last night I saw Ewan Wardrop aka The Silver Peevil, the stand-up comedian from 1930s Venus – aka a George Formby one-man play – aka a former Matthew Bourne principal dancer – perform an astonishing hour-long dance show Stump! with his six-man morris dancing troupe The Bo Diddlers.

It is very rare to see a morris dance based on The Midwich Cuckoos book/Village of The Damned film nor another based on what appeared to be the Dawn of Man ape sequence from the movie 2001. Astonishingly original choreography.

“They are gorgeous,” said my eternally-un-named friend, “Captivating. They made me feel like dancing. You know the way boy bands have dolls they sell to fans? This group could have figurines. You could arrange them dancing on your mantlepiece.”

“Maybe,” I said.

The Bo Diddlers are repeating the show at The Place tonight.

A fully sold-out soirée in a Cemetery somewhere in London

Which clashes with the one-off Martin Soan/Adam Taffler event Soirée in a Cemetery in which comedian Stewart Lee, the British Humanist Association Choir and others perform a comedy show in a Victorian cemetery somewhere in London (it’s a secret until later today) – all accompanied by cake and hot spiced cider from the Women’s Institute. Tickets have sold out.

Slightly eccentric you might think. But only comparatively.

I have received an email from mad inventor John Ward, who designed the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards trophies. He lives in Lincolnshire. He tells me he is in a documentary being premiered next Wednesday at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The film is called A Different Drummer after a quote from Walt Whitman: I step to the beat of a different drummer. Not surprisingly, as John Ward is featured, it is about eccentrics. There is a trailer on YouTube.

What is it about Vancouver? Is it becoming the world centre of eccentricity? Or has the entire world gone doolally?

This blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent Anna Smith lives in Vancouver. She spotted a notice:

Anna Smith spotted this in an educational Vancouver building

ATTN: Debriefing for the Porn & Genital Image Online Survey and the Romantic Relationships & Mindfulness Online Survey will now be held in room 1606.

Anna has also been watching TV and tells me:

“On the CBC, the big news is veterinary. Doctors are saying that far too many stoned dogs are showing up at clinics and they wish the owners would just be honest about the problem, because vets have to give the dogs expensive blood tests. The laboratories found that although, in a few dogs, traces of cocaine and heroin were detected, the overwhelming majority of the dogs had ingested too much marijuana. However, the veterinarians said that it is not lethal, not a reason to panic and the most common side effect is that – I quote – It gives the dogs the munchies…”

Without pause or link, Anna then asked me:

“Just wondering, have you ever taken a picture of slugs fucking?”

A reasonable enough question (it seemed to her) but I had to say I had not, although my eternally-un-named friend appears to be on a barely-controllable mission to eradicate slugs from Planet Earth. She was out in the dark again late last night.

Slugs mating with something coming out (Photo by Cathleen Smith, Anna’s mum)

“My mum,” Anna Smith told me. “took pictures of slugs fucking. They created a thin string of slime about a metre long and were dangling from the roof all day, possibly for several days. I visited my mother whist this blessed event was taking place. I don’t know which slug was emitting the slime or if it was both of them or what that blob of goo is. We live in what is left of a rainforest. Slugs love it. People make fun of them.

“My grandmother used to wonder why there was so much fuss about slugs. She once asked: Why don’t people just eat them? They eat snails.”

Anna had no answer to this. Neither do I.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, John Ward has started to tinker with motorised vehicles again.

John Ward with his small but effective fire-fighting engine

He was last heard-of in this blog arranging and supervising a charity cabbage-hurling event, but his last motorised effort was creating what is apparently the smallest fire engine in the world, based on the chassis of a 3-wheeled Robin Reliant car. He created it because the British government has been trying to save money and has closed various local fire stations. John Ward likes to help out.

He tells me his next effort involves stripping down another Robin Reliant to the chassis.

“I took the car apart,” he told me, “but what do you do with the body? It’s too big for our local rubbish tip. So I got a small bench saw and reduced it to a wheel barrow full of smaller bits before putting them into carrier bags – Tesco ones of course as every little helps. Then I took it to the tip.”

I have no idea where any of this leads – neither the sawing-up of 3-wheeler cars nor taking photographs of slugs mating; neither trained ballet dancers doing morris dancing nor holding comedy shows in cemeteries.

I can only sit back and wait expectantly.

Strange things are happening.

Sichuan Opera’s face-changers, British variety acts & magical Chinese medicine

In 1942, screenwriter and science fiction author Leigh Brackett wrote that what seems witchcraft to the ignorant is simple science to the learned. In 1962, this was re-phrased by science fiction author Arthur C Clarke into his Third Law of Prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

The Chinese ambassador’s wife (left) and Professor Ke (right)

A couple of nights ago, I went along to the official opening by the Chinese ambassador’s wife Madame Pinghua Hu of the Asante Academy of Chinese Medicine’s new site in Highgate, north London.

In 1991, I was hit by the sharp edge of an articulated truck while standing on a pavement in Borehamwood. I blogged about it in 2011.

I was thrown backwards with a slight spin and the back of my head hit the sharp edge of a low brick wall maybe nine inches above the ground. What I did not know until much later was that my spine had been twisted and jerked when my head hit the wall. It took about nine or ten months to get over the concussion. I still have trouble reading. I still have a slight line in my head where it hit the edge of the wall. The discs at the bottom of my spine are still slightly mis-aligned and occasionally cause me extreme pain if I twist my back at certain angles. It took about eighteen months to (mostly) sort out the pain in my shoulder.

My shoulder in 1991 – the bone was pulverised in two places

In 1991/1992, I was in extreme pain from my shoulder for about 80% of my waking hours. My GP asked me what drugs I wanted for the rest of my life. Instead, I went to a Chinese doctor, knowing that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is slow because, whereas Western medicine tries to cure the symptoms, Chinese medicine tries to cure the cause.

The Chinese doctor gave me some Die Da Wan Hua Oil to rub on my shoulder and, within two weeks, my shoulder pain was gone. It has never recurred unless I put extreme pressure on the shoulder – and, even then, it is discomfort rather than pain.

The ‘miracle’ cure for my shoulder pain cannot have been psychological because it never entered my head that TCM could have a quick effect. I had thought, if it did work, it might take many months or maybe a year.

I have no idea how it worked and, surprisingly, when Madame Pinghua Hu officially opened the Asante Academy of Chinese Medicine’s new site this week, she too said she had no idea how TCM worked.

Anything sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic to the uninitiated and this ’thing’ is several thousand years old.

Professor Ke at his new Asante building in Highgate this week

The Asante is run by the Chinese doctor who helped me – Dr (now Professor) Song Xuan Ke. He started to learn his skills when, aged 13, he was apprenticed to three herbal masters in his home province of Hubei in China. He qualified in both Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine at university in Canton in 1982.

I found him in 1991 because he tended to be interviewed on ITN TV news reports whenever they referred to Chinese medicine – and because he was listed as an advisor for an Observer newspaper series on alternative medicine.

Since then, among other things, he has been providing an acupuncture service in NHS hospitals including London’s Royal Free, Whittington and North Middlesex, has been involved in TCM research programmes with various London hospitals and became president of the British Society of Chinese Medicine and vice president of Pan European Federation of TCM Societies. He is actively involved with the UK Department of Health in the process of statutory regulation of professional practice and he was a member of its Regulating Working Group.

But the reason for writing this blog is not because of the near-magical-seeming effects of some traditional Chinese medicine but because, as part of the opening of the Asante centre this week, Professor Ke booked a man called Hou De Zhang who did a face-changing (bian lian) dance as performed in traditional Sichuan Opera.

Sichuan Opera face-changing this week (Photo by my eternally-un-named friend)

It seemed as magical as some Chinese medicine.

The dancer wears a face-hugging silk mask which can be changed in a split second into a totally different face-hugging silk mask. I have seen a video in which a photographer says he set his shutter speed to 1/200th of a second and could not capture the mask-changing moment.

The dancer twirls with his hands visible – or, for literally a split second, obscures his face with a fan or with the briefest of head-spins (without touching his face) and the mask changes.

At one point, Hou De Zhang shook me by the hand while his other hand was visible and, with a head shake, his face mask changed, but I did not see the point at which it changed.

Hou De Zhang performing at the new Asante

There is some sort of trigger mechanism which, I understand, can be hidden almost anywhere on the body. I reckoned it was in his hat. But it is impossible to see the point of transformation and how it can change one face-hugging silk mask into another is beyond my weak ken.

At another point in the dance, a moustache suddenly appeared on his face and then disappeared. My eternally-un-named friend (who does a neat line in Monk-like thinking) suggested it might have been inside his mouth. I suppose that must be right, but it was impossible to see. The moustache just appeared.

The dance was arguably the best variety act I have ever seen because it seemed to be actual magic. Perhaps Jerry Sadowitz’ close-up magic equals it, but it is a close-run thing.

I mentioned at the start of this blog Arthur C Clarke’s Third Law of Prediction.

His First Law is: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

His Second Law states: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

I am all for that… in everything.

There is a video of Sichuan Opera face-changing on YouTube.

I might have nominated this new UK comic for the Malcolm Hardee Award

Last night, I was at Vivienne & Martin Soan’s always odd comedy club Pull The Other One. Vivienne did part of her introductions in fluent German… of which I suspect we will hear more in the coming months.

As always, last night was a variety fan’s delight with Steve Aruni’s surreal act accompanied by a saxophone-playing vacuum cleaner, Lindsay Sharman in her persona of red-turbanned psychic advisor Madame Magenta (she should add even more songs to this character), Jody Kamali as a very-hands-on karmic Eastern healer, The Greatest Show on Legs searching for Dr Who amid stage smoke and Miles Jupp as the token stand-up comedian showing once again that, however successful he becomes, he is still vastly under-rated.

Visitor from Venus – The Silver Peevil returns

But, for me, the highlight of the evening was the second coming of The Silver Peevil, a successfully odd character ripped straight out of 1930s Hollywood Saturday morning adventure serials who is, he says, from Venus. I mentioned his first ever appearance in a blog two weeks ago.

After last night’s show, I was chatting to him. His Earth name is Ewan Wardrop.

He told me he was new to comedy and this was, indeed, only the second time he had ever performed the Silver Peevil act.

I was astonished because he was going on to me last night about being totally new to comedy – yet he was so self-assured (and so funny) on stage. The whole thing about being a newcomer did not gel.

This year, Formby is Edinburgh’s great loss

He said he had been a dancer and actor for about ten years. He told me he had performed at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe as George Formby in a one-man play he had written himself – Formby – I remember the show and had almost gone to see it, but it did not seem to fall within the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award area and it got elbowed-out by other shows.

He had performed as George Formby at Pull The Other One earlier this year but I had missed that. And he is touring the UK in his Formby play this summer and autumn. There is a trailer on YouTube.

But there was something about Ewan Wardrop that threw me last night. He seemed more confident on stage than someone with the experience he hinted at. This turned out to be because he was rather over-modest.

I checked him out afterwards.

He has acted in London at the Old Vic and for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the National Theatre… He has also appeared in theatrical runs on Broadway and Los Angeles and in Tokyo.

And he is a founding member of The Bo Diddlers – an ‘experimental’ Morris dance group formed in 2008 for the Brighton Fringe Festival. featuring performers from the contemporary dance world. There is a showreel on YouTube:

Which brings me on to what is now-stand-up-character-comedian Ewan Wardrop’s most interesting angle.

He attended the Royal Ballet School (where Morris dance was bizarrely taught as part of the curriculum) and all the dancers in the Bo Diddlers worked for Matthew Bourne’s contemporary dance company New Adventures. Ewan played leading roles in Bourne’s very highly acclaimed productions of Swan Lake and Nutcracker!

Indeed, it turns out my eternally-un-named friend saw him perform in Nutcracker! at Sadler’s Wells in 2003.

If he were performing at the Edinburgh Fringe this year in a full-length show as The Silver Peevil, instead of touring the country as Formby, I might be very tempted to nominate him for a Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality.

Instead, I suspect his visible talent will probably be spotted elsewhere and he will make lots of money… something that does not necessarily happen if you win a Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award – unless it is the ‘Act Most Likely To Make a Million Quid’ Award.

But there is definitely something unusual about Ewan Wardrop. Something which the late Malcolm Hardee and the very-much-alive Martin Soan were/are very good at spotting – genuine, original, mesmerising talent.

If you can’t see him as The Silver Peevil, see him in his self-penned biographical play Formby or – totally different – as George Formby singing modern rapper lyrics. There’s a clip on YouTube:

The one-legged dancing bull fighter who had a golden tassel affixed to his stump

Double-legged former dancer Anna Smith in her hospital bed

The So It Goes blog’s occasional Canadian comedy correspondent Anna Smith has just been released from St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver after being admitted to their emergency department on Valentine’s Day to get a Dacron patch sewn onto her aorta… She tells me she wants “to warn healthy young people about the dangers of enduring  years in murky subterranean caves that pass as limelight”.

When in London, before her move to the Dominion of Canada, she helped Sir Gideon Vein run the now ironically-named Open Heart Cabaret. She used to dance at the Nell Gwynne club in Soho during the day, the Gargoyle Club at night and then spend her time at the old Comedy Store until the early hours.

If she had died under the surgeons’ knives in Canada, she had wanted her obituary to include the fact she had performed with Julian Clary and the much lamented late David Rappaport and that she had been forced to learn to play the accordion as a child and appeared on Canadian television with Andre the Giant.

“Now,” she tells me, “I’ve been given a heart-shaped pillow as a physiotherapy tool and it says Open Heart on it….Veins, hearts, sternums being sawn in half and wired together.”

She also tells me she was given “orientation at the hospital for the cardiac rehab program… The walls were adorned with vapid monotone posters dedicated to mind-boggling philosophical questions like WHAT IS AN AVOCADO (printed on green paper) and NUTS – WHATS IN ‘EM ? (printed on brown paper). Now that dietitians and physiotherapists can produce their own amateur pamphlets with the push of a print button, there is no longer any need for the Department of Health to waste public money on artists or copywriters. I sat though a dull PowerPoint presentation about Cardiac Health, which I made bearable by mentally substituting the word Catholic for Cardiac: WHY CATHOLIC PATIENTS NEED FIBRE… HOW CATHOLIC PATIENTS RELIEVE STRESS…”

Anna tells me that recent local Vancouver news includes the story that “Immigration Officials abetted by a local television station and the National Geographic TV channel raided a downtown building site where they chased, captured and filmed migrant construction workers from Mexico and Honduras. The workers were made to sign legal papers which they did not comprehend and which turned out to be releases so that their images can appear on a reality TV show called Border Services to be screened on the National Geographic channel.”

Anna also tells me that her sojourn in hospital has made her realise there is “hope for mutilated dancers” but it also seems to have allowed her to develop a possibly unhealthy obsession about Signor Donato, an obscure one-legged dancer who was an enormous success touring Australia in the 1870s.

She reports:

“It appears there was more than one Signor Donato. The original was a hit in Covent Garden in London in the 1850s and danced dressed as a bullfighter with a golden tassel affixed to his stump which, it was said, resembled a cushion on an old fashioned sofa, his mutilated state notwithstanding.

Lola Montez – pursued by a one-legged man?

“The second Signor Donato was an imitator of the original, who toured Australia and New Zealand several times before heading to California… possibly following the trail of Lola Montez, the Sligo-born ‘Spanish Dancer’, toppler of governments, and creator of the infamous erotic Spider Dance who ended her days performing charitable work for the fallen women of Brooklyn.”

Anna continues:

“One of the Signor Donatos (the first, I think) was said to be an immense favourite in London, Paris and Milan. He was said to have lost his leg fighting under Garibaldi when a shell burst during the Battle of Magenta in 1859. He surprised his audience with the grace and agility he displayed and danced to an introductory adagio, followed by the Jeanette Polka (accompanying himself with castanets) and concluded with the Garibaldi March.

“I first heard of him in a book I read in the 1980s: Enter the Colonies, Dancing, an Australian history of their early touring dancers. Then I read an article titled Strange Players by Dutton Cook (Belgravia). Strange Players was written in 1881 and is a documentation of famous maimed and mutilated dancers and actors working in London at that time.

“This small advert appeared in the Wellington Independent, 16 August, 1872 :

SIGNOR DONATO
Who created the great furore
at Covent Garden in 1864
will appear at the
ODD FELLOWS HALL
for
ONE NIGHT ONLY
On his way to San Francisco

“I have no idea what the great furore was…..and can’t find out if he ever arrived in San Francisco.”

The preface to a 1895 German book (Fahrend Volk by Signer Saltarino, Leipzig) says:

“The one-legged dancer first came into style with Julio Donato, a Spanish bull fighter, who lost a leg in a bull fight. Through industry and practice, he was able to perform the most graceful, surprising and agreeable dances. His appearance, manner and personality were far from painful. He married the daughter of the Viennese actor Julius, herself a popular actress, who bore him a lovely daughter, Dora Donato, who became a very well known light opera singer. After Donato’s death, a number of artificial (kuenstlich) and genuine monopedic dancers and clowns sprang up, all of whom were only weak imitations of their prototype. Only the one-legged clowns who called themselves The Donatos after their famous original appeared not only to inherit the artistic ability of their predecessor but his luck.”

Anna tells me:

“The imposter Signors Donato were particularly prevalent after the Great War and some even teamed up together. One particular duo called themselves The Merry Monopedes.

Anna is recovering well from her operation but worried that she may become “the world expert on monopedic dancers”.

YouTube currently has a 1949 clip of a one-armed and one-legged dancer called Crip Heard.