Dear Constant Reader,
Although I still have a huge pile of books to review, today I’m grabbing the newest addition to my library from the top of the pile.
Brown Skin Showgirls by Leslie Cunningham, 2017.
This slim paperback showcases photographs from Leon Claxton’s Harlem in Havana, a revue with Black and Cuban entertainers that toured with Royal American Shows from 1936 to 1967. Royal American was the carnival with which both Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee toured, and just a few tents away Harlem in Havana also presented striptease as well as Latin and Caribbean dances.
The book is almost entirely photographs with captions, but very little other text other than a short introduction to the history of the show. Some of the stars of the show are highlighted, like The Bates Sisters (including the author’s grandmother), The Cuban Dancing Dolls, and female impersonator Greta “Garbage” Garland. It certainly left me wanting more!
Don’t get me wrong — The photos are absolutely worth the price of admission. Pages and pages of performers on stage (and occasionally off). Performance photos are so much rarer than publicity photos and photos of Black burlesque performers are very scarce. This book is a treasure trove! And you can get a good look at the costumes too.
I was happy to hear that Cunningham is going to expand on the story of Harlem in Havana with the documentary film, Jig Show: Leon Claxton’s Harlem in Havana. It should be out soon (all things depending on the pandemic, of course). I want to learn more about the performers in these tantalizing photographs.
Order your book direct from the author and she’ll sign it for you!
I want to thank Jo Weldon’s NYSB Book Club for arranging for Bebe Bardeaux‘s great interview of Leslie Cunningham about Brown Skin Showgirls, Harlem in Havana, and Jig Show.
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Gypsy and Me: At Home and on the Road With Gypsy Rose Lee by Erik Lee Preminger (1984). Also published as My G-String Mother.
I couldn’t review the book without making something. The “wonderful” vintage dessert Fudge Batter Pudding had the note “If you try any of my vintage recipes…try this bad boy!” So I did. You make a simple chocolate sauce that goes in the bottom of a baking pan, then you spoon a chocolate batter on top and bake. The result is a sort of brownie with a fudgy sauce underneath it. The cake part is on the dry side (it has no eggs and only a smidge of butter and milk), so it needs the sauce. When we had it cold the next day, a little cream poured over was a nice addition. It was easy to make and can be whipped up from pantry staples, so I’ll call it a win.
Booty Lab by Michelle L’amour (2013).
The Night They Raided Minsky’s, directed by William Friedkin, MGM, 1968.
We began with Grape Old Wons — meat & cheese-stuffed wontons. The end result was supposed to look like eyes, but we couldn’t quite shape the wonton wrappers to look like lids. I should have gotten round ones instead of square. This recipe also showed the issues with translating the arcane recipes. I had interpreted “mixture from the ranch hidden in the valley” as ranch dressing mix and bought the powdered stuff. Dr. Becky, who has the bookstore edition with the recipes translated, discovered they meant bottled ranch dressing, so we added a little more milk and mayo to make up for it.
Next was Pallid Bisque — seafood bisque. It’s hard to go wrong with crab, cream, and sherry. We tried molding little masks out of rice (in tribute to The King in Yellow) to garnish it, but we were only partially successful. If I did it again, I would use smaller shrimp (or larger bowls — although these have charming skulls on them) and dollop the sour cream onto the soup first, then arrange the rice masks and shrimp triskelions on top of it.
Our main course, and crowning glory, was The Fate of The Elder Things — a most unusual eggplant parm. The hardest part was hollowing out the eggplant without rupturing the skin, but with saving the flesh for cooking. Next time I might try a melon baller. Then we breaded (with fresh, home-made breadcrumbs, by the way) and fried the eggplant tidbits, made a cheese sauce, and warmed up some marinara. The cheese sauce was poured into the hollowed out eggplant, where it oozed out of slits cut in the sides. The whole thing was topped with a slice of starfruit, procured by Dr. Becky’s husband when my market had none.
This was accompanied by Dining Trapazohedron — a wedge salad. The very best part of this salad was the candied bacon. It took a bit of work — first you cook it almost crisp, then chop it up and fry it until it’s crunchy, then add brown sugar and cook until it’s glazed — but any good ritual should be a challenge. The blue cheese dressing wasn’t bad either…
For dessert we served The Mounds of Tindalos — molten chocolate lava cake made in a slow cooker. We poured cake batter into the slow cooker, then chocolate pudding, then topped it all with a bag of chocolate chips and ignored it for the next three hours. I wasn’t sure what we were going to get but it smelled good. The result was so delicious — hot and gooey and intensely chocolate. We served it with a sprinkling of shredded coconut on each serving.
Oh, The Glamourous Life! 