1/22/2024 0 Comments Roger bennett children![]() ![]() And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.Īccording to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.Ī blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. ![]() “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. “The fact I had become a citizen at the very time the United States became so turbulent and chaotic was crushing,” he writes, noting that like so many other immigrants, he had come to the country on a tourist visa and simply stayed on, never having had to cultivate the fear of authorities that so many other would-be Americans have to endure.Ī three-cheers homage to an America that, Bennett suggests, is returning to its open-arms promise of days past.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. He takes a serious turn, though, when he writes about when he finally became an American, a time when the nation was presided over by a racist xenophobe. Bennett is good-natured, self-deprecating, and wryly observant throughout, recounting a disastrous bar mitzvah, feckless romances, teenage infatuations, and suchlike things. ![]() ![]() “For me, the United States has proven to be a land so free, you even allow bald blokes with accents to appear on television,” he writes appreciatively, having logged many hours as the co-host of Men in Blazers, a popular soccer-focused sports show. Most of Bennett’s entertaining memoir takes place in the U.K., though at the end, he finally arrives in the U.S., first in Chicago and then in New York. instead-all reason enough for the author to have considered himself, from his earliest years, as “an American trapped in an Englishman’s body.” If his parents and schoolmates were sometimes bemused by his attachment to such emblems of American popular culture as Saturday Night Live, he found encouragement in the teacher he fondly calls “Fat Knacker,” who told tales of an America that welcomed newcomers and promised grand adventures. "America existed almost as an alternate planet to me, a place filled with possibility and promise, where life seemed to be lived with a different gravitational pull.” So writes Liverpudlian Bennett, the descendant of a Russian Jew who left home to go to America and mistakenly got off in the U.K. A fan’s notes on the beckoning city on the hill, the America of old. ![]()
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