Ch 3: Considering Who We Are

Chapter One First Light
Chapter Two The Thud and a Nipple Dress

It must have been July 1969 because they had brought a black and white TV backstage so we could watch man’s first steps on the Moon during rehearsal. Opening night I was a big hit. My sister Patricia came backstage and said to me, “I don't know why you’re bothering with a career like this, considering who we are.”

I knew exactly what she meant.  I went into a kind of trance, went home, quit the show, and started answering ads to find work doing porn. Not real porn, simulated sex. When they started doing real sex in the new porn of 1969, I quit and went to Laguna Beach to find Timothy Leary.

*************

2010 - East Hollywood, on the phone

“You'll never guess who got in my cab this afternoon, Barbara Blaine.”

“No, Rick, that was no coincidence.”

Too late. I knew exactly what that meant. 

Within weeks our plans for action about pedophile priests in Chicago were squelched.

*****************************

Even among a population of women who take off their clothes for a living, my sister Patricia stood out as a person who was willing to go just a little bit farther than the others, maybe too far.

In 1972 within a hundred miles of San Francisco there was vast open country, rugged canyons, vistas of meadow.  A network of two-lane highways twisted through open spaces that today in 2015 are so completely covered with concrete you cannot recognize them.  

In 1972 about three in the morning, the tittie bar parking lot is empty but for two pickup trucks and an aging M-G sports car.  Today in 2015 lap dances take place at bachelorette parties for school teachers, but in 1972, the topless dancer was a new phenomenon, about as popular with the general population as was the can-can dancer in 1830.

In the moonlight, Trish would get behind the wheel of her aging sports car and like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, drive up the tangle of two-lane highways to her home where events would take place for several more hours.  There were at least three vehicles  following her at the end of her shift at the topless bar, driving the 14 or so miles to spend the next few hours on a vast mattress on the floor in Trish’s little hut near a creek, if this was Tuesday, two trucks, in a Saturday night, four or five.

Trish reeled them in using the instinctive skills placed in her at age nine, when Father Horny was trying to keep his sessions with her secret, and she, at age nine had turned the tables, driving the drunken priest crazier than he already was.

Around that same time, 1972, I lived in Dallas Texas in a Yoga ashram. 

My sister was an atheist in 1972 when she was taking men home from topless bars.  She was six years older than I was when Father Horney predated on our family, she remembers what happened more clearly than I do, and so has never to this day trusted a religious figure enough to give in to a spiritual life. She won’t even go to 12-step meetings, instead becomes enraged that you have to “buy into this god shit” in order to go through rehab if you need it. 

I on the other hand in 1972 was in full religious mania mode.  The experience with Father Horny at age five had made me, from puberty onward, into a kind of religious zealot who always confused sexuality with spiritual pursuits.  I made an absolute fool of myself once in Tim Leary’s home, don't want to go into detail about that.

(((((((((((((((

1969: In the dark with other cast and crew, we're in awe as the man in a space suit takes slow slow slow steps down towards the Moon surface with the shadow of the space station in the TV picture.  Just as Neil Armstrong is saying the famous words, “That's one small step for mankind,” my Director calls from the stage, his shrill soprano drifting  in with the dust in the light of the curtain. “Where’s Charlie, get Charlie out here now. We're ready to rehearse the scene.”  

I wish I could say playing the lead in “Charlie Was A Lady” was a career advancement, something worth missing one of the most important moments in the history of mankind. 

But it was not. 

Even though it was based on the historical character Charlie Parkhurst, Charlie Was A Lady” was probably the world’s worst play. I include more about it here as I'm pretty sure that as Charlie, I insisted I not wear pants in the scene where I pull my gun (see photo at R-Rated site Outtake 1).  It was when the compulsions in me from being molested by a pedophile priest were just starting to emerge.  

I've found a character in California history from around 1860, actress Adah Menken, whose biggest performance was playing the role of a man. Menken insisted on appearing near naked in a thin leotard in a scene that was usually performed by a dummy. Raised Catholic in a broken home, she became the highest paid "actress" of her time, just by appearing almost nude, as if she were driven to do so by some compulsion placed in her in childhood. More about Adah Menken at the bottom of this post. 

Adah Menken insisted on performing a role near-nude, when up until then it had the scene had used a dummy, like I insisted on performing bare legged, compulsions so similar, so similar.

*********

Charlie sings Solitaire

The "musical comedy" Charlie Was A Lady was an embarrassment, except for one song.  I asked them to let me sing it as blues and “Solitaire” became a show stopper.

Opening night Patricia came backstage and reminded me I'm a pedophile priest victim, sort of.

Patricia came back to my dressing room after the performance opening night. 

In the middle of my celebration, she came up close to me with a strange air.

Looking me straight in the eye, she said to me genuine concern:

“I don't understand why you pursue a career like this, considering who we are.”

I became stunned. 

I knew exactly what she meant.

The party around me became unimportant because she’d shocked me out of reverie into a reality I had been avoiding, somehow.  I had a job and rehearsed at night and took voice and dance classes, so as always I lived at Faster Than the Speed of Life pace.

But what she was was more than what it looks like on the surface. 

It was not about the futility that all my work had only gotten me as far as Burbank Community Theater, that's not what Trish was trying to tell me. 

It was this deep shared secret we had of which we never spoke but all she had to do was look at me and we knew we shared it. 

What she said put me in a fugue state. 

Honest. 

Next morning I went out and picked up Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety and in both of them were reviews of Charlie Was a Lady.  Both said the play was awful but singled out my performance and the song as something to look at.  Both of them mentioned me. 

But I was in this fugue state, still reeling from what my sister had said to me the night before. 

And I turned to the back pages of the trade papers, both Variety and Reporter were running ads for pornography shoots in their classified ads at the time.  The Supreme Court ruling that created the X rating had just come out and people didn't really know how to deal with it, so for this short time that lasted only a few months, the two main entertainment industry trade papers in Los Angeles were both running ads for work in porn films in the help wanted section. 

I called Pretty Girl International agency and began my career in “nude modeling” which included film that day.  I also called the director and told him something came up and to have the understudy do my part, which ruined the whole play because she was just a mediocre performer. 

I did soft core for the next six months.  It ruined what chances I had to have the acting career I’d dreamed about my whole life.  Really in a way because of what Patricia exhaled at me that night in my dressing room.

I HAVE TO POINT THIS OUT

We did not have real sex in porn in 1969

Back then porn was not real, it was “simulated sex” it said so on contracts, on posters, on movie marquis.  In fact the day I quit porn was when it stopped being simulated and eventually I will write that episode at R-Rated section of this story.

Oh heck here is a short version:  Link to R-Rated Outtake 1 

**********

PRESENT: LAKE TAHOE 2015, CAN-CAN DANCER  

I have cable TV for the first time in years, and a can-can dancer scenes in an old Western movie got me wondering. I’d just packed up and moved for the fifth time in four years. So I spent a few hours online reading about the history of the can-can dance form around the same time I was reading history of Tahoe sites. 

Tula performs her Quadrille Dance at the Bijou Tavern near the Tahoe Lake 

Tula took to the new dance trend that had come out of Missouri around 1830 as if she’d been born to do it and came to California as soon as she was old enough. She landed in Tahoe where wealth was available to the ordinary man, if you were willing to dig in the dirt to get it. 

Tahoe Lake, where prospectors came with their gold to party and Tula was well known locally for her performance of the can-can, which in the unruly region now known as the Sierra Nevadas had evolved into an erotic public sexual performance that involved the customer in ways that would shock the coldest owner of a tittie bar in the San Fernando Valley today.

Tula had no boundaries, there was nothing Tula would not do.  

CUT TO R-RATED OUTTAKE 2 

Tula’s mother in St. Louis was a Roman Catholic who, when not dancing on the wrong side of the tracks, went through periods of reverence where Catholicism dominated the household for months on end.  Little altars with statues of Mary or Jesus appeared in parts of the house where there used to be furniture. 

It was during one of these periods of reverence that Tula’s mother became friendly with a young priest, who really was visiting the home to get his hands on Tula, then age seven and lithely prepubescent.

So Tula confused the serenity and “holiness” that accompanied the priest with the sexual arousal she felt at the tip of his fingers between her legs, when mom went off on an errand and he stayed behind to watch her. 

None of the other dancers ever do more than a kick where the man gets a peak at their panties, at least not while dancing at the Bijou Tavern.  They were shocked at what the girl with the Catholic upbringing was willing to do.

Tula performed sex in the tavern as if it were just another dance, having no boundaries, not after all those months when she was age seven being finger banged by Father Horny in Missouri.   

BACK TO PRESENT:

I POPPED AWAKE

I’d been dreaming after reading a bit about the history online on the new region where I’d moved, Lake Tahoe, and the history of the can-can dance.  The tall trees looming in my window disoriented me, as only days earlier I’d lived in a desert, now I live in a mountain resort.  I just keep running and running and running

Woke up in that familiar place where I'm both angry and grateful for the astounding sexual imagination I've had since puberty, thanks to ideas put in my head by Father Horny when I was six years old.  He taught First Confession classes and for some reason met with me in private sessions where he described exactly what “impure thoughts” are, and how to repeat them back to him later in Confession. 

A group of children surround the priest as he explains, "In the confessional, you tell the priest your sins, if you lied, stole something, had impure thoughts."

I pipe in age six, "What are impure thoughts?"

He reddens, "Wait and I'll show you later." And he does. He fills my head with fantasies about exposing myself in a sexy way to several men at a time. . . 

***************

EAST HOLLYWOOD 2010

On the phone, “You'll never guess who got into my cab today,” he said.

“Who?”

“Barbara Blaine.”

I filled with dread as he continued, “Yeah I was at the cab stand at Karnacki and Wabash, and I turn around and it's Barbara Blaine in the back seat, she asked me to take her to the SNAP office.  I recognized the address and looked up, wow imagine how surprised I was, you don't expect Barbara Blaine to be in that part of town."

I had called him to continue a conversation we’d been having, with emails, about me coming to Chicago because my case is in that archdiocese, and we both agreed there was a dearth of activism where there should be more in Chicago.

Now I held the phone awe struck as Rick continued his story.  Why would Barbara Blaine, who probably has a car, be anywhere hailing a cab in Chicago, and how could she happen to be there on that corner hailing Rick’s cab.  It sounded funny from the start. 

“What a coincidence,” I said, “what happened?”

“Well we got to talking and she told me there is something brewing in Chicago, and we should hold tight and not do anything until we heard from her.” 

That was even stranger. 

“What did she say was brewing?” I asked Rick.

“She said she’d be telling me in a few weeks, but in the meantime, whatever we are planning, we should put a lid on it, and wait for SNAP to do what it's going to do.”

“Rick,” I said, “don't you think it's kind of strange she just showed up in your cab and said this?”

“No-no-no,” Rick said. “It just shows you never know who’s going to get in your cab on the streets of Chicago.  Boy oh boy.”

Two weeks or so later, when I called Rick wondering why I hadn’t heard from him when we’d been cooking up plans for this project, he hesitated before saying to me,  “You know what, we've been talking here locally and decided whatever we do, it should only be people who live in Chicago.”

“Is that Barbara Blaine you're talking to about those plans, Rick?”

“Well yeah, you know, we're doing together something together, locally, and it should just be people who live here, this time.  I'm sorry to say this, but we've got this big project coming up, and it's better if it's just local people, you know what I mean.” 

"What are you telling me, Rick?"

"We want to keep it local." 

I wanted to say, “And you don't think it's funny that the result of her happening to get in your cab is that the project you and I were planning gets canned, isn't that a little suspicious?

But I didn't.  I avoided confrontation again.

Still, just to niggle Rick, every few months or so far a while after that, I’d call and ask him, hey whatever happened to that big project you were cooking up with Blaine to publicize pedophile priests that could only  involve local Chicago people.  But he never had an answer.  He started pretending he didn't hear the question.  Then he stopped taking my calls.

That day I just held the phone out from my ear as he talked, shaking her head.  They did it again.  SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, kaiboshed what we were trying to do, and kaiboshed it in the name of doing something for us. 

I wasn’t keeping track but up until then Rick and I had held at least ten conversations, between phone and email, that I was going to come to Chicago so we could combine forces and do some kind of activism to expose the pedophile priest cover-ups in that city.

Now I was no longer welcome.

When I got there about two years later, the situation was the same.  

refernce

**********

Today it's 2015, I'm getting old and a bit beaten down.  Everyone in my family has cut me out of their lives because of the stories I've written about pedophile priests, specifically the dysfunction in my own family created by the injudicious fingertips of one perpetrator priest in a small town outside Chicago in 1955.

***

I did almost dance topless myself once

When I am contemplating dinner these days, I think about the kitchen pantry in Lakshman’s house.  His real name was Lee, I met him when I moved into the Yoga Ashram in Dallas.  At one point he tole me, “My daddy owns a bank.” L lived in the ashram too, he was dedicated to god more than I was, which was saying something. 

He’d take me to his family house and I’d just gaze.  They had a walk-in pantry in the kitchen.  You opened a door to what was like a walk in closet with shelves so well stocked it had more food than a corner bodega. They had every snack and convenience food you could find in 1970.  I think of L’s pantry a lot today when I go through another “end of the month” with no money so no food.  That happens a lot to me as an old lady in 2015, which is fine because I had gotten too fat, but still. . .

His parents never did more than sniff at me from behind their backs in the next room when L introduced me. I think of Lakshman a lot when I'm looking at the one shelf I have for food in the one room where I live, because when that shelf gets empty, there is nothing else left. . . and that happens at the end of every month.

One day when I was still a new arrival at the Ashram in Dallas, L took me on a job interview. 

I had decided to be like my sister and get a job as a topless dancer.  My interview was at a tacky bar somewhere in Dallas. L drove me and watched from the empty tables.

I came out in a costume they had provided and in what is really a journalist’s body, did a very awkward dance, felt totally strange, and never went back there again. 

Like I said, the pedophile priest experience at an early age affected me and my sister in different ways. At this point in my life I was confusing sex with religion in most embarrassing ways.  In a few months I was editing the newsletter for the ashram, I ran the kitchen for a while, and learned hatha yoga good enough to teach advanced classes there in that house on Lemon Avenue in Dallas.

((((((((((((((

Things I found in other files that may incorporate here:

http://cityofangels2.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-sister-patricia-is-very-much-part-of.html

Possible line of dialogue:

I was not a horrible person but I had uncontrollable compulsions that I had to act out on but then had to keep secret. Once people found out who I was after hours, it would get me hated and fired and thrown out of groups.  I was not born a slut, something made me that way.

I laugh now when I think of the one or two encounters I’ve had with men since the memory came in in 1994.  I’d run two blocks down the street before I realized he was just trying to say hello.

The amazing part of the whole experience is that since 1994, I've never acted out in a promiscuous way at all.  The sick behavior just came to a stop, once I realized what was causing it.  I knew it wasn’t really me, and stopped being a whore. 

In 1986 or thereabouts I was in therapy with Dr. DiNicola at Cedars Sinai Thalians outpatient clinic in L.A.  I told him about that incident.

I told him about the time when Patricia came backstage and said something to me that caused me to quit legitimate acting and do the new porn work instead.

He said to me, wow, I’d love to know what it was she said to you. 

All I remember is a vague memory, something like, what I wrote above, “considering who we are,” is the line I remember most of all. 

I also at that point in my life could not remember one thing, ONE THING, from my life before age six.  Dr. DiNicola told me that was usually a sign of childhood trauma such as sexual abuse and I said to him, honestly, nobody in my family would do anything like that. 

CUT TO 1995 San Francisco:

Stand up on Market Street.

With Lizzie age nine by my side, I'm trying to raise money for dinner, so with an open hat in front of me, I start improvising comedy in the financial district of San Francisco on Market Street.  I come up with this line and it gets me a twenty dollar bill:

Bill Clinton getting a blowjob in the Oval Office actually makes him more popular with voters in San Francisco.  When he makes an appearance in town, there are dozens of men and women calling out, (In funny sexy flirty voice) “Bill Bill look over here, me, Bill Bill."

The crowd laughed and threw twenty dollar bills in my hat. 

************

True Story based on my life by Kay Ebeling

Please hit my PayPal button with High Fives ($5’s) to keep this blogger alive

POST NOTES

THERE REALLY WAS A CHARACTER LIKE IN HISTORY LIKE TULA AND LIKE ME AND MY SISTER!!!!!

Me: Blowing me away, turns out there is a real historical character who was a lot like Tula and a lot like my sister and me, Adah Menken:  

Research:

Based on Menken's assertions of being a native of New Orleans, Wolf Mankowitz and others have studied Board of Health records for the city. They have concluded that Ada was born in the city as the legitimate daughter of Auguste Théodore, a free man of color (mixed race) and his wife Magdaleine Jean Louis Janneaux,^[4][7] likely also a Louisiana Creole. Ada would have been raised as Catholic. (Wikipedia)

Me: Adah Menken, young Catholic girl, came to the Tahoe area (Comstock) in 1863 to perform in her full body leotard that made her appear to be naked, an act she’d been performing in San Francisco for several years.

Research:

Menken wore her wavy hair short, a highly unusual style for women of the time. She cultivated a bohemian and at times androgynousappearance. She was deliberately creating her image at a time when an expanding media existed to publicize it

She had several husbands which was scandalous in the 1800s

Me: Also she has signs of PTSD and living Faster than the Speed of Life.  She felt compelled to publish her personal life for the world to read:

Research:

While in New York, Menken met the poet Walt Whitman and some others of his bohemian circle. She was influenced by his work and began to write in a more confessional style. In 1860-61, she published 25 poems in the Sunday Mercury, an entertainment newspaper in New York.

Me: She urged her manager to let her do this part, she wanted to do it and look nude in front of as many people as possible. Like me in Charlie Was A Lady, insisting on doing the shootout scene without pants on. [PICTURE]

I WAS PLAYING THE ROLE OF A MAN TOO!!!

Research:

Jimmie Murdock offered [Menken] the "breeches role" (that of a man) of the noble Tartar in the melodrama Mazeppa, based on a poem by Lord Byron.^[1] At the climax of this hit, the Tartar was stripped of his clothing, tied to his horse, and sent off to his death.^[13] The audiences were thrilled with the scene, although the production used a dummy strapped to a horse.

Menken wanted to perform the stunt herself.^[6] Dressed in nude tights and riding a horse on stage, she appeared to be naked and caused a sensation.^[6]Not only was she a woman playing the part of a man, and playing with conventions of gender, she heightened the sensationalism by appearing to be nude.^[9] New York audiences were shocked but still attended and made the play popular. 

Some of society thought it beneath them.

Looking for more acclaim, Menken took the production of Mazeppa to San Francisco. Audiences less concerned about convention flocked to the show and made it wildly popular.^[8] She became known across the country for this role, and San Francisco adopted her as its performer.

Me:  Her first jobs were as an actress writer performer in Galveston Texas. My first jobs were as an actress writer performer in Austin, Texas. . .

Wow

Research: Menken had the urge to travel. She arranged to play in a production ofMazeppa in London and France for much of 1864-1866, when she swiftly conquered London and Paris. Productions frequently traveled between New York and London, and were promoted in each. The sensational aspects of the production attracted attention before the show opened (adding to the publicity.)

Controversy arose over her costume, and she responded to critics in the newspapers of London by saying that she was influenced by classical sculpture, and that her costume was more modest than those of ballet or burlesque. The show opened October 3, 1864, at the Astley Theatre to "overflowing houses".^[15]She was so well known that she was referred to as "the Menken", needing no other name.^[9]

Jokes and poems were printed about the controversy, and Punch wrote:^[15]

"Here's half the town - if bills be true -
To Astley's nightly thronging,
To see the Menken throw aside
All to her sex belonging,
Stripping off woman's modesty,
With woman's outward trappings -
A barebacked jade on barebacked steed,
In Cartlich's old strappings!"

This period established her lasting image. The highest-earning actress of her time, she was generous to friends, theatre people in need, and charities  (Wikipedia)

Me:  She was able to be an exhibitionist with herself all over the world before she died. I wonder what Catholic priest got to her as a little girl to make her so profoundly oversexed in such a similar way to me and my sister.

Close to two hundred years later, Ella is in Tahoe, broke again.  All she has going for her is her body but the cops are real uptight about prostitution in this town, I mean it, where there are casinos there are very alert cops keeping the professional women out of the way.

So she came up with an idea, a dance, she put on a leotard that covered her but she was as good as naked.  Then in a public area, she set out a hat, played music on a portable tablet with speakers, and made several hundred dollars in a few hours. 

The fabric of the leotard barely covered her, but it covered her, so she could not be arrested.  She could dance as close to her audience members as if she were in a dance hall asking for lap dances. 

She had enough money to rent an apartment soon, but no one ever touched her.

Oops, dreaming again.

More on Menken:

Adah also was compulsive about religion, you could even say was “anything but Catholic”

Per San Francisco Museum website:

Research:

When she met Alexander Menken in Texas, she became Jewish and married him.  The marriage did not last as she did not want to be a wife, she loved performing and the “adulation of young men” so left him, but remained “devoutly” Jewish

Also from San Francisco Museum re the bare horseback ride onstage that Menken insisted on doing:

“At the thrilling climax of the play, the noble Tartar lad, stripped of his clothes by his captors and bound to the back of a wild horse dashed out of the wings up to the papier-mache cliffs and disappeared in the clouds, while the audience grew hysterical with apoplectic applause.

It had been a tradition that during the ride of the barebacked horse, a stuffed dummy, naked and resembling Mazeppa, would be used. 

Menken would have no stuffed dummy.  She would ride the horse herself. She would wear skin-tights.  No matter how it shocked the audience that had never seen an actress in tights, she would play the role with dramatic realism, she would wear tights.  So she wore tights. The audience was shocked – scandalized- horrified – and delighted! But New York was too stilted, too smug, too proper to appreciate great art.  And Adah Menken said, “I'll go to the one place where the audience demands real art; I'll go to San Francisco.”

“at climax of the play, the Menken vaulted to the back of her full-blooded California mustang and, clad in tights with hair streaming down her back, raced her steed at mad pace across the mountains of Tartary, the enthusiasm of the audience was a mad frenzy never to be forgotten. 

“So thrilling was the performance that it was said on the opening night the leading man, Junius Booth stood in the wings and completely forgot his lines.”

Me; Yes, performed like a true pedophile priest survivor acting out compulsively as an adult. 

****************

More notes on Adah Menken from San Francisco Museum website:

Later years:

“The tide turned.  Ill health, the fruit of dissipation, wasted her away. She had made a fortune; her wealth had disappeared, and she lived in comparative poverty. In London, desperately in need of funds, she published her volume of Victorian poems and realized a few dollars.

“London was cold, unfriendly. She returned to Paris and Paris had found new loves.”

And the religion again:

“Faithful to her adopted religion, she spent her last hours speaking of life and faith and hope to a friendly rabbi.”

She died in Paris at 33

http://www.sfmuseum.org/bio/adah.html

More on Adah Menken

actress "not known for her talent, but rather for her frenetic energy, her charismatic presence, and her willingness to expose herself," was born in a suburb of New Orleans (Richards 192)

n the summer of 1859, Menken first became introduced to Pfaff's by her friend, the actress Ada Clare. According to scholar Justin Martin, Menken soon gained the reputation as being "the wildest, most brazen, and most colorful" of the Pfaffians (Martin 68).

https://pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu/node/54132

more on Adah from another source:

A sheer body stocking made Menken appear nude. Her audacity made the puritanical Horace Greeley, owner of the New York Tribune, the single newspaper which refused to carry advertisements for French contraceptives and virility aids, fume. Greeley blasted the “naked lady” for daring to expose her nude body. Outrage gave way to astonishment: Menken not only usurped an exclusively male role, but in the dangerous scene rode the horse herself instead of using a dummy.

About this time a magnificent spectacle dazzled my vision—the whole constellation of the Great Menken came flaming out of the heavens like a vast spray of gas-jets, and shed a glory abroad over the universe as it fell!—Mark Twain

WORLD'S FIRST PRESS CONFERENCE was about Menken who was performing when Lincoln had just taken office 

In Albany, Menken’s manager Edwin James called the first press conference. He lured his fellow journalists up the Hudson to gape at the beauty whose star quality struck them like a bolt of lightning.

James, a former lawyer, currently theater-sports reporter on the New York Clipper, mustered representatives from New York’s six daily newspapers, three weeklies and two monthlies.Mazeppa opened three months after Lincoln’s inauguration. The Civil War may have been heating up, but the “naked lady” captured front page attention. James could boast of notoriety in his own right. An Englishman, he provided the model for Stryver, the crooked barrister in Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.  James may have had a shady past, but he remained Menken’s truest friend, the only one to stand fast when flatterers eager to drink champagne at her expense in flush times abandoned her in adversity.

Me: So weird, so weird that she also played a man in the play where she exposed herself, and I think I insisted on keeping the pants off in my costume for that scene from Charlie Was A Lady in that picture as well.

Research:

Mazeppa-Menken, a Tartar prince, first appeared onstage, a regal figure in black velvet cloak and tights ready for swashbuckling and dueling. At Mazeppa’s climax, a gang of enemy soldiers apparently strip our hero-heroine nude. Tied to the back of a snorting steed, storm raging, Menken clattered up a cardboard mountain over a narrow plywood ramp ending on the “flies” four stories up. This pioneering striptease act kept Menken in the limelight throughout her brief career.

The toast of Frisco and Europe brought rave reviews from discerning critics like Mark Twain, a friend and admirer. In 1864 Twain, who worked as a fledgling newspaper reporter for the Californian, witnessed the Menken bring down the house. His inimitable prose described how “A magnificent spectacle dazzled my vision—the whole constellation of the Great Menken came flaming out of the heavens like a vast spray of gas jets, and shed a glory abroad over the universe as it fell.”

Mark Twain reviewing Mezzepo in The Californian.

“a complete ballet with prima assoluta, secondi and ballerini was unknown. The little the public had seen of women in tights was confined to the performance of "Mazeppa," in which either an Adah Isaacs Menken , a Kate Fisher or a Leo Hudson was lashed to the back of a wild, untamed Barbary steed. The sensation can be imagined when all at once the stage of Niblo's garden, New York, was filled with what seemed to be myriads of women in short skirts, in trunks and in tights. It was a beautiful spectacle and it appealed to the senses as no theatrical performance ever had before.

http://cather.unl.edu/j00002.html

That above is published for some reason in Nebraska State Journal

April 1, 1894
page 13

Between the Acts

OMG I think I may be Adah Menken reincarnated:

Infelix

BY ADAH ISAACS MENKEN

Where is the promise of my years;

    Once written on my brow?

Ere errors, agonies and fears

Brought with them all that speaks in tears,

Ere I had sunk beneath my peers;

    Where sleeps that promise now?

Naught lingers to redeem those hours,   

    Still, still to memory sweet!

The flowers that bloomed in sunny bowers

Are withered all; and Evil towers

Supreme above her sister powers

    Of Sorrow and Deceit.

I look along the columned years,   

    And see Life’s riven fane,

Just where it fell, amid the jeers

Of scornful lips, whose mocking sneers,

For ever hiss within mine ears

    To break the sleep of pain.

I can but own my life is vain

    A desert void of peace;

I missed the goal I sought to gain,

I missed the measure of the strain

That lulls Fame’s fever in the brain,

    And bids Earth’s tumult cease.

Myself! alas for theme so poor

    A theme but rich in Fear;

I stand a wreck on Error’s shore,

A spectre not within the door,

A houseless shadow evermore,

    An exile lingering here.

Wow.  

CUT PARAGRAPHS: 

Charlie Was a Lady was loosely based on Charlie Parkhurst, a woman who posed as a man so she could drive stage coaches on the El Camino Real. She's a real character in California history.  She realized as a woman she could never have a career and she had to support herself, so she dressed and acted like a man, slept in the barn with her horses, drove a stage coach better than almost all the other Wells Fargo drivers in early California, and it was only upon her death that the public found out, after a coroner’s examination, that he was really a she, there really is a good story there.

In the Burbank Community Theater 1969 version, 

******************

2010 - East Hollywood

“You'll never guess who got in my cab this afternoon, Barbara Blaine.”

“No, Rick, that was no coincidence.”

Too late. I knew exactly what would happen. 

Within weeks our plans for action to publicize pedophile priests in Chicago were squelched.

 More coming in upcoming chapters 

CUT PARAGRAPHS ABOUT THE ASHRAM IN DALLAS

Apparently since I only remembered the molestation experiences the way one remembers things that happen at age six, instead of being an atheist, I pursued alternative religions with passion, anything but  Catholic. In 1969 I had moved to a commune in Laguna Canyon where we took LSD every day and sometimes had face time with the man himself, Timothy Leary, who had a ranch just across the Riverside County line.  From Laguna I moved into the Integral Yoga Institute ashram in Burbank, meditating with starlets, and when Swami Satchidananda opened a branch in Dallas, I made my way there.  So in 1972 I lived in an old mansion on Lemon Avenue close to downtown Dallas sharing a dorm-like room with two other yoginis. 

Like Adah Menken, I found religion in Texas through a man, dropped the man, kept the religion.

Now in the ashram, I was still in the Annie Fanny phase of my life.  The fashion was to go braless and I joined in, although my Polish C cups were, as a result, a distraction everywhere I went.  Instead of covering myself up, I’d stand in awkward stances trying to cover my protruding nipples with my elbows to no avail.  In that state I arrived at the Integral Yoga Ashram to learn to be a Yoga instructor, when all the time, inside, I was really in pursuit of the priest

We got up every morning at four A-M or so, for group meditation, conducted chanting and prayer sessions for the public.

This was the tail end of my Annie Fannie period.  Mind you, I was as clueless as the cartoon character as to the effect I had on people.  I was just who I was, a busty barely clad curious female who because of how I looked, often ended up in the middle of the story.

Maybe I was always born to be a journalist.

Make this a scene: Within weeks I was wearing whites and teaching beginning hatha yoga classes

-ke

I know this goes on and on and on, I am in bad need of an editor. 
And a publisher

-ke

And PayPal clicks, please click my PayPal button with high fives

COMING NEXT
CHAPTER 4
"The Blog"

-By Kay Ebeling
the City of Angels Is Everywhere

COMING IN 2017

In Pursuit of the Priest at NASA in Houston 

refernce