Girl Show: Into the Canvas World of Bump and Grind

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This attractively produced and generously illustrated book explores the
100-year history of girl shows in North American traveling carnivals.
Historical oddities are mixed with exhaustive details of finance and
production and verbatim stories from survivors such as Bambi Lane
(“the last of the tassel-twirlers”) and Tirza (the Wine Bath Girl
who became her own professional plumber). There are expositions of
burlesque (whose dancers played the carnivals in the summer), cooch
shows (“cooch” being a southern U.S. word for female genitals),
posing shows (no moving), girl shows, and revues. We meet producers
(often women), comedians (always men), girl-show talkers (who lured the
customers into the show), show girls, and strippers such as Gypsy Rose
Lee.

In 1894, following the notoriety of shows presented at the previous
year’s World’s Fair in Chicago, the touring midway started with no
rides but 20 shows; a century later, there were perhaps 30 rides, 100
concessions, and no shows. Sexually explicit material was now available
in bars and clubs and in the home; there were no more naked ladies in
the fairground.

The author, who has spent all his life in circuses, is vice-president
of the Circus Historical Society. His great service here is to record
many names that might otherwise be forgotten and to faithfully spell out
the mysteries of running a side of show business that is no longer with
us. The history is a sober account, but the book’s presentation is
lively, with photographs on every page. A glossary assists readers with
such words as “bally,” “tip,” and “ding.”