Stephen Dixon - Frog

“My mother was first runner-up in the Miss America pageant of 1922 or ‘23. Maybe even ‘24, since she later danced on the stage for two years till her father pulled her off it, got engaged to my father soon after, married in ‘27 and had my oldest brother at the end of that year. Or was he born in ‘28? He’s eight or nine years older than I almost to the day. ‘The woman who won the contest,’ she said, ‘was a Miss Sunshine. That was her last name. We all called her Sunny, though she was a real bitch. I don’t remember her first name or what state she was from. Pennsylvania, I think. Ohio. She looked typically Polish and most of the Poles came from Pennsylvania and Ohio then. She was a striking bleached blonde with that little upturned nose the real Poles have — much more so than mine, and squinched. I would have won the title — everyone said so — if they had counted talent and intelligence as qualifications then. Sunny couldn’t do anything but smile brightly and strut her behind, which were really no better than mine. While I danced, sang, knew something about manipulating marionettes, and played Bach and popular music on the violin. I also had graduated a good public high school with an academic diploma and very near the top of my class, and I don’t think Sunny or very many of the other contestants ever got past primary school.’ George White was one of the judges and all the runners-up were invited to dance in his Scandals that year. This famous woman mimic was a shikker . This famous male singer slept with boys. This one had twenty stray mutts in his dressing room and once a month one would be found dead in the alley outside. Several of the dancers ended up living off sugar daddies and one she especially got friendly with married a cattle baron in Argentina who beat her to death. ‘I avoided the stage-door Johnnies like the plague. Mr. White knew I was repulsed by them and gave me special permission to leave through the lobby.’ She was one of the six women to introduce the Charleston and one of the twelve to introduce the black bottom, ‘or maybe it was the other way. I know that for one of those dances six girls were on one side of the stage and six on the other. Some of the outfits we had to wear barely covered our bosoms and pubic areas. But I made sure, with skillful pinning or these pink beads I glued on, that my nipples were never exposed, though they were awfully painful to take off.’ She danced in two or three movies made in a studio in Long Island City. The Song and Dance Man one was called, ‘though it was also known as The George White Scandal Movie —maybe that was its title.’ Helen Morgan and Don Petricola were in it, she thinks. ‘There still wasn’t sound yet, but when I saw it I seem to remember songs sung and shoes tapping and brief applause. What I remember most is the work I put into it, after spending nine hours at the hospital every day, and the rotten pay.’”

“His mother, after graduating high school, got a job as a medical secretary in the x-ray department at Bellevue. ‘I worked personally for Dr. Katzburger, perhaps the foremost roentgenologist of his day. He wrote books and books on it and the governor and high officials of different states and presidents of countries and wealthy and important people like that came to him. I wanted to be a doctor and thought my father, who was totally against it, would change his mind when he saw how well I did at the hospital and was told by professionals there like Dr. Katzburger what a fine doctor I’d make. But he always said “Marry one, don’t become one, and you’re in the perfect place to meet one. It’ll be cheaper and faster, you won’t have to work so hard studying and later practicing, and you’ll wind up getting just as good medical treatment being married to a doctor as being one, and what would you do with your practice once your babies start to come?”’”

“His mother’s mother was a saint. Mine was. My mother’s mother was a saint. The whole Lower East Side thought so, my mother said, ‘or let me say “the Jewish part of it.” Crowded as our apartment was, with nine surviving children, two live-in Polish maids, my parents and an uncle who always lived with us but wasn’t really my uncle but my father’s boyhood friend from Dembitzer near Lemburg. Bei Lemburg, in German. Or maybe that’s where your dad’s folks came from and mine were from Christapolia bu Schmetz. I don’t know what the “bu” means, even if I was very good in German in school. Maybe it’s Polish. But really, we slept two and three to a bed then, though Uncle Leibush always had his own room. Still, she put total strangers up if she heard they had no place to sleep. And for days to weeks, whole families of landsmen who just came over on the boat with no place to stay, and on holidays she often took poor people off the street to feed, no matter what their origins or religion. Stern as my dad was about most things, he never said boo to this. Maybe because we had all kinds of food cooking nonstop anyway, what with the needs of his bar right downstairs, and the guests never slept anywhere but in the hallway on the floor.’ Photos of her mother were always on her dresser. Same with my father’s parents on his. She had blue hair in them—‘Gray turned blue because of some photographic tinting process,’ my mother said. And a big gawdy broach she said had been painted on the photos by the photographer because he thought she looked too plain. ‘She had her hair dyed blue for thirty years,’ my Aunt Rose said. ‘Then it wouldn’t go back to its natural color when she wanted it to, which by that time she couldn’t find out what it was. The broach was my father’s wedding gift, but was missing from her jewelry box after she died. We think my sister Bertha took it when the rest of us were in the funeral home. It was worth thousands even then.’ My mother’s mother worked full-time in her uncle’s bakery as a little girl, became a model for Milgrin’s when she was thirteen, ‘which even that time,’ my mother said, ‘was one of the fanciest women’s stores though not on Fifty-seventh yet,’ married at fifteen and had a dozen children, three dying before they were five. ‘Nine out of twelve was considered a pretty good ratio then, even for someone with a little money and local influence like my dad. So besides being generous to a fault, perhaps, she was also a great beauty—’”

“His grandmother worked as a fashion model for a fancy New York women’s store when she was fourteen. She told them she was older. His mother apparently inherited these looks, or maybe she got them from her father who was quite handsome, for she became a beauty contest winner and then a dancer in the Ziegfield Follies. ‘I was strictly a dancer, I want you to know — not a showgirl. They had to prance around stark naked at times, while we had enough covering our pubic area where we didn’t have to keep it shaved as they did. We also had at least one breast unexposed, if maybe just the nipple part of it with a single black or red or violet bead, depending on the costume color. My nipples were sore because of it for the two full years I was in the show. Your father, once he met me, went to it practically every night. He got front- or second-row seats and a lot of those times he went with his friends — The Filthy Four they were known on the lower East Side as, because of their carousing and womanizing and so forth. He kept doing one terrible thing to me then. He’d wink and wave at me to get my attention whenever I danced on his side of the audience. I got Flo — Mr. Ziegfield — to let me dance as much as possible on the other side of the stage whenever I saw your father there.’ ‘What happened when he sat in the center, if he ever did?’ ‘Then I’d keep my regular position and take the abuse. The other girls adjusted to my position switches easily, since we were a great crew, always looking out for one another, which we had to, for the men thought we were all whores. After the show he’d wait for me with the other stage-door Johnnies, but I avoided them like the plague. I got Mr. Flo — he knew I came from a strict family and was a good girl — to give me special permission to leave through the lobby.’ ‘So when did you really start going with Dad? Or why did you even continue to see him if he acted this way?’ ‘You should ask first how we met. It’s a good story, full of intrigues and laughs. Not romantic, though. Your father was never like that unless he was terribly guilty about something that he had no intention of telling me what. Then he’d just hand them to me — flowers, but a real big bouquet — and turn around and go straight to the dinner table or wash up.’”