It was in my second year in college, I'm studying to be a history teacher, when my professor gave us the assignment. We were to do a full report on any one period in history. He gave us complete freedom to choose the time or event and plenty of time to complete it. He did however tell us to be as thorough as possible. Then he dropped the bomb.
It was going to be half of our grade for the semester!
He left the room, leaving behind him a sea of open mouths. Then chaos erupted. Some of my classmates immediately began firing out ideas for essays. Some were going to go far back into history, Egypt, the rise of Alexander the Great, King Leonidas and the battle of Thermopylae, a collective history of the Emperors of Rome.
Others began to call out that they were doing the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the rise of the Industrial Revolution. One fellow called out the Sexual Revolution to a general scattering of laughter.
I heard the fall of the Berlin wall, 911, the cold war with Russia. The Apollo Space Program.
Me?
I had no idea what I was going to write about. I was scanning through my history book and talking to the others but nothing appealed. I knew if I didn't have a lot of passion for what and when I was writing about I would get a poor grade, and I needed this credit. Grabbing my things I left the storm of history being tossed about and headed for Greek row and the frat house. We have a few history people in house that could give me a few...maybe unique ideas. Unfortunately as luck would have it they were not there when I got there, though I did leave a post-it on their doors telling them to get with me when they got in.
Going to my room I hooked up my laptop and went surfing down the data waves trying to find inspiration. I spent hours following time lines. The Vikings sounded interesting but I knew some of the others would be doing them as a side story for their medieval essays. I wanted something that the professor had never seen before. Some lost fragment of history, a time remembered enough for me to find material on, but forgotten by the most of history.
Nothing just jumped out at me.
Finally like most men on a computer I ended up on a porn site. When inspiration fails meditate to tits and ass. I was going site to site just trying to get a virus when I somehow I ended up on a vintage site. That's when I saw her.
The clip must have been filmed in the 1930s. She had skin like pale marble, but how lovely she moved. Her face looked angelic. I watched her slowly strip out of a frilly looking dress. When her breast were bare her nipples were covered with pastes, silvery tassels dangling from the tips.
I must have spent the rest of the night searching through similar sites. I had my time period.
Vaudeville. Burlesque. A history of the dancers of the Vaudeville age.
It was perfect.
I found huge amounts of historical pictures, film clips, interviews. Even a documentary. There was also a massive historic database of names.
Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Storm, Blaze Star, Evangeline the Oyster queen of Mardi Gras. And hundreds of others not as well known.
The next day I tore into the library's old new paper section looking for Variety pages. I spent the whole day copying and scanning images into my computer. I swear it felt like my laptop gained five pounds before the day was out.
I downloaded the two-hour documentary from off line and watched it sitting in Starbucks drinking way too many cups of espresso. One espresso good. Twelve espresso bad.
I was wired for sound and taking it all in like I was plugged into the lap top myself. I never knew anything about the history I was learning then. Most of the dancers were poor, came from hard backgrounds. Taking their clothes off for money was, for many, the best option just to survive. Some of them were the daughters of old comedians. They had grown up in the theaters going town to town with their parents.
Many of the actors I grew up watching were in fact the sons and daughters of Vaudeville people. Hawkeye... Alan Alda from M.A.S.H. was one such.
At some point my endless pages of notes began to overwhelm me though. I needed a focus to my essay. It was with coffee shakes shooting through me at four in the morning that I found her. My focus.
Her name was Rose Kipner. She had dance under the name the Azure Rose. I don't know why she stood out to me from all the others but from the moment I saw her I knew she was what I was looking for.
Maybe it was because she didn't come from some far off place but from right around here. Towns who's names I knew. She went to high school in a town nearby. Hell my Mom and Dad went to the same school. Come to think of it my Grandmother did too. I wonder if she had known Rose. When she was still Rose Kipner.
Before she became the Azure Rose.
I spent the next few days in a haze of her images. I went through every piece of data I had found and went looking for more. I learned everything I could about her but it wasn't enough. I needed...wanted to know more.
Finally I ended up just looking at a picture of her for hours on end. I would stop what I was doing and just stare at her image.
"Damn, she's hot."
I looked over my shoulder at Todd. He's one of my Frat brothers.
I nodded.
"Yep she was that," I said looking back at the frozen image.
Todd reached past me and grabbed the mouse. He clicked the little arrow in the middle of the picture starting the video. Rose started to dance and strip to soft music. She moved in a column of blue and white lights letting item by item drop away.
"Whoo ho! My god would you look at her," he wolf whistled. The sound attracted several other brothers who came over to see what all the noise was about. I soon had a small group of guys leaning over my shoulder watching the clip.
"Damn I wish she didn't have those stupid things on her nipples."
"Wow what an ass!"
"Holy shit, shake it darlin."
Their comments at first annoyed me. Then as she gets down to nearly nothing they really bothered me. Finally I closed my laptop and got up.
"Hey Martin, where you going? I want to see more of her. Man come on," Todd pleaded as I walked away.
"You've got a computer look up vaudeville strippers," I told him as I pushed open the door. I heard his voice follow me outside.
"Ah come on Martin."
I walked faster. I walked across the campus to the green. I stopped next to the school bell clock and plopped down on the steps.
I... was mad.
I realized this about myself in a confused bit of self-examination. I was mad at them... No I was pissed! Pissed about the way they had talked about Rose.
Taking a deep breath to calm my nerves I opened my laptop. I pulled back up her picture. It must have been taken fifty years before I was born. She's only eighteen, but had already been stripping for years. The daughter of a Ventriloquist she had spent her childhood dressed as his dummy. Then when she got too big for that she helped get him ready for the next show. From what I had read that mostly meant hiding the bottles from him till he was safely on the train.
He died when she was fourteen. She had no family other than him and at that time she could have easily ended up on the streets. The ladies took her in and taught her the trade. She was dancing for men on stage before she could have legally drove a car.
Damn them!
My frat brothers.
How dare they talk about her like she was some modern porn star whore? They didn't know what she had been through, what she had done just to survive! The pain she had endured in her life.
As I sat there storming I came to realize something impossible.
Somewhere in the middle of all this researching I have fallen in love with her. This woman in blue light from the past.
I've had the odd girl friend over the years. All of them seemed like vapid self-interested little girls to me now. Rose was a women. Even in this young photo she was more self-reliant than any of the cell phone tweeting girls I see walking past. They're like chattering magpies. I know if I watched long enough I would see one walk into a tree. Tweet, tweet, tweet POW!
I look back down to Rose's picture. My god how beautiful she was. Todd was right about that. She had a body like the screen legends of her day. Jane Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe. Betty Page had nothing on Rose. She was all curves and soft flawless skin.
For the tenth time I start to reread her bio. It's then that I notice something.
They have a date of her birth.
But there is no date of her death.
I start a hunt then that dwarfs my other searches. For days I track down every piece of paper with her name on it that has survived the decades. There weren't many. She had not been as famous as some of the others. Not Blaze Star the Queen of Vaudeville, not Tempest Storm who stripped into her seventies. But to me she had outshone them all.
And I couldn't find anything about her now! Not when she had died, not where she was buried.
Could she be alive? She would have to be in her nineties.
I don't sleep that night. I toss and turn no matter how mind numb I have become. I'm out the bed with the sun. Several of my frat brothers are threatening crucifixion till I leave the house as quietly as I can.
I have a credit card Dad gave me my first year in collage. Said it was for emergencies. I've never used it.
I do now.
The detective I hire is a local man like myself, but he comes with a good reputation. He knows how to find people. People time has misplaced. It takes him two day to find what I never would have found.
Rose Kipner 'aka' Azure Rose married four times in her life. Something of a scandal in her day so it was kept from the papers. The first, third and fourth had ended in divorce.
But the second was to a man named Daniel Smith. He had been the love of her life. They had a few years together in what must have been the best time of her life. She gave up the stage, settled down into a nice house with a loving husband. The big war was over we had won. Everyone was excited and life seemed perfect.
Then Korea and the draft notice. Daniel Smith would kiss his young wife goodbye and never return.
She soon go back to the stage. Just to survive.
