Texas Guinan: Leopard Dance

Drena had been a featured dancer with TEXAS GUINAN for three years, where she introduced the "Sensational Dance of the Leopard." After that her career was firmly launched. 
• • Drena Beach • •
• • Always supportive of her "little girls," Texas Guinan would be in the audience, attracting more press coverage to the event, making certain that her performer (or her former employee) was noticed. And how could you not notice Drena Beach with her shapely legs and thrillingly long tigerish fingernails?
• • The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote: Pass the laurel to Drena (Paramount Grill) Beach... for her "Sensational Leopard Dance," which is one of the most unique things we've ever seen. Why? Because she conceived it when she was 15 years old, as a result of a dream she had of being attacked by a leopard... because in it she takes one of the most startling falls we've ever seen on the stage... because she's been doing it now for seven years... because she was a featured dancer with Texas Guinan for three years ... because she is a Fancon and Marco protege... because she has created a new number called "Dance of the Eyes," which is said to be even verier. . . because Ted Helms was so impressed with it that he immediately wrote the theme song "Haunting Eyes" for it... because she has never studied dancing and she also designs all her own costumes... because she once had an entire Publix unit built around her... because she was offered a year's contract at the Folies Bergere in Paris, which she had to refuse because of local tie-ups here... because she's beautiful and blond and doesn't rely on either her looks or locks to put her over... and finally, because her Leopard Dance is more Interesting and arresting than anything we've ever seen in any Broadway production, which is why some Earl Carroll, some Florenz Ziegfeld, some George White or some Schwab and Mandel, Aarons and Freedly or Mr. Shubert ought to sign her up... pass the laurel to Drena Beach.

• • Source: item in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (N.Y.); published on  Thursday, 25 July 1929.
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• • The legal battles fought by Mae West and Jim Timony are dramatized in the play "Courting Mae West: Sex, Censorship, and Secrets," set during the Prohibition Era. Texas Guinan is in some scenes, too. Watch a scene on YouTube.
• • Website for all things Mae West — http://MaeWest.blogspot.com 

• • Exciting Texas Guinan news is on the horizon. More anon.
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Source:http://texasguinan.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Texas Guinan
• • Photo: Texas Guinan • • Drena Beach • •
NYC
Texas Guinan.

Texas Guinan Fans and Mae-Mavens

Many publications announced the Texas Guinan and Mae West walking tour and also saluted the August 17th birthday of Mae.
• • Playbill, marking "this date in theatre history," has managed to get her birth year wrong (again) and also tripped up on the stage plays in which she appeared. No, Mr. Playbill, Mae West wrote The Drag but did not star in this 1927 production since she was still appearing in her play Sex at the time.
• • Other news outlets recognized the writer and comedienne as "an actress from the 1930s," erasing her long career in vaudeville and on Broadway, which preceded her 1932 Paramount debut when Mae was an "overnight sensation" at 39 years old.
• • A more faithful close-up was offered on Sunday in the Brooklyn blonde's hometown when a group of Mae-mavens gathered along Shubert Alley to learn how she forged her dreams of deliverance in Times Square along with her diamond-draped colleague Texas Guinan.
• • Attendees posed for pictures in the same spot where the graceful, well-groomed Bucephala, Texas Guinan's horse, was mounted 82 years ago — — that magnificent creature who carried the queen of the night scene up the center aisle of the Shubert Theatre and deposited her onstage as the red velvet curtain was raised for Padlocks of 1927.
• • Ah, Longacre Square, the legitimate theatres, those expensive playhouses built to look like a palazzo, a Tuscan hillside hideaway, a marble mansion, a Venetian villa, a Georgian fantasy — — where little Mae held her mother's hand as they waited for an usher to seat them, lavishly spending each moment of a matinee, drinking in the illusion of the drama in which the mountain of self might have no top, and each encounter might be a reckoning with fleet-footed fate.
• • On Sunday August 16th, the patient assemblage viewed vintage news clippings that decorated the disappointments of another century — — front page humiliations, the raids, the padlocks, the prison sentences, and the losses of a $200,000 advance for Pleasure Man after the purity police shuttered the show on 1 October 1928. They genuflected and strolled down the aisle of St. Malachy's, the church where Texas Guinan and Mae West examined Rudolph Valentino's coffin in August 1926 and mutually agreed the hardy 31-year-old must have been poisoned.
• • On West 54th Street, thanks to a gracious doorman, the tour takers paused in the same vestibule where Mae West entered and exited in 1927 as she was writing Diamond Lil and getting better acquainted with Owney Madden and others who bulleted the headlines.• • Perhaps West 54th recalls the roll calls of absent names, first kisses, the confetti victory parades in an era when Mae West's latest show was billed as "hotter than the Armistice."• • • • Prizes • • • •• • And the group has something else to remember as well — — a handful of raffle prizes. A number of individuals each won a colorful Mae West magnet, a few screened with film posters, stage plays, or her one-liners. Two lovely ladies — — Denise from Manhattan and Karen from Pittsburgh — — each won a "Gaudy Girls" CD, courtesy of Maggie Worsdale and Anne Marie Finnie, who perform live as Sophie Tucker and Mae West. Everyone received a "Gaudy Girls" flyer announcing their next racy performance at Monticello Raceway and Casino on 21 October 2009. And two lucky lasses won a treasured set of Texas Guinan's silent films — — fashion model Gwen Bucci from Manhattan and art curator Frédérique Joseph-Lowery from Fairlawn, New Jersey — — courtesy of an avid Texas Guinan archivist.
• • Exciting news is on the horizon. More anon.
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Source:http://texasguinan.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Texas Guinan
• • Photo: Texas Guinan fans • • tour group on 16 August 2009 • •
NYC
Texas Guinan.