Femmes Fatales | Dec 17 2022 |
Blaze Starr drums up interest in her dancing.
Actress, burlesque dancer, and famed consort Blaze Starr looks like a natural with this authentic animal hide djembe, and she'd surely be the center of the best drum circle of all time, but we suspect she rarely needed props to help her draw a crowd. She was one of the top performers of her era, taking her talents from the stage to cinema with the naturist paean Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, and later becoming infamous when her affair with a prominent U.S. governor became public. We talked about that episode a little here, if you don't already know her and are interested.
We tried to date this photo made by James Kriegsmann but it was tricky. Online claims are often incorrect, and we've replicated such errors a few times by trusting them, so our method these days is to be evidentiary about it and try to find the shots on or inside magazines. Most sources, including the respected Getty Images, date the photo to 1960 or 1962, but we found it inside a January 1957 issue of Modern Man. The photo could have been made earlier, even several years earlier, but we're calling it 1956 and we feel pretty confident about it.
Femmes Fatales | Jun 16 2015 |
I call this move “the giraffe.” Nice, right?
Judging by all available evidence, burlesque dancer Miriam Kartis spent her entire life in this position. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but she must have really liked it at least, because look—there she is below striking a similar pose. She’s one of the thousands of burlesque dancers who don’t have an online presence today, so we can’t tell you anything about her except that most of her surviving photos were shot by famed Austrian lensman James Kriegsmann. We’re guessing around 1960 on these.