Who was Lili St. Cyr?

Search: lily st cyr lilly sincere st clair

Why: I've had "Rose Tints My World" from Rocky Horror Show in my head for the last few days (which probably means I will watch it soon, possibly tomorrow!! or tonight!!!). Part of the song goes:

BRAD: It's beyond me / Help me mommy

JANET: God bless Lili St. Cyr.

Answer: A burlesque dancer from the 1950s! Born Willis Marie Van Schaak in 1918, she graduated from childhood ballet lessons to becoming a chorus line girl in Hollywood. After her manager let her do a solo act, she moved to dance at a club with another act. She realized that her salary was 1/18th as much as a "featured" star (wink), so she started stripping.

She became one of the most famous women in Montreal:

Those who remember the exotic dances of Lili St. Cyr know that they were just that- while big busted raunchy girls were swaying hips and twirling tassels in the burlesque houses, Lili St. Cyr was pulling elements of fantasy, mysticism, ballet, and Eros into her act. Instead of taking it off, Lili was often putting it on, dressing on stage for her audience, and the results were no less tantalizing.

From the 1940s and most of the 1950s, Lili was believed to have taken the throne from Gypsy Rose Lee and Ann Corio as the queen of the striptease. Her act was like an erotic ballet, was rivaled by nothing in any burlesque house. Though she is rather obscure today, her name popped up regularly in 1950s tabloids: stories of her many husbands, brawls over her, and her attempted suicides.

Source: Viva Vavoom

The More You Know: I just learned a good vocabulary word:

• ecdysiast - n. a striptease performer or exotic dancer

H.L. Mencken's invented proper word for "strip-tease artist," 1940, from Gk. ekdysis "a stripping or casting off" (used scientifically with ref. to serpents shedding skin or crustacea molting), from ekdyein "to put off," from ex- + dyo "sink, plunge, enter."

However, the Queen of Ecdysiasts, Gypsy Rose Lee, was not amused. In a 1940 interview, she leveled her guns against Mencken: "Ecdysiast, he calls me! Why, the man... has been reading books! Dictionaries! We don't wear feathers and molt them off... What does he know about stripping?"