South Pacific Nightclub Tour 1979-80

MISS X:

“Yeah, to think I almost packed it in! I for one learned so much about performing while in Sydney and the fact that it was so far away gave us a chance to try things, make mistakes and try it differently!

Syd’s was a low dive, indeed. It was a big room. I have some backstage pictures, I wish I had pictures of the actual show because it was brilliant. It was really cobbled together. I remember I sang “I Only Have Eyes For You” and walking through the audience, which was a great fantasy of mine realized, you know, those 40s Hollywood movies where the chanteuse moves through the audience. I was pulling out pinpong balls (from my wig) that Doris had painted to look like eyeballs and handing them to people in the audience. I did a version of “The Amazing Blonde Women” (Marlena Deitrich).

This show was all RECORDS, it was us singing to records. We had found instrumental versions of all these songs and while I am singing the words, Doris and Tippi are all made up in black leather garb and they’re beating the shit out of each other behind me. There was a nasty mattress by the back wall and they were being thrown back on it, with kicking high heels–I mean, there was a lot of action.

I believe we may have done “You Only Live Twice”, I believe there is a picture of us in these ridiculous stretch garments, and I use the term loosely, which had been stapled together, there was no sewing involved to the best of my knowledge, she had painted fish scales and there were fins on the back and they were just tubes that you pulled on with tattered fish tail things at the bottom and sequences that had been stapled on here and there. Those were used subsequently in the Hotel Utah shows.

We did a more full-blown version of “You Only Live Twice” where I sang it in a ridiculous kind of mermaid gown, which was basically several layers of crinoline safety-pinned to a black Mylar tube and some kind of dress and layered flounces. Then the three “chorines”, Doris, Tippi, and Freda, did the Busby Berkely dance routine as I sang. I think that was part of the James Bond Medley. Tippi did “Old Finger”, which was the working girls lament to the tune of Goldfinger.

We were doing several shows a night. A lot of those shows were at Stranded, which was a fabulous, many-tiered, wrought-iron festooned mall, like a modern shopping mall but almost New Orleans looking with black ballistrads and banisters. In the basement was a former Italian restaurant which was known as “Karl’s Italia Romantica” which was all marble floors and Roman columns all over the place. It had a little raised stage with swagged curtains at the back, but no backstage, you had you to actually go through the audience to get to the stage.

I did a few numbers…Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”. I crawled through the audience across the marble floor and climbing up the leg of the grand piano and posing on top of it. We had a piano player named Martin, who of course I had an affair with! (It’s the only way to keep a good piano player.) Tippi had an “affair” with a man who drove a “Mr Whippie” truck which sold ice cream to children, of course she’d pick him up (or vice versa) after dark…

We were very well received. While we were there, they all treated us like royalty! Goddess only knows how they talked about us behind our backs, but being with Doris who already had quite the rep, was an open entree into that milieu”

Tippi and I did a medley in uniform of Blue Navy Blue and some Army song from the sixties. We did many shows at Stranded, and it was always a late show so we could perform somewhere else, like Syd’s earlier. It was some sort of Bob Hope USO Tour, that was the underlying “plot” of Sluts A Go-Go which evolved into Blonde Sin.