![]() ![]() ![]() Appropriately, Abbott’s presentation will be accompanied tonight by performers including Miss Indigo Blue and The Swedish Housewife. Yet by the ’50s, she had developed a confident, comic, almost intellectual persona that has much to do with the current burlesque revival. When the Karen meme took over in 2020, she was. And while Lee became a striptease star by the ’30s, she still struggled for the love of an unforgiving, finicky public. Karen Abbott is the author of Sin in the Second City, American Rose, and Liar Temptress Soldier Spy, which was named one of the best books of 2014 by Library Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and Amazon. New York City-based author Abbott Kahler formerly known as Karen Abbott knows just how powerful names can be in her industry. Lee and her sister, future actress June Havoc, were ruled by the whims of a near madwoman. In Abbott’s telling, the money-lusting Mama Roseplayed by Ethel Merman in the landmark 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy, based on Lee’s memoirscared more about her two daughters’ early vaudeville fame than their well-being. ![]() But is this anything new? Not according to Karen Abbott, author of American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (Random House, $26), whose subject was born in Seattle 100 years ago. Overbearing mothers skank up their preteen daughters for beauty pageants, while we watch in horror. ![]()
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