ML - Vegas Magazine

2014 - Issue 4 - Summer

Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.

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T he end of Folies was bittersweet. The closing was, predictably, steeped in nostalgia, as its original choreogra- pher, Jerry Jackson, returned to say a f ina l goodbye. But t he show was in tatters, literally. Its costumes were frayed, the curtain in need of a good vacuuming. Cast members decried the lack of quality control in the show's final few months. But no such fate ha s befa llen Jubilee, which remains as extravagantly appointed and as pre- cisely performed as ever. The cast is still robust, with 85 dancers (plus 175 production team mem- bers), a nd audit ions held ever y si x mont hs to keep the show fresh and ward off complacency. Stringent physical requirements remain: Every dancer in Jubilee must be a minimum of 5 feet, 8 inches tall when measured in bare feet. If you don't have extensive formal dance train- ing, a job with Jubilee is not for you. During the audit ion process, da ncers must quick ly lea r n complex rout ines, replete w it h ba llet t u r ns. Those who can't are shown the door. Performers with ballet, jazz, and contemporary-dance back- g rounds a re t hose who tend to su r v ive t he audition, and then it's a month of training before they can join the show. That training regimen includes learning how to walk while wearing a 20 -pound, rhinestone-encrusted headpiece. It's as physica lly dema nding a role as t here is for dancers anywhere in the world. Aching joints are a constant challenge. For all the weight a dancer must carry across the stage, being a showgirl can be, in a very real way, a pain in the neck. "I can say that, because of all the showgirlism I've done, my neck is a mess," says Tara Palsha, who moved to Vegas in 2003 and has danced in a half-dozen Strip productions since. "But I am so thankful for the experience, because what- ever I do in any show, I can handle, because I got the exact training for that in Jubilee." To a large degree, the payoff in enduring all of the challenges of being a showgirl is… you get to be a showgirl. "When people see the curtain go up and all these beautiful women draped in jew- els, t heir eyes light up," says K at Schw ing, a member of t he Jubilee ca st for t he pa st t h ree years, who spent two years dancing at Le Lido in Paris before moving to Las Vegas. "It's like you're in a dream. I'm so proud to walk out on that stage, because there is nothing else like it." CONFESSIONS OF AN ORIGINAL SHOWGIRL Vegas's first seminude showgirl, Lisa Medford, tells all. When Lisa Medford left the stage as a Folies Bergère girl at the Tropicana in 1968, she turned around and sold her Las Vegas home for $60,000 to a young would-be casino executive named Steve Wynn. Today, at 77, Medford says she is "closer to death than a good time." But she is still full of salt and stories, and she can drop the words "cocaine" (her long-ago addiction) and "Cary" (as in Grant, her long-ago love interest) in the same sentence. Medford holds the distinction of being the very first seminude showgirl in Las Vegas. That was in February 1957, when the dancer, working at a Los Angeles talent agency, was approached by two men looking for a shapely woman to stand still during a number in a show at the Riviera headlined by Harry Belafonte. It was a history-making moment, more than a year before Lido de Paris opened at Stardust and Folies opened at Tropicana. "I was standing under a waterfall, looking like a plant," she recalls. Glitter and electrical tape covered the crucial areas. "I was not allowed to dance, and the security guys were watching me very closely to make sure I did not." When she moved her arm down from her chest, revealing her breasts, "the crowd went wild," she says. Medford spent more than a decade dancing for and delighting Vegas visitors. Her dalliance with Grant is well-chronicled in her self-published 2010 autobiography, I Can Hear the Applause: Adult Language… Some Nudity, cowritten with Jeanne Gulbranson (published by Emperor Penguin and available on Amazon.com). The story is that Grant asked her to carry his child, and in exchange he would set her up for life. Medford declined, suspecting that Grant was actually gay and that her parents would disown her. "You would not have believed the city at that time," she says, mentioning that her father (a dress manufacturer in Los Angeles) was friendly with an assortment of nefarious figures, including Benjamin "Bugsy" Seigel, a poker buddy. "For a showgirl to know Cary Grant was not that out of the ordinary. This was an exciting, wondrous place." Her story was not all glitz and glitter, however. After stints selling cocaine and chauffeuring call girls, Medford married a television director and moved out of Vegas, then got divorced and moved back in 2002. Today she works as a limousine driver, carting tourists around the city she knows so well. "There is no mob anymore, no shows except Jubilee that are even close to being showgirl shows," she says. "You never see the showgirls and stars in the showrooms like you used to. Nothing will ever be like it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when this city was the greatest place to be on this planet." From a showgirl who started as a statue but refused to stay still, it is a hard point to argue. PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF LAS VEGAS NEWS BUREAU (CASINO DE PARIS); BY UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES (MEDFORD) VEGASMAGAZINE.COM 91

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