You can't make up New Jersey stories like this...

"Her name was Hope Diamond, "the Gem of the Exotics."
She was a shapely, dark-haired burlesque queen, performing through the 1950s and ’60s from Buffalo to Toledo, as a headliner in places like Union City’s old Hudson Theater.
This week she will be on a different stage with a different name — accused of taking cash that did not go into a garter belt, but rather into Jersey City’s tumultuous mayoral campaign."

Ah, burlesque!  "New Jersey was once a hotbed of girlie shows, benefiting from the exodus of performers leaving New York after striptease was banned by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1942. The Garden State was one of the last holdouts as burlesque gave way to strip clubs, with local theaters continuing to offer old school comedy into the early '70s.

The famed Minsky Brothers produced elaborate spectacles featuring a cast of 40 at the Adams Theatre in Newark. The city was also home to the Empire Theatre, a vaudeville house that had been presenting racy entertainment since 1912.

(Want more about Asbury Park scandals, scoundrels, and successes?)

Other haunts included the Hudson Theatre in Union City and the Savoy Theatre in Asbury Park.
Venues were usually in immigrant neighborhoods and ethnic stereotypes were joke fodder, laughs springing from the misadventures of Irish cops and German butchers. Burlesque was racially segregated, dying out just as the civil rights movement was beginning to take hold.


The word burlesque is a French term for caricature and it also links to burla, Italian for joke. The etymology may have foreign roots, but the American style is an original, a mix of glitz and satire with costumes as colorful as the language."

Fun stuff from today's Star-Ledger.  Unfortunately, the people of Jersey City resented being stripped by this once-titilatting burlesque queen.

Keep writing,

Maureen