A little scandal goes a long way

The side of a large box in the corner of the City Reliquary in Brooklyn claims that the history of burlesque lies inside. Open the door of the diorama, and it becomes clear that much of its scandalous history centers around one mythical dancer—Little Egypt, a belly dancer who premiered at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

Sol “The Music Man” Bloom created the concept of the Midway Plaisance in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition, the first American World’s Fair—created as a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage. The Midway, which offered “entertainment for the masses,” served as a contrast to the clean, white beaux-arts city, and left the fair’s most lasting legacy.

Though originally conceived as “anthropological,” Bloom spiced up the Midway with dancing, sex, and imported goods. A truly American mixture of spectacle, legend, and capitalism, the Midway was by far the fair’s most popular aspect. That year, the “hootchy-cootchy,” or the belly dance, premiered.

The dance was performed by a Syrian woman named Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, who was supposedly called Little Egypt backstage, though newspaper accounts prove that the nickname only caught on a few years later. She danced to a song composed by Mr. Bloom himself—“The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid,” better known as the popular children’s song “There’s a
Place in France Where the Naked Ladies Dance.”

Conflicting legends arise here: Who actually coined the name Little Egypt? Did Mark Twain suffer a coronary from watching her perform? Did she popularize the newly minted zipper, used to peel herself out of her tiny costumes? Was her performance the shock of a century or simply another tent at the Midway? Did her undulations drive men crazy, to crime, to destitution?

History obscures the authenticity of the real Little Egypt, who inspired hundreds of competitors and fakes, though Mazar claimed she was the true original. Some answers lie in the 1896 Herbert Barnum Seeley banquet, also called the “Seeley Bachelor Orgy,” where another dancer named Ashea Wabe was arrested on charges of indecency for her risqué stomach swivels. Though newspaper accounts claim she was nude, she was actually clothed and sipping champagne as the cops rolled in.

The national scandal, which appropriately involved P.T. Barnum’s grandsons, popularized the name and the new “Little Egypt” belly dance, formerly called the “hootchy-cootchy.” The Little Egypt nickname was pinned on Wabe, though Mazar’s legacy is more lasting; she danced again at Chicago’s Century of Progress in 1933 under the name Little Egypt.

Wabe, though, found celebrity in her own right—Oscar Hammerstein asked her to play herself in a spoof of the Seeley dinner, and the Seeleys never lived down the scandal. In that moment, an exotic dancer rose to national celebrity, sex and scandal permeated front page news, and burlesque became a part of the American lexicon.

These legends are brought to life at the City Reliquary, which crafted an animatronic Little Egypt behind a one-way mirror who will wiggle her hips with the press of a button. As I watched and giggled at the shimmying mannequin, my friend reminded me of an old tour guide maxim: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

The City Reliquary, collectors of historical ephemera in an attempt to recreate a forgotten New York, may leave the truth shrouded in myth. But these myths are what persist, living on in the artifacts the past has left behind. In the dark corner, the door open to a shady past, I press the button for my own personal show, where Little Egypt belly dances her way back into the historical present.

Jennie Rose Halperin is a Barnard College junior majoring in American Studies. Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt runs alternate Wednesdays.