The Immodest Miss Modesty

This Sunday, 11.15am, World Bar Kings Cross, the suburb’s biographer Louis Nowra hosts a conversation with Elizabeth Burton, stripper extraordinaire, and others, about the area’s lively past. Part of the Vivid Ideas program, for details and booking see: From the Horse’s Mouth.

Burton was a bopping waitress at the Whisky a Go Go’s Celebrity Room in the late 1960s until tapped on the shoulder for a role in the go-go cages. From there she went to Vietnam to entertain the troops in the Rainbow Show tour. Deported by the Military Entertainment Bureau for fraternizing across race lines, she returned, and ended up in New York. Later she stripped at the Barrel Theatre in Bayswater Road, and then went back to New York, working as The Immodest Miss Modesty at the Psychedelic Funhouse, and  a successful international career.

Her story is briefly told in Sydney Noir: the golden years. Co-author Michael Duffy will be another guest on Sunday, to talk about the Cross’s other great traditional forbidden pleasure, gambling.

 

Sydney Noir Cover