Karen Abbott Quotes & Sayings

Classic burlesque in the style of Gypsy which many modern burlesque troupes practice is, at its core, so playful and teasing and innocent. It's not hardcore stripping so much as letting your body tell a story; the women are playing characters and unfolding a complete narrative onstage, with beginning, middle, and end. — Karen Abbott

I think Gypsy [Rose Lee] would be appalled at today's rawer, more blatant displays of the female form. She was, in her own way, a prude. — Karen Abbott

I felt differently about her [Gypsy Rose Lee] during every phase of the research and writing process. Often, I felt incredibly sorry for her; she had an extremely difficult childhood and a complicated 'to say the least' relationship with her family, her mother especially. — Karen Abbott

War, like politics, was men's work, and women were supposed to be among its victims, not its perpetrators. Women's loyalty was assumed, regarded as a prime attribute of femininity itself, — Karen Abbott

She [Gypsy Rose Lee] was a sophisticated self-satirist with a contagious delight in the comedy of sex. She was coy; she was sly; she always had a witty quip; she had an intensely dramatic presence. — Karen Abbott

She once said, 'I'm really a little prudish, which people may think incongruous'. I take a prudish point of view on certain films, books, and trends. Then, I pull myself up short and ask myself how Gypsy Rose Lee could possibly be this way.I thought that quote was so telling, a key insight into the way she so carefully separated who she was from her meticulous creation. — Karen Abbott

There is nudity, of course striptease is an essential component of burlesque but it's much more complex and intelligent than a display of nudity for nudity itself. And its often laugh-out-loud funny. — Karen Abbott

Well, just remember this. When my ma got me, she picked what she wanted. But when your ma got you, she had to take what she got. — Karen Abbott

Gypsy [Rose Lee] is as unique as she is timeless. Her story is classic Americana, and the strangest rags-to-riches saga you'll ever read; I like to call it Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton. — Karen Abbott

And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them. — Karen Abbott

In the beginning of the war, Southern women wanted their men to leave - in droves, and as quickly as possible. They were the Confederate Army's most persuasive and effective recruitment officers, shaming anyone who shirked his duty to fight. — Karen Abbott

Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight. — Karen Abbott

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism. — Karen Abbott

A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have. — Karen Abbott

At least in cities where the Confederate Army established a base of operations, young women were overwhelmed by the number of prospective suitors. Thousands of men flocked to the Confederate capital of Richmond, prepared to work in one of the government departments or to train for duty in the Army. — Karen Abbott

The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness. — Karen Abbott

A Republican is a man who wants you to go t'church every Sunday. A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it. — Karen Abbott

Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side. — Karen Abbott

When Gypsy was older, after she became Gypsy Rose Lee, I think she was both proud and slightly ashamed of her Seattle roots. She worked very hard to rid her voice of any trace of a local accent, cultivating an affected way of speaking that sounded as if she pinned the ends of her words. — Karen Abbott

He spent all of his twenty-three years operating at only one speed and in one direction, furious and forward, convinced that a collision could only improve the ride. — Karen Abbott

Burlesque thrived during the Great Depression, and by extension, so, too, did Gypsy [Rose Lee]. Men could no longer afford to pay $5.50 to see a show on Broadway, but they could scrape together $1.00 for a matinee at a burlesque house. — Karen Abbott

Gypsy [Rose Lee] wasn't a linear person, and she didn't live life in a linear fashion. She was relentlessly self-inventing, and moved backward as often as she moved forward. — Karen Abbott

One of the biggest questions to me was whether or not Gypsy the person was capable of loving anyone or anything beyond Gypsy Rose Lee the creation, and even that was a conflicted, tortured relationship. — Karen Abbott

I had spent five years not earning a penny, getting rejected. Thank God I had a husband who was supportive and encouraging. But I still said to myself, 'If the Everleighs doesn't sell, I'm finished with writing forever.' I was going to get an office job. — Karen Abbott

I don't consider 'American Rose' to be a biography so much as a microcosm of 20th-century America, told through Gypsy's tumultuous life - it's 'Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.' — Karen Abbott

Mother was,' June thought, 'a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.' Her broken edges cut her daughters in ways both emotional and physical, and only sharpened with age. — Karen Abbott

Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own. — Karen Abbott

He was just a taker. She was a taker in her way too. They were taking each other, and they loved each other for that. -June Havoc — Karen Abbott

It is so delightful to be of enough consequence to be arrested, — Karen Abbott

I greatly admired Gypsy [Rose Lee] for being able to rise above her circumstances; I was terrified of her; I thought she was generous; I thought she was brilliant; I thought she was cruel. — Karen Abbott

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives. — Karen Abbott

I came upon a telegram from Eleanor Roosevelt herself to Gypsy Rose Lee that read, 'May your bare ass always be shining'. That was the clincher; I had to write about this woman. — Karen Abbott

I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you. — Karen Abbott

Her mother was by turns tender and pathetic and terrifying, broken in a way that no one, in that time or place, had any idea how to fix. — Karen Abbott

As a kid, I liked to write, but I didn't think that was a viable career choice. My dream, actually, was to be a white girl rapper and join Salt-N-Pepa - which obviously was a much more viable career choice. — Karen Abbott

In the sudden absence of husbands, fathers, brothers and beaus, white Southern women discovered a newfound freedom - one that simultaneously granted them more power in relationships and increased their likelihood of heartbreak. — Karen Abbott

The real Rose Hovick was seriously mentally disturbed; June Havoc called her a beautiful little ornament that was damaged. — Karen Abbott

I thought both she [Gypsy Rose Lee] and her story would be ill-served by a conventional, birth-to-death narrative, and so I structured the book like one of her stripteases: revealing a peek of shoulder, then a glimpse of knee, pulling back a bit before you go a bit further, until all is revealed at the end. — Karen Abbott

Gypsy [Rose Lee], who was called Louise as a kid, gave her first performances here with her sister [June Hovac], playing for the local Masonic lodge halls. It was a tight-knit community, and the support and success the act enjoyed here enabled them to hit the road and make it in big-time vaudeville. — Karen Abbott

If Lady Gaga and Dorothy Parker had a secret love child, it would've been Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy arrived for opening nights at the Met wearing a full-length cape made entirely of orchids, while Lady Gaga shows up wearing a full-length cloak made of meat. — Karen Abbott

By 1865, all Southern women - the happily and regrettably single, the perpetually engaged, the wives and widows - had tired of the war. The Confederacy was shrinking, and the morale of its remaining men shrinking with it. — Karen Abbott

I spent three years researching American Rose, research that included connecting with Gypsy's sister, the late actress June Havoc (I was the last person to interview her) and Gypsy's son, and also spending countless hours immersed in Gypsy's expansive archives at the New York Public Library. I became obsessed with figuring out the person behind the persona. — Karen Abbott

In 2001, I moved from Philly to Atlanta, where I lived for six years. I had never lived anywhere but Philly, and you can imagine the culture shock; the Civil War seeps into daily life and conversation down South in a way it never does up North. — Karen Abbott

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them. — Karen Abbott

It was a great challenge to reconstruct Gypsy Rose Lee life, and my interviews with her sister [June Havoc] proved invaluable. It's not often that writers have access to living primary source material; this was the only person who experienced life on the vaudeville circuit with Gypsy during the 1920s, and who saw her perform at Minsky's Burlesque in the 1930s. She knew things that no one else could ever possibly know. — Karen Abbott

The cousin said that Gypsy [Rose Lee] took a full fifteen minutes to peel off a single glove, and that she was so damn good at it he gladly would've given her fifteen more. So this story got me thinking, who was Gypsy Rose Lee? Who could possibly take the simple act of peeling off a glove and make it so riveting that one might be compelled to watch this for a full half-hour? So I began researching, and I came across a series of articles from the year 1940 about Gypsy in Life magazine. — Karen Abbott

I wasn't really a dark kid, but I was in my head a lot. I got good grades all through my 16 years of Catholic school, but I was always writing these weird - and, I have to say, really bad - stories, filled with murder. — Karen Abbott

In Gypsy [Rose Lee] the musical, her mother, 'Mama Rose', is portrayed as a slightly eccentric, pushy, ambitious stage mother, but that version doesn't come close to the truth. — Karen Abbott

America's first Olympics may have been its worst, or at least its most bizarre. — Karen Abbott