Chickee Lane
A renowned burlesque performer in early New York, Miss Lane jiggled and jived at the Arlove Theatre on East 14th Street. Celebrated as the original Koochee Coochee Girl, she was a beacon for poor garment workers and the down and out. Erupting from tenement sweatshops, throngs marched daily from Cherry and Orchard to see her perform. Craving a mere glimpse, this “fresh off the boat crowd” nursed watered down cocktails as they stood in awe of the bangs and booms of Chickee’s erotic disrobing.
The wealthy attended too. Already liquored up, they arrived at the Arlove incognito in long black limousines. As Chickee’s finale concluded the tired, hungry, and poor, desperate for a bit of shut eye, retired to flop houses and beds rented by the hour. This before another grueling workday in the “Rag Trade” of the Lower East Side. The wealthy headed to speakeasys and opium dens, or home to beds of luxury. Miss Lane stripped for them all in the decades before the Great War. Americans, poor and far from native lands or monied bourgeoisie from uptown palace apartments, a whole rainbow melted into the audience of Chickee “Boom” Lane.
At the height of the 30’s depression multitudes of down and outers were at the Arlove theatre. Even radical, cigar smoking, lesbian, feminists in need of free meals scrounged up cash for tickets just to see Miss Lane. Drunk on cheap liquor, they threw flowers to Chickee screaming “Drive us Insane, Make it Rain!” Responding, the Koochee Coochee Girl sprayed them with beer, then slid bare naked, umbrella in hand, across the liquor soaked stage skidding to a stop in her splits finale. The drunken mass went crazy. These infamous jiggles at the Theatre Arlove were a respite for so many dreary lives.
After all Chickee Lane was an immigrant too, but from before the great revolution. During Tsarist times she journeyed to America from Minsk, the capitol of White Russia. Like most impoverished peoples, this young girl traveled steerage.
Boom Jigga Boom! (Cont.)
Chickee Continued . . .
As she tells it, conditions were rough and the voyage hard. The passage was crowded and the passengers were desperate. To survive this journey across the sea, they stayed sane by dancing. The chosen form was the Humba, a primitive gypsy love dance, a dance of seduction. Their minds stayed distracted from the suffering at hand. It helped with sea sickness too.
Arriving at Ellis Island, Chickee (an Americanized version of her Yiddish name - Chickalah Rene Boinsteen) pleaded with the dancers to teach her their ways. She craved knowledge of the Roma love traditions. Her mother Phyllis and her loving uncle, Tio Toadie Shmuel Boinstein, were on the journey as well. They had other ambitions for the smart young girl, constantly nagging her to be a doctor, dentist, lawyer, or Certified Public Accountant. But in this new land Chickalah knew her destiny was to please the masses. Her life’s journey was as a siren with waves of her torso and ritualistic dance.
So came the infamously famous career of Chickee Boom Lane, the original happy Koochee Coochee girl of lower Manhattan. She titillated many. Sad soldiers and veteran dough-boys, women craving women, rich socialites from uptown, all were her congregants through hard times and tough luck.
Thank you Chickee, (Miss Lane), for your inspiration, life, and fervor keeping the downtrodden hopeful during the roughest of times. You are an American institution, an icon. May the Boom be a national treasure kept for eternity or longer. God bless America. God bless our newcomers. God bless dances of seduction.
Boom Jigga Boom! Boom! Boom!