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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.