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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.