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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.