“The Dance of the Bashful Bride” by Charles Rammelkamp

“The face that launched a thousand anti-sub sorties,”
Grandad quipped, and Grandma rolled her eyes….

Wow, Julie Gibson made it to 106!
My grandfather used to talk about seeing her
at the Coral Room in DC.
He lived nearby in the Congress Park Apartments
when he worked for the FBI.
Said he’d even seen the Vice President,
Dick Nixon, in the audience once
when she did her signature
Dance of the Bashful Bride,
which started out with Julie in a wedding dress.
This was after she’d been arrested 
in Massachusetts, on obscenity charges,
for doing the same striptease act.

Born in 1913. I’d forgotten all about her.
I assumed she’d been dead for years,
until I read her obit in the Telegraph –
“a foil to the Three Stooges, 
played Helen of Troy for Orson Welles,”
the headline read.
She once sued a Bucks County producer
for replacing her in the cast of a production
of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Sued him for slander for saying she wasn’t sexy enough.

Grandad said he saw her 
in other clubs in the District,
like the Bayou, and also clubs in Philly.
Performed at a club called The Wedge
frequented by engineers working 
on submarine defense systems.
They loved her so much they named 
their “listening buoys” system for detecting explosives
“the Julie,” even invited her aboard
the USS Valley Forge aircraft carrier!

“The face that launched a thousand anti-sub sorties,”
Grandad quipped, and Grandma rolled her eyes.
“Bashful bride, my foot,” she muttered.

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two of his full-length collections have been published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing.