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15 - ‘Shut Your Hole, Girlie. Mine's Making Money, Doll’: Creative Practice-Research and the Problem of Professionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2020

Agnieszka Piotrowska
Affiliation:
University of Bedfordshire
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Summary

These are words that have come out of my mouth:

Good evening. I’m … a raconteur. A storyteller. Dirty stories. Clean stories.

I’m also a chanteuse. [Are there any Jews in the house? Yeah?] That’s French for kurva.

I own a vibrator. A French poodle. And I went out and bought a rotorooter. Ah that roto-rooter. I live it up with that roto-rooter. Mechaya! A long roto-rooter, I can lend it to two broads standing behind me.

… I like that one myself. Clever, isn't it?

Definition of indecent: if it's long enough, hard enough and in far enough, it's in decent …

Definition of a cotton picker: a girl who loses the string of her tampax.

Definition of a happy Roman: Glad-he-ate-her.

Definition of a guy who manufactures maternity clothes. A mother-frocker.

… Honey, I got no talent. I got guts, [baitzim,] big balls. Get used to me, doll. (Williams, 1962)

Almost all of them belonged originally to Pearl Williams (1914–1991) and appear on her live comedy record, A Trip Around the World Is Not a Cruise. This album was recorded in 1961, when Williams was in her late forties, and lasts about forty minutes in total: just under twenty minutes per side. The first side features one of her ‘midnight’ shows at a club in New York; the second was recorded during her ‘late late’ set, presumably on the same night. Accompanying herself on the piano, and with a liberal sprinkling of Yiddish, Williams jokes about oral sex, vibrators, adultery, promiscuity, prostitution, ethnicity and class. She is working deep ‘blue’, throwing in a few belted song parodies and some vaguely liturgical Jewish popular classics. When it was released the following year, Williams's LP (an acronym for a ‘long playing’ album) had a warning on the cover that read ‘For adults only’ (see Figure 15.1), meaning that it was not considered suitable for radio airplay and that it was usually kept behind the counter in record stores. You had to ask for it. My grandfather had a copy and it was regularly played at my parents’ house parties in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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