Kathleen - Fleen - Topaz - Miss Mew

 

A couple of pleasant women are presently embarking on making a documentary on the exotic dancer scene in Vancouver in the late, 70s, in the 80s and until now.

In those times I photographed many if not most of these ecdysiasts. This endeavour coincided with me doing the same with the Vancouver punk bands.

It was one afternoon in the early 80s that I was walking to the Carnegie Centre on Main and Hastings after having had a few soda waters at the Number 5 Orange. Those of us who frequented it simply called it The Five. On my walk I noticed a dancer I had seen minutes before. She went by the name of Topaz. Those who knew her called her Fleen and her real name was Kathleen. 

I asked her where she was going. She was going like me to listen to the punk band D.O.A. From that moment we became friends until she died on November the 17, 2021.

The two documentary women have already interviewed me with a tape recorder. They are returning today Tuesday to film me. For this occasion I decided to get a haircut and I did on Monday at noon.

In my new interview I will further explain how I felt all those dancers had style, grace and intelligence. In this age of 21^st century red-carpet pornography, I can only assert that these women had style. That style is gone.

I called Kathleen Miss Mew because she reminded me of a cat. She had this flawless complexion that looked like Devon Cream. She came a few times to our Railway Club lunch gatherings and I was shocked to find out her face was all freckles! She used good makeup.

The main reason for writing this blog is something that happened between us. In those late 80s I did a gallery show of dancers that I called Homebodies. The procedure was that I would ring the bell and be allowed in. I would be offered coffee and I would look around before I photographed them nude in their home. It was not supposed to be erotic. They were full-length portraits of nude women doing household chores.

When I was just about to finish the project, Miss Mew called me and said, “Alex I want to be in your Homebodies. The fact that I live in that fleabag hotel, The Niagara does not mean that it is not my home. It is." At the time she may have been taking drugs and or drinking. I showed up at her hotel room and my heart was broken when she posed right next to a little display that she had of flowers, high heel shoes and an apple.

I hope nobody will become offended by placing that photograph here. The third one is of her dancing. She always made eye-contact and she liked to dance to Lou Reed.

Sarah Rodgers & Allan Morgan - July 2006

In Spanish the verb impartir is more used than its equivalent impart. The RAE dictionary of the Spanish Language is I believe the best on-line dictionary particularly as they always include the etymology.

Impartir significa dar, comunicar o distribuir algo, frecuentemente conceptos no materiales como clases, justicia o bendiciones. Según la Real Academia Española (RAE), es un verbo transitivo derivado del latín impartīre, que se traduce como "hacer partícipe de", "repartir" o "dar parte de"

In short, the word derives from the Latin impartīre which means to make someone a participant.

Allan Morgan 8 March 2026

I like the world because I have teaching in my blood. My mother and grandmother were teachers. When I met Rosemary in Mexico City in 1967 we were both teaching English to Mexican executives. I taught Spanish at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana and algebra, ancient history and English I an American high school in that city.

My present frustration is based on the fact that I have not found anybody interested in what photographically is in my head. My grandmother often told me that the devil knew more not because he was the devil but because he was an old man. That wonderful relationship I had with my grandmother could not happen in this century. To my two granddaughters I am simply an old man.

Travelling to Mexico City this past December 1 to photograph and extremely active 91 year-old blind photographer, Pedro Meyer, gave me the impetus to keep doing new stuff while I am still alive.

 Pedro Meyer

A couple of days ago I was visited by actor Allan Morgan. Many years ago I photographed him with actress Sarah Rodgers on their participation of the play Angels in America. I used the logic that to include the idea of an angel I only needed one feather. The photographs were well received.

This time when Allan came over I printed (few photographers of my generation no ever print) for him a version of the photograph in which I scanned the Polaroid peel. The peel is a negative so I reversed it to positive in Photoshop. In that last century before scanners happened we photographers threw those peels away.

The second photograph here is the result of a now 3 year old mistake. In photography mistakes can sometimes bring lovely results. The deal is to figure out the mistake and then be able to repeat it.

I was taking photographs of a Marina Hasselberg, a very talented local cellist when the flash cord failed. I tried to jiggle the cord but nothing helped. When I downloaded her photographs there were 8 black rectangles. I was amazed that there was something there. The results are portraits that do not have a correct colour but somehow appeal to me.

And so I keep at it without being able to impart what I know.

Marc Destrubé

Folia a baroque Louie Louie 7 listening to Marc Destrube play while on my back under a harpsichord.
 

According to my Real Academia dictionary folía is a word of French origin that means mad. It is further defined as a dance typical of the Canary Islands but also an extremely noisy Portuguese dance that involved many people. This is partially confirmed by the Folia website and I quote:

Natalie Mackie

The name "Folia" is of Iberian origin and refers to a fertility dance in three-four time originating in the late 15th century. The first time the name emerges is in a text by the Portuguese dramatist Gil Vicente entitled "Auto de Sibilla Cassandra". In music Folia meant, at least till the 1670's, a very quick paced and tumultuous dance, in which the dancers carried men dressed as women upon their shoulders. They were literally driven mad by the noise and the stirring rhythm.

Lucas Harris

Yesterday March 7 I went to an intimate concert by La Modestine ( a trio) at Hodson Manor. It was a most pleasant surprise as the music was early baroque compositions by Spanish composers or by a Portuguese composer Falconieri who was in Spanish ruled Naples and an English Henry Butler who  and English composer who spent 29 years in Madrid in the court of Philip IV.

Because my Manila-born grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena was educated in Valencia in the 19^th century she inculcated me with lots of stuff about her Spain. Interestingly she often told me that the best songs about Spain had been written by Mexican composer, Agustin Lara (one version of La Malagueña) or by Cuban Ernesto Lecuona (the other better known Malagueña). She further cited Edouard Lalo’s Opus 21 in D minor Symphonie Espagnole written for Spanish virtuoso violinist Pablo de Sarasate. She would end her argument telling me that Rimsky Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol sounded more Spanish than most Spanish music. She did not have to tell me about Bizet’s opera Carmen to put the nails on the Spanish coffin. I eventually agreed with her in 1961 when in my new craziness for American jazz I bought Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain.

Because I am Argentine, and, because of my grandmother’s love for the Spanish language, I was most impressed by lutenist-theorbist(?) & Spanish guitarist, Lucas Harris’s fine pronunciation of Spanish. My Argentine counterparts say they speak castellano while Mexicans and Spaniards speak español. In Spanish we never capitalize languages or nationalities.

I was delighted to see Ray Nurse and Michelle Speller who never uses tail hair from female horse to make her violin bows.

Many years ago Ray Nurse gave fabulous pre-concert talks. One day I asked him about my favourite folias, chaconnes and passacaglias. He told me that they were basically the same thing. And then amazingly he surprised me by telling me that the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five was a chaconne!

Marc Destrubé’s groups always feature lots of explanation of the music played and its origin. 

One of the real pleasures of listening to La Modestine (in this case minus a harpsichord) was the lovely sound blending between the always smiling Natalie Mackie and Lucas Harris’s Spanish guitar and his huge theorbo (built by Ray Nurse).

All in all the concierto was macanudo ( an Argentine word for wonderful). And there is this: Macanudo (1963) is a jazz album by pianist Ahmad Jamal, released on the Argo label. Recorded in 1962, it features Jamal with an orchestra arranged and conducted by Richard Evans, blending Latin-influenced sounds with strings

Niño & Niña

Each time a woman lies about her age she becomes an accomplice in her underdevelopment as a human being.

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then into obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier – and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

1972 – Susan Sontag- On Women – Copyright 2023 by the Estate of Susan Sontag.

 Some beginning to read this might wonder why I am using a phone photograph of my two cats Niño and Niña on our bed with Sontag’s book.

In the late 70s, 80s and in beginning of the 90s I photographed many Vancouver ecdysiasts. I was trusted, so I was even given access into their verboten dressing rooms. A couple of days ago I was interviewed at home by two women who are starting the project of making a documentary on the exotic dancing seen in Vancouver until now. They tape recorded me and plan to return next week with a video camera.

One of the women is the daughter of famous dancer in the late 70s at the Number 5 Orange Bar. She is lovely and intelligent and showed me nude photographs of her mother with a not-in-the-least understated smile.

On a whim I wrote to her and asked her if she would pose for me in the spirit of things. I received a very quick and enthusiastic, “Yes!”

While I am excited about the project, in my career as a magazine, I was constantly pushed by pushy art directors to “do it differently”. While my dancer photographs were mostly portraits and never cheesy, I cannot approach these photographs with a last-century mentality.

This is especially so as I finished Sontag’s book a couple of days ago. Reading it I could not help but compare her liberated woman of 1975 to that of my liberated Rosemary. It was she who made all the decisions in our life together and thanks to her I never have to worry about where the next buck is going to come from.

Will I have to persuade this woman not to take all her clothes off? Because she is inspired by her mother’s former profession, she is keen on imitating the photograph she showed me of her fully nude.

So how am I to combine in a photograph that 80s ecdysiast portrait I so often took, while giving it a modern approach? I know how I am going to start. In the late 70s one of the first dancers I photographed was T. I took my photograph of her reflected in a Mexican 8-sided mirror. I still have that mirror by my entrance.

In the 80s and the 90s some of my friends who were writers, illustrators, editors, designers, strippers, poets, etc. would meet for lunch every Thursday at Vancouver’s then fabulous Railway Club for lunch at noon. One very lively and pleasant young woman was Kimberly Klass. She seemed to be innocent and proved it with enthusiasm when she visited me one afternoon and I played her some of my favourite jazz. She had never heard it.

Somehow I got to photograph her many times. She was more than a muse as she made me (without saying anything) push the boundary of what I usually did. The photograph of her with her black skirt, stockings and hand is one of my most favourite ever.

One day she called me to tell me that she had a new friend who was a painter/artist. I immediately told her to bring him to my studio and for him to bring a little paintbrush.

At the end of the 20^th century and in the beginning of this one there was a photographic gallery called The Exposure Gallery on Beatty Street. They kept having group shows with themes. A frequent one was The Erotic.

Somehow I managed to photograph two women, Kimberly was one of them in which I had a procedure which involved me pointing my camera at their faces while below they indulged in a self-induced orgasm. Then from the contact sheet I would pick five and run them in a long matted frame which I called a narrative. It was up to me to figure out (and as I was a man that was next to impossible) to find that third frame that marked the orgasm.

I will never understand women. At the opening about five of my women friends came up to me and asked, “Alex, why did you not ask me?”

This positive blog now goes in the opposite direction as some years ago Kimberly committed suicide. While we were friends she never ever told me about what might have led her to do that.

I am placing her beautiful photographs here in her memory.

Sursum corda.