A Red Pepper Shaker

A Red Pepper Shaker Daily News 1963 Nov 24

DEPPER POWELL had just come from her contrology class at Joseph H. Pilates' Universal Gymnasium, 939 Eighth Ave. She goes twice a week to sharpen the use of her dynamic tensions for exotic effect in Ann Corio's "This Was Burlesque." "

"It is one way to keep supple in the city, where, as you know, none of us play enough tennis," Pepper explained. "Mr. Pilates is very firm with me. Although he's 84, he picks me up by the scruff of the neck and shakes if I don't relax."

Miss Powell, a flame redhead, cuts her swath at 37-226-36. She weighs 120 pounds, ideally, and stands 5 feet 8 in her size 6 shoe. She has been an exotic dancer for eight years.

The wellspring of her career, it develops, is cash. She was a show girl in an Atlantic City club at $80. The strippers were making $300.

Pepper is practical and made her seminude debut a later week

It is Pepper's considered opinion that every woman should learn the stripper's art, in order to be a good housewife. "One of the important things in marriage is to feed and bolster the male ego," she observed.

"I came by this knowledge about a man's ego the hard way. You see, I was married three times... at 15, again at 17 and at 19," she explained. "And it took all those marriages to discover I was looking for a father pro- tector instead of a husband. The next time I'll know what I am doing."

Pepper never really had a daddy of her own. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, she was orphaned at 3 and she was raised by her granny, who, she said, never really understood her. Pepper is an American Indian, Sequoia and Cherokee, with a dash of Welsh and a soupcon of French.

"I have been cited by Harold Minsky as one of the best exotics in the business," Pepper told me. (Incidentally, there are about 2.500 strippers bumping and grinding across the country.) "We lead lonely lives on the road, hotels, restaurants, no home life."

Now that she has an apartment on Manhattan's East Side, Pepper has accumulated a library of 1,500 pocket books, a cat named Jinx and two dogs-Kupe Ming, a Lhasa, and Gina, an Italian greyhound. Her ceiling is draped with fishnets; she loves the sea.

"It is wonderful to settle down and cook pork and sauerkraut," she exulted. "There are about 20 burlesque houses left in the country. Our world is really shrinking and I do prefer theatres to night clubs, where most of us have to toil."