Welcome to another Showgirl Story Time!! In this video, I am defining lines, the way that they organized the performers in Jubilee. The names of the lines have come up in a few of my podcast interviews and I figure they need a bit of defining!
I will dive deeper into each line that I was part of during my time in Jubilee later in the month.
I will also be keeping up with defining terms used during the podcast in these videos throughout the year. If you have any questions about any of the terms we use, comment below or in the post of the specific episode.
Enjoy this video!
? Athena
Costume by Athena and Phelyx
Video and editing by Athena
Transcript
Hey there, welcome to another Showgirl Story Time. I want to talk today about lines have been talking about them in some of my videos about being a Bluebell and all of the things on my IGTV. But now I want to talk about all of the lines in the show, because it’s come up a lot in some of my podcast interviews and I thought maybe some people don’t understand what that means. So I’m gonna define it for you.
So a line is basically just a group of dancers, and they categorized all of the dancers in the show. There was over 130 dancers, when that show first opened. By the time I got to the show, there were only 85 dancers in the show. But they still had to organize these groups of people, so that the show could move and it was, it was very highly choreographed in onstage and offstage. So it was, it was very dangerous to be on that show, and you had to be in the right place if you were not, you could die. That’s kind of how it worked.
So they needed a way to organize the groups of people and they called them lines, everyone. Each line have a line captain, and a swing. And there’s a whole video about line captains and things that’s coming, so watch out for that. And so here we go. There were five female lines, female dancer, lines, and then one big group of boys.
So the covered dancers were the Bluebells. There were short short Bluebells and tall Bluebells. And short Bluebells ranged from five foot eight, you had to be at least five foot eight to be in the show. Five foot eight to five foot nine, five or 10, somewhere in there and then they were tall Bluebells, who were like 5’9″ to sometimes to six foot or taller. And was the same thing for the nudes, the nudes, were the topless dancers, and they weren’t short nudes, and tall nudes, again same kind of height.
We had when I was in the show, we’d a girl that was six foot three with no heels on. So, and I’m five foot nine, so she was like half a foot taller than me, which is crazy, but cool. So they had, you know, there was, you know, a span of heights, And that’s how they organized the dancers.
They also had a line of girls called the Ebony line, and I’m still learning about that line. I had read that Donn Arden created the Ebony line for this woman, back in the 70s, for Hello Hollywood Hello, and she, she wouldn’t go topless. And so he created a whole line for her to dance, and everyone in the line was African American, or dark skinned. And so that, I thought that was pretty cool. And I’ve been since learning that it was actually quite difficult to be a person of color back in the 70s and 80s into the 90s, because most shows only hired one. And so that was difficult but there was a whole line. And it was when it started, I believe six, six girls strong, and by the time I got there was about four. And then they ended up calling it like four because it, the Ebony line was offensive to some and so they, they changed, they changed the name to line four, so it was more politically correct.
And then there were the boys, and I believe there were about 28 boys when I was in the show. Of course they cut the cast more even after I left, which I didn’t think was possible but they did.
And then they had singers and principals, so the singers, they had some chorus singers, and some principal singers. There were six of six females, and six males, and I believe it was one or two of those were principals of the male and female and the rest were chorus, singers. And then the principal dancers, male and female.
And that makes up all the lines. I hope that clears up some, some stuff that’s been coming up in my podcast if you haven’t heard my podcast, you can go to Showgirls dot life slash podcast and the episodes will be listed there. We’re talking about all kinds of things about being in Jubilee, being a show girl in Las Vegas, and confidence, how it has helped us in our lives because we are show girls. So check out the podcast, a new episode comes out every Saturday, so I will see you on the other side.