Lula Shaker

If a pretty girl is like a melody, then Lula Shaker is one hell of a song. Born in a bar in New Orleans at the turn of last century (she was the first hurricane to hit that damned city), her first word was ‘whiskey’ followed shortly after by the word ‘neat’. Lula’s mother was a gin-soaked dancer with a lazy smile and a chequered past; her grandmother was on the run from the law after performing the illegal ‘hootchy cootch’ shuffle at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Lula began working at a young age…by 5 she was the most fastidious bussie in New Orleans…so fastidious that most of the time she would take the unfinished glass from some drunkard’s hand and polish the rest off herself. By 6 she was picking up moves from the street hoofers and by 7 she had decided on her chosen destiny when she pocketed a pair of elbow length black satin gloves left at the bar by Blaze Starr when she breezed through town on her way to a torrid affair with the governor of Texas. Lula left the New World for the Old when she stowed away on a passenger ship to Nagasaki and spent her formative years in the dark cavernous rooms of smoky opium dens and speakeasy dives. She emerged just in time for the Jazz Age – more specifically the Shaker Age for it was in this decade she made her name and unmade her reputation. Men raised their glasses to her while she just raised her hems. Women shook their heads in public and then shook their hips in secret, desperately trying to emulate Lula’s captivating moves that burnt the small stages of the underground cabaret clubs across Europe where she was in such demand. She was the darling of the jazz set, the ruin of many a man and the example every mother set her daughter of what would happen if she didn’t finish her education (the number of female university dropouts for the 1920s has never been exceeded).