Alex Mar - The Electricity Fairy (Inventions: Untold Stories of the Beautiful Era collection)

In Fullersburg, a rural hamlet just outside Chicago, an infant is passed around in the dressing room of a dancing hall. Of the people packed inside, no one knows how the girl got thereuntil, finally, one woman speaks up: This is Lillies baby. Lillies baby, Mary Louise, the girl who was born in the common room of the Castle Inn tavern just six weeks before. (The winter of 1862 had been bitterly cold, and no other building in town was as warm.) A couple of the men decide to carry the baby out to entertain the crowd, as a prop. By the end of the evening, having made her debut, she is placed back in the hands of her parents.

Later on, there will be rumors that her mother once had a brief career as a singer, but that may be history trying to make sense of her daughters originsin most of the photographs that exist of Lillie, shes as austere as Whistlers painting of his mother, complete with a high-collared black dress and bonnet. Its hard to know exactly how Mary Louise becomes convinced that she requires an audience.

Lillies baby, Mary Louise, would soon be known simply as Loe.

As a teenager, her family having left their farm for Chicago, Mary Louise changes her name to the more singular, less country Loe and begins acting in farces and melodramas. Curly-haired, baby-faced Loe has a look thats unremarkable save for her eyes, which are always lit up; when offstage, she almost never bothers with makeup and has no particular fashion sense. But through determination, she lands a string of minor roles and eventually, at nineteen, goes on tour as a banjo-strumming prairie waif in one of the outdoor melodramas of Buffalo Bills Wild West show. Onstage in New York and Chicago, she appears as a second-rate singer, as a Cockney boy (not a girl who could paint her mouth heart-shaped, shes decent in drag), as a widow hypnotized by a depraved doctor.

It is in this last rolea role so small her name is omitted from the programthat Loe finds her voice. Asked to provide her own costume, she sews lengths of a gauzy white fabric to a long, thin silk skirt she owns. And at the end of the play, in the hypnotism scene, Loe improvises light, woozy, swaying movements timed to the doctors commands, raising her arms high so that she can travel without tripping on her robe. And the improv turns into a dance, with the actress rushing quickly back and forth across the stage. Her movements are so unique, so eccentricmovements she feels free to make perhaps because she is playing a hystericthat the audience moves through confusion into fascination. And though the play itself is a failure (how high can ones hopes be for a play called Quack, M.D. ?), she is a success. Loe is asked to perform the dance again, as part of a variety show. She has transformed herself from a wannabe actress into a featured dancer.

What is it? The theater manager dubs the act the serpentine dance. All that winter, Loe takes her routine on tour throughout the East Coast, the number evolving each time they perform in a theater with a better lighting rig. Though her role is small, she is mentioned in nearly all the reviews.

In 1892, Loe feels she has stalled, and she decides to reinvent herself yet againas a soloist. Something to know about Loe: as a dancer, her looks are not in step with the times. She is short, with a thick waist and thick thighs; her body is described as shapeless. But after a solid decade of random rolesa decade of struggling, smiling and singing to mixed receptionshe has a moment of clarity. She believes she is destined to become an artiste ; she will go to Paris, where real artists do their work. Without formal training, and now ancient for her new calling at thirty, Loe crosses an entire ocean, dragging her aging mother with her to Europe.

She takes her act to the Folies-Bergre, the most famous music hall in Paris and the only theater that will see her. Not yet the palace of corsets and garters it will soon become, the place is a gaudy circus of acrobats, musical clowns, and animal acts, a raucous, smoke-filled venue where you can count on finding a high-end prostitute in the standing-room section. (It costs only two francs to enter, whether you stand or sit, and the clientele ranges from the working class to the business class.) She arrives for her audition and, to her great shock, finds that her act is already on the bill: a copycatsome other recently arrived American girlhas been performing her serpentine dance, with a floor-length costume and a lot of swirling and spinning. An early imitator, one of dozens more to come. But after Loe dances for the director, he gives her a contract on the spot. The pretender can go.