Shay Stafford went from tapping down the aisle at Woolies to twirling in a banana costume in BrisVegas. Yet when she became a showgirl at Paris’ famed Moulin Rouge, she found love. David Leser tells her story.
“I will need see your breasts,” the ballet mistress declared matter-of-factly.
“Now?” the young woman replied. “Here?”
“Yes,” the mistress said, nodding to the lithesome shape and lighting a Marlboro Red.
The young woman turned her back and, in slow motion, began to slide out of the straps of her leotard. With a deep breath, she turned around, hands on hips, and offered her inquisitor a radiant showgirl smile.
The older woman took a long drag on her cigarette, sized up the young woman’s attributes for what seemed an eternity, then declared in her thick Yorkshire accent, “Smashing”.
Not your run-of-the-mill interview, true, but then the Moulin Rouge, the famed Parisian cabaret, is not your run- of-the-mill employer.
Just ask Shay Stafford, the young woman from the Brisbane suburb of Tarragindi, who was the one unveiling herself that day, 13 years ago, for the cabaret’s maitresse de ballet, Janet Pharaoh.
Within 48 hours of arriving in the City of Light, Shay had cartwheeled across the rehearsal room floor to land a job as one of the cabaret’s Doriss Girl dancers, named after Moulin Rouge’s founding ballet mistress, Doris Haug. Now the only question was: did she have the goods to be one of the “nudes”?
This might all seem rather academic, prurient even, except for the fact that a cabaret dancer needs to be not just exceptional at dancing and to have extraordinary powers of endurance and resilience, she also needs to possess glorious form and shape. And Shay Stafford, at 175cm tall, with a waist measuring 64cm and perfect 90cm hips, has glorious form and shape.
She was born to dance, although never in her wildest dreams did she think it would be as a showgirl for the two most famous cabarets in the world, Moulin Rouge and Le Lido.
Memoirs Of A Showgirl, published by Hachette Australia, $35, will be released on November 1.
Postscript: Bryce Corbett and Shay Stafford are friends of this writer, and Bryce is Associate Editor of The Weekly and author of the best-selling memoir A Town Like Paris.
Read more of this story in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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