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A Colored Girl at the Stork Club
Night Club Ladies' Room Conversation, 1937

Posted June 2, 2013

Stage Magazine, 1937

The New York cafe society of the Thirties was well documented by such swells as Cole Porter and the New Yorker cartoons of Peter Arno - not so well-known, however, were the goings-on in the ladies' bathrooms at such swank watering holes as El Morocco, Twenty-One, Kit Kat, Crystal Garden and the famed Stork Club. That is why this one page article is so vital to the march of history - written by a noble scribe who braved the icy waters of Lake Taboo to report on the conversations and the general appearance of each of these "dressing rooms".

"The maid at the Kit Kat is obviously a little bored by what she hears; it is so much the same. Always a wild chattering between two blonds who are worried that Ed Sullivan or Sobol has seen the married man they are with."

"The colored girl who used to preside over the dressing room at Twenty-One explained it all. She admitted she didn't earn much, 'But working here,' she said, 'gives me a very fine social position in Harlem.'"