theartsdesk has an insider at Glastonbury this year - one of our writers is performing in the festival. Here we present the diary of Miss Kitty Kowalski, ukulele diva, and her cohorts in The Strumpettes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce The Strumpettes - three gals, three ukes, all the best tunes from the Twenties, Thirties, Forties and Fifties sung in perfect three-part harmony. Imagine The Andrews Sisters crossed with Rita Hayworth and a little George Formby, and you’re gettin' pretty close.
"We've been kickin' around the London cabaret scene for about a year now, after driftin' over from the States with nothin' but the clothes we were standin' in and a battered old ukulele - just three sweet-singin’, wise-crackin’, low-down vagabonds lookin' to hit the big time. And it turns out you Brits know a good thing when you see it. A few months back, the call came through. Some festival out in the sticks… Glastonbury or somethin'… has asked us to swing by and strum our stuff on the Croissant Neuf stage, which we’re told is kind of a big deal. And now, all of a sudden, it ain’t so far off. On 27 June The Strumpettes will be entertainin' the troops in the Greenfields, and I’m gonna keep this little ol' diary going each week and tell you all about it - the highs, the lows, the backstage buzz, the onstage fear.
"But first I guess I’d better introduce the band. First up is our head girl - the brains behind The Strumpettes - Miss Velma Valentine. This tough little cookie had a rough start in life. The 16th child of Irish immigrants, she grew up in the back streets of Brooklyn and soon learned to trade that pretty face and sugar-coated voice of hers for a dime or two in the subway. Some say she picked a few pockets on the side, but they never pinned nothin’ on Miss Valentine - though Lord knows they tried…
"Next in line is Miss Bettina Winters. This broad needs no introduction - we’ve all heard the stories. The infamous love child of a German film star and a certain ex-President, she quickly made a name for herself as a high-class society girl, famed for that incorrigible opium habit and her string of famous lovers – Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hughes, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald... Believe me, this hoochie coocher has seen and done it all. Just buy her a couple of gins and she’ll tell you all the dirty details.
"So that just leaves me, Miss Kitty Kowalski. I ain’t had it so easy either. Once upon time I was quite the little rich girl – heiress to one of Poland's wealthiest lines, would you believe. After the uprising, though, I had to get the hell outta there. A girl’s gotta look after herself, ya' know, so I got myself smuggled outta the country in a vodka barrel and shipped all the way to America, where I paid my way singin' in jazz bars and fleecin' all the hepcats at poker. The girls found me in a gambling den in New Orleans when I was pretty down on my luck. The rest, as they say, is history.
"And that’s just about all you need to know, for now. You’ll find us trying to keep our victory rolls neat, our noses powdered and our seams straight in the Greenfields soon enough, but in the meantime we'll be teasing the crowd with a little warm-up show at this swell speakeasy joint in the City tonight. So why don't you come up and see us sometime...?
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