I found out from speaking to the dancers that many of them were on a circuit traveling around the East Coast from city to city, theater to theater. It was a tough lonely life. Most of the time they traveled from city to city by bus. The money they made from performing just about covered their expenses and per diem needs. They stayed in cheap hotels near the theater. Some of the women used there off hours to engage in prostitution. Others traveled with their boyfriends or hooked up with a rich customer when they first arrived in a town and stayed with him until they moved on. I kept being reminded of those old black- and -white movies where the vaudeville entertainers go from town to town with sequences of steam trains flashing by on the screen.

Walking around the Troc was like being in one of those old black-and-white movies. The Troc was built about a hundred years ago and opened as the Trocadero. In its heyday it was one of the most elegant venues in town offering the period's best show business and burlesque acts. Some of the most famous and legendary strippers like Tempest Storm and Gypsy Rose Lee performed there. The depression, the war years and finally the 1950's saw the decline of live entertainment and high- class burlesque. The theater fell into decay and disrepair.

In fact, the theater had never had a complete remodeling. Some of the furniture and decor looked to be thirty or forty years old; some of it as recent as a year or two. Nothing was ever removed. Rather, improvements were made over the years piecemeal, one on top of another so that it was possible to look at a wall and see posters from the 1940's, ropes from the 1920's, curtains from the 1930's and even a modern Coke machine.