Doody

Doody the stripper, she was stripping in 1969, so if she was of legal age then she'd be in her 60s now. Thats something to make you think when you next see a woman in her 60s, it could be her, the legend who went from stripping to theatre!
Ive tried a few things to find her but ive had no luck. Id love to see what shes up to now.
it all started with the "hey whats going on" article i found in The Truth newspaper while looking for other stuff. Ive found a few mentions of the gallery owner too, he was a bit of a shit stirrer. Ill put that at the end of Doodys info.

HEY, WHAT'S GOING ON?

... it's Doody and it's coming off!

Middle-aged stockbrokers and teenage office girls peered out of windows of the drab, grey, Melbourne stock exchange as a busty former convent girl stripped at a premiere of the city's weirdest lunch-time strip show.

Crowds of businessmen and more girls milled in the street outside as a band beat out heavy rock music to accompany Doody, the noted undress artist.

Doody got her gear off at the Stopover Strip Cafe on the second floor of the In-Out Turnover Gallery in Little Collins street, only yards and windows away from the Stock Exchange.

Doody danced erotically and stripped completely, but the stockbrockers' stares were in vain.

A large, dark curtain over the stage window shielded her from outside eyes..

Truth attended at the invitation of gallery owner and leading art and antique dealer Philip St. John Reed

He said: “Some people seem to think we only deal in sexually orientated wares. This is not true. Many fine works of art are available.”

ESCORTED

The Truth team found its way to a table at the front of the dining-room where Doody was to perform.

After a delicious lunch we recognised two intruders – senior by-laws inspectors from Melbourne City Council.

The officers hovered around outside Doody's dressing-rooms, then decided to inspect the musical equipment of the rock group, The Banana Experience.

The group was in the middle of a song, but that did not deter the boss by-laws men. One clambered over electrical cords and had a prolonged peep at the amplifier, his nose almost inside it.

The lead guitarist, fascinated by the inspectors curiosity, reciprocated with a screeching riff which made the inspector lurch back several paces.

After asking Reed to tone down the music the council men were escorted from the building – before the strip show.

As the elder one passed Truth's table he uttered the oath “Jesus Christ”. Truth did not reply.

Next Doody appeared in a swirling cape which she deftly shed very smartly.

She was not slow in removing her other garments.

Then she danced completely nude with vocal encouragement from a group of Bendigo men - “just visiting the city on business”.

Soon after her act the vice squad arrived. Two men and a policewoman took a seat at the table and waited. But the second scheduled didn't not go on.

The only customers left were pressmen and police.

The squad then moved downstairs and seized some candles, 17^th century drawings and some windstoppers which they put in a cardboard box and left.

The show was over. The stockbrokers went back to their figures and Reed added wistfully: “I have just had $1400 worth of stock seized. When will I get a chance to defend it”

Melbourne Truth, sat, Nov 18, 1972, pg 5

 the location of the gallery is now Cafe de Tuscany

TWO DANCED NUDE IN CITY STORE

More than 300 people cheered as a naked couple danced feverishly at the launching of a new city clothing store.

The exclusive invitation-only party was held a week before the official opening of the store, In-Out Turnover in little Collins st.

Police, who stood outside for half an hour, left before the naked dance but others returned some days later.

Vice squad detectives, in two raids, seized rings, metal sculptures and other articles.

However, owner of the store, Mr. St. John Reed, has not been charged. The swinging opening party started with drinks at 6.30pm and security guards manning the entrance.

The silver invitation card stated “a mixed bag of sexually orientated merchandising”

Paintings of naked women in compromising positions adorned the walls.

At 7.30pm a band, The Banana Experience, struck up, and at 8.30 a stripper wearing a gold cape appeared.

She stripped to a g-string then flung it toward the band.

She was joined by a well muscled man who stripped to his briefs.

To the cheers and encouragement of the women, he stepped out of the briefs and danced naked with the stripper.

Later truth asked the male stripper his name, and he replied : “Suzanne.”

Mr St.John Reed said he wasn't surprised when the police raided his shop.

He added: “But I don't consider the articles obscene”

“The store wasn't open to the general public when the police came. There's a sign on the front door that says that.

I'm annoyed by the way the vice squad treated me. They were rude.”

excerpt from: Joe Camilleri - A life in music

I went on the road with Dave Flett and Peter Starkie. Peter chose a stripper over the Skyhooks. He quit the Hooks to join a band called Roger Rocket And His Millionaires with Dave Flett and I. We played a strip joint in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, where we met a stripper named Mary “Doody” Scott Pilkington and her manager, Paul Madigan.

Paul organised a tour of mining towns in WA, where we’d be Doody’s backing band. We were also her roadies and security.

We wore white boiler suits, with our names emblazoned on them. I think Doody was the first stripper who actually took everything off, so the police would turn up, to shut down the show which was good news because it would generate publicity. But the tour fell apart when we hit Port Hedland. I’m not sure that the Walkabout Hotel knew what they were getting. I used to do a Lou Rawls-like monologue during the show. This night, I decided to do  The Walkabout Blues . I rapped about the chicken that got up off the plate and walked away, that sort of thing. The wife of the manager was furious, and they stopped the show. I remember hiding under a car because we couldn’t get out of the car park. It was the first time I’d been run out of town.

September 22nd, 2006

full text link

Stripper's life laid bare

it may be the title; it may be the subject matter; or it may simply be that the word got around that there is more to 'Doody – The Stripper's Progress' than meets the eye.

At all events, this late night show at the Universal Theatre has been drawing good houses since it opened.

In this one hour, one woman show Doody, a former art teacher who turned to stripping when her pay cheque from the Education Department failed to turn up, charts the last 10 years of her life.

It is a journey of self discovery, enacted in dance but with the help of a sharp voice-over commentary and slides.

Her “parade to no man's land”, as she terms it, begins in Kings Cross with a re-creation of her original cape dance – an erotic act done with artistic flair, which at the time created a Press sensation.

A few years later cynicism was the beginning to set in; and her second dance is a parody of the sportsman's rorty night out. All is bared, but not in a titillating way that her beer sodden customers expect.

Her next phase was bodily self-expression in the style of Isadora Duncan with scarf and chiffon robe and free flowing dance movements. Again it ends up with her baring all.

The last dance is what she calls her statement. It is Doody's farewell to the world of stripping and the exploitation that goes with it, and is done in grubby sweat stained chemise and this time without music.

No more policemen offering to “befriend” her; no more magistrates reading her a courtroom lesson; no more bending to the will of the people like the prim ballerina who wanted to refine her or the radical feminists who stopped her from performing at Latrobe University. Henceforth she will be her own mistress.

The beautifully build Doody carries off her illustrated “lecture” with style and flair. It is a good, entertaining, thoughtful show with a point of view of its own. There is talk of adding additional, early performances

The Age May 4 1981

Doody bares her soul for culture

by richard coleman

When Doody made the transition from stripping in Melbourne footy clubs to stripping at the Adelaide Festival of Arts last year, she won an almost cultic following overnight

as part of the fringe festival in Adelaide, Doody, or Mrs. Doody Scott-Pilkington as she used to call herself, presented The Strippers Progress, a collection of four dances and reminiscences about her life as a stripper.

The response was encouraging enough for her to present her show in Melbourne, where the reaction was much more varied.

The Melbourne Truth had a field day, the lesbian left at LaTrobe University banned her from the campus, while a critic in Theatre Australia discovered that “Doody used classic Brechtian alienation devices combined with elements of contemporary performance art to create a gutsy and challenging piece that was funny and deeply moving.”

“the four dances she performed constituted a dialectical critique of her work over 10 years” the critic wrote.

Doody thinks that review was very funny.

“Some people think there's nothing but a body and some people think you can do a dance without a body,” she said

Doody has been dancing with a “beautifully built” body (to quote L Radic, theatre critic of The Age) since 1969, when she gave up work as an art teacher at Bendigo Girls High and came to work at the Pink Panther, the Paradise Club and the Pink Pussy Cat at Kings Cross.

The Strippers Progress, which she will perform at the Phillip Street Theatre starting next Thursday, recalls her days at the Cross, some of the girls she worked with and what they thought of “the mugs” who made up their audiences.

These were quite different from the Audiences who cam to see The Stripper's Progress in Adelaide and Melbourne who were, for the most part, “young innocent trendies, a few feminists, dancers and a surprising number of oldies”

asked to describe her theatre who, she calls it a “parade to no man's land”

Doody gets green light

by richard coleman

Doody, the former stripper banned from performing at the Phillip Street Theatre after objections from the Anglican church, got the green light yesterday to go ahead with the planned six week season of her auto-biographical dance presentation, The Stripper's Progress.

She will give her opening performance at the Phillip Street Theatre tomorrow night, two days later than originally intended.

The Phillip Street Theatre is leased by the St.James Church from the owners of the building, the Glebe Administration Board of Anglican Diocese. Mr Peter Williams leases the theatre from St.James's Church

Mr Williams told Doody last friday that she would not be able to perform at the Phillip Street Theatre after objections from the theatre's Anglican board of management.

This arose from photographs in last fridays Herald of Doody at Kings Cross where she began her career as a stripper in 1969.

Mr Williams lease of the theatre contains a clause that gives St.James's Church power to prevent any performance of which it does not approve.

On tuesday, Doody and Mr. Paul Madigan, her manager, both of Melbourne, approached the Chief Judge In Equity, Mr Justice Helsham, for an injunction to prevent Mr Williams and the theatre from cancelling the season.

They claimed Mr Williams had breached an oral agreement to allow them to use the theatre for a six-week season.

An agreement was reached yesterday – on undisclosed terms – to allow Doody to perform.

Sydney Morning Herald Aug 21, 1981

The naked truth about Doody's Strip

The Stripper's Progress

conceived by Doody

co-produced with Paul Madigan

Phillip Street Theatre, late night

by jill sykes

 Doody describes herself as a dancer. I couldn't agree – at least, not in the sense of the basic dance standards I expect when I go to review a performance.

During the course of her background monologue on the progress of her professional life as a stripper. Doody refers to classes she took in classical and modern dance, and she has had guidance from two people well known in the dance world.

But that doesn't make her a dancer. She has a body worth stripping down to and she simply undulates it in the approved stripper style.

Her four “strips” were curiously lacking in drama and sensuality. Even in my meagre exposure to the art of stripping I've seen more piquant exhibitions than this.

The point of the program, as I understand it, is Doody's rejection of her role as sex-object. Her laconic approach to the stresses of being a strip tease artist – for example, the hostility of transvestites on the one hand and feminists on the other – is dryly amazing, the only aspect of the show I can recommend.

But it is impossible to take her words seriously when every action belies them. Her voice tells you how awful stripping is and how she is moving towards higher arts, yet her body tells you otherwise.

Seems to me that the lady wants it both ways. Well, good luck to her.

by bill courcier

Ambition can be a malicious dictator.

In the case of the determined Doody, ambition has driven her to every Australian city. Living precariously, risking arrest, she aims at transforming strip-tease into a performance art. The four scenes which result swing wildly between innocence and blatancy

But it is the first 20 minutes of the hour late-night show that is fascinating. Using screened passably drawn pencil sketches her off-stage voice describes the world of strippers and her personalities.

Her story is the story of the debasement of Kings Cross: the change from a leafy, informal village to a vulgar, sleazy area, with mere patches of peripheral charm fighting for the survival of soil against cement.

As recently as 1970, the strippers were girls who never drank, let alone took drugs, worked non-stop for tiny wages and fell into bed exhausted as 1.30 each morning. Then came the pimps, the developers, their strong-arm men and the sex shops.

Doody gives the names and the background and claims that there are no longer any genuine strip-tease performers at the Cross. They have been forced into oblivion by two contradictory developments: transvestites an the militant feminists' campaign against sex-ploitation.

A Perth magistrate rightly dismissed a charge of indecency against Doody, but the performance I still built around traditional stripping and tends to lack suspense, when each act, however graceful, climaxes in total nudity

It is as a raconteur rather than and embryonic Marlene Dietrich that Doody stays in the mind

sydney morning herald aug 24 1981

Whatever happened to gallery owner Phillip St.John Reed?

The 26 year old former Melbourne Grammar student & gallery owner got busted for drink driving and when the cops tried to question him he said "dont speak to me you homosexual bastard". Then he was taken to the Russell St headquarters where he called the policeman a greek homosexual bastard. When asked if him and his wife (of 2 months) had been drinking at the Eltham Barrel he replied "yes, you latent, middle age homosexual bastard with a moustache" and admitted drinking, scotch & water, rose & port, but denied he was drunk. He had 2 previous convictions for driving under the influence.
Sergeant Olson described him as "unsteady but not like a Gertrude St drunk"
I looked up his antique shop and it wasnt listed after 1973/74

  the awesome Eltham Barrel