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This, from the The Times-Picayune April 08, 2009 8:30AM:

Long before stripper poles cropped up on every corner, Bourbon Street in the 1940s and '50s was a swanky place. Men in dinner jackets and neckties and women in party dresses and white gloves would fill the smoky dens of the 500 Club, the Sho-Bar, the Casino Royale and the Poodle's Patio.

Beauties with exotic names -- Wild Cherry, Lilly Christine the Cat Girl, Evangeline the Oyster Girl, Alouette Leblanc the Tassel Twirler -- would lure in customers with elaborate acts, popping out of oyster shells or spinning pistols. The shows often included contortionists, magicians and acrobats, all backed up by live jazz bands.

Ms. LeBlanc was a featured dancer in the 1995 film "Naughty New Orleans," about a young girl who works as a stripper in a New Orleans nightclub.

She was among the former dancers featured in a panel discussion presented by Rick Delaup (filmmaker and producer of "Bustout Burlesque" in New Orleans) in 2002 at the Shim Sham club, where a revival of burlesque was under way.

Speaking on tape, dancer Ms. LeBlanc was blunt: "What killed burlesque was the drugs, " she said. "The first club owner who convinced the first drugged-out bimbo to get up and dance for nothing but tips -- that was the end of burlesque."

Peggy Scott-Laborde's 1993 documentary "Bourbon Street: The Neon Strip" explored the checkered history of Bourbon, with special attention paid to the bustling burlesque era of the 1920s through 1960s.

"She could do things with a tassle like no one else could, " former club owner Frank Caracci recalled admiringly of his star stripper Ms. LeBlanc.

In a 1991 Times-Picayune story headlined "Recalling the flavor of old Bourbon," staff writer Frank Gagnard noted that Ms. LeBlanc was among the regulars at the 500 Club and "performed in a chaste costume resembling a one-piece black bathing suit."

He went on to write: "Burlesque eventually went the way of vaudeville and the brontosaurus, being replaced on Bourbon Street by the T-shirt and eggroll dispensers. There are a few faded hold-outs, but the glory days are gone. There probably will be no more stories like the one about the resourceful transvestite revue in which the drag queens went out on strike one night and were replaced by real females - who nevertheless were represented to the customers as female impersonators.

That was Bourbon Street."