Hey, everybody. Before we start, I ran into some audio problems with
this show, so you may hear a little bit of distortion here and there,
or occasionally a word will get clipped. I've cleaned it up the best
I can. So now here's the show, Hey everybody, and welcome to
Life is a gamble. My guest today is Lori Thompson, who has gone
from Las Vegas strip entertainer to entertainment attorney and Laurie. Welcome to Life is
a gamble. Thanks so much, Richard, it's so great to see you.
What a flashback from us in the eighties. Yes, yes, gray
hair, but I color mine. Okay, well, yeah, So Laurie
and I first met on the first movie that I ever directed, was called
Dance or Die, and as you might surmise, there was dancing in it,
and Laurie was a dancer at the Tropicana in the Falls, Brugier at
that point, and that is how we first met. And I don't think
I've seen you much since then, so it's great to reconnect. Absolutely.
Yeah. I want to start at the beginning. You started college at sixteen,
and I also started college at sixteen, and for me, it was
not a very easy transition. I was sixteen, but I looked about twelve,
and I really did not feel like I fit in at all. How
was it for you? Well, I was a little scared going to college,
especially when I first showed up and I found out they'd overbook the dorm,
so I had to find a place to live. And my worst fear
is that somebody would find out I was only sixteen, because of course I
thought of myself as in a mature adult, which I'm sure you might have
as well. So you know what really helped me the most was growing up.
I was in theater and as a performer. I sang and danced in
musicals, and I had the glee choir you know club at my high school.
And when I started college, I thought it was going to be pre
law because I, you know, always wanted to be a lawyer. I'd
been something that I decided when I was nine years old. I wanted to
be a lawyer. So when I got to college, I was a little
uncertain. I didn't really know any lawyers. I just knew that I wanted
to be the one that was the glue to put every buddy that was very
talented together to make something bigger than I could by myself. So what happened
was I wanted to also take dance classes and you know, continue to perform
either professionally or with university projects. So when I went to go an audition
for my dance class, as I found out I had to be a ballet
major in order to get into the major ballet classes. So I auditioned and
got into the top ballet class, and then a little bit later after that,
I got into a musical and an equity theater. And getting back into
that group of people in the theater is what really grounded me. I really
felt like I was secure now. I was doing something that I'd been trained
to do since I was six years old, and that brought my confidence back.
So I think as long as you can find your posse and find your
people in life, I think whatever you stick your neck out to do,
you can get a foundation and some support around you. So that was really
a smart thing. So I stayed undeclared as a major, and I performed
with Ballet West, the professional ballet company there in Salt Lake City, and
had a chance to go and work at Disneyland for a summer. And they're
all American Singers and Dancers program from college students from all over the country.
And when you sang and danced on the Space stage in the park and did
the parade at night, but also to during the day. They gave us
classes on Disney, which was so beneficial. I just ate that up.
Told us how they produced all of their shows and their events. Took us
over to the Burbank Studios where they were just starting up a new Mouseketeers group,
and saw Don Knott's riding a bike down the street in Burbank doing Pete's
Dagon and it was just you know. I was eating up the business and
entertainment, very excited about it and was excited to get into a career of
business. And then these things just kept popping up in the entertainment industry.
I got a chance to go to the School American Ballet in New York,
came back, graduated, was dancing with Ballet West doing Don Quixote, and
they added a matinee performance, so I had to miss my l sat for
law school. Then I got a chance to go to Miss Jackson, Mississippi,
danced with the Jackson Ballet and go out for the International Ballet competition,
and I thought I was going to be staying in Salt Lake and go starting
laschool and dancing with Ballet West. And when I told Bruce Marks at Bally
West that I've been offered a soloist position with the Jackson Vallet, he didn't
say, no, Laurie, stay here. You can dance with our company.
I'll make you a soloist and you can go to law school at night,
and I'll work around that schedule. And that's not what he said,
Richard. He said, I think you're gonna love Mississippi. Well, I
want to jump back just a moment, though. I want to jump back
to what happened to you at nine years old that made you want to be
a lawyer. You know that. I was sitting on a rock. I
grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Was sitting on a rock up on the
beautiful mountain at Chautauqua Park, going up the hill, and I was thinking
about a girl that had been killed in a car accident that I knew,
and she was graduating from high school, and I asked her, what are
you going to do? Because she did so many things. She was in
the band and in the orchestra and she did costumes through all the plays,
and she said, I don't know, I don't know. I don't have
a plan. And so I thought, oh my gosh, if you don't
have a plan, you might die if you're done. I mean, it
was a really odd thing for a child to think that. I thought,
I need a plan, And you know what, I don't want to pick
something where I'm going to hit my head on the ceiling and not have anything
else to do, because I might not be done yet. Right, So
I thought, you know, law is always changing, it's always something new
to learn. There's always more people coming along that need deals put together,
people that are creating things. And I think that that would last forever,
and maybe even longer than I'm able to last. That was one thing.
The other thing was I started to realize I was really bossy. I would
do the play in my garage and everybody would come over and I would tell
them what parks they're going to play, and I would tell them what they
needed to go and get from their house to come over to do our show,
and tell them to invite their siblings and their parents to come to our
show. And so I thought, gee, if I'm going to be this
bossy I better know what I'm saying. Surprising that you end up our director?
Right? Oh well you did because I couldn't dance. Oh oh is
that it? So? So you get to Mississippi, which must have been
a bit of a culture shock coming from Boulder and then Salt Lake. You
know what, it was really a culture shock. I did not realize how
isolated I had been in Boulder. First of all, when I first ran
into somebody that said, we're fixing to have lay ass over Yonder, I
thought, whoa, whoa, whoa, Wait, what planet am I on?
Does she really talk like that? I guess she does. So,
Yeah, it was very different being in Mississippi. The thing that was kind
of I mean, there were many things that were different about Mississippi. Where
I grew up. Everybody was middle class. In Bolder, you know,
my father worked at IBM, and many of my friend's parents worked at IBM
as well. They were computer engineers, and the university there. If they
weren't computer engineers, they were professors at the university. And it was very
racially mixed, you know, because of the technology hotbed there. So it
was I didn't realize how much everybody was the same, and everybody got along
and bolder. And I got to Mississippi and there's a very wide division.
The people that were supporting the ballet and the symphony and the fine arts center
that I was working at. We're very very wealthy. And it was my
first experience really with being with very very wealthy people that were interested in supporting
the arts. That was something that I learned there was you know, there's
which was a good thing for the arts, maybe not so good for the
rest of the people in that community that you know, were really struggling.
So I saw that as you would drive into different areas in Mississippi, I
would see that anything I couldn't get used to was the humidity. Oh my
gosh, I don't think I ever stopped sweating. I had leather shoes that
actually molded. I saw a cockroach that was as big as my fist.
I thought, wow, this isn't bolder. So but I learned so much
there. How long did you end up? You know, I was only
there for a year, but boy did I learn a lot. I learned
how a nonprofit gets funded, and how to go and solicit donors to build
a new work, underwrite you know, the costumes or whatever it is that
we were trying to do for our season. So I did learn that,
and that was something that was missing missing my college degree. They forgot to
tell us how to make it a business, right, So as we were
performing and they were teaching us how to sing, how to dance, how
to act. I uh, that was the first time that I learned that.
Plus having the International Ballet Competition before our season started, and so I
saw people from all over the world, had a chance to work with Robert
Joffrey and people that I hadn't had a chance to work with before. And
see these dancers coming from even from Russia and ones that wanted to defect from
Russia at the time. So you know, that was really a quite a
eye opening experience. And I probably would have stayed there except that the Jamie
Gallagher I'd started dancing with him, he was from California and he had been
hired to dance with the Jackson Ballet as well, and he had friends that
his ballet teacher in California's son was in a show called Hallelujah Hollywood in Las
Vegas. So he and his partner Linda now Linda Green said they need an
adagio team for Jubilee. Why don't you guys put together a video and give
it to us and we'll get it to the right people. Now, for
our listeners who don't know what an adagio teams, would you explain that?
Well, I'm top man, which makes it a lot easier for me.
But what it is. It's actually started in vaudeville and it was a type
of dance where the guy lifts the girl in the air and they do some
acrobatic type lifts. It used to probably be a little more spectacular, and
then the art side of it started adding to it. So think ballroom,
classical ballet with stunning one handed lifts and spins and flips added in, or
this spectacular element of it. So I had been a gymnast as a kid,
so I wasn't afraid of being an upside down there. You know I
could do that. So we put together a seven minute number to Balro to
come out and perform it for the people. The producers of Jubilee, the
new show that was going in to MGM at the time, so they saved
us spot for one of their adagio teams, and we finally finished our season,
we did a summerstock musicals in Saddleback College in California. When we got
finished with that commitment, we finally get to Las Vegas and we're staying at
the Highlander Inn, which is now the Beautiful Palladium, but it was just
a small kind of motel next to MGM on Flamingo, and we go over
and watch the first is it the first show or the second show? I
think was the first show of Hallelujah Hollywood, which was amazing at the time.
I think they had close to one hundred dancers in the show. And
I just had seen the Follies Bergere, which is a smaller show on my
way out to work at Disneyland in the seventies, but this is nineteen eighty
and I was just so overwhelmed by it. So then the whole cast goes
and sits in the audience between shows, and my partner Jamie Gallagher, and
I went on stay age to do our seven minute Bolero number for most of
the cast no pressure right right, and we got all kinds of oh my
gosh, that was so wonderful. And Michael Pratt was there, and I'm
trying to think of who else, But I ended up meeting these people later
on. And then Flufflico comes over and she says, oh my gosh,
that was beautiful, but I am so sorry I misunderstood and thought you were
taller. That was the first time I realized, Wow, this is a
hype thing, and let's make it. It's so weird, Like it's not
like you would be dancing in the line, right You're you're an act would
matter, you know. I think part of it is that Bob Mackie was
doing the costumes at the time, and the really tall girls, you could
have more costume, you know, show off the costume better, the big
head pieces. If they put one of those head pieces on me, I
would be half head piece, half body, and with the showgirls their two
thirds body one third head head piece, right. So, and I think
it was just a style and a look. And so she said, but
you know what, let me send you across the street. I know Pat
mckechney over there, and they've got a show over there, Casino, Dave
Perry, and I think she would love to have you. So I go
across the street. My partner Jamie starts getting fitted. You know, these
sizes for the new show already and I get over there and I'm starting to
lace up my point shoes to show her that I can dance, and I
have to jump in here because unfortunately we had some audio distortion and dropouts.
And what happened was Luri went across the street to the dunes and was ready
to audition for the producer and show him her ability as a professionally trained ballet
dancer. And he said, oh, that's okay, just take your top
off and walk across the floor. And I don't know if your JODG just
hit the floor, but my mind did. Last time when that happened,
I was, you know, a college graduate. I was only twenty years
old, but still I remember my ballet teacher whenever I did something wrong.
And he said, so, if you're not going to take this seriously,
you can always go to Las Vegas and dance. And I thought, oh,
no, what have I done wrong? So I decided. She said
we're starting rehearsals right after the show, and I thought, and I just
watched the second show and I thought, oh my gosh, it's like two
thirty in the morning. I go back across the street. I'm in tears.
Flufflico says it's okay. She said, just because you dance talkless doesn't
mean you're a bad person. There'll be other jobs for you here. You'll
figure it out. I said, I just can't do that right now.
So she called Nancy Howsell's in the middle of the night and said, Nancy,
I have a ballerina here that I think will be very happy with you.
Now. Richard, I don't know if you know Nancy Hausele's, but
it was such a wonderful thing to meet her. She had the Adagio act
in the Fall Spears Are years ago. She was called Zoni and Claire Francois
Zoni and Nancy Claire. And then she met Kel Housel, whose father was
one of the people that first built the Tropicana hotel and was the president of
the Tropicana. So Nancy actually started Nevada Ballet back in the seventies, and
I think the company was fully professional around own seventy seven, seventy eight maybe,
so it only been professional for two years now. I say professional.
It had professional dancers in it because they were the dancers from the shows on
the strip that were trained ballet dancers. So it was a very good company.
It just hadn't gone to where they have a regular company that rehearsed during
the day and died performances at night, rather than rehearsed at night and did
performances during the day. And so you know, that was a big step
for the company to go to take that step to hire a separate company.
And I met her and danced with the company then for two years and out
of ballet, and in the meantime Jamie Gallagher started dancing with the company.
After the fire, Yeah, with terrible fire, and they were just in
their final rehearsals to open Jubilee. The cast had already been let go for
the evening the show. The hotel all had to be shut down for a
while and all those dancers went elsewhere. Some of them waited for the show
to start back. Some of them went over to the Lido. They went
to the Follies Vigier. My partner Jamie Gallagher, actually went to dance with
the ballet company with Nivata Ballet, and he and I got a hold of
Nancy Hausel's tapes when she had the Adajo act in the Fales Vigier and started
putting a plan together to try to get the Adajo act in the follies.
Briger, Jamie and I were doing a show called One of a Kind at
the Desert in the Felds actually did it. Irving Feld was still alive,
and they produced a show called One of the Kind and I think it was
the Music Box Review from Florida. Frankie Caine and Manuel I forget his last
name, two female impersonators that were beautiful. They didn't sing live, they
lip sync, but it was a beautiful show. And we got asked to
go and do a TV show that had just started one season before called Star
Search. Think those of you that don't know Star Search, think about American
idol with judges that tell everybody how great they are. Well, it's more
like America's got talent, right, I mean, because didn't they have all
sorts of different acts. Yes, they did, and we did it.
They had actors and singers and comedians and bands and dancers. So we were
in the dance category. You can only do a minute and a half,
so you got to figure out how to squeeze everything in there that you want
to do. And we did about seven shows and got into the finals.
But we knew that Larry Lee was going to be one of the judges,
and he was the producer of the Falies Bragier. So we had two numbers
that we went out there to do that week, and we decided to do
the classical number because it resembled a number that was in the Pullies Bager.
We ended up grabbing his attention and first we got hired as the understudied team
in the Phualies Bugier, and then about six months later we got the job
as the Principhilidagier team. I was there for thirteen years. Wow wow now,
which which brings us to you. You're there working and at this time,
Nevada, I believe, was the only state in the Union that did
not have a law school. And my god, you still wanted to go
to law school. And I remember picking up the National Inquirer one time and
seeing a picture of you in in you know, a show girl outfit,
and they had an article about you flying every day to San Diego to go
to law school while you were doing the show at night. Oh my gosh,
Yes that I did do that, and it wasn't as hard as I
thought it was going to be. I thought we were going to be opening
the law school shortly after I arrived in Las Vegas in nineteen eighty, and
there were some reasons why they law school didn't end up getting opened. I
think some of it had to do with that professional basketball team at UNLV that
was best in the country. I think they won the championship ten years in
a row. But we're not supposed to have a professional basketball team at a
university, so the donors could no longer be anonymous, and it kind of
changed the way they saw the university after that, so it took a while
before they could get to law school. So I started thinking about it,
and I thought, I'm doing two was a night, six days a week.
But I could actually fly to law school after work and then fly back
after class and still do my two shows. But when do you sleep?
I know, well, you know, I was young, and now you
never really. If you like the way law school is depicted in all the
movies, you know that they're they're already not getting any sleep because they're studying
so much. I'm mind boggled by your ability to do oh, Richard,
And that wasn't the hard part for me. The hard part for me was
I graduated from college in nineteen seventy nine, and I'm going to be starting
law school in nineteen ninety five. And I wasn't sure they still teach in
English. You know, it's been so long since i'd been in school.
I had no idea. That was the hard part for me. It was,
you know, showing up in a classroom. So what I did was,
before I went to law school, I went over to UNLV to see
about taking some classes again, just to sort of get the hang of it.
And I saw that they had an entertainment and fine Art law class,
and I went, well, this will be perfect. So I took that
class. The first day I walked into class, I you know, was
I wanted to look like a student. So I wore my little my,
my blue jean shorts and my boots, and you know, I put on
a hip necklace and walked into the classroom realized I didn't have a notebook to
take notes. I thought it was about the costume. I ran back to
my car and grabbed my day Runner because we weren't using computers back then for
school yet, so I grabbed my day Runner to take notes, and it
ended up being Mark Trottos was teaching the class and he had a law from
Quirk and Trottos with Ted Quirk and Mark Trottos, and that's where I first
met him and realized that he did speak in English and I could learn.
I did miss one on one of the tests, and I was a wreck
over it, and he looked at me, like, you missed one.
I'm like, no, no, no, So we became friends. I
was closer to his age than the student's age. I was about thirty two,
I guess. We became good friends and started a production company together,
a consulting company, which was my second company I'd started in Las Vegas in
production. He was very supportive of me getting to law school and back,
but also too, I still had to work out the logistics. So when
I got into the University of Utah for law school, that's where you know,
I went to undergrad school. But it snows in Salt Lake, and
I thought what if? And it's a time difference too, So I started
thinking, I got to go somewhere where it doesn't snow and it's close to
the airport. So I ended up going to San Diego to University of San
Diego, a lovely school looks like a country club overlooks the ocean. It's
so beautiful until you start paying for all of that. But what happened was
I got a call from a reporter that said they were with the European version
of People magazine, and I said okay, and he said, well,
can we kind of shadow you? So they came to the show and there
was a tent card on the tables. There was also the billboard that was
up laying on my side in a show gold costume. It's not actually when
I wore in the show, but and it said meet me for dinner at
eight, because we used to have a dinner show then and it was an
eight o'clock dinner show, so it was pretty kind of cute. And so
he grabbed that tent card and then he followed me to the airport and I
was getting on the plane or getting off the plane. I think he was
in San Diego then getting off the plane, and he they told him I
couldn't get on the plane, and he did and he took pictures on the
plane, and then he came to law school with me and he interviewed my
my is it contracts? Professor? Professor as my oh, I think it
was constitutional law or I remember two of my professors and they were only too
happy to do the interview about the lost law school. And yes, it
ended up in the National Enquirer, and I thought, I want to go
and do intellectual property and entertainment, and I didn't pay attention to what magazine
it was going to end up in. So that and you know what,
it was a very nice artifle. I should be so lucky to have such
a nice article that generally you think of National Choir is something that's sensational,
overly sensational, and I guess I just didn't think it was that sensational for
a show girl to go to law school, but apparently that's what intrigued them.
Yeah, well, especially to do it at the same time in another
state. I mean, that's true. But I guess we're always lucky.
And it's a combination of what happens to you. And I actually got asked
to do the commencement speech for my law school in twenty twenty, and it
was such an honor to go back and think of all the things you know
that you are insecure about in law school and insecure about in starting the practice
of law, and so I had this journey in twenty nineteen October and November,
putting together my speech, you know what I wanted to tell them,
and thinking about my life and what they learned from that experience, and both
flying back and forth and being at the end when I graduated from law school,
I'm about to start to practice law. And I was six six even
months, six six months pregnant when I took the Navada bar, and so
I'm thinking about all the things, you know, and I write this speech
about how wonderful their careers are going to be, because this is twenty nineteen,
and well, you know what happened in March of twenty twenty. The
pandemic shut down everything, and people were so uncertain about what was going to
happen. And some of these law students that had been given offers to start
work after they graduate were put on hold. And so at first they say
we're canceling. And then I get a call in a few weeks before,
I said, we're going to do a virtual tool duation. So we need
you to videotape your commencement speech and we'll run it on our online graduation ceremony.
Well, the problem is things are different now, you know, the
things that I wanted to say before are very different now They're going into a
very challenging world. And and I'm so glad. You know, even the
title of your your podcast, I just life is a gamble, right,
And so I thought about that, and I thought, it's a pivot.
You what you've learned in law school is how to pivot. But so I
managed to write a whole new graduation speech in a week and get back to
h and tape it and send it out to them, And so that was
I think I bet of fitted from it way more than they did. You
know, I forgot to mention this when we were talking in the beginning,
before we started about what I wanted to cover. But I can't not ask
you about many of our listeners have seen the show on Netflix Glow Gorgeous Ladies
of Wrestling, and you were one of the original Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.
So so so now how did that work into the mix? So while I'm
waiting for the lost open, before I realized this might not happen, I
had done star search and gone out to do take the television show where I
have to fly out during the day, take the television show for Star Search
and then fly back and do my shows at night. And I was lucky
that, you know, that worked out time wise. That I wanted to
really learn television and get more into television, and I heard that they were
going to be doing a television show at the Riviera Hotel and I thought,
well, that'll be perfect if I can, you know, do work on
that show. I can learn the television industry. You know, it's just
my brain. I just am always wanting to know how things work, what
makes them succeed. So I went over to the Riviera and the producers there
showed me a videotape of Japanese women doing these acrobatic moves in a ring.
They were wrestling and doing like a clothesline and she'd do a back layout.
I just my jaw hit the ground and I said, oh, oh no,
no, I'm not a wrestler. I'm sorry and said wait, wait,
don't leave. What do you do? I said, Oh, I
sing a little, I dance. I've done some comedy before, musical theater.
I said, but I don't wrestle, and he said, you know
that's okay. Wrestling is the hook. We're doing a comedy show, and
it's so one hour show, but we only get it like twenty minutes in
wrestling in it. That's kind of the hook for the show, and we're
writing it as we go. So I thought about it and came back and
said, okay, but I need three things. It's it. First off,
I need spinoffs because I'm not really a wrestler, you know, spinoffs
for like sitcoms or movies or whatever you know they're going to do. And
I said, second of all, I want to learn the television industry,
So I want to shadow the writers, the director, the producers, the
distributors. I want to learn how you sell the show. And the third
thing said, see that billboard. That's me on the billboard, the principal
dancer in the Flyes Beige are and I do two shows the night, six
days a week, and you're gonna have to work around that schedule. So
I picked up my notebook got ready to leave it or my portfolio, and
he said, wait, wait, wait, okay, you really said,
okay, oh, I'm gonna have to learn how to wrestle. I did.
I kept my side of the bargain, and boy did they keep their
side of the bargain. I was so David McLean and Matt Simber they kept
their side of the bargain and I got to learn the television industry, and
I'm so very happy I had that experience. Ended up moving into the river
A hotel, staying in a suite there so I could get to the Tropicana
faster and get back faster, because sometimes we would tape in the casino at
two am after I got back some of the comedy stuff. So I was
a good girl, of course, and glossy. And I remember Matt said
to me, I think you should be Star, and the writer says yes,
and we'll have like a twinkle on your tooth and then maybe a twinkle
on your eye and you know, so that'll be like your character. And
I thought, oh my gosh, what am I going to do with that?
Was that the name of your character? They wanted me to be Star?
And I thought about it, and I said, a cheerleader. I
can be a cheerleader. So I said, how about my parents call me
Susie. It's my meddle name is Sue. I said, how about if
I'm Susie's spirit a cheerleader, and I can be for good eating habits being
nice to everybody, supporting everybody and cheering them on, and athleticism and how
we need to work out. And I said, I can do something with
that. And I said, there's no such thing as the name cheerleader.
Yeah, I could go find a partner if you want to be a cheerleader.
Hi was one of the acrobats and the falling SiGe Air, and I
went and sent and said, how do you feel about wrestling? Went?
Are you serious? She came and wrestled and sold in the very good gymnast
and she got it down quickly, and so we were the Cheerleader, Susy
Spirit and Debbie Debutante. In our first match, we wrestled the heavy metal
sisters Chainsaw and Spike. Chainsaw came into the ring with the chainsaw and Spike
had a blowtorch with flash paper. It was light and throw it for fine.
So anyway, we have this match with these two lovely sisters who were
just in incredible characters a delight, and it ends up that Debbie Debutante one
of them bites her foot and gets lockjaw of miss the the uh. They
had to call the ambulance and the that she had to be carried out on
a stretcher because they couldn't get her mouth off of her foot. You know,
it was just fun, you know, we would I was fighting Palestina
once and she cheated and through sand in my eyes. So Americana came to
the rescue, and and then Noshka jumped in to help Palestina the Russian.
I mean, it was just comedy. R really funny comedy, and we
never admitted that weren't really the characters. So when I would do interviews,
I went on the late night show at Joan Rivers as Susie's Spirit. So
I'm sitting on the couch with Mike Tyson and John Davidson and and Linda whose
wonder woman h Carter of Linda Carter. Yeah, and I'm Susie Spirit.
To be Mari Thompson, I had to be Susie Spirit. Mike Tyson is
is you know all nervous, comes to my room and asks for my autograph.
Wait, you're Mike Tyson? Will you sign all of these for my
friends? So it was quite an experience. I'm really glad that I did.
I got to go to napty and learn how to actually pitch the television
show, you know, on the floor of the convention. That's how I
learned television. And it was a little tough back in the Follies Vigi Air
because well two things. The showgirls were very upset that I was doing something
like that that was so disgusting. And they didn't want the affiliation with wrestlingling,
you know, because they're only dancing in a top of the show Hi.
And of course when I did Glow, they said, don't tell anybody
you're in there. We just don't want the him at the Toubles show.
And I thought, really, you guys, it's entertainment, right, It's
all good. So I'm really glad for that chapter. I'm really happy for
the things that I learned and the chance that I had. And then years
later, these two kids that grew up watching it with their dads came and
said, we want to do a documentary on Glow. Can you help us?
And by then I was practicing law, so I helped them with they
what they could and couldn't do to do this show, and they did the
documentary and GINGI Conan from Orange is the New Black. The producer saw the
documentary and said, I would really like to do that, got the rights
from the documentary from these producers and recut it a little differently, and then
she created the show Glow, got the rights to use the name Glow from
a license, and we created that for Netflix only this time the story was
about the girls that were playing the characters, so they got to be real
people. And there was a character on the new show that was kind of
like me because she got into the production side of it. She was a
Russian Instead. I broke my arm dislocated it in the four camera shoot while
I was doing Glow, and that was not planned, but we had probably
eight hundred people in the live audience at the time, so we had to
figure out how to get around that. I actually my a map because it
was dislocated on the side of the rope, and she said, get back
in there, Susie, you're not a quitter. My Glow show on Netflix
they had the character breaker leg instead of her arm like I did. That
was a tough explanation. Richard to go to the producer of the follies,
Vigier and say, I'm going to be out for about six weeks because I
have to let my arm heal. They thought am I going to keep my
job. Wow, that is is quite a crazy story anyway. So now
you have gone from entertainer on the strip to television with Glow, and then
you've had this pretty long career as an entertainment attorney. We're one of the
top entertainment attorneys here in town, which is great. But now I understand
you are going back to the stage, right. Tell me about that.
So, Richard, it's been twenty seven years since I've been on stage in
the follies, Bigier. I do a lot of speaking and a lot of
teaching, but I'm always with a PowerPoint and not in fancy costumes and definitely
not dancing. So I had worked with I'm on the board for Nevada Ballet,
and I had met two gentlemen there, Tom Michelle and David Robinson,
and they were putting together a musical in Las Vegas, the Follies. So
Stephen Sondheim had written in this musical in the seventies and it opened on Broadway,
I believe in nineteen seventy one, and it's been produced though several times
since then, but it's never been done in Las Vegas. And Follies is
about a group of people that performed together in a theater in the follies production.
I imagine it was probably a take off on the Zigfield Follies or something,
and they get together and have one final reunion because they're tearing the theater
down. So they're producing this show in Las Vegas. It's on a website
called Showgirls Come Home dot Com and they've got twelve legendary showgirls. They've got
a cast of Broadway stars and some of our local stars Clint Holmes, Michelle
Johnson, Linda Woodson is actually singing in a just some wonderful people, Gabriella
Versace and anyway, I am one of the legendary show girls, so that's
going to be a lot of fun. I had to get my top shoes
out the other day because we just started rehearsals last week and we're seeing and
dancing and trying to look fabulous. We're very excited because Steven Song Somendheim did
a beautiful job. Beautiful Girls is in the show, probably one of the
most famous ones in the show, and it's really it's a wonderful opportunity to
do something that is this has this much history to it, and it just
so happens. The theater that I've performed in for thirteen years is being torn
down on April second, the Tropicana, the Fullly Spaciety here, it's being
torn down, and our show is opening on April eleventh at Aliante. We're
doing six shows running through the fiftheenth, so it opens on Thursday, Thursday,
Friday, two shows Saturday, two shows Sunday, and that's it.
We're just doing those six shows. It's a nonprofit, so it's not meant
to make money, it's just meant to bring that art to Las Vegas and
do something meaningful for the community here. I think it will mean a lot.
They'll see a lot of performers that they know. Well. There's a
wonderful number that Kelly Clinton and Clint Holmes do together, and so I think
that you really will enjoy that and it's fun for all of us. I
am one of the youngest legendary show girls and I just turned sixty four.
There are one of our show girls is ninety seven. We have one that's
ninety one, that's eighty nine, and we're a charity faster than they do,
so we're very excited. David Lowe is our musical conductor. We've got
the Joy Jazz Orchestra with us JOI. It's I think it's about a thirty
five piece orchestra with our production, So it should be a it should be
a treat. That should be a treat for the people on stage and the
people in the audience, and I'm really looking forward to it. At first,
I wasn't so sure. That takes a lot of nerve. I dug
out my tap shoes that I bought when I was in college and in a
couple of musicals and tap dancing, and had to break those out for my
rehearsal the other day and it came back. I was surprised. So I'm
so excited, and I hope the community has a chance to come out and
see this production, and you know, maybe it we'll revive the production and
maybe it'll get off on a tour. I'm still going to practice law,
though, I think that's my calling. I've been spending the last few weeks
with all of my clients talking to them about Super Bowl ads with can it
can't do? So I think I have a purpose doing that, and I
know I'm good at that. I am so grateful to come and talk to
you, Richard. It's been so much fun and fun to reconnect with you
again and I look forward to hearing many episodes of your show. Lauri,
thanks so much for doing this. It was great to have this conversation,
and I just want our listeners to know I was actually able to find a
clip of you getting your arm dislocated on Glow and I will put a link
to that in the show notes so everyone can go check that out. Anyway,
that's it for this show. I'm sorry about the audio glitches, and
as always, you can reach me at Life is a Gamble pop at gmail
dot com or on Twitter at r w M twenty one. Until next time,