Here’s Johnny

Johnny Ramirez, aka Mexican Mike, was Georgette’s third ‘unofficial’ husband (Ronnie Evans had been second – “a great man, but very lazy” was her send-off). Ramirez was practically born in the carnival – a carny couple had adopted him on the spot after he survived a car crash in Mexico that killed his parents. Strangely enough, when Georgette’s first husband Dave had threatened her with a gun in one of his jealous rages, it was Ramirez who’d loaned him the piece!

“I run across him in Tulsa,” Georgette recalled. “I hadn’t seen him since I was 18 or 19 years old.” Ramirez was a flat store agent, pool hustler and sometime magician. “I connected with him. I thought, ‘He knows how to gamble, he’s fuckin’ sharp, he’s got the eye of the tiger.’ He wound up bein’ dead weight.”

But that was in the future. Right now Dante had a plan. The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was under construction and Georgette wanted to take a three-tent show up there. Georgette and Johnny could do their show in one tent, there would be gambling in another, and “in the middle would be the prostitution.” Georgette was ready to go. “I had an 18-foot trailer, it had gambling devices, marijuana, some guns.”

Off they went. “We’re on our way out of Kodiak, I’m sittin’ in the Suburban, settin’ my wig, puttin’ colors on it. Johnny was drivin’…like an idiot, I let him. I had a gut feeling, but I didn’t listen to it.” On the highway behind them was a drunken Eskimo in a stolen car, closing in fast. “Johnny seen the Eskimo come up on the side and kept drivin’ faster…the Eskimo hits the side of the trailer and knocks us right off a cliff – we just kept going down, down, down. When we went off the cliff both Johnny’s hands went up in the air. If he held onto the goddamn steering wheel, we woulda been okay.” Georgette’s dream was now wreckage, junk scattered on a frozen hillside. Even the weed.

So she split for Las Vegas, Johnny in tow.

Neon Flashin’, One-armed Bandits Crashin’

Once they hit Sin City, Georgette looked up burlesque pal Dusty Summers, who was appearing at the Royal, a mob-owned hotel just off the strip.  “She done told the casino owner a lotta good things about me,” said Georgette. “Normally people audition. I don’t do fuckin’ auditions for anybody.”

Georgette was soon starring in her own revue at the Royal. “She played to a full room all the time,” said bandleader Perfecto Mangual, who was working across the street. “She was an amazing performer. I’ve never seen anybody do what Georgette did. She used to stand on a Tesla coil and light fires from her fingers. She’d have somebody come onstage, and as she was helping them up she’d be picking their pockets, wearing that little smirk of hers.” The audience would often be peppered with Vegas superstars.. “They were all crazy about her, because she was very exotic and they couldn’t figure out what they could do to get next to her. That’s what was so funny. She wasn’t interested. ”

Johnny Ramirez wanted to be a magician, and Georgette started incorporating magic into her act, becoming a regular at magic world legend Gary Darwin’s weekly soirees, where a couple of practicing superstars hit on her – and where Siegfried (Roy’s significant other) always managed to wear an outfit that matched Georgette’s. “If I wore white, he wore white. Every week we wore the same color.” Georgette’s new skills left an impression on Dennis Wiley. “She’d levitate one o’ them strippers and run a hula hoop over their body. I don’t know how she did it.”

Perfecto Mangual, who got chummy with Georgette during her Vegas stint, remains mesmerized. “She’s unlike any other woman I’ve ever met. You never had to wonder where you stood with Georgette. If she didn’t like something, she told you. She has no filters.” Perfecto once visited her apartment with a friend as she was about to use her outdoor shower – “which she did, naked,” he recalled, still amazed. As far as weed went, “Georgette always had the best.”

Like so many others, Manuel marvelled at her street smarts. “Georgette could figure people out easily. She’s nobody’s fool. She did her own contracts, because she didn’t trust anybody. People would try to pull fast ones on her, but there was no way you were gonna get away with it – she was a carny, true to the word.”  And when somebody tried to mug Georgette in the parking lot, “She beat the living crap out of him. She said to the cops, ‘I guess he never saw my show!’”

Dante’s relationship with Johnny Ramirez ended in Vegas. She found out he was pimping on the side, which led to a brawl that ended with him “stickin’ his fingers in my eyeballs. I got a nose that’s crooked now because of that asshole.” Johnny, aka Mexican Mike, was history. “He rang her bell one night and the next day she cleaned his clock,” said Dennis Wiley. “She wound up almost killin’ him.”

Dante and Teflon Don

After Vegas, Georgette did a stint with Minsky star Ann Corio’s This Was Burlesque dinner theater show.  Dante’s take on this revered legend? “As an entertainer, she was gorgeous. But she was a prima donna that didn’t want anyone else to shine. Pinky Lee quit on her.” Georgette ran her own carnival for awhile and returned to the clubs, but it didn’t last. “They got real raunchy. They went X-rated.” She tried out new stage names like Lucky Desmond and Dale Collins. “You been around 30, 40 years they think you’re an old broad and they’re not gonna take a chance on you. Change your name for the new generation.” She promoted oil wrestling, Jello wrestling and boxing, which also meant gangsters.

“I was involved with John Gotti on and off since I was 19, 20 years old,” Georgette announced one day. “I did money laundering all over the world.” Dante had known mobsters all her life. “When I worked nightclubs they were owned by gangsters. And I didn’t B-drink. If they said, ‘Mix with your customers’ I’d tell ’em, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ I had a show. I’d say, “You see my show, you’re not happy, I’m outta here.’ I never had no problems. They called me Miss Dante and they highly respected me.” Maybe they knew what could happen to them if they didn’t. When one Chicago heavy crossed her, “I grabbed his neck, threw him up against the wall, reached into my purse and pulled out my .38. The son came and said, ‘Georgette, Georgette – please put my father down!’

“All the gangsters I’ve known through the years, they’re all good people, special, special people. They’re very religious, they kiss each other on the cheeks. I know people say they do bad things, well…”

Dante won’t go into detail on her capers with the mob, saying only that she had a New York City apartment where they’d bring in “huge fuckin’ duffel bags of money. I’d have to stand on a chair and push the panels in the ceiling to hide it up there. I had a shotgun by the door, a gun at my hip and baseball bats in the different rooms.” Georgette also admits she was sometimes used as bait to lead degenerate gamblers to a motel where they’d be strongly advised to pay up. “I’d dress up nice – didn’t have to sweet talk ’em much, honey.” Off to the motel they’d go, and a couple of gorillas would “come out of the bathroom and beat him…one time we over-stabbed a guy.”

When the heat finally came down on Gotti Georgette was instructed to disappear. “For over ten years I had to keep a low profile so they couldn’t find me. I was in Louisiana with my Mom and Dad, building parade floats.”

Commit a Crime #3

Before that Louisiana getaway, in around 1980 or so, Georgette was in Detroit, promoting boxing and wrestling with a couple of local thugs. The three of them were holed up in a motel room with a pile of cash – $3400 belonging to the gangsters, another $2700 that was in Georgette’s purse when she ventured out for a bucket of chicken. “I didn’t worry about leavin’ it. I’m walkin’ to Kentucky Fried Chicken.” As Georgette returned, “my two gangster friends come walkin’ out of the room…then two black guys come out.”

Her associates were not in good shape. “My one friend looked at me and said, ‘We just been robbed!!!’ He had his hand on his head, blood runnin’ between his fingers. The other guy was laid out on the ground. What they were tryin’ to do is score some fuckin’ drugs from these black guys – cocaine, the idiots.”

“I threw my chicken down, grabbed one of the guys and I’m beatin’ his fuckin’ head into the ground. I’m goin’ through his pockets, seein’ if he’s got the money. I hear a ‘click!’ A fuckin’ switchblade. He slashed my side.”

Crook #1 didn’t have the money, so Georgette “started chasin’ the other black guy. I’m running and running, it was like a damn movie. I’m callin’ him’ every motherfuckin’ name in the world. The guy climbed a damn fence, I grabbed his foot, a shoe came off in my hand. He’s over the fence, he’s gone. I fell backwards. All I got is his damn shoe.”

The police arrived. “They followed my blood, that’s how they found me. I wound up in the hospital.” As did the switchblade brother she’d pounded on. Georgette was released, he stayed. “I got the hell out of town…back down the road with the carnival.”

It wasn’t until years later that Georgette learned how the story ended. She was playing Club Juana in Orlando and some carny buddies were in the audience. “I went over to the table to talk to ‘em. The one carnival guy says, ‘Dale’ – that’s my real name, Dale – ‘she’s a mean motherfucker, she killed a guy.’ I laughed and said, ‘I shoulda killed him.’ He said, ‘You didn’t know? The guy was in the hospital, he took himself out early and he died. Had he stayed there, he probably would’ve made it.’”

The Parade’s Gone By

Throughout, Georgette would stay in touch with her parents, but it never seemed to amount to much. “She always wanted a good relationship with ’em but every time she hooked up with ’em, it never would happen,” said Roger Evans. “She tried.”

Years of heavy drinking had left Delilah in particularly bad shape. “When Dale wasn’t around anymore, Delilah got to drinkin’, usin’ pills,” said Donna Smith. “She was in her middle 50s, still dancing. She had to dance by herself, couldn’t keep nobody around her. They weren’t gonna put up with her bein’ so hateful and catty.

“Sometimes I’d go down when it was teardown night and she’d be real loaded. I’d be in front of her trailer and I could hear her cussin’ God and bawlin’.” Donna would be shocked at the sight of an inebriated Delilah tottering down the midway with a cigarette in her mouth, still wearing her stripper gown, to get change for the girl show. “I never saw her do that stuff before. The drinkin’ and druggin’ changed her personality.”

Sometimes Delilah would feign suicide. “She was always pullin’ that fuckin’ crap,” said Georgette with a sigh. “Always tryin’ to cut her wrists, throw little temper tantrums.” One day in Galveston Delilah got into it with Georgette’s then-boyfriend Ronnie, “scratchin’ his face clawin’ on his neck and callin’ him cocksucker and whore monger.” That afternoon Georgette was alone on the beach when she saw a woman in the distance walk into the sea. It was Delilah. “She was way the fuck out there in the ocean. I ran in, dragged her back outta there, gave her to my stepdad, and Ronnie and I left.”

Bob and Delilah eventually retired from the carnival to run a parade float business in Louisiana.  Georgette came down to help, moving into a bus she’d fixed up. She’d do artwork on the floats with her mother. It was hard labor. “I’d be workin’ in the sun so many hours I’d get huge blisters on my shoulders and my eyeballs would get bloodshot.” Her parents spent most of their time in the bag. “My father had a vodka in one hand, a beer in the other. But they could still work hard.” Sometimes Bob would be so drunk up on top of a float he’d go to the bathroom in a bucket and forget about it.  The many stray cats on the property would do their business up there as well, so when a float was delivered, often to customers dressed in minks and gowns, it “would be all full of shit.”

On January 18, 2008, Georgette was nearly killed in an auto accident. She wasn’t at the wheel. “We were pullin’ out of the gas station  –  I was still putting my safety belt on, because I had a big coat, it was wintertime – and he pulled right in front of an 18-wheeler, a salt water truck.” The impact “threw me through the back windshield and I landed 27 feet away. I didn’t even know I was on the ground.” She was transported to a nearby hospital by helicopter. “I wound up goin’ to four or five hospitals. They had a helluva time savin’ my life.”

Georgette was all smashed up. “My face hit the dashboard, caved my mouth in.” (She’d have all her teeth taken out, and decorated a hat with them.) Dante spent the next four and a half months in a hospital bed recovering from mangled limbs and internal injuries. When she was finally released, despite being weak and wheelchair-bound, she stopped by a boot store on the way home to pitch an American flag to its owner. (Bob, Delilah and Georgette sold flags to laundromats, car washes and motels on the side: “I got real good at it, real good. I never got a ‘no.’”)

She shouldn’t have left the facility. “I took myself out of the hospital early, because my mother was going to have open heart surgery.” (Before Georgette’s accident, Delilah had fallen off a float while working a brush and laid there paralyzed. “She had paint all over her.”)

But Georgette was in no shape to take care of her mother. Internal complications developed,  causing her weight to balloon from 140 to 240. “I didn’t go to the bathroom for three months.” She has photographs of herself lying naked in the bus, her belly distended, obviously in pain. They are hard to look at. A bungled insurance settlement paid only the hospital bills, awarding Georgette nothing for her considerable pain and suffering.

Delilah got through her own surgery, but now Bob was falling apart, and living in a double-wide with rotted floors that Georgette was convinced would soon give way under him. There were 40 inbred cats in there as well. “My Dad loved cats, but he had no food for ‘em there in the fuckin’ wilderness of Louisiana. He didn’t give a fuck. So every time the momma cat would pop out 10-12 kitty cats, I’d go to the back of the school bus and drown the sumbitches in the bathtub. We couldn’t keep ’em. They were full of worms, eyes poppin’ out of their heads…they didn’t need to be livin’ anyway.”

One day she tried to cheer dad up by dying his hair black. Unfortunately it came out blue. “My Dad kept his feet in ice, so he’s sittin’ there with his feet in the bucket, can’t get up, can’t do nothing. With blue hair.” A flag business road trip ended when Bob had to be taken to an emergency room in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Georgette asked about Bob’s condition, the doctor replied, “Your dad’s got prostate cancer and pneumonia. Didn’t you know?”

Georgette returned to the family compound in Jennings, but in the wee hours of the morning the phone rang. Georgette rounded up her mother and they were there in Bob’s hospital room when he passed. “We got back in the car and I drove my Mom back. We never said a word about what happened.” Eventually Georgette was able to pay for Bob’s ashes, and outside a club in Mobile where her on-again off-again ‘husband’ Ronnie Evans was playing, she scattered them in the ocean. With folks playing pool inside the club and stray cats prowling the exterior, she thought her stepfather would approve.

But a week later Georgette got a call from the law. They’d found an empty ash receptacle and were investigating whether human remains had been dumped illegally. She bullshitted her way out, explaining there had been a robbery and that her dad’s ashes were among the items taken. Apparently the authorities felt bad, because they tracked down Delilah and sent her ashes, claiming they were her late husband. Georgette had to inform her mother they weren’t, “because I threw that shit in the ocean.”

Now Delilah was in and out of the hospital. Georgette would take her to a motel to get away. “She’d shit and piss all over herself constantly, couldn’t control nothin’. And I was crippled up, I couldn’t hardly move.”

With her stepfather gone and unable to run things herself, Georgette sold the float business for quick cash – 18.5K. It was a typical carny deal, as the parade floats had been stored outdoors exposed to the elements. “The floats were rotten underneath that pretty paper…they didn’t know.”

The good daughter took the spoils to her mother in the hospital. “I showed her all the money. She looked at me with big eyes.” Georgette had bought an assortment of magic props and supplies, painting Delilah’s name on some of it. “We’re gonna start over in Vegas,” Georgette announced. “You got a whole new world comin’, a new life, Mom. You’re gonna be a magician.”

It was not to be. There in the hospital, Delilah “kept tryin’ to pull the tubes out of her body, fightin’ everybody, rippin’ everything out.” Suddenly Georgette had an idea. She raced down to her van and found a tape she’d made of Bob talking on his CB radio. As soon as Delilah heard his voice coming out of the cassette player, she “calmed down immediately.” When the tape ran out and her mother became agitated once more, she played it again.

But Delilah’s time wasn’t long. “I had a gut feeling. She’d say, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying.’ I’d say, ‘I know, Ma. But in time you’re gonna be reborn again. You’re gonna be a brand new little baby and and I’m gonna adopt you.’” Georgette crawled into the hospital bed with her mom, holding her close. “Over and over and over she said, ‘I love you.’ She was tryin’ to make up for lost time.”

Recalling something Delilah had once said – “When I die, take a flower, kiss it, and throw it to the wind” – Georgette hit a nearby Walmart for a dozen roses. When she returned holding them in her arms, Delilah had a “shocked look on her face, almost terrified.” Georgette brought the bouquet closer, and the sweet perfume seemed to calm her for a time.

On July 15, 2010,  just a little more than a year after Bob’s passing, Delilah died in the hospital bed as her daughter lay beside her. Georgette asked the nurse for some scissors, cut a lock of her mother’s long, black hair, slipped the ring her stepfather had given Delilah off her mother’s finger, and left. A few years later in Santa Monica, not far from the piers “with the carnival rides,” Georgette would scatter Delilah’s ashes to the sea so “her ashes would meet my Daddy’s.” She has a yearly ritual on the anniversaries of their deaths. I celebrate both those days. I make sure I get drunk. They loved drinkin’ and I don’t.”

I asked Georgette whether her mother’s death had affected her much. “Not really,” she replied, tough as ever. But there are some nights on Facebook when she posts picture after picture of Delilah, commenting over and over on her mother’s beauty. “I miss the fuck out of her.”

The Slow Road

On the day of her birth in 2011, Georgette packed up her van and drove to Las Vegas, where she found a shadow of the fabulous showbiz mecca of yore. “The old money isn’t there anymore,” noted her old friend Perfecto Mangual. “The easy money’s not there.” Nor is the style. As Georgette admits, “The old school is gone.” But she’s adapted to the new ways of Vegas, promoting herself online just like the kids do.

She’s lived all over town in the customized van she souped up herself, which is packed with pictures of show business pals and her carny family. Friends have tried to help get her established. “We offered to buy her a motor home she could park and live in,” said Dave Williams, active in the burlesque scene as performer and historian.  “She out-and-out turned it down.” (Dusty Summers tried to help Georgette write some promotional letters but grew frustrated when Dante refused to let her address each recipient as ‘Dear.’ Said Georgette, “I wanted to put in ‘Hi,’ not ‘Dear.’ I said, ‘Dusty that’s horrible, ‘Dear,’ what the fuck is ‘Dear’???” “I guess it’s your way or the highway,” Summers shot back. “Yes, Dusty – if you’re gonna do somethin’ for me – and I really appreciate it – it IS my way.”)

For awhile Georgette stayed in a warehouse stuffed to the ceiling with circus and carnival equipment, and infested with rats and bedbugs. There was no heat or air conditioning. During Vegas heatwaves she’d have to run to the bathroom and pour water over her head to cool down. During one of these jaunts she slipped on the wet floor and cracked nine vertebrae. She’s had surgery, but five remain broken. No more acrobatics for her.

A couple active in the burlesque world – Jamie Burns and Francine Krajewski – let her move into their house in 2018. “The first home I’ve ever lived in in my life,” declares Georgette, who’s spent a lifetime in motels, vans and the possum bellies of semi trailers. She gets by for the most part on social security and face-painting gigs for kids. Dante performs her magic/fire act whenever she can, but money gigs are elusive. “I don’t worry about fuckin’ nothing. No matter what happens in life, you just deal with it. I’m not cryin’ the blues.”

Nothing dims her spirit. “When you got old you gotta slow a bit,” said her old band buddy Roger Evans. “Not Georgette, though. She’s still wide open.” And forever on the move. She knows every soon-to-be-somebody in Vegas. Every time you turn around there’s another celebrity impersonator she’s pals with – Michael Jackson here, Neil Diamond there, Ray Charles over yonder. Georgette is active in local politics as a booster for her close friend, mayor Carolyn Goodman (wife of infamous mob lawyer and former mayor Oscar Goodman, who plays himself in Scorsese’s Casino). She’s also the vice president of the Sammy Davis Jr. Museum.

Dante is somewhat involved in the current-day burlesque scene but retains a skeptical eye. “There’s a lot of old broads that don’t deserve the title ‘legend’ – they’re just fuckin’ old!” The one exotic legend she socializes with is aforementioned friend Dusty Summers, not only a vintage burlesque queen, but an author of numerous books and once a well-known Vegas columnist. (“I don’t have time for deadbeats,” states Georgette. “Just like my mother only socialized with one dancer, Patti Starr. She was a character, and a tough broad. Knew all the gangsters in Kansas City.”)

Georgette’s been a minister since she bought a mail-order license in 1980. “When I preach here in Las Vegas every once in awhile, I don’t get on a damn Bible kick – ‘God said this, God said that.’ It has nothing to do with God, it has to do with the individual person. I preach being organized – make sure when you go to bed at night your dishes are clean, your house is clean, your nails are clean. You gotta be an example for everybody else.”

She’s also involved in the Unification Church and has sermonized there on occasion. Georgette feels that the movement’s controversial founder, Sun Myung Moon, has gotten a bad rap. “He had to wheel and deal, do all kinds of horrible things to raise money to help his people in the Korean War. He went to jail, people always tried to sabotage him. Just like carnival people, he had to do what he had to do. We had to do things we didn’t like doin’ to get by in life, and he was the same goddamn way.”

Georgette dreams of writing a book about her life called “The Hard, Wonderful, Fun Life of Georgette Dante.” She also wants to start a movie studio on a piece of property she’s had her eye on. “They want 11 million, but I think they’ll take 8 or 9.” The first movie Georgette wants to make is about gay people. “I’m going to call it ‘Body And Mind.’ And I’d explain how some people have a man’s body, a man’s dick but their brain thinks like a woman.” She wants to utilize homeless people in the cast. Then there’s her planned remake of The Exotic Ones. “I’d use a famous basketball player to play the monster and this time I’ll play the Ron Ormond gangster part.”

She wants to do a film on the carnival world, to explain it to the world at large. “They misunderstand carnival people.”  Modern-day carnies would not be included. “Carnival people are not what they used to be. They’re just not the same – they’re not characters, they’re not unusual people…People are not what they used to be. It really has nothing to do with the carnival. There’s no morals, no respect—people are just a bunch of walkin’ zombies now. They walk around like, ‘Where the fuck am I?’ I love people, but I don’t fuckin’ like ‘em.”

In addition to everything else, Georgette posts endless updates on Facebook, whether it be vintage photos, live events or personal messages to her fans and the world at large. (“A fabulous promoter,” declared Gary Darwin.) As she is the first to admit, her writing skills aren’t the best, resulting in a surreal, unedited mélange of broken English and autocorrect. Figuring out what she’s trying to say is like decoding a Burroughs/Gysin cut-up. Here’s a favorite: “This semi truck was originally my mom and dad girl show we had a big tit and a beautiful front now is part of the bracelet business you look closely you’ll see me in the possibility.” And another: “I got that truck I’m standing on from Evelyn Curry famous lion Tamers very few ladies can perform with your Liars cuz when is that time of month the lions and tigers smell that blood it is hard to work with him and Johnny Ramirez extra Magic not good for a husband but a good friend who passed away four years ago.”

Commit a Crime

When byNWR came to Vegas to shoot her act in September, 2018, When we came to Vegas to shoot her act in September, 2018, Georgette was the first one to arrive. She worked the crowd like a politician, promo materials on every table. After the show her back pain was so severe she immediately had to lie down – suddenly becoming naked as a jaybird in the process. (“Honey, they’re show people, they understand,” she said to her helper, waving off concerns about our crew.)

Later that night we met up at her van, where she ruminated on Sun Myung Moon as she demonstrated how to make use of the tiniest of roach butts by heating it with the car lighter, then sticking it on the end of a pin in order to inhale (a trick she did with Bob Hope, apparently). “I like my marijuana,” she confessed. Georgette also admitted that she feels a bit more mellow these days. “Used to be I beat the fuck outta people, nowadays I don’t do any of that stuff. I take a walk. My mind is strong. It overcomes everything.”

She had presents for all of us. If Georgette likes you, at the end of a visit, she’ll hand you a little doll – a strange, stuffed creature or statue of something. And she names them all Toby. “This way, before I go to bed at night, I pray for whoever owns a Toby, wishin’ them nothin’ but luck and happiness.” (This is not just mystical, but practical. “Otherwise I’d have to name everybody and say, ‘Good luck, Bobby…Good luck, Sue…’”)

Case in point: Carolyn Goodman was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. So Georgette sent her a little package. Inside were a few photographs showing their friendship, along with a little surprise. “I got a rock that I found in Mobile, Alabama by a log cabin that I liked real well. Now, I’ve been carryin’ this rock for twenty fuckin’ years. And I just rub it every so often.

“So I put that rock in a baggie with a little note to Carolyn. And I says, ‘This rock is named Toby. I’ve had this rock for over twenty years. Now Toby’s gonna take care of you and protect you.’”

Stories such as that one move me, but I can’t get sentimental about Georgette. She’ll deck me. When she goes, though, a whole secret history of America will go with her. Personally I think Las Vegas should build her a museum – and they should do it right now so she can join in the fun.

On the first floor would be Georgette’s voluminous collection of photos and memorabilia. The second level would be home to the Georgette Dante Theater Of Unknown Show-Biz Legends, where all her pals and celebrity impersonators could perform.

Next floor up would be The Georgette Facebook Archive, which would present every one of her posts and re-posts in chronological order, helpfully annotated to unlock their actual meaning.

And the top floor would host The Georgette One-On-One Theater, where you’d encounter gigantic past-and-present holograms of Dante doing her thing, with Georgette in the flesh right next to you to provide a running commentary on her life’s work.

And up on the roof would be a golden ladder to the sky, with a nearby spotlight set up for a special event. Why a ladder, you ask?

As Georgette told me more than once, “When I get to the point somebody has to take care of me and wipe me, I’m gonna climb to the top of a building somewhere, take a handful of pills and just fall off the damn thing – and it’s over with.”

There would be no better place for this event to occur then atop the Georgette Dante Museum.

She could climb those golden stairs, breathe a little fire, whip out a magic trick or two, then make her final exit as an audience of her fans watch from below (and maybe even jump out of the way). Ghoulish? I suppose. But I think Georgette would see the showbiz in it. Talk about going out with a bang.

Until then, Georgette will keep right on scheming and dreaming. She has no regrets. “To be honest with you, if I had to do it over, I would not change a goddamn thing. Look at what it made me.” Nor has she any fears concerning present or future.

“My road is a slow road. When I finally get there, I might be 75. But when I get there, I’m gonna feel good about myself.”

Which is why you can’t ever utter the words ‘sugar daddy’ around Georgette.  “No fuckin’ way! I could get a sugar daddy, but I’d feel like a piece of shit. My mind would be warped. I ain’t suckin’ nobody’s goddamn dick or let ’em fuck me in the ass to pay my goddamn bills. No one’s gonna be able to say, ‘She screwed her way all the way to the top’ about me. Bullshit!

“I worked real hard for every fuckin’ thing I’ve got. And I like the idea that when I get to the very top, nobody around me is gonna say nothin’ bad. They’ll say, ‘She worked her ass off, she deserves what she’s got.’

“And I like feelin’ good about me. I know I’m cool. Hell, I’m so cool, I pee ice cubes.”

Special thanks to Charlie Beesley and Natalia Wisdom.

Jimmy McDonough is a biographer and journalist. He has written acclaimed biographies of Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, Russ Meyer, Al Green and Andy Milligan. Time magazine declared his Milligan biography The Ghastly One “a masterpiece” and John Waters has repeatedly named it one of his all-time favorites. McDonough has also authored definitive profiles on Jimmy Scott, Gary Stewart, Hubert Selby, Jr. and Link Wray. His most recent work is The Exotic Ones: That Fabulous Film-Making Family from Music City, USA -The Ormonds.