Zorita

Zorita, born Kathryn Boyd, was a renowned American burlesque dancer.

Born in Ohio in 1915, Zorita was adopted by a religious Christian couple raised in Chicago. At age 15, while working as a manicurist, a client noted her full and womanly figure, and she began working as a bachelor party stripper to earn extra cash. Around this same time, she entered a beauty pageant, through which she was discovered and started burlesque dancing.

At 17, she moved to San Diego, California, to work at a nudist colony at the California Pacific International Exposition — a kind of regional world’s fair. At this exposition, she befriended a snake charmer who gifted her two snakes, boa constrictors named Elmer and Oscar, who became part of some of her most well-known acts.

Zorita’s burlesque performances gained her a high degree of visibility and notoriety. Her acts were frequently designed to shock. In her famous “Half and Half” act, she would dress as both a bride and groom. After the groom slowly stripped the bride, the number ended in a wedding-night romp. Several of her dances were arachnid in theme. In one, a hidden “spider” removed her clothes while she danced in front of a sparkling spider web. In another, Zorita emerges from a giant spider web glittering in rhinestones, and dark spider’s hands slowly peel off her garments from behind.

Her most iconic acts involved the boa constrictors Elmer and Oscar, including “The Consummation of the Wedding of the Snake”, where she stripped while draped in one of the eight-foot snakes.

Zorita’s unconventionally risqué performances brought her some troubles along with the fame. In 1941, she was arrested for indecent exposure and sentenced to six months in jail. That same year, animal rights activists had her arrested for cruelty to animals for using snakes in her act, though she escaped incarceration. Zorita encountered legal issues in multiple states over the use of her snakes, including being arrested, fined, and having snakes confiscated.

Through the 1940s and 50s, she was among the most famous dancers in the country, donning over-the-top outfits and taking her pet snakes on walks with a leash. Zorita and her snakes even starred in a sexploitation film, I Married a Savage (1949), where she seduces a stranded sailor with her erotic snake dance. She appeared in five films over her career, including a cameo in the 1974 Lenny Bruce biopic, Lenny, starring a young Dustin Hoffman.

Zorita was known to be bi. She was married (and divorced) three times to men, the first of which at age 15, and had one daughter. She regularly toured with “girl friends.” She said that while she stripped for (and occasionally married) men, she preferred women more.

Zorita retired from stripping in 1954, and spent the next two decades running nightclubs in New York City and Miami, Florida. Her first was “Zorita’s Show Bar.” In 1974, she retired completely and spent her latter years breeding Persian cats. She died in 2001 at age 86.