Trixie Friganza
She began working at a young age (12 or 13) in order to help support her family, securing a cash girl position at Pogue's store, and earning $3 per week.Motivated by the desire to provide more for her family, and the responsibility she must have felt due to being the oldest of the three daughters, she auditioned for a chorus girl position in The Pearl of Pekin' (1889).She got the part but in order to avoid any embarrassment to her mother and family (stage careers for women were not considered reputable at the time) she opted to begin performing once the production moved up to Cleveland, Ohio.[3] Her own personal life is consistent with those ideals; having taken her mother's maiden name and refusing to leave her career in spite of marriage, she defied society's proprieties and norms, modeling what Susan Glenn calls "New Woman".At the age of 79, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she confessed to enjoying watching TV a great deal saying “that's where vaudeville has gone – into television” (Slide, Encyclopedia… pg.Records from appearances during the week ending April 28, 1918, indicate that the audience's response to Trixie Friganza was huge, where she elicited a total of 29 laughs, second only to Charlie Chaplin's motion picture A Dog's Life.Frederick James Smith, writing for the Dramatic Mirror (February 8, 1919) called her show “a vigorous comedy act” (Slide, Selected Vaudeville Criticism, pg.She performed many successful acts, many of which revolved around her plus-sized figure, which she described as the “perfect forty-six”, and the trials and tribulations of love (Slide, Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, pg.On July 21, 1915, the Dramatic Mirror reported successful completion of a 75-week tour on the Keith vaudeville circuit; during this time, she never missed a performance, never was late or was involved in any altercations with the stage or house manager.The first minute of the picture is lost to nitrate decomposition, but the entire Vitaphone soundtrack survives, preserving a glimpse of what must have been part of her vaudeville act of the time.During her career, Trixie Friganza published articles and poems in newspapers, some of which still exist today in the Robinson Locke Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
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