This wonderfully wicked burlesque dancer’s snake act sizzled the midcentury stripper circuit
When trouble followed Zorita, she simply chalked it up to good publicity
It was a mild morning in downtown Miami. But one striking young woman was wearing a fur coat around her shoulders anyway. Her flashily unseasonable outfit wasn’t the most attention grabbing thing about her, however. She was also leading a 10-foot Chinese bull snake down the sidewalk on a leash.
She didn’t get far. About 1,000 onlookers gathered to watch the dark-haired beauty and her slithering companion. The spectacle stopped traffic for 10 minutes. Then the police showed up and arrested the woman for disorderly conduct.
“What’s all the shouting about, anyhow? We were only taking the morning breeze,” she insisted, while posing for news photographers. When asked, she gave her name only as “Zorita.”
Two days later, on February 24, 1939, an ad ran in the back of the Daily News:
ZORITA
AND HER SNAKE
OPENS TONIGHT
WITH A BIG NEW SHOW!
MINSKY’S BURLESQUE
It was the first of hundreds of ads over four decades that would tout Zorita’s name. The young dancer toured the country during the heyday of burlesque, in the 1940s and 1950s. Her snake act surely turned heads, but it was Zorita’s piercing and sensual disposition that made her so irresistible. And when trouble followed, she simply chalked it up to good publicity.
Zorita’s real name is something of a mystery. Some accounts have her as Ada Brockett; others as Kathryn Boyd. She was adopted at an early age by Methodist parents in Chicago. Home life was challenging, and she took a job as a manicurist at age 15. One day, a client noticed the teen’s full, mature figure and suggested she perform at stag parties for extra cash. “It’s hell trying to dance to an accordion,” remembered Zorita in a 2000 interview.
At 17, she moved to San Diego to work at a nudist colony at the World’s Fair. There, she befriended a snake charmer. Despite her phobia, the man gifted his protégé two serpents, which she promptly named Elmer and Oscar, and stowed them away in a canvas sack in her closet.
Soon, she was inspired to pursue a career in burlesque, with the snakes to star in the act. With Elmer, Oscar, and plenty of charm, Zorita was born.
It’s still unknown just how she chose the name. “She liked to sound exotic,” Zorita’s daughter, Tawny Petillo, told the Miami Herald. “All I know is it had a ‘Z’ in it, and you could make it into a snake.” Sure enough, Zorita often added eyes and a thin tongue to her autographs.
The performance itself was devilish and orgasmic. Not only did Zorita choreograph it, she named the act “The Consummation of the Wedding of the Snake.” The storyline, as she told it: “A gorgeous young maiden is going to be sold into slavery to an ugly old man. Instead, she dances with a snake, gets bitten, and dies.” As she writhes with the snake, she undresses. It slithers through her breasts and over her buttocks. As she succumbs to the serpent, she moans. The consummation is complete.
Her secondary acts were just as thrilling. In one, Zorita emerges from a giant spiderweb dripping in rhinestones, as dark “spider” hands slowly tease off her clothing from behind. In another, called “½ ‘n ½,” she dressed one side of her body as a man in a suit and the other as a virginal damsel. She posed in various romantic contortions for a carnal trick-of-the-eye.
Between performances, Zorita would walk among the tables. In tight spaces, her snake would graze the heads of customers. One patron reportedly became so alarmed that he pulled a gun on her before the club manager intervened. Other times, she would bring out the children of her fellow performers and threaten to throw the snake on a table unless they gave the kids a dollar.
No wonder she sold out shows.
When her reputation preceded her, the law intervened. On August 15, 1941, at age 23, Zorita was arrested for indecent exposure at the Kentucky Club in Toledo, Ohio. She had “stripped herself down to a costume of goose pimples,” according to a report by the Toledo Blade. She was released on bond, but after receiving word that Zorita planned to leave town, police re-arrested her. She appeared in court “wearing conventional clothes and a pair of green-tinted glasses framed in daisy petals.” As she left court, she told an officer the whole affair was “kind of corny.” On August 27, Zorita was convicted by a jury and sentenced to six months in jail.
At the time, she had been touring venues in a trailer with a “girl friend.” Known to be bisexual, Zorita nonetheless married and divorced three men. After her daughter was born, Zorita slowed her travels and settled in Dade County, Florida. She bought an estate using money from General Motors stock, which she frequently requested from men she slept with. Later in life, she revealed she stripped for men but loved women.
Once in Miami, Zorita opened her own nightclub in the 1960s. She named it Zorita’s Show Bar. According to the Miami Herald, after performances, she ate breakfast at 3 a.m. at a drugstore in Little Havana. Her snake nestled on the seat next to her in a basket. She fed it crumbs of food.
“She raised quite a few eyebrows,” said her daughter.
Zorita purchased and operated several more popular nightclubs in the Miami area, until she officially retired in 1974. Though she remains relatively famous in the burlesque world, she abruptly withdrew from public life. She died in 2001, at age 86.
As for her snakes? She traded them in to breed Persian cats.
