5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
After fame and fallout, Lucy Wightman finds peace and clarity among the birds
Wightman has moved through various lives in her 65 years. She's been a debutante, a photographer, a mental health professional, and a gas station attendant. But she's still best known for the feathers she once wore as part of her costume — the costume that she peeled off nightly in her role as Princess Cheyenne, Boston's most famous exotic dancer in the
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On June 17, Wightman will celebrate the release of her autobiography,
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'I love the fun of those 11 years that are covered in the book,' she says, sitting in an alcove of the Plymouth Public Library.
The only child of well-to-do parents, raised in Illinois and Connecticut, the former Lucy Johnson landed in Boston as a teenager in the late 1970s. She was already on her way to becoming a Zelig of sorts: Infatuated with the singer Cat Stevens, she'd gone to his concert at the New Haven Coliseum, learned of his plans for the last date of his tour in New York City, then took the train there and maneuvered her way into a liaison with the star performer.
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Wightman's new autobiography follows her journey through the '70s and '80s, during the height of the Combat Zone's heyday.
Provided
In Boston,
she answered an ad for exotic dancers in the Boston Phoenix. Quickly displaying a knack for theatricality, she became the star attraction at the Naked i Cabaret, the red-light district's most celebrated nightclub. The mainstream press took notice.
'Princess Cheyenne is to the Combat Zone what Gypsy Rose Lee was to burlesque,' wrote Stephanie Schorow in her 2017 book
Well-aware of the stereotypes about her fellow dancers' lives, Wightman challenged expectations. She looked forward to her conversations with the lawyer and Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz.
'He'd ask provocative intellectual questions, like, 'How does it feel to be objectified?'' she recalls. 'And I'd say, well, I'm not the one making myself into an object. That's on other people.'
She'd grown up comfortable in her own body. 'If it's just about being naked, I didn't see the big deal,' Wightman says. 'I still don't.'
Once she made her name, she became a local celebrity. Often she engaged with her friend LauriUmansky on local talk-show appearances. Umansky, the author (under a pseudonym) of 'Naked Is the Best Disguise: My Life as a Stripper,' had quit the business and become a feminist scholar.
'She didn't believe I could have feminist views and do what I was doing, and I disagreed,' Wightman explains.
Wightman took a respite from dancing when she reconnected with Stevens in London. For a moment, she thought she might marry the singer — he'd given her the copy of the Qur'an that had introduced him to the Islamic faith. Her mother met the famous entertainer and pronounced him humorless and 'boring'; Wightman and Stevens went their separate ways.
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There were other notable encounters. One day in the club, a strange man with a curious accent came in, badgering the staff with requests to speak with 'zee Pleencess.' Amused, Wightman sat down with him and tried to communicate through doodles and playing Charades.
It turned out to be the comedian Andy Kaufman, who'd become famous as Latka, the immigrant cab driver on the sitcom 'Taxi.' He was famous, that is, to almost everyone but Wightman, who worked nights and didn't watch TV. She had no idea who he was.
'He was otherworldly, above everyone's pay scale,' she recalls of the time she spent with Kaufman, who died in 1984 at age 35. 'It took me about a year to figure out he wasn't life-partner material. I was pretty naive. Still am.'
Wightman's publisher is the independent, Boston-based
He and Wightman have developed a close friendship, they both say. He was impressed with her writing as soon as he began reading her manuscript.
'I barely touched it,' he says. 'Her personality really comes through. Funny, smart, sensitive, tough — all of it. There are no flies on her.'
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Wightman stopped dancing in 1988.
'The Zone was being cleaned up,' she says. 'And I was getting bored.'
Though the book ends there, her life has remained eventful since. Beginning in 2005, she endured a public trial after being charged with
'That was a life-changer, at a cellular level,' she says.
Other than a bout with long COVID, her spirits in recent years have been good, she says. She still dances around the Cape Cod house she bought last year to the sound of her most prized possession, her stadium speakers. The bird banding keeps her busy, and she's been making new friends through that.
'You're walking eight miles a day together,' she says. 'You have to have a certain intellectual capability to
do
the research and sort through the tiny little details.'
Sometimes, when she tells a new acquaintance she has a book coming out, they blanch when she tells them about her former life.
'If somebody doesn't like it, what… ever,' she says. 'Because I had a blast.'
James Sullivan can be reached at
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