Pauline Musters, the Smallest Woman Ever
![Pauline_Musters_4[1]](http://travsd.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/pauline_musters_41.jpg)
Today is the birthday of Pauline Musters (1876-1895), at 23 inches tall the smallest woman ever recorded. She began to be exhibited when still an infant; in later years, she acquired dancing and acrobatic skills to enhance the act. She was billed as “Lady Dot’, “the Midget Mite”, and “Princess Paulina”. A native of the Netherlands, she toured extensively in Western Europe before coming to the U.S. in 1895 to play the vaudeville house Proctor’s Fifth Avenue. It is while she was staying in New York that she contracted pneumonia and died.
To find out more about the variety arts past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. And don’t miss Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, to be released by Bear Manor Media in 2013.
February 26, 2013 at 8:17 am
Just curious: Did she never actually make it to Proctor’s before she died on that trip?
February 26, 2013 at 8:30 am
yes, from what I read, she performed and she was very well recieved, making it doubly unfortunate