travsd

Happy 100th Birthday, Marie Ellen St. Aubin

Born 100 years ago today, performing little person Marie Ellen St. Aubin.

Trained in dance and acrobatics, St. Aubin became a professional entertainer at the age of 13 at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Troupes she performed with include Rose’s Royal Midgets, Fred Roper & His Wonderful Midgets, Henry & Dolly Kramer Midget Troupe, and Nate Eagle’s Hollywood Midgets. In 1946 she played a leprechaun in the movie Three Wise Fools with Lionel Barrymore. In 1947 she was working as an elf in the toy section of a Chicago department store when she met Parnell St. Aubin, one of the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz (1939), whom she married and opened a bar with. The bar, called The Midget Club, was open from 1948 through 1982.

Since the passing of all the little people who played Munchkins, St. Aubin has been in demand at Wizard of Oz fan fests throughout the country as a Munchkin Widow. There are (or have been) such festivals in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri (Hannibal), Kansas, upstate New York, and elsewhere. This article from the Indiana festival is where we get the info for this post; read more here. 

For more on performing little people please check out Rose’s Royal Midgets and Other Little People in Vaudeville. 

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.