One day last year, the Miccosukees’ alligator handler position opened up. After the 1928 construction of Tamiami Trail, which connected Naples and Miami, many Miccosukees moved near the new road, where they drew in tourists with their crafts and performances, like the alligator demonstration.
They migrated to Florida and then escaped to the Everglades to elude the federal government’s violent effort to move them to the West. Members of the tribe originally belonged to the Creek Nation in what is now Georgia and Alabama.
She got a job flipping burgers at the Miccosukee Indian Village, a tourist outpost that showcases the history and culture of the Miccosukee people. “They told me women are not capable of wrestling alligators,” Cottone says, “so I quit.” But she hit a glass ceiling while working for one Orlando park. Hired at a handful of different attractions, she learned how to interact with birds, primates, reptiles and more.
Jessie Cottone, the tribe’s first female alligator wrangler, does the same trick, but she refers to it with a gender-neutral name: “Face Off.”Īs a kid, Cottone loved the outdoors, eating mud and playing with insects, but as she grew older, she says, her mother pushed her to become more “girly.” When she finished high school, she considered going to cosmetology school, but instead decided to work with animals. 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.For decades, alligator wrestlers working at the Miccosukee tribe’s Indian Village cultural center have performed a trick they call “Close Shave.” Seated on an alligator’s back, they hold the big reptile’s mouth open by clamping down on its top jaw with only their chin, then pass their hands through the gaping maw of the deadly beast. 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. 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 written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. (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).
0 kommentar(er)
