What's it like being a Parisian showgirl

Imagine dancing topless when you were pregnant. Wearing a 15kg feather backpack. And then imagine coming back after maternity leave and dancing again on days that begin around 4pm and end at 2:30am. Then going home to be a mother. Of two. In Paris.

Dancer Shay Stafford worked as a showgirl at the famous Moulin Rouge and the Lido during the 12 years she lived in Paris. Now she’s written a book about it (along with her husband, Aussie journalist Bryce Corbett) and I sat down with her for a chat…..

Filmed on location at The Loft, Sydney.

If you want to read more about Shay’s life in Paris and what it was like to be a Brissy girl raising children in France and then going back to a night job of dancing as a showgirl, Shay has written this guest post exclusively for Mamamia…

Walking the tightrope of being a working mum can be a challenge at the best of times. Doing it under the spotlight dressed only in a sequinned g-string, feathers and nine-centimetre heels is something else again.

I know because for the past twelve years I have been a Paris showgirl – and for the last two of those I’ve been that most incongruous of things: a showgirl mum. Nappies by day, sequins by night. And all against the backdrop of the world’s most romantic city.
From the humblest of beginnings in suburban Brisbane, and thanks in large part to a teenage crush on Leroy from Fame, I went on to dance at the Moulin Rouge and Lido cabaret shows in Paris.

In my new book, Memoirs Of A Showgirl, I offer up a glimpse behind the red curtain of Paris cabaret and account for my journey from a gangly kid with freckles in the suburbs of Brisvegas to dancing lead roles on two of the world’s best-known stages. And while there’s little doubt the whole Paris showgirl existence was a novel one, becoming a mother in France was an astonishing experience of its own kind.

I met my now husband Bryce, a fellow Aussie, eight years into my Paris adventure. I’d had a string of relationships with French men, mostly notable for their melodrama, and found I was relieved to meet a man from the homeland who understood me implicitly and with whom I could communicate in a kind of cultural shorthand.

A few months after we married, I fell pregnant. I kept dancing – two shows a night, six nights a week – for a couple months. By that time, my breasts and waistline had changed shape sufficiently that I no longer slotted seamlessly into the chorus line. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, there are actually quite a few showgirl mums in the ranks of the Moulin Rouge and Lido. Some even dance up until the five-month mark – not something I was keen to try. Especially not when the French maternity leave entitlements are so generous.

By law, every woman is entitled to six weeks full pay before their due date and ten weeks full pay after it – with a possibility to extend it by another four weeks (which almost everyone does). As a cabaret dancer, physically incapable of performing twelve shows a week, I stopped work much earlier than most French women and was paid 80 percent of my salary up until the point I was eligible for the full-pay maternity leave benefits.

I returned to work four-months after the birth of our son (more acutely self-conscious about my body than I had ever been in over 15 years of professional dancing) whereupon I was given the option of taking an extra paid day off per week in the event I felt more inclined to dedicate that time to motherhood rather than high-kicks. After the birth of a second child, this is an arrangement you can stretch out for three years – the rationale being mothers should be given more time to take care of their children until they reach school age and still have a place in the workforce.

It’s no accident that France has the highest birth rate of any country in Western Europe. As a dancer, my maternity leave benefits were more generous than most, but this generosity of spirit towards working mothers is across the board and speaks volumes for the value they place on the important job of parenting. The whole experience was so smooth that we decided to try for a second little Aussie-in-Paris. When Flynn was 20 months old, I was back in the familiar surrounds of Les Bluets Hopital Maternité in the 12th arrondissement of Paris delivering our second child, Rose.

Of course, it’s not all wine and roses in France when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. The country’s rusted-on reputation for being a nation of neurotic dieters (at least it’s true of the women) was brought home to me during the appointment with my GP when she confirmed I was pregnant.

“You are NOT eating for two,” she warned me. “One kilo per month is permitted, but no more.”

Given that I was no longer performing twelve shows a week, by the fourth month – and after the nausea had passed and my appetite had returned – I had put on three kilos. At a subsequent visit to the doctor I was told my sudden weight gain was “unacceptable” and that I was to stop eating dairy products immediately.

The final benefit on offer to mothers in France’s great state-sponsored motherhood project comes in the surprising form of government-funded vaginal re-education classes. Every new mum is invited to avail themselves of a series of sessions with a trained medical professional whose sole purpose is to rehabilitate your perineum. The French consider it an investment in the future health of the nation, staving off the costly treatment of incontinence-related issues among their womenfolk later in life.
If it’s all so great in gay Paree, I hear you say, then why didn’t you stay? As a pair of Aussies in Paris, my hubby and I were keen to give our kids the same upbringing that we had enjoyed. A childhood shaped by big skies and beaches, sunshine and trees to climb, grandparents and cousins.

Besides, after twelve years spent dancing on the stages of the Moulin Rouge and Lido, I was ready to hang up the heels. When I arrived in Paris on a wing-and-a-prayer over a decade ago, I couldn’t have imagined the places life was about to take me. That it led me into the path of a fellow Australian and eventually back to our homeland with two beautiful children in tow is to me, a fitting postscript to my Paris adventure. It certainly makes me one very happy old showgirl.

You can visit Shay’s blog here.