Calgary Herald from Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 29

ft 3 Calgary I Icrald TODAY Classified D3 Weather D5 Editor: Mark Tremblay CALGARY, OCTOBER 30. 1988 Annie turns talents to saving street kids musician, writer and feminist. And, because of her insider knowledge, she fights, through her Wake Up program, to keep kids out of the sleaze of drugs and prostitution she says the stripping business has become. "Doing something good is a high. I have taken a character that represents everything bad and am using it for good stuff.

Kids like Annie Ample. They believe me when I tell them what is happening out there. I've been there why would I lie?" il By Barb Livingstone (Herald writer) Dead pigs and mud. Now that she's retired, Annie Ample is up to her famous 44 DDs in both. The former stripper, who once insured her cleavage for $1 million with Lloyd's of London, walked away from the business in 1987 tired of seeing young kids shooting drugs between their toes and into their eyes so no "tracks" would show; tired of men throwing everything from syringes to acid at her.

She left the big money and bumps and grinds of stripping, for life on an Ontario farm with her third husband, Marshall. And before the tour to promote her book Annie Ample: The Bare Facts (Key Porter Books), that new life included being knee deep in rubber boots to help dispose of a neighbor's dead pig. Now, when she prepares for a photo shoot, she struggles putting on makeup that was second nature to her a year ago. She still says "sexy snake" instead of "cheese" as the film rolls but jokes that she no longer worries about catching cold she gets to keep her clothes on. In fact, on this particular cold, snowy day, her famous cleavage pumped by implants after risky silicone treatments threatened her with a mastectomy is covered in a sedate black blouse and a deep purple suit.

But her black hair, streaked with grey "that I've is wild and her lips are covered in bright pink lipstick. For seven years, Annie Ample earned as much as $4,000 a week using her burlesquean sense of humor while throwing off her clothes in clubs throughout the United States and Canada. "I found I had one peculiar talent I could twirl my breasts. I'd jump up and down and get them going. Then, I'd hang on to one while the other whirled around.

I'd do that to chickens clucking the William Tell Overture," she says in her book. Now, that woman is sometimes referred to as the Blue Vanna White. She is a farmer, with the rich and famous in Cannes or at Studio 54 in New York. What started as a job to support her two children produced during a teenage marriage to an alcoholic eventually led to layouts in High Society magazine, dances with Ryan O'Neal and a and a run-in with a lecherous Robin Leach of the TV series, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. During yet another abusive marriage and two common-law relationships to men crippled by drugs, alcohol and financial dependency, Annie fought back.

"Sometimes I don't know how I survived when others didn't," says Ample. "It wasn't that I had self-confidence look at the men I chose. When you lack confidence, you don't feel you deserve a good relationship." By 1985, life in the strip clubs was getting bad. Other than the York Hotel in Calgary and the Zanzibar in Toronto, which Ample describes as her favorite places to strip, there was a "white slave market" out of Montreal shipping teenage girls to clubs throughout the country. "An agent will pick up young kids almost anywhere high schools, bus stops, off the street For a fee and a promise of stardom, this slimeball becomes their manager," she says in her book.

Club owners no longer treated the strippers well. Ample divides them into three categories Las Vegas Maybe of jewelry, slicked-back hair, shirt cut to his navel. He'd even put hairspray on his chest hair if he had any to look more Mafia Wanna Be (He'd "wear a gun that he'd let the girls see just to keep them in line or and The Professional probably go to church on Sunday with the family and few people would even know he" was the owner of that kind of Ample started complaining and that put her in conflict with the owners, the agents and other strippers who resented the fact she didn't do drugs. She refused to have table i iinri ii AMPLE: Reading, writing and Women's breasts chronicle century's social progress 'An agent will pick up young kids almost anywhere high schools, bus stops, off the street' Annie Ample In 1980, when Annie, born Karen Bell, started stripping, she had already survived an abusive childhood. The ugly duckling child adored her mother but her TV repairman father drank their money away while providing more than professional services to his female customers.

He also taunted Annie with being mentally retarded because she had trouble reading. It wasn't until her own son was diagnosed as being dyslexic that she realized what her problem was. "At the age of 30, a whole new world opened up to me when I learned to read. The people at the post office say 'don't throw out the junk mail, Annie will read it'," she says in a chat over coffee. But her dogmatic reading these days of encyclopedias bought at Goodwill in Sudbury is a world away from partying when I saw "Why your breasts aren't as weird as you think" on the cover.

"The next time you're sure you've got the world's weirdest boobs," went the article, "just chill for a minute, realize you're not alone. That's for sure. The story made me think of Edward Maeder, curator of costumes and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He's a man I wanted to meet ever since I'd read that "Maed-er's unique talent lies in his ability to date art within one year of its origins by the relationship of the breast to the body." Could you have resisted? "In a nutshell," said Maeder 9 i Dean Bicknell, Calgary Herald and Maegan, 4, study problem i I A when I called, "in 1798, the bosoms were under the chin In 1903, they hung over your belt and were called the 'mono-bosom' and in the '20s, you weren't permitted to have them at all! "In the '30s, everyone thought they'd gone so far in the '20s that the next step was total nudity," he said. "In fact, that was achieved!" I said I hadn't ever heard about that.

"Well, bias-cut fabric is like total nudity because women in those gowns couldn't wear underwear it would cause a line," said Maeder. Unless you were an adolescent then, the '40s were a bor By Robin Abcarian The first time my breasts occasioned a public discussion, I thought I was going to die on the spot. "My, my, my," crooned the Southern-bred Mrs. Taggart, I queen bee of our neighborhood because she had a dozen children, a thriving real estate business and big ones of her own. "Aren't you just developing so nicely!" Please, God, won't you kill me now? No such luck.

So. Having learned the hard way that breasts are such a sensitive topic for adolescents, I grabbed a recent issue of Sassy magazine Larry MacDougal, Calgary Herald new loves in Annie's life tend to let Canadians wallow in their naivete. She'd like to see a 24-hour counselling line for kids in need and takes the story of her life and life in the strip joints anywhere she's asked to "I have nothing against adult entertainment, but I don't like to see kids hurt," she says. "You can't give up hope for the kids already on the street, but the chances of reaching them are slim. I want to get to them before they get to the street." She studies theology "sounds strange doesn't it" grows vegetables and looks to the day when one of her kids could make her "Granny An-me.

fi 1 DOLLY PARTON: Success such a relaxed atmosphere, par-i ents felt comfortable talking to and sharing concerns and questions with regards to their children's math. As two participants jauntily made their way to the front door after a morning with pattern blocks and having fun with symmetry (honest, they were all laughing and chatting as they tested figures to find out if they were symmetrical, looked for the line of reflection and magically moved mustacheson to dolpins with the help of miras, another interesting math tool) the name tags with "I'm 4 Math" seemed to say it all. "Did you enjoy yourself this morning?" questioned this reporter. Both grinned widely and Mom Myra Phipps answered, "Thoroughly." Parents and teachers interested in math conferences can contact Marilyn Harrison at R. B.

Bennett Elementary School at 288-4242. Harrison says a video is also being developed to show the' concepts used in the conferences. "Each committee must careful-' ly consider the audience for which such a conference is targeted," said Harrison. "The structure would be the same, but the activities must meet the school's individual needs." farm chores have become the try has the most sexually explicit strip acts in North America, matched only by New York City. "I was in one hotel when I performed in Calgary at the Stampede and I was embarrassed being a Canadian (she considers herself one since she married a Canadian)," she says during the interview.

"There were X-rated films and advertising for strip clubs. And at Expo in Vancouver, you were in walking distance of Chicklets where a 15-year-old was stripping, eight-months pregnant, shouting 'die, die' and the customers were shouting it back." The ex-stripper doesn't in shaping the '80s breast: Pumping Iron and Dolly Parton. "Because of the success of Dolly Parton, it was all right to have huge' breasts," said Maeder. Parton-size pectorals have yielded to smaller, but nonetheless ample, bosoms with muscular shoulders, said the curator. "You know, there was a time when breasts were like BBs on a bread board," he said.

"Now, women with reasonable-size breasts are back in vogue. I'm delighted, needless to say." But what do you care? You probably buy Playboy for the articles. (Abcarian is a columnist with Knight-Ridder news service.) "I think we can get some," her mom answered. Harrison sees this parent-teacher involvement as a chance for parents to learn some rather fun ways to help their children with mathematical skills. And, since math teaching has changed a lot since these parents went to school, it's an opportunity for them to understand what is being done in this area.

"Math is problem solving, logical thinking and applying all those kinds of skills to everyday life," said Harrison. Arithmetic, she added, is simply the mechanical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The African game Kalah was a big hit with the kindergarten crew and each parent-child team made their own Kalah game to take home. And not only were participants taking home some actual materials, but as the "teams" left, happy chatter included, "Can we play that again when we get home, huh, huh?" to "I'm going to find those puzzles of yours so we can do them together." Communication between the teachers and parents was improved as teachers were able to take some time to explain to parents why their children were involved in hands-on type activities during math periods. And in dancing naked young girls dancing right at a customer's face during her acts.

The shows were getting raunchier with any art being replaced by "duos" and inserts. "It wasn't just the work that was nauseating to me by now the girls were humping and bumping behind the scenes, as well as doing drugs. On stage, they were rubbing their bodies against each other. It was a cesspool." Today, "the preconceived notion of a stripper or dancer as part-hooker, part-doper is not out of line," Ample says in her book. And despite what Canadians would like to believe, this coun ing time for breasts, but, ahhhh, the '50s were much better.

"It was the antithesis of the '20s," said Maeder. "Everything was lifted and separated. We'd achieved the atomic bomb, better living through chemistry, and all this naive optimism produces very flamboyant dress, and nothing could be more flamboyant than the '50s breast. In bullet bras, they were lethal weapons." In the '60s and said Maeder, "everyone looked like an unmade bed" although there was a move toward the masculine, flattened silhouette. Two conflicting forces, appropriately enough, are at work sor Richard Skemp's research into the way children best learn mathematical concepts were presented.

Children from kindergarten to Grade 6 took part in the activities. One classroom found adults and children bent over pattern blocks trying to make 10 different blocks fit into a star-like pattern. As the teacher moved around the room she offered encouragement, answered questions and explained why the activity was math related. Letting children manipulate materials is the key to getting them to understand concepts and problem solving, she said, Giades 1 through 4 had a chance to explore on the computer. Grades 5 and 6 did some string art related to geometry and tackled some mind benders.

In the kindergarten area, children built and explored with uni-fix cubes, playing games where they matched similar colors and put together different lengths of rods that they then ordered from smallest to longest. "I wish I had some cubes," said one pint-sized participant. Math conference brings parents, students together "If a child cannot learn the way we teach then we had belter start to teach the way the child can learn. Sign hanging in R. B.

Bennett elementary school Saturday morning math clas- ses don't sound like popular options for children, let alone their parents. But an enthusiastic crowd of more than 70 parents and children attended R. B. Bennett elementary school's biannual math conference one Saturday morning this month. As the children and their parents busily buzzed around the school accompanied by happy chatter, furrowed brows, joint concentration and hugs, one began to wonder when the scare went out of math.

R. B. Bennett teachers and a university professor offered math activities where parents and students could work together. The conference is the brainchild of R. B.

Bennett teacher Marilyn Harrison. She liked the concept of involving parents in their children's math education and decided to give it a try. Once parents understand and feel comfortable with mathematical concepts used in teaching they can learn games that practice these skills. Then they are partners in their child's education, Harrison says. Games based on British profes- PARTNERS: Wilma Campbell i mimAimk .1 mi.