Vegas showgirl Anna Bailey broke barriers. At 97, she still has it.

Bailey was one of the original showgirls at the Moulin Rouge, which when it opened in 1955 was the first racially integrated hotel-casino not only in Las Vegas, but in the country. She was also the first black woman to perform in an otherwise all-white choir line on the Strip.

On this day at the Aliante, she was like any other dancer: she marked her steps and struck different poses: she lifted her chin, pointed her toe and stretched her arm balletically; Then she tilted her head back and dramatically spread her hand in front of her forehead like a fan.

Along with eleven other former Vegas dancers, Bailey would play the small role of “legendary showgirl” in two group numbers. “Follies,” Stephen Sondheim’s sprawling, beloved musical that premiered on Broadway in April 1971, is a bittersweet melodrama about aging showgirls who reunite at their former haunt, the Weismann Theater (a fictionalized Ziegfeld Theater), on the eve of demolition.

Bailey said she had hesitated to commit to “Follies” because she suffers from arthritis in her right knee: “I guess it’s just getting older,” she said with a shrug. “I’m one of the oldest girls here.” She also stopped driving last year, at the age of 96. But her children (John R. Bailey, a local attorney, and Kimberly Bailey-Tureaud, co-publisher of Las Vegas Black Image magazine) convinced her to take the plunge.

“You never get over being a ham,” she explained. “When they turned the lights on, I got the stage and the audience – that’s why my family cheered me on.”

Bailey was surprised that producers at Metropolis Theatricals, the nonprofit theater company that staged the limited-run production, had found her. “I’m just sitting in my living room and one day I got a phone call,” she said, “I think maybe they Googled it or something.”

One of Bailey’s most charming qualities is how down-to-earth she is, especially considering she is an important figure in Las Vegas history, as is her late husband, William H. “Bob” Bailey, an entertainer who was a local became a television personality. and prominent civil rights activist. She was part of the historic opening of the Moulin Rouge, where performers and patrons of all races were able to dance and socialize together for the first time in a deeply segregated Las Vegas; she also participated in the desegregation of the Strip when she was hired to perform alongside white dancers at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino. Her long and storied life is a lens through which to view the struggle for civil rights in Las Vegas.

“She is present at this pivotal moment in history,” said Claytee D. White, director of the Oral History Research Center at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas Libraries. “It comes in the 1950s, when big changes are happening in the city: the Strip is growing and you have the first integrated hotel. She witnessed everything from that period to the 1960s, when integration occurred, to the 1970s, when the consent decree was signed, giving blacks jobs on the Las Vegas Strip. She is the first black dancer in a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. She sees the entire evolution of the city.”

TThe next afternoon after rehearsal, Bailey sat on a white leather couch in her peaceful, bright home in a planned waterfront community in Las Vegas, reminiscing about her early days as a dancer. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1926, and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn from the time she was one year old. As a young teenager, while studying at the celebrated Mary Bruce School of Dance in Harlem – taking the train from Brooklyn to 125th Street several times a week for tap lessons – there was a strike at the Apollo Theater and the students were asked to to fill. “I think we crossed the line,” Bailey said. “All we were thinking about was working at the Apollo.”

It would be her big break: she began dancing for Larry Steele, the impresario known for his all-black revues, and Clarence Robinson, the choreographer known for his work at New York’s legendary Cotton Club and for the movie musical ‘Stormy Weather’ from 1943.” Bailey toured with Robinson, as did her husband, who had been a singer in the Count Basie Orchestra. (The Baileys married in 1951.) When Robinson was asked to create a show for the new Moulin Rouge, he hired Anna as a dancer and Bob as a singer and master of ceremonies.

Bailey arrived in Las Vegas in March 1955-28 and was full of excitement about her new gig. There was such a fuss surrounding the upcoming opening of the Moulin Rouge that she and the 27 other young women hired to perform there were met at the airport by a group of photographers.

Bailey had assumed the new hotel-casino would be on the Strip, but the dancers were put into limousines and buses and transported past the legendary hotel-casinos, under an overpass and over the railroad tracks before arriving at a location three miles away . on the edge of the predominantly black neighborhood now known as the Historic Westside. She was pleasantly surprised by the beauty of “the Rouge,” as she calls it, but the experience was disorienting nonetheless. “New York was the most liberal and diverse place,” Bailey said. “So when I came here it was a culture shock. … I thought the city was way behind the times.”

On the Strip and in most other parts of Las Vegas, Jim Crow restrictions had a completely shameful effect: Black people were not allowed to patronize the city’s hotels, restaurants, theaters, or clothing stores. Bailey remembers when it was forbidden to eat at a certain hot dog place on Fremont Street: “We could go in there and buy it, but we had to eat outside.” Even famous entertainers could not dine, swim, stay or gamble in the casino hotels where they performed.

“Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Pearl Bailey, Johnny Mathis – all the greats – they come in through the back doors of the casinos,” said White, the oral historian. “They can’t eat in the casinos. They go through the kitchen to get to the stage. They can’t gamble. If someone comes to town strong enough, maybe he’ll say, “Okay, Sammy can sit at the table in the corner with this person.” But that rarely happens.”

Bailey remembers being turned away by a security guard when she and three other dancers tried to enter the Sands. “We were about to enter the casino, but he stopped us,” she said. ‘But you know who saved us? Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra. Sinatra saw us and came to get us and took us to their table. They were so upset that they hit the table.” Sinatra famously threatened to end his popular show at the Sands unless Davis was allowed to stay there with the rest of the Rat Pack.

aAlthough the Moulin Rouge opened with much fanfare – standing room only, celebrities, the cover of Life magazine – it would close within six months.

“We went there and the padlock was on the door,” Bailey said. “And that’s how we found out. We had no idea.”

Although the reasons for the closure remain murky, with some historians citing financial mismanagement, debt and eventual bankruptcy, Bailey believes the casino closed because the 2:30 a.m. show, which no other casino had, took business from the mob’s ownership. , White-only casinos on the Strip. Yet in its short existence, the Moulin Rouge laid the foundation for desegregation in Las Vegas. Five years later, in March 1960, Bob Bailey was among a group of civil rights leaders, hotel owners and government officials who met at the defunct site – a symbolic choice – and signed the “Moulin Rouge Agreement,” which lifted Jim Crow restrictions and the city integrated.

It was around this time that Bailey was hired by the entertainer Pearl Bailey (no relation) to perform at the Flamingo. Pearl placed her “right in the middle,” as Bailey puts it, of the white performers, making her the first black dancer to integrate a chorus line on the Strip. “I never had any problems with the other girls,” she said. “We were all so happy to be able to work.”

Her husband, something of a Renaissance man, hosted a number of popular television shows, worked as Pearl Bailey’s road manager and was appointed chairman of the Nevada Equal Rights Commission in 1962 by Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer (D). The Baileys also opened a lounge called Sugar Hill in 1964; For 25 years it was a popular meeting place outside office hours. The couple was a power couple long before anyone used the term, and Bailey’s home is filled with memorabilia from their 63 years together.

“I really miss him,” she said, showing me a book of photos from Bob’s memorial in 2014. “The only way we had strength was to be together,” she said as she flipped through the pages. “Sillies,” she added, have been a gift in the long aftermath of his death: “It gives me some kind of purpose.”

The following week, as I watched the final performance at the Aliante, I realized that this applied not only to Bailey, but to all the former showgirls in the musical, many of whom danced in the Folies Bergère, the glittering, feathered spectacle that played 49 years at the recently closed Tropicana casino.

‘Follies’ is about the past, about regrets, about the inevitable passage of time. It’s about middle-aged entertainers and the destruction of an old theater, which Las Vegas, with its retired showgirls and controversial penchant for imploding historic casinos, is familiar with.

The women glide across the stage – they are in their sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, while Bailey is only a few years the oldest – seemingly blooming with renewed vigor, like plants that have turned to the sun. Obviously the muscles have a memory, but the mind remembers too. After the show, Bailey stands beaming at the front of the theater. A few fans ask for her autograph.

“I think this might be my last performance,” she told me, “but I’ll see what the future brings. I don’t know what could happen tomorrow.”