Chris Owens, glittery chanteuse of New Orleans’ rowdy Bourbon Street, dances down the decades

New Orleans’ Bourbon Street chanteuse dances on

NEW ORLEANS — The band kicks up the tempo, the crowd applauds and Chris Owens prances out on stage at her Bourbon Street night club, her black curls flying and sequined tights twinkling.

It’s show time and this is a night for performing like all others. Only this French Quarter first lady has been entertaining audiences for more than 50 years, a fixture on a New Orleans night club scene that faded long ago even as she outlasted many a singer and dancer in a city awash in revelry.

“I can see you’re ready to party!” Owens tells adoring fans.

For the next hour or more, Owens will lead the crowd through repeated applause, wowing them with nonstop dancing and singing while exhibiting the enormous energy of a woman decades younger. Life is a cabaret for Owens, and she’s been coming out night after night, week after week, under the stage lights.

“I’ve always loved to dance,” Owens said. “That’s how it all got started, and that’s what keeps if going. It’s that special way your backbone slips when you feel the rhythm. I was born with that.”

Owens’ Las Vegas style review is a throwback to Bourbon Street in its jazz-steeped heyday. Backed by a live band, she works the crowd masterfully, picking some from the audience to bring on stage as she dances, sing and pokes fans with good-natured jokes.

“She’s the last of the real entertainers, the entertainer with an act,” explained clarinetist Pete Fountain, who had clubs on Bourbon Street from 1959 until 1977 when the night club scene began to fade. “That’s what clubs used to be like. People would dress up and come in, have a few drinks and watch the show.”

The acts that made Bourbon a magnet for entertainment seekers are long gone. The burlesque houses of the ’50s and ’60s, featuring exotic dancers with names like Blaze Starr, Lilly Christine the Cat Girl and Alouette Leblanc the Tassel Twirler are no more. Elaborate shows with gaudy props and old-school entertainment have given way to rowdy bars and strip joints advertising “barely legal” girls and “live sex acts.”

“She’s the only thing left from what the French Quarter used to be,” said David Otillio, 50, a longtime fan attending a show. “Nobody knows how old she is, I’ve heard everything from 65 to 84, but whatever it is, she’s amazing.”

And Owens won’t give her age, throwing out her stock response: “A woman who will tell her age will tell anything.”

No matter the years, so many signs of youthful vitality remain.

She proudly boasts of a 36-24-36 figure. And standing 5-foot-7 inches, she has a 128-pound body that has changed little over the years; her flexibility and energy seem endless.

Owens performs three nights a week at her club and also books private parties. Between acts, she also manages 25 apartments and four shops in the club building and keeps the books for all of her businesses. Oh, and she’s also the star of the French Quarter’s annual Easter parade — which rolls down Bourbon Street.

Not bad for someone who runs on little sleep. She frequently goes to bed at 2 a.m. and gets up at 5 a.m., she said.

“It’s all exercise and diet,” Owens said. “I’m very careful about both.”

Owens has a gym in her apartment behind the club and works out two hours a day on the treadmill, bike and weights. She eats only fruits, vegetables and seafood, and makes fresh juice twice a day.

And performing gives her lots of exercise.

Owens’ show offers the kind of music and audience interaction that was once featured in big show rooms along the Vegas strip. It’s still able to attract new audiences. On a recent Friday night, the place was packed with tourists, regulars and young people out for a night on Bourbon Street.

“This was great,” said New Orleans resident Marjorie Gehl, attending her first Owens show. “It’s different from all the other clubs where you can see a band or a stripper.”

To watch Owens on stage is to forget she is not a 20-something showgirl.

She dances, shimmies and throws in a few bumps and grinds. A seasoned entertainer, she is quick to point out her show is exotic, but she’s not an exotic dancer.

“I was never a stripper, but I guess people thought if you’re on Bourbon Street dancing, you must be,” Owens said.

Her act has changed regularly over the years, Owens said, but it always includes live music, fast-paced dancing, and plenty of audience participation.

Members of the audience take the stage with her to ride hobby horses, be ridden as a horse by Owens in a cowboy hat, do push-ups and to dance along with Owens. To wrap things up, Owens leads a New Orleans’ version of a conga line around the club.

“It was a gas,” said Sarah Bonilla, 21, who shimmied on stage with Owens to one number.

One of eight children, Owens was born on her father’s ranch near Abilene, Texas, and came to New Orleans at 15 to visit an older sister. She returned after high school and went to work for a doctor. It was there that she met her late husband, millionaire car dealer Sol Owens, who died in 1979.

She first learned to dance in Havana in the ’50s, charmed by the show girls and Latin rhythms when she and her husband vacationed there. That was before Fidel Castro ended their trips in 1959.

“I caught it on the very end, when Castro’s troops were actually moving in,” Owens said. “I loved the Tropicana. It was the most fabulous club in the world.”

She was not yet dancing professionally, Owens said, but she came to know the routines well enough to be invited on stage regularly.

Walter Winchell saw her dancing with her husband at El Morocco in New York and wrote her up every day for a week in his column. The Saturday Evening Post did a two-page spread on her. She was written up in Town & Country, Newsweek, Variety.

“I had offers to go to Hollywood,” she said. “But my husband had just bought the club at 809 St. Louis and we opted to stay in New Orleans.”

Her husband loved to show off the dark-haired beauty, and people loved to watch them dance. Sol Owens quickly realized it was not his fancy steps that drew the audience, and opening a nightclub for her seemed a logical step. The first club opened in 1957.

“We had big crowds and more and more they would pack around the dance floor to watch Sol and me dance,” Owens said. “So after a while we built a stage and I started dancing on it instead of the dance floor. It just went from there.”

The couple bought the building that is the present club in 1967. They renovated it, including an elegant apartment — complete with white grand piano and French antiques.

The crowds no longer line up around the block for her show, but they mostly fill the club for each of her performances. And no one loves that nonstop hour more than Owens.

“People ask why I don’t write a memoir,” Owens said. “I just tell them I’m not done living it yet.”

On the web: www.chrisowensclub.net/pages/home.html