Diane Pine, eighteen-years-old, is a hugely talented young dancer. She currently performs at Trude Heller's, in Greenwich Village, whose style and beat match her own. Diane's style--very hip--manifested here in a raisin brown zipsuit--worn with a white turtleneck ye-ye sweater and a sailor cap...Lada Edmund, at seventeen masterminds a full-blown dance-singing-literary career that includes the Broadway stage, television and columning. Here, she dances the Blob at Trude Heller's with pro Tino Valentine, exhibiting her own look--described as Beatle: ribbed ye-ye sweater, repp tie, checked knee shorts.
Zowie! I don't know what became of Ms. Pine, but Lada Edmund--Lada Edmund Jr. to be precise--is well-known to '60s nuts as the caged go-go gal with furiously flinging fringes on Hullabaloo. For personal reasons I don't feel comfy linking to her fansite, but it's easily googleable--you can also look her up on imdb.com, and the fab Go-Go-Ology website. Found out an interesting factoid myself--I knew she'd recorded some singles on Decca, and was in a few movies in the late '60s and early '70s, but darned if she wasn't in the original cast of Bye Bye Birdie as well.
Speaking of the Great White Way, two other Hullabaloo dancers, Michael Bennett and Donna McKechnie, went on to become Broadway legends with A Chorus Line. But the H. dancer I'm most curious about is the heavyset gal with the semi-beehive. You really didn't see women of her non-stick-figure size shaking their moneymakers on TV in those days, and she could really move--wish I knew her name.
I'd long assumed Hullabaloo was made in L.A., but according to Station to Station: The History of Rock & Roll on Television by Marc Weingarten (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), it was taped at NBC's Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, the same studio of SNL and Toscanini fame. "Despite Hullabaloo's strenuous attempts to put a temperate face on rock 'n' roll, the atmosphere inside Studio 8H...was always thick with sexual tension. Apparently, many of the show's participating rock stars just couldn't keep their paws off Hullabaloo's go-go dancers. 'The NBC executives used to send memos down to the set about how they would find prophylactics in the bleachers,' says [Gene] McEvoy [the show's set designer]. 'The show was taped in a Brooklyn studio during the last season, I think, because NBC just wanted to get rid of us.' Hullabaloo lasted about as long as Shindig, but its eventual cancellation in August 1966 was more like a mercy killing." True, the show as a whole was more square than Shindig or some of the other more local teen rock & roll programs of the time--but those Hullabaloo-a-Go-Go segments, inevitably featuring a caged Lada Edmund Jr. rivaling Candy Johnson for hyper hip shaking, are once and future bastions of boss.
