Meet Margo Christie, Author of "These Days"

Hi, Everyone!  Yes, that's right.  This is me.  I write under the name Margo Christie, Margo because when you say it backwards it's "Go Mar!"  Members of my family often shorten Mary down to Mar, and who doesn't need an enthusiastic "You go, girl!" every now and again.  Christie is for a dear old friend whose full name I'll leave private.  An old burlesquer, she taught me much of what I needed to know to write "These Days," a coming-of-age novel about the perils of romanticizing the past.  "These Days," takes place, in part, on Baltimore's World Famous Block, a once-stylish adult-entertainment strip where the infamous Blaze Starr cemented her strip-teasing legacy.




Blaze Starr publicity photo



A 1940's Pin-Up at heart, I've always been fascinated with showgirls, starlets, burlesque-ers strippers and other glamorous albeit "fallen" women.  Thus, "These Days" centers on Becky Shelling who, at the tender age of 15 going on 21, finds herself on Baltimore's Block.

Following is the pitch that got "These Days" through the first round of eliminations in Amazon.com's yearly Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA):

A coming-of-age story about the perils of romanticizing the past, These Days, takes place in 1970’s Baltimore, a city in which “The true local malady is nostalgia.” (Laura Lippman, in the foreword to Baltimore Noir)

Fueled by a passion for golden-era Hollywood and her musician father’s tales of a time when “every hole-in-the wall bar had a band,” 14-year old Becky Shelling dreams of a career in show biz.  When her beloved dad disappears, abandoning her to an abusive step-mother and an indifferent step-sister, Becky is left with an emotional wound that can be soothed only by the attention of Lenny Moss, a smooth-talking married businessman whose nostalgia is limited to a time when men ruled and women knew their place.  Taking Becky to work for him on Baltimore's World-Famous Block, Lenny inadvertently leads her down a path of self-discovery on a once-stylish, now-decrepit adult entertainment strip where everyone has a tale about “the good old days,” but nothing is quite as it seems.

As Becky struggles to reconcile her life as Lenny’s mistress/star performer with the realization that her father’s disappearance was no accident, These Days juxtaposes past and present, myth and reality through burlesque and movie imagery; jazz and disco music, in ways delightful and profound.




The Gayety Theater, on Baltimore's Block, in its heyday