Sunday, December 28, 2008

From Henry Penndorf


Ursula Bottcher.21 - 1978 GDR Postage Stamp, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Here is the Postage Stamp that I spoke of. The commentorative Postage Stamps were issued in 1978 by the East German Government.
The one in the lower right hand corner honors Ursula Bottcher and the "Todekuss" or "Zuckerkuss" part of her act.
Henry

Posted by Buckles at 12/28/2008 06:30:00 AM

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of the reasons I got hired on RBBB was to be Ursula's interpreter in 1977 on the Blue Unit. She had ten bears in the act, which were a gift to the East German government from the Soviet Union. Ursula had been a rider and a lion trainer. The DDR handed her the bears and told her to put an act together. The bear she used for the "Todekuss" (Kiss of Death in German) was named Alaska. He stood ten feet tall and, according to Ursula, weighed 1400 lbs. She stood at just over five feet and weighed 130 lbs. The sugar cube was about 1/2" and weighed about an ounce. Ursula would occasionally regale me with horror stories about the bears injuring people who were stupid enough to get close to them. One time she pulled out a foot locker which was filled with broken 35mm cameras which the bears had snatched from careless news photographers. What endeared me most to her was the endless treasure of obscenities with which she would address the bears. Her act was beautiful and ran like clockwork. I watched it almost every performance that season along with Baumann's outstanding tiger act, the Gaona flying act and the incredible three ring perch display.

Elmo

30 December, 2008 21:42

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