Billie Mahoney danced with the best of them — and at 80, this sexy number isn't done yet

At her house in south Kansas City, Billie flips through a scrapbook that she put together to display at her 80th birthday party. The front of the white plastic binder reads: "Billie Mahoney. Dancing for more than 3/4 century!"

Her house has just been remodeled, so mementos are still strewn about. A living-room wall holds about 40 framed pictures in a precise grid pattern. The photos document her career highlights, such as a 1961 photo of her interviewing Chubby Checker. They were both taking part in a dance forum analyzing the twist. Nearby, on a side table, is a photo album from her 2006 trip to India. A brass iguana with scales made of blue lapis lazuli stone — a souvenir from her December trip to the Galápagos Islands — lounges on a half-ledge wall that separates her new kitchen from her office area.

As she goes through the scrapbook, she punctuates stories from the past with her crackling, rousing laugh. Some anecdotes bring her to tears, which come quickly and make her voice shake and squeak. When she describes a dance routine, her compact body demonstrates limber moves as she sits in place in her office chair.

Her hands sculpt the space around her when she talks, which is at a driving pace. She injects onomatopoetic noises into her descriptions for emphasis. When she talks about the first modern piece she danced in 1949, she makes a wrrroooooww sound, followed by a cat screech, to describe the atonal electronic music that accompanied the routine. "I didn't know what the heck was going on," she says.

On the first page in Billie's scrapbook is a short Kansas City Star article dated October 20, 1932. The headline reads: "The Baby Parade Presented A Galaxy of Prize Winners." The accompanying photo features five costumed kids. Five-year-old Billie is up front, gazing seriously at the camera. She's dressed in an iridescent one-piece that resembles a baggy swimsuit. Huge, gauzy butterfly wings sprout from her back. She won the "most attractively costumed baby" category and took home a small gold piece that was worth $5 or $20 — she can't remember which. Whatever the amount, it was a lot of money during the Depression. The third-place winner got a puppy — an injustice that made her cry.

Her mother, a talented dressmaker, made Billie's award-winning costume. Rona Mahoney designed the women's uniforms for the Kansas City Philharmonic and dresses for the Belles of the American Royal. She worked at different dress factories around town but spent the longest amount of time at Nelly Don's. During those years, Billie and her older brother, Jack, performed at Nelly Don's Christmas parties — Jack played the xylophone while Billie danced.

Their dad, Francis Henry "Jack" Mahoney, worked as a circulation manager for the Star. Both Billie and her brother were latchkey kids; they tagged along to each other's drum and dance lessons. Billie also started taking baton-twirling lessons. She practiced five hours a day and wore down the grass in front of their house in east Kansas City, at 51st Street and Garfield. She became an expert at twirling two 1-pound batons.

The scrapbook photos from her college years show a curvy, strikingly pretty woman with auburn hair in a Bettie Page cut. Starting at age 14, Billie performed at conventions, local bars, nightclubs and military bases. Her main routine back then was set to a military medley played live — the musicians' union didn't allow recordings. It started with a strut onstage to the Air Force song, with its familiar off we go into the wild-blue yonder riff. She tap-danced to "Anchors Aweigh." "The Marines' Hymn" brought on high kicks, splits and backbends as she twirled two batons. She'd pass the batons under her legs and do the "fingertip trick" — making both batons spin horizontally on her fingers. The routine ended with "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Stars and Stripes Forever."

"There was constant applause — if not from the tricks, then from the music," she says.

The military-base shows helped her get booked at Kansas City bars in the 1940s. Long before she could drink, she worked the roadhouses and bars that could stay open all night because they were outside city limits. At Mary's Club, a "county" bar at 80th Street and Wornall, Billie did three shows a night starting at 11:15 p.m. and ending around 4 a.m. Mary's was a "big barn of a place," she says, with a huge dance floor that was always packed. She also performed at neighboring Tootie's, which resembled a house with additions. Tootie and his wife lived in a bedroom, which also served as a dressing room. A live chicken usually roosted on the headboard, Billie says, and a big bulldog slept on the bed, which caused some consternation for Billie and her mother because the bed was the only place to lay out costumes. She remembers that legendary Kansas City jazz stars Jay McShann and Myra Taylor also played at Tootie's. Taylor was 10 years older than Billie. "She was slender and cute with red hair," Billie says. "She's still kickin' around."

She also grew up with what she calls "all that racial stuff." Once, in the '40s, she and a few other entertainers met their agent downtown for a gig. They didn't know where they had been booked, so when the agent drove them to a club near 12th Street and Vine — she thinks it might have been called the Mardi Gras — they were shocked. "We're in the black neighborhood? We'd never been in a situation like that," she says. "Anyway, we did our show. It was a wonderful audience, and we were greatly received. And my girlfriend and I thought, boy, this is fun. We were adventurous. But tell our parents? No way. I never, ever told my parents. You just don't do that. That's another world," she says about the segregated neighborhood. The next week, The Call ran a two-page spread on the performance, complete with pictures of Billie. Because her dad worked at the Star, she was terrified that he'd see the pictures. But he didn't.