During her band’s heyday from 1976 to 1992 in Upstate New York, Peggy Haine became as well-known for her spectacular entrances as she was for her vibrant vo-dee-o-doh vocalizing. Peggy and her Lowdown Alligator Jass Band, based in the college town of Ithaca, N.Y., regularly played an annual fundraiser for the Schuyler County Hospital.
“We got to make a grand entrance,” Peggy recalls. “I remember bursting out of a cage on stage to the tune of ‘Wild Women Don’t Worry’ as a cavalcade of local men dressed in Tarzan costumes paraded up to the stage.”
And one summer at the jazz and wine festival in Hector, N.Y., Peggy—dressed as Cleoptara—was carried out on a chaise lounge by a gang of local winery guys dressed as pharaohs. “Another year they allowed themselves to be dressed as angels, which everybody knew was a joke,” Peggy said. “We had a wonderful time dreaming up those entrances.”
Peggy and the Alligators will likely revive that outlandish show-biz tradition when they reunite for the first time in three decades at 7 pm Saturday, May 6, at the Trumansburg Conservatory of Fine Arts, an historic 1851 Greek Revival church building at 5 McLallen St. in Trumansburg, a few miles north of Ithaca. Ticket prices range from $23.18 to $81.88; tburgconservatory.org; (607) 387-5939.
Longtime Ithaca radio broadcaster Phil Shapiro, host of WVBR-FM’s “Bound for Glory,
