Doreen Tracey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Doreen Tracey | |
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 Doreen Tracey on The Mickey Mouse Club |
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| Born | April 3, 1943 London, England |
Doreen Isabelle Tracey was born April 3, 1943, in London, England. She is best known for having been a performer on the original Mickey Mouse Club television show from 1955-1958. Her parents, Sidney Tracey and Bessie Hay, were an American vaudeville dance team that performed for Allied soldiers during WWII. When Doreen was four years old, her family returned to the United States, where her father opened a dance studio in Hollywood, California.
Doreen learned to dance and sing at an early age, courtesy of the many instructors and performers who worked out at her father's studio. Her first professional work was an uncredited singing and dancing bit in the musical film The Farmer Takes a Wife (1952). At age twelve she auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club, was hired, and appeared on the show for all three seasons of its original run. In 1956, she was featured in the Disney western Westward Ho, The Wagons!, and in the third season of the Mickey Mouse Club, had a role in the serial Annette. She was cast as Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, in a musical number from the proposed live-action Disney film Rainbow Road to Oz on an episode of the Disneyland television show in September 1957. The movie was never made, and when the Mickey Mouse Club stopped filming in 1958, Doreen switched to singing live at concerts and teen nightclubs.
After guest appearances on several television shows during the early sixties, Doreen wound up her career as a performer with a tour of military bases in South Vietnam, doing lead vocals for a Filipino rock group. She later worked for Frank Zappa as a publicist, and became an amateur weight-lifter. She posed for the men's magazine Gallery in 1976, wearing her Mouseketeer ears and little else. In 2001 a small excerpt from her memoirs, called Confessions of a Mouseketeer, was published in the NPR anthology I Thought My Father Was God.
