Did the St. Charles Sugar Plum Fairy Get Fired For Cussing or For Showing a Little Skin?

Yesterday we brought you the absurd tale of one Laura Coppinger, the once Sugar Plum Fairy in the St. Charles annual Christmas pageant that was fired on grounds that she cussed at a standard city employee drug screening. Cussing, apparently even while not in character, is a big no-no for St. Charles’ Christmas staff as stated in the sounds fake, but apparently all too real, “Christmas Traditions Code of Conduct”. Obviously this is absurd! It’s one thing to be fired over cussing while in costume surrounded by kids, but it’s quite another story if you are out and about looking very un fairy-like and decide to cuss on your own free time. But while St. Charles is clearly a city with a large stick up their ass, we’re now wondering: Was she really dimed out and fired for spontaneous cussing away from work, or was it because her other performing gigs involve a little less costume and a lot more skin?

We recently were made aware that Laura Coppinger, former Sugar Plum Fairy, also performs burlesque under the name “Mimi le Yu“.

“Research” and “fact checking” are crap we let the real news people do, leaving us more time to do things that we’re good at like obscure reference dick jokes and pissing people off, but rarely does research involve burlesque, so lets do this thing! …so we need like a oversized magnifying glass now or what?

[Mentally create and watch us in a research montage…now!]

[…ok now fade the montage out to black…perfect. Now continue reading.]

It didn’t take long to lock down the fact that “Mimi le Yu” is definitely the name of an active burlesque dancer and her photos to have a strong resemblance to the photos that have been included in the recent “Sugar Plum Fairy” news (note the teeth).

…oh and there’s this MySpace post with a captions of both her real name, and her burlesque name:

So ok, the research wasn’t that hard. Laura Coppinger aka the nationally known Sugar Plum Fairy, is also burlesque dancer Mimi le Yu! But is that why St. Charles city let her go from her long-time post as the Sugar Plum Fairy? If so, is the cussing a cover-up? Why not tell Coppinger the “real” reason then, as it’s pretty clear she’s under the impression she was fired for off-duty cussing? Maybe the city used the cussing as the one clear rule violation as a way to get her out the door without having to dive in to the whole naughty details? No one knows for sure since St. Charles sure isn’t talking so far.

To be clear, we’re not saying she should have been fired for being a burlesque dancer, or for cussing at herself on her own time. She seems like a cool chick, a great Sugar Plum Fairy, and looks to put on a hell of a burlesque show. We’re just wondering why we hadn’t heard this connection being made anywhere else. If St. Charles will shit-can Christmas characters for saying “shit-can”, you’d think they’d really be against this:

We’re not. We think that’s just super…but you gotta think St. Charles city officials don’t really agree with us too often. We can probably all agree on pudding though. Everyone loves pudding.

Photo Credits:

  1. Plasticfootball on Flickr

  2. STLToday

  3. arkbuilder on MySpace

  4. Lee Harris for the Riverfront Times