Cooper Hays, better known as Madam Cooper, is a Portland singer, songwriter, stripper, burlesque entertainer, bar owner, and rodeo clown. From an early age, she sought an audience. Growing up in Coos County, she sang “Proud Mary” on honky-tonk stages and the national anthem at the rodeo. Her soundtrack was country music: Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash on her grandma’s record player, Shania Twain on the radio. “If you met me at 7 years old, I’d be like, I’m Cooper, and I’m gonna be a country star,” says Hays, her red hair wrapped loosely in pink curlers as she sits on the stoop of her Old Town business, Madam Cooper’s Parlor.

The Parlor, which occupies the Ankeny Alley space once home to Valentine’s, is red-walled and red-lit, with fringed lampshades and Western art sourced from thrift stores. Hays moved in last fall as part of a program run by Downtown Portland Clean & Safe that provides temporary retail space to small businesses during the holiday season, and the spot became permanent in February. In the back sits a plywood peep show booth, also painted red, that she built in Skagway, Alaska, as a pandemic-safe way to perform for cruise ship tourists—a little singing, a little stripping. To fit it into its current home, Hays says, “We just kind of sawed it off here and chopped it off there.” Inside the booth is a fun house Victorian boudoir, with mirrors on the ceiling, a burgundy velvet chaise, and knickknacks galore; among Hays’s favorites is a pencil sharpener in the shape of a beaver. Hays calls the booth the Music Box, and six-minute performances cost $10. The bartender—often Hays’s husband, dressed in a cowboy hat and bolo tie—squeaks a rubber chicken when it’s showtime.

“It’s the funky, weird space of my dreams,” says Hays, who spent a decade in Nashville hosting burlesque shows up to seven nights a week. It also feels like a homecoming. As an undergrad studying theater at Portland State University, Hays worked service jobs in Old Town. She began her burlesque career at Dante’s, performing weekly for nearly four years at the rock club’s anything-goes Sinferno Cabaret. The neighborhood, she knows, has it rough edges. But that’s always been the case—in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the area held brothels, flop houses, and gambling dens—and it’s part of what makes it special. “What’s happening here is gritty and authentic,” she says, “and we’re trying to be good stewards of the spirits and the ghosts.”

Hays isn’t the only one betting on this scrappy corner of town. Her Parlor sits in the heart of the newly christened Pink Light District, a nascent arts and entertainment zone stretching from the river to Big Pink and from W Burnside to SW Pine. The idea came from Chris Pink, an owner of the Seattle-founded Can Can Productions, which bought the nearby Paris Theatre in 2022 and gave it a thorough rehab, relaunching it as a burlesque house last year (which was, in fact, the building’s function when it opened in 1890). Pink—really his last name—imagines a district united by pink streetlights, pink planters, and pink cocktails. It just made sense, he says: “This was here before I was. You’ve got Voodoo [Doughnut], you’ve got Big Pink, you’ve got cherry blossoms.”

And there’s buy-in from the city. In early May, Mayor Keith Wilson, standing next to Hays, marked the district’s official launch by switching on a pink light bulb. The Portland Bureau of Transportation is currently refreshing old crosswalks, installing new marked crosswalks, and painting signal poles and ornamental streetlights. A street mural is in the works for SW Pine, and Ankeny Alley’s rose mural will be extended to SW Naito Parkway. In July, the neighborhood hosted a Pride block party with aerialists, DJs, and a three-on-three basketball tournament. Going forward, Pink sees the district leaning into seasonal festivities, which in the fall will mean Halloween. At the Paris, Can Can will mount a supernatural-tinged show called Hitchcock Hotel starting September 11, and Pink says a multivenue cabaret festival is in the works for October. He expects other businesses to lean into spooky season, too, allowing visitors to plan a meandering yet cohesive evening. “Go grab a cocktail and appetizers at Dan and Louis, and go over to Mother’s for dinner, and come to Can Can for the main show,” he says. “Then you go to Madam Cooper’s for your after-cocktail, and the Kit Kat for your nightcap.”

Hays, who joined Pink Martini for a handful of shows in June and is currently starring in jukebox burlesque revue Dolly! at the Paris, has plenty more ambitions. In Skagway, she coached locals to perform in the peep show booth, and she hopes to launch amateur nights at the Parlor. She’s developing a walking tour focused on the area’s sometimes seamy history of show business; she imagines it as a murder mystery guided by a pink-clad showgirl who’s been reincarnating since the 1890s. 

What she doesn’t want to see is a scrubbing of the neighborhood. “I’m not interested in the Pink Light District becoming another Disneyland,” says Hays, who watched downtown Nashville transform into a theme park. “I like that it’s a weird place [for] outlaws and misfits.”