I've been watching Fiddler on the Roof for about the fifth or sixth time…

[Warpy]

7. I was looked down on even in the 60s

when I did stage lighting as "ugh, show people." Landlords didn't want us for some weird reason (hey, we were gone most evenings and at the workshop during the day and fell into bed and slept like rocks when we got home, we were ideal tenants) and suburban types treated us like we had leprosy unless they were trying to get a kid on the stage.

I can't imagine what it must have been like 80 years earlier and only "fallen women" went into the business, seamstresses to chanteuses.

So yeah, you were spot on. They went into showbiz for the same reason they'd gone into the lending business in the Middle Ages: good Christians felt it all beneath them.