make a living, I was willing to burn". Billed as "The Bronze Goddess of Fire" or "LaWanda, the Flame Goddess", Page entertained small St. Louis nightclubs. She later described one East St. Louis club where she worked as "the kind of place where if you ain’t home by nine o’clock at night you can be declared legally dead. [Everybody] walked around with knives in there. You better had one, too—knife or gun or something!" At some point, Page moved to Los Angeles, California. The exact year she moved is unknown, though she likely moved sometime in the 1950s. Once there, Page took a gig dancing and waiting tables at the Brass Rail Club for 15 years. She also toured her fire dancing act and made appearances at nightclubs across the country and world, including Canada, Brazil, and Japan. Stand-up comedy It is unknown when and where Page began stand-up comedy. She may have been introduced to stand-up while dancing at the Brass Rail Club in Los Angeles. According to an interview in the Philadelphia Tribune, Page did not like comedy at first, but a fellow Brass Rail Club employee and member of the comedy duo Skillet & Leroy saw Page's potential, telling her: "you can do comedy. As a matter of fact, if you don’t do comedy you can’t work here". Page may have also been introduced to stand-up while touring the Chitlin' Circuit, where she shared stages with noted comedians such as Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. No matter how or when she transitioned to comedy from dance, it was in Los Angeles that Page started honing the feisty approach to comedy that would make her famous. In the mid-1960s Page became a member of the comedy group Skillet, Leroy & Co. (before Page joined, the group was a duo known as Skillet & Leroy). Skillet was Ernest "Skillet" Mayhand (1916–2007) and Leroy was Wilbert LeRoy Daniel (1928–1993). During her tenure as a stand-up comic, a career she continued into the 1990s, Page often was billed as "The Queen of Comedy" or "The Black Queen of Comedy". Page recorded five live solo comedy albums for the Laff Records label and several other collaborative live comedy albums with comedy group Skillet, Leroy & Co. in the late 1960s and early 1970s under her LaWanda Page stage name (she often went just by her first name, sometimes styled as La Wanda).