Mother-daughter stripping midget teams are a dime a dozen amid the red barns and horse manure that define everyday life out here in rural Pennsylvania. But this spring marked a special date, a milestone for central Bucks County’s thriving sex industry—Li’l Gretl Schratweiser turned 18 and became legally empowered to join her mother Greta (36) and her grandmother Gertie (53) as part of the “Little Sisters,” who are now thought to be the only
tri-generational team of stripping midgets east of Pennsylvania Dutch Country.
And the most amazing part of all is that they’re all Buddhists!
Gertie and Greta, even though they’re technically mother and daughter, have been dancing as “The Little Sisters” at Kling-a-Ding-Diddle’s in Quakertown, PA (right near the Q-Mart) since the early 1990s. Their act, however, has always been more sophisticated than a mere tawdry exploitation of their adorable “little person” status—it has consistently
featured juggling, fire-dancing, mutual grape-feeding, and all the parlor tricks that normal strippers do. Their wrestling journey has taken them through oil, hot cream, spaghetti, and mud. On special occasions (and for a hefty fee), they have been known to perform a complicated maneuver they call the “Velvet Donkey.” They’ve even graced the silver screen in an X-rated version of midget classic The Terror of Tiny Town, performing simulated 69 on one another over a techno remix of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” that earned them an AVN Video Award nomination for Best Simulated 69 Scene by a Mother-Daughter Team of Little People.
But despite such achievements, Gertie and Greta remained more of an underground cult sensation than a pop-culture phenomenon. In contrast, their success has been sudden and massive since the addition of Li’l Gretl. They’ve been on Good Morning, America and Charlie Rose. Even ex-president Bill Clinton is said to be a fan. In a word, they are H-O-T.
“Li’l Gretl brings a young, sassy, unpredictable element to the act which, frankly, was missing before,” says Dag Sloat, wunderkind editor of Bucks County XXX, the most successful of an estimated six free publications distributed throughout the Greater Perkiomen Valley’s gentlemen’s clubs and erotic juice bars. “Unlike Gertie and Greta—who represent more of the classic-rock generation—Li’l Gretl brings a sensibility that is very urban, very hip-hop, very now. And the guys just LOVE her. You never know what she’ll do next!” Sloat beams.
“She’ll come out in these crazy outfits—like a man’s tie and a fig leaf—and the crowd just goes wild.”

“We have small vaginas,” Gertie Schratweiser, elder stateswoman of the Little Sisters tells me with a wink when I ask her to explain their appeal to averaged-sized men. “Very small, very tight vaginas.”
A warm-yet-stern woman, Gertie corrects me sharply when I refer to her as a midget. “We are DWARVES,” she hisses, her eyebrows arched behind Coke-bottle glasses. “And technically, the proper spelling is ‘dwarfs,’ but everybody gets that one wrong. But referring to me as a ‘midget’ is like calling an Arab an Israeli. It just isn’t done. We have normal-sized heads. They’re little from head to toe.” She refers to porn star Bridget the Midget as a “self-hating dwarf” and recalls an onstage catfight between the Little Sisters and the notorious Smalltown Midgets from nearby Reading, PA, which culminated in gunfire. When I ask her to pinpoint the basic dispute between midgets and dwarves, she says, “It’s good to know your enemies” and demands that we change the subject.
“The Buddha is looking over us, so it’s all good,” Gertie says philosophically. She recalls the “tough days” before converting to Buddhism when other strippers would pull tricks such as hiding the Little Sisters’ dancer’s bags on high shelves so they couldn’t reach them. “But the Buddha is watching after my bootylicious ass now,” Gertie says. “I was stripping when I had my baby, and she was dancing when she had hers. Even though it’s always hard being a single mom, the Buddha is taking care of us.”
I finally muster the courage to ask her whether the Little Sisters have ever engaged in incest. “Nice ladies don’t tell,” she says with a demure eyelash flutter. “But I will tell you this—Li’l Gretl is pregnant!”
Thanks for the scoop, Gertie! Hope you’re still around in eighteen years for the follow-up story!