The year was 1967. The Dallas Cowboys were playing the Atlanta Falcons at the Cotton Bowl. It was the middle of the first quarter. Suddenly, the referees stopped the game. The time clock froze. What was happening?
A woman made a grand entrance to get to her box seat on the 50-yard line. She was wearing what later would be called a micro miniskirt. She held two stalks of pink cotton candy across her chest.
Men lifted their binoculars for a better look. Nearly everyone turned to watch her.
A photo appearing in the next day’s Dallas Morning News shows, by my count, 40 smiling, happy people surrounding her. The caption: “Game? What game?”
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Meet Bubbles Cash. A stripper. Why was she there? A player had given her tickets.
Why this matters
Bubbles Cash’s in-stadium sex appeal is part of Cowboys legend. Some say she was part of the inspiration that led to the world-famous Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
Known as the team’s unofficial mascot, Bubbles parlayed her sudden fame and twice ran as a write-in candidate for state governor. Once she even came in fourth.
Stripper publicity
Bubbles Cash is alive and well, living quietly in East Fort Worth. I met her at a neighborhood diner near her home. At 78, her famous blond hair is replaced with long dark hair flowing down her back. The legendary pole dancer who practiced her routines at home in front of a mirror now mostly rides in a wheelchair.
At her Fort Worth home in October 2025, legendary exotic dancer Bubbles Cash showed the 1967 photo of her at a Cotton Bowl game that led to nationwide attention. In the original photo, taken by Dallas Morning News photographer Joe Laird, Cash turned heads when she descended the stairs holding cotton candy and wearing a miniskirt.
Chitose Suzuki / Staff Photographer
Over a lunch of meatloaf, she recounted the chapters of her life. It could be a movie, starting with her dancing near naked at the Athens Strip bar on Lower Greenville Avenue.
Several Cowboy players saw her there. Upon learning she had never seen a pro football game, they gave her player tickets.
What happened next was brilliantly photographed by Dallas Morning News photographer Joe Laird and best described by writer John Eisenberg in his book Cotton Bowl Days: Growing Up with Dallas and the Cowboys in the 1960s.
Eisenberg writes: “Her blonde hair was piled atop her head. She wore a tight sweater and a leopard-skin miniskirt. She carried two helpings of pink cotton candy, which she held at chest level.”
A roar of delight cascaded through the stadium. Referees temporarily stopped the game.
Wide receiver Bob Hayes pointed her out to confused quarterback Don Meredith.
“Dandy, look there! It’s Bubbles Cash!”
Meredith called timeout.
Coach Tom Landry shouted, “What did you call timeout for?”
Meredith replied: “Coach, it’s Bubbles Cash.”
She recalls doing “a little cutesy turn-around” before taking her seat. “Gotta be cute,” she chuckled in between bites of that meatloaf.
Bubbles Cash, the former stripper and Dallas Cowboys mascot, is 78 years old living in Fort Worth.
Courtesy of Cash Family
When exotic dancer Bubbles Cash attended a Dallas Cowboys game, which she did often as the team’s unofficial mascot, she stood out from the crowd.
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Life changed forever
Laird’s photo took up a good portion of The News’ front page. The caption identified her only as “the young woman.” One of the Weinstein brothers — either Barney or Abe — who each owned clubs where she danced — called The News and identified her by name in time for the next edition.
After that, her life changed forever.
She was a mere 19 years old at the time.
‘Aaahh.’
The caption for the photo in The Dallas Morning News when Bubbles Cash entered the Cotton Bowl for her first Cowboys game was “Game? What game?”
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From then on, players left her tickets for games, even away games where they arranged flights. She was the team’s lucky charm.
In his book Once a Cowboy, the late Walt Garrison writes that “she always waited for the middle of the first quarter to make her entrance. You knew she was coming when you heard the crowd start going ‘Aaahh.’”
As the team’s unofficial mascot, she became a celebrity. Her entrances were often captured by TV cameras. She signed game programs and photos, where her autograph appeared like this: BB$.
Tickets to the legendary 1967 Dallas Cowboys football game against the Atlanta Falcons where Bubbles Cash made her debut.
Courtesy of Cash Family
‘Spontaneous combustion’
Looking back at that day 58 years ago, she says her debut lit up like “spontaneous combustion.”
“Well, it just broke out all over the stadium. I didn’t know it was going to happen. I didn’t realize what a happening it was.”
When Bubbles Cash entered the Cotton Bowl for the 1967 Cowboys-Falcons game, there was such an uproar that the refs stopped the game.
Courtest of Cash family
She came to terms with it: “The blond hair and the short skirt hit at the right time, I guess.”
She adds, “I didn’t know a stripper could get publicity like that.”
Bubbles Cash says one entrance to a Dallas Cowboys game changed her life.
Courtesy of Cash Family
Micro miniskirts
The skirts Bubbles wore to the games were so short — one newspaper account called them mini minis — that you couldn’t buy them in a store. She bought regular skirts and shortened them. Considerably.
Business boomed for the Weinstein brothers. Male-female couples attended the sudden celebrity’s shows. People wanted to see Bubbles. Before the Cowboys were dubbed “America’s team,” some called them “Bubbles’ team.”
A trooper
Her trademark miniskirts didn’t always help her, especially in colder games in northern climates.
“I was a trooper,” she recalls. How did she stay warm? “I rubbed my knees together like a grasshopper.”
The publicity machine didn’t let up. “I’d go to a football game, and I’d get my picture in the paper, and that would make me more popular.”
Enter Tex Schramm
Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm, a football genius, knew a strong P.R. gift when he saw one. He was the guy who remade the NFL when the AFL teams joined. He pushed for instant replay and argued that refs needed microphones so they could, in the words of one ref, “talk to America.” He advocated for a 30-second play clock and fought for wind direction strips on the top of goalposts. He also masterminded the creation of Valley Ranch, the Cowboys’ massive training facility.
Tex Schramm in 1959 (Dallas Morning News file photo)
He even arranged for the Cowboys to play in the Eastern division, believing they would get even more publicity with East Coast teams. That worked out better than expected.
Another of his top achievements was recognizing the potential of the kerfuffle around Bubbles. “We could sell this,” he supposedly said.
He was talking about sex appeal, a game within a game. The team already had a cheer squad made up of high school boys and girls with the forgettable name CowBelles and Beaux.
Eventually, the boys were dropped. After that, the squad disbanded. Schramm pushed for a professional squad, and he got it in 1972 when the new Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders debuted in their hot pants, halter tops and white leather go-go boots. They quickly gained world renown.
Yes, the G.M. could sell this. And he did.
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders performed their pregame routine during the home opener against the New York Giants at AT&T Stadium in Arlington on Sept. 14, 2025.
Tom Fox / Staff Photographer
Myth or truth?
Dallas Morning News writer Sarah Hepola is the resident expert on the Cowboys Cheerleaders. She created a Texas Monthly podcast called America’s Girls.
“Cash was a media sensation,” Hepola says on the podcast. “Shots had been fired — and the sexual revolution was coming to Dallas.”
But Hepola says it’s unclear whether Bubbles was the impetus for the world’s most famous cheerleading squad.
“Bubbles liked to say she was the inspiration,” Hepola continues. “And that idea gained a lot of traction over the years. Who could resist it? The story that a stripper is behind America’s Sweethearts is too delicious.”
If anything, it’s a mythical story about a football team with unlimited legends. Only this one takes place off the field.
Her nickname
Bubbles got her nickname as an infant. She couldn’t talk yet, but she could blow mouth bubbles on command. She liked the attention and kept it up. A metaphor, perhaps, for her future career.
Older Cowboys fans who remember Bubbles often forget she ran for Texas governor. Twice. The first was in 1968. It kept her name in the news.
She was more serious the second time, in 1990, when she earned an asterisk in one of the state’s most memorable elections. She noticed almost 20 people signed up as write-in candidates. “Everybody and his dog was running,” she recalls.
She paid the $50 filing fee. Her platform focused on ending the Vietnam War, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 and making it easier to buy alcohol.
In that race, most of the attention focused on Democrat Ann Richards and Republican Clayton Williams.
Bubbles ran a serious campaign. She dressed in a business suit and made the rounds to various organizations. Her slogans were “Bank on Bubbles” and “Texas needs Cash.”
“I kept everything G-rated,” she recalls about her time in the public eye. “I was never risqué. I tried to never do anything off color. Nothing to embarrass my family or my brother who was a Baptist minister.”
The brother, Durward M. Cash, told me he was teaching at Arlington Baptist College, and his students sometimes asked if he was related.
“There was no estrangement due to her professional career,” he told me. “I never did mind. She’s a very positive-minded person. She was not an immoral person.”
On election day, Richards beat Williams and a Libertarian candidate placed third.
Bubbles, running as an independent, beat all write-in candidates. She received 3,287 out of 11,553 write-in votes, enough for fourth place.
As she explained to me, “I had to do something with all that publicity.”
She argues that for a stripper she was quite the goody-two-shoes.
“I didn’t prostitute or anything like that,” she recalls. “That would be an embarrassment for my family and for me. I didn’t want to be un-classy.”
She brags, chuckling, “I was able to get press and not go to jail.”
Post-stripper career
“I didn’t want to grow old wearing a G-string,” she explains.
She understood the shelf life for a stripper is short. Bubbles had a lot of jobs. She worked at a butcher shop where she created a big meat “Bubbles Burger.”
“I grounded the beef. It was show-offy big, just like me,” she says.
She owned Top Cash Gold and Silver pawn shop in Dallas for 10 years.
She became a country-western and blues singer and a guitar player. She played with a local band, the Bucks.
She appeared in several B movies, including: Hip Hop and 21, Hot Thrills and Warm Chills and Mars Needs Women.
Perhaps her most interesting job was one she created. She stood in the street median along Lemmon Avenue and held up advertising signs.
“I’m in the advertising business,” she once explained. Companies pay her a small percentage of sales. “As I told my mama, it’s legitimate streetwalking. I attract a lot of attention because people think I’m some kind of protester. They stop and ask me what I’m protesting and read my signs.
“It’s good for business. I tell them when they go into the store, ‘Just say Bubbles sent me.’”
After her exotic dancing days ended, Bubbles Cash took on many jobs. Here she held signs in the median of Dallas streets to gain attention for local stores.
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Big plans
Her dream was to make it big in Dallas, then do the same in Las Vegas, and from there move to Hollywood where she’d become a movie star.
She missed a big break that could have made it happen.
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson invited her for an appearance. But the Weinstein brothers blocked it.
Why? “They thought they would lose her,” says her daughter Keiley Mynk.
To this day, Bubbles remains completely loyal to her favorite NFL team.
“Jerry Jones, too?” she is asked.
“He’s all right,” she answers.
“I’m totally for the Cowboys. Win or lose.”
Bubbles Cash likes her position in Cowboys lore. She made a contribution to the spirit and culture of America’s Team.
Of that, she says, “I am honored.”