[6] Katherine had been performing on stage for some time as Kitty Hayes before catching the eye of actress Florence Roberts playing a French dancer in Jules Massenet’s five-act opera Sapho at San Francisco’s Alcazar Theatre.

[7] Not long after Robert's encouragement to pursue a career in dance, Gertrude signed on at the age of sixteen as a dancer with the vaudeville comedy team of Matthews and Bulger and began a tour that would eventually take her to New York City and the Paradise Roof Garden atop Oscar Hammerstein's Victoria Theatre.

[4][5][8] In 1903, Gertrude Hoffmann was hired as a rehearsal director at Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria Theater, working with the sixty-member "Punch and Judy Co." shows and other vaudeville routines performing at the venue.

[9] Three years later she replaced an ill performer in Ziegfeld’s "The Parisian Dancer" and became a hit imitating Anna Held singing "I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave".

[10] Following Hoffman's success, dancers as diverse as Eva Tanguay, Vera Olcott, Lotta Faust, Ruth St. Denis, La Sylphe, and Ada Overton Walker offered a burlesque Salome dance as part of the popular craze known as "Salomania.

[8] In 2006 the social historian Armond Fields listed Gertrude Hoffmann in his book Women Vaudeville Stars: Eighty Biographical Profiles.