Colleen, "The Irish Potato"

I just downloaded a Russian stripper struttin' her stuff to a Louis Prima song circa unknown--and though I'd like to think it was around Nikita Khrushchev's swinging years, the lingerie and digital coloring bring me back to the Putin years. Think her name is Lyalya Bezhetskaya and she looks kinda lonely. Great song, cool routine. Reminds me of my younger years, mid 1960's in L.A., when some class mates and I (Catholic school high school lads) drank some beer and drove down to a burlesque theater at 5th and Main Street downtown. It was the proverbial skid row that it is today, but there was even more of a seedy feel. The theater had been around for a long time and the pasties and g-string crowd had all but dried up. There were probably only 4 or 5 of us, and we were about a quarter of the crowd. Outside there were sandwich boards with hand made posters of the women we'd be seeing inside. They weren't the showgirls the Rat Pack knew, any dancers with more talent, younger or prettier had left for Las Vegas years before. But everyone needs to make a living, and in retrospect they were probably mothers of families with few prospects at a better living.

Although they were rather plump, and on the down-side of middle age, I was probably only 16 and had close to no experience at viewing any semi-clothed women doing the bumps and grinds on a stage or anywhere else for that matter. My sex life mostly consisted in being frustrated in the back seat of a Corvair, or worse yet a '64 Mustang that belonged to my girlfriend.

Though my memory flags on most occassions, I do remember two of the dancers from that evening. There was Tiara, "Daughter of the Nile," and Colleen, "The Irish Potato." Those black and white 8 x 10's which were affixed to the posters outside didn't fill me with much optimism, but I must remember that testosterone levels do funny things to a guy's aesthetics--if you add some beer it helps too. Anyway, I was surprised to see that there was an actual musician's pit below the stage where a couple of old guys were playing--one on a pawnshop saxophone, and the other gent bent over a snare drum with a top hat. How I wish I could talk to those guys now. Did they play with any bands in their youth? Big bands? Swing bands? Dance bands? Perhaps they scored some reefer down on Central Avenue when things were flush, saw Swing bands at the Palomar over on Vermont before it burned down, or caught the shows at the Palladium. No telling how old they were, I was about 16 so everyone looked down right Biblical to me.

Before the girls began, they were preceded by a comic at the microphone with jokes we didn't understand. This wasn't the place to hear the liveliest comedy. The comic's jokes probably dated from World War II and no-one really cared since everyone had come to see some flesh not hear jokes. The comedic warm-up was just a tease, and the drummer actually hit rim shots to tell us when to laugh. It was fuckin' sad. John Cassavettes, in THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, was mining an authentic vein when he showed Mister Fantastic warming up the crowd at Ben Gazzara's "Nudie" club. It was ten years later and the movie actresses were cuter of course, but the acceptance of despair was genuine.

When the burlesque dancers began, each was introduced by the comic (maybe he owned the place), and they would follow the saxophone melody onto the stage from the wings. No curtains parted like the Big Time. Who knew if the pulley system even worked anymore? Each girl had her own song. Tiara, "Daughter of the Nile," entered to something exotic like snake-charmer music. She wasn't the first to perform, but she was my favorite. Probably the youngest and sexiest of the bunch, even dressed in layers of synthetic taffeta with a generous application of dark pancake powder, she had me believing. The dancing wasn't so great. I've seen YouTube clips of Tempest Storm, or Candy Barr, or Brenda Starr from their heyday, and the dancers I'm talking about weren't nearly as enthusiastic, nor athletic. Like the 3 minute pop song, their routines had a formula which wasn't usually altered. The intro, sultry and beguiling; then the middle rounds of removing one piece of garment at a time; and eventually the finale when they stripped to the style of panties our mothers wore and finally a flourish to reveal those pasties on their nipples. No-one spun their breasts around and made tassles defy gravity, no-one undulated like a python digesting a poodle, it was bare bolts stripping with a few bumps and grinds as a tribute to the craft if nothing else.

Colleen, "The Irish Potato," was worse and fatty and lacked Vitamin D. Her outfit was all plaid and she wore one of those funny berets with a pompom on its top. She was about the age of our parents and did this Highland Fling rendition during which she tossed her clothes around the stage like someone in a very bad mood. After each dancer had finished, the economics of show business demanded that she stay on stage to pickup her own layers of costume, somehow an act more degrading than the dance itself. This is where my guilt arrives.

See, some of my friends had been to this place before, or others just like it. There was a sort of custom in the day for overgrown brats such as ourselves to bring pea-shooters and if you sat close enough, you could blow through the tube and hit the denuded dancer with a whistling hardened pea. It was just after the finish of Colleen's dance when she was walking and bending down to gather her clothes from the stage that I actually spit a pea and hit her. Of all the people, she immediately knew that I was the pimple-faced culprit and she caught me in her gaze, stood and just looked at me. My friends were cutting up and giggling in that high school imitation of gross emotional flatulence, but she was still looking at me and I couldn't lower my gaze. That's when it began, the guilt over Colleen. So when I saw this clip of the Russian it captured something I once knew and regretted. I mean I like nudity just fine, and sex sure, even the odd perversion, but I will never, never shoot an over-the-hill stripper with a pea shooter again. Promise. Never.