Tom Waits for no man

[LeeVanCleef]

If there's any Tom Waits fans lurking around here, his new album comes out next week. Bad As Me ranks up there with one of his best later releases. Check out the first song!

 

[sleepy]

I caught Tom Waits at The Ivar Theater in the 70's.
He was sitting in the seat next to me while we watched the strippers...he was a very nice man.

I wish they would use him in the next Batman. I was floored by his performance in Coppola's Dracula, though I hated the movie.
If anyone could match Heath Ledger's Joker, it would be Waits.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

Pasties and a G-String! Yeah, Waits has been pretty good in a lot of not-so-good movies... Renfield is definitely one of those roles.

 

[sleepy]

It may have been the early 80's, can't remember for sure now.

Pasties?...not that night.
G-String?...nope, though I did buy the "Small Change" album in '76.
The Ivar was a legit smaller theater in the heart of Hollywood on Ivar Ave. near Cahuenga Blvd. that ran out of business, so they flipped it to a bust-out strip theater for the bread and butter, and it featured strippers for about a year and a half until they got the money up to renovate, and why not?
They were going to replace the seats at the end anyhow.

So they threw out the strippers and renovated the theater, then reopened again as a legit little theater and went broke again.

The night I caught Waits there, it was a shambles. Canned music and no props. Just the barren stage like a high school auditorium and the chicks. So-called "Amateur Strippers"; totally bogus. I remember there was one stripper who couldn't get a babysitter, so she does her dance, goes all the way, and then comes back onstage holding her baby in her arms...

 

[sleepy]

Well, I am almost correct about The Ivar...found a good reference page about Waits and The Ivar:

http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/topography/ivar.html

 

[LeeVanCleef]

WOW! What a horribly depressing den of misery! I'm pretty sure one of Dante's inner circles of Hell is the Ivar Theatre!

 

[sleepy]

Yeah, it was pretty depressing, complete with "the intermission" z-grade porn short, in the darkness and one of those murky "all dick in the camera blocking the chick" shorts, but that never was why I bothered to show up.

But...this was not the worst of them. It was the night I was bummed out by my hazers over the biz and "the mainstream girls" who I had looked to and had since found out also worked in porn and so I hit the road and dropped in at "The Tiki Room" on Santa Monica Blvd. Hollywood.

Everything was sticky to the touch and walking on the floor made the sound of walking on layers of Scotch Tape. Might have been dried Coca-Cola...

The dancer that evening was aged. She was well past her prime as a nude dancer with sagging flesh though she was at one time obviously attractive, and she was obviously classically trained in ballet as her entire performance consisted of graceful and very sad ballet moves in the nude on a derelict stage that was trashed by years of bustout porn attendees who let their chips fall where they landed without a thought.
She was the sort of woman that you expect to find at The Bolshoi in lovely ballet tights and not the sort of woman that you would expect to find on a third-rate strip stage.

She sometimes danced and mostly gestured to the music of Swan Lake, and I couldn't help but feel for her as a woman who was indeed a well-trained and talented dancer in a town of over a thousand ballerinas, all seeking their opportunities before time runs out, and who in the years since had become a woman who desperately needed to make the rent for the month.

It was my worst experience and perhaps my richest experience.

 

[sleepy]

I see there are not many pinball table wips on this website. - Pinball Nirvana Forums

So PN is a nice place to talk to friends about whatever comes to mind... whether it's Star Trek, global warming or the scariest strip bar in America.

Hey, they didn't even have a bar. If you wanted to get juiced,
you arrived juiced.

Not sure if it was "the scariest strip bar", but in 1978 I stopped in at The Airport Strip Club on the main drag to LAX. $5 cover and $5 a beer.
That is like $10 a beer in 2011.

The featured "nude dancer" was a dead ringer for the actress who played the secretary on the original Bob Newhart Show.
She never danced much. Her specialty was as a female contortionist who tucked her legs behind her shoulders while sitting on her butt like a giant egg.

Out here in the L.A./Hollywood area you sometimes encounter some strange stuff. Liz Renay, the girlfriend of mobster Mickey Cohen, once streaked on Hollywood Blvd. among a crowd of thousands. It was announced on the local main AOR station prior to "the event".

Driving nights on Sunset Blvd., when the working girls are out, they sometimes lift their skirts at the drivers. No panties.

While driving in West L.A. around Oct., you might stumble across the Gay Pride Halloween Celebration, with hundreds of scantly-clad Gays and Lesbians cavorting and partying in the night streets, often butt naked wearing devil aprons. This was not by my intent. I was driving around just to get out for the evening, but it was a spectacle.

When I found out my family has business ties with a few GLBT, I attended a couple of events to check out the attitude.
One was an art project in the industrial zone and the other was at a church for GLBT featuring a nude lesbian dancer with a live band. The church was built as a Methodist brick and mortar structure; very prim and traditional Tudor design.

 

[LeeVanCleef]

I don't know, Sleepy... your exchange rate may be off... that's more like a $20 beer in 2011! I don't think I'd wanna see Bob's secretary naked... letting alone contorting herself. Still, that shot of the Ivar... I've seen mental institutions with more charm.
You should really read that LA Noir book I posted in one of the other threads... great look at Mickey's years running LA... didn't cover Liz's streaking, though!