Friday, April 2, 2010

Blast From The Past

I'm sure we're all having lotsa fun with the RNC's weenie self-stomp at the Voyeur club in WeHo. I found out today that it's the old Pink Pussycat, which was pretty infamous back in the day. I even managed to find it a coupla times.

From a NYTimes obit on its former owner via Pensito Review, along with a lot of other history of the place:

Located near the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, the club was a popular destination of tourists and locals alike, known for its glittering stage shows and equally glittering celebrity clientele.

It was a favorite watering hole of the Rat Pack, and for good reason. Mrs. Schiller shrewdly gave her dancers stage names like Fran Sinatra, Samya Davis Jr., Deena Martin and Peeler Lawford, and the originals soon showed up to inspect their namesakes.

The club was also internationally famous for its attached institution of higher learning, the Pink Pussycat College of Strip Tease, familiarly called the Navel Academy of the West…

The Pink Pussycat had a good ride, but by the late 1970s, nude dancing was in and striptease was out. The Schillers, now in their sixties, converted the club to a discotheque called Peanuts that was popular with gay women.

I remember the first time I went to a topless dancing joint. My friend Roger took me to one up on the Sunset Strip. I can't remember the name of the club but it was across the street from the Whisky a GoGo. Nice place, nothing sleazy about it. There weren't any table dances or 'private shows' in those days, so it was all pretty clean-cut fun. I was just out of the service (1966) and I had never seen anything like that in my young life! Pretty girls! Tits a-floppin' all over the place! I don't think my jaw un-dropped for a week. I may have revisited the place once or twice to make sure I wasn't seeing things. I was, thank you Lord. But I digress...

It turns out that Mrs. G and I have some shared experiences in WeHo (That's new. We just called it West Hollywood in those days.) in the years before we met. Besides being folkies and bluegrass fans and thus patrons of the Troubadour and the Ash Grove, we came dangerously close to crossing each other's paths a lot closer to what is now the Voyeur.

Mrs. G lived on La Jolla Ave. about four blocks from the club. I lived about three miles away, but we both used the same laundromat at Sta. Monica and Crescent Heights, two blocks from the club. Mrs. G says they had pizza there, but I don't remember that. There was a donut shop there. I remember that. Heh. Our skivvies mighta been waltzin' with each other and we never knew it.

Donuts and pizza only go so far while you're waiting for your laundry, and as luck would have it, there was an adult bookstore on the block. It was called The Book Circus, and the sign had red and white stripes and a picture of a clown.

Update: Holy crap! It's still there!

Mrs. G remembers going in there with her friends, stoned outta her gourd, to get a pack of smokes and her friends taking off and leaving her there. Heh.

I remember getting kicked outta the joint. Me and my buddy Howard actually paid the admission and went into the hard-core part of the store. We had a ball! We were looking at books and magazines and laughin' our asses off. Hold up a photo and in a loud voice, "Hey, Howie! Look at the schlong on this one!". Stuff like that. Well, we found out that porn is serious business and we were disturbing the patrons with their hands in their pockets and the manager asked us to leave. He even gave us our 50¢ back.

I met Mrs. G in '71 after she moved to Burbank and the rest is history. I can't remember how long it was before we put two and two together on our West Hollywood days, but we still get a big kick out of it.

Thanks for putting up with my sashay down memory lane. I had one yesterday, too. Check my comment at Fixer's post. Sometimes yer past comes outta nowhere and tickles ya on the ass.

Blogger is sucking wet monkey ass today.

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