Showtime

I've been listening again recently to Jason Isbell's excellent 'Southeastern' album during my gym sessions. There's a couplet in the song "Different Days" that gave me a way in to today's blog about   showtime  and the lines go: "You can strip in Portland from the day your turn sixteen/ You.ve got one thing to sell and benzodiazepine." 

It's a sad song, referencing those at the bottom end of the social scale who see no viable alternative to raising funds for food, lodging, clothes, drugs than by taking their clothes off seductively in public. They are almost always (though not exclusively) women, their audiences mostly (though not entirely) men.

Stripteasing is not a subject I've researched in depth, but I'm pretty sure it's as old as the first civilisations. In Sumerian legend, Inanna (goddess of love) descended into the underworld to find her lover Damouz, and removed an article of clothing at each of the seven gates to hell. In biblical times Salome is supposed to have performed the 'dance of the seven veils' for her stepfather Herod on his birthday, in return for anything she wanted, namely the head of St. John the Baptist on a plate. And there are illustrations from Pharaonic Egypt and from Ancient Greece of young women dancing in various stages of undress; whether as part of a cultish or religious practice or as seductive entertainment is not clear.

In more recent times, certainly from the 19th century onwards, stripteasing has been purely for the sake of entertainment, as showtime in bars, clubs and theatres, more of less regulated by licensing laws of varying degrees of stringency intended to protect both performers and public decency. 

For a while striptease became the province of theatrical burlesque revues, with bevvies of young women performing scantily clad in choreographed routines in the nightclubs of liberal cosmopolitan cities from San Francisco  and Chicago, via New York and to London, Paris and Berlin, Local statutes often dictated to what extent the process of undressing was allowed to go, and sometimes even stipulated that the fewer clothes the performers had on, the more static they had to become so as not to over-excite the audience. The erotic tableau thus became a showtime climax. As liberalisation in the 20th century progressed, so did the growth of revue bars and gentlemen's clubs, dances with snakes and never a veil left undiscarded.

a burlesque performer in tableau

My first encounter with stripteasing was, strangely enough, in the Beatles' 1967 movie 'Magical Mystery Tour', where in one scene the Fab Four and their entourage find themselves in a nightclub watching a stripper from Raymond's Revue Bar disrobing to the music of a cabaret band. The scene was obviously carefully edited for prime showtime viewing on the BBC on Boxing Day. It delighted fourteen-year-old boys countrywide but offended many parents who never held those "nice lads the Beatles" in such high regard after the event.

My first encounter with stripteasing in the flesh, so to speak, was in my local pub The Falcon when I lived in Camden Town in the late 1970s, for by then striptease was no longer the preserve of  the clubs. The Falcon was just round the corner and down the road from the mews flat I rented with friends. It was actually a great pub, not least because the landlord and his family were Greek and its pub food consisted of many of my favourite dishes from hummus or taramasalata with pitta bread and olives as a bar snack to stuffed peppers, lamb in pitta with Greek salad, to souflaki, or baked aubergine with tomato and feta (and chips). Only the beer was traditional English fare. Greek beers hadn't arrived in the UK at that time.

We used to frequent The Falcon several times a week, would often eat there if it had been a long, hard day at school (I was a teacher in those days), would play darts and pump shillings into the juke-box in the cosy front bar. It had a much larger bar with a stage at the rear but that only got used on Fridays and Saturdays - and Friday night was showtime, striptease night. Don't ask me why. 

my local pub in Camden Town

We usually sat drinking in the front bar, leaving the back room to the increasingly drunken and noisy men who were drawn in on the promise of the free spectacle. Sometimes we'd chat with the women who came along to perform while they drank a beer or glass of wine before they went off to get  ready for their act. We even got quite friendly with a couple of the regular artistes and our girlfriends in particular (being feminists) were intrigued to understand why these women did what they did.

In every case it was for the money. I couldn't imagine anyone doing it for the fun, especially in a pub. A couple were fashion students using the funds to help make ends meet and they'd been introduced to it by students who'd gone that route before, one was an aspiring actress at drama school, but mostly they were single mothers with rent to pay and mouths to feed, trying to get a jumpstart on circumstances. Occasionally we would go in for showtime at their insistence (the actress in particular). I wrote a poem about stripteasing based on those conversations with performing ladies at The Falcon. 

I mentioned I was a teacher. One of the classes I taught was a group of less academic sixth-form girls who were doing a vocational secretarial qualification. I took them once a week for 'improving' English. They knew I wrote because I scripted school plays and pantomimes. One last day of term they asked me to read some of my poetry. The poem about strippers was among them and it provoked a lively debate. Two of the brightest pupils said after class that they'd like to see it for themselves, so I invited Debbie and Pauline round and cooked dinner one Friday evening and then we headed to The Falcon. I think they were a bit gobsmacked by the whole experience but they wanted to talk to the performer afterwards and we all chatted for a while, extramural education in the raw. I then called a taxi to take them back to their homes. I can't imagine that sort of thing being countenanced now. Those truly were different days. I've nothing against stripteasing providing the artists actually enjoy their work and don't feel demeaned or exploited. Sadly that's not always the case. And I'd like to think that Debbie and Pauline (and the whole class of '78) have lived happy and fulfilling lives. They were good kids.

I moved out of the area heading south to Hackney at the end of the decade and never went back to The Falcon. I suspect it eventually changed hands for by the 1990s, the nature of showtime at the pub had changed. As the Camden music scene blossomed, so The Falcon became a popular live music venue for a few years, all Britpop and no Greek cuisine, I'm told. Nowadays. it's all boarded up and looking for a property developer. I've no idea what happened to that poem. It was probably a bit bathetic, if I'm honest, and I'm not inclined to try and recreate it - so no poem from me this week. Instead I offer you Donall Dempsey's unusual and amusing take on the idea...

a bra in a tree (in case you wondered)

North North West

Shock firstly
followed by awe

a crow's mocking
caw

as the blouse comes off and
then the bra

tossed now
nonchalantly aside

the flighty flirty skirt
yanked down

and of course the knickers
...follow.

Blouse and skirt
leaping over the wall

bra being worn
by an apple tree

the knickers being led up
the garden path.

"Ok..!" I say "...OK!"
"Enough is ENOUGH!"

The wind is in a silly mood.
I chase it chasing me

I trying to catch
the scattered clothes.

The line looking
almost naked.

"** **!" shouts the wind
enjoying itself immensely.

All that remains toeing the line
are a blue boxers and yellow socks

who have manfully withstood
the wind's assaults.

The wind chanting:
"Get them off...get them off!"

like a drunk punter
at a striptease show.

The wind drops and
drops the stolen items.

The line smiling
with all of its skewed pegs

looking shameful and
gormless

at the wind's
misdemeanour.

"I was only trying it on!"
sulks the wind.

"Trying to get in touch with
my feminine side!"

Knickers in hand
I slam the door

in its protesting
face.

"A cross dressing wind...
....that's all I need!"

                           Donall Dempsey, 2015

Thanks for reading, S ;-)