Nights in White Satin with Liz
Nights in White Satin with Liz: A Dancer’s Story
Ah, that I only had nights in white satin with Liz, but this bit of reverie will be about a dancer I followed with some regularity in San Jose in the mid to late 1970s. Like more than a few, I had a serious crush on her, but like bar maids in any joint where I was a regular, nothing would ever come to pass. And really. . . she never knew.
You can cover a lot of cultural ground in a piece like this, but suffice to say by the mid 1970s I had moved on from my days as an earnest journalism major at San Jose State. I had dabbled at novel manuscripts, underground comics, and singing with a garage band formed by co-workers of mine. Somewhere in the middle of all that was a helluva lot of pot, speed, and psychedelics, dosed and monitored in the atmosphere of twelve hour graveyard shifts at a microfilm factory in Silicon Valley which shall remain nameless. . . although they were known to have an innovative coating process. Yes, microfilm. The PC and Apple were barely the gleam in the designers’ and programmers’ eyes, and data storage and other material processes were only slowly moving beyond the analog realm. Much was still happening under amber filtered light cranking out 16, 35, and 105 millimeter base film rolls, and packet after packet of microfiche.
Hanging out with a crew that looked a good deal like the cast of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Freak Brothers comics, I learned it was possible to indulge in a heady realm of altered states, with progressive rock music blasting out of component stereos lugged in faithfully each night, and regular trips to the parking lot or “up on the roof” to partake of pretty good Colombian weed . . . and still function rationally, making production goals, getting raises, and enjoying paid vacations. Most of us roomed with fellow co-workers, since we all worked odd shifts, and were likely the only people who could tolerate each other. I roomed for a good year with the senior QC tech from my graveyard shift, living in a small cabin off Highway 9 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Our 45 minute commute could be contained in the entirety of Stephen Stills’ Manassas album on 8-track. Returning in the morning we enjoyed three sunrises over three different ridgelines as we headed back to our refuge in the redwoods.
Still later in the seventies, after some wild adventures in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a truck wreck, I was hunkered down in San Jose in another notorious bachelor pad with more guys from the same factory, all of us as indulgent as in my previous sojourn in the production clean room. We had a pool table in the middle of the living room, which pretty much filled the space. Sometimes, pool was played on it. At another time one of us was caught balling a particularly skanky woman upon it. That was not my claim to fame. I did spend a lot of time catching up with bands in the local music scene, particularly at a club called the Bodega, in the ground floor of an old Del Monte cannery in Campbell. Some years later I worked as a roadie for one of those bands, which didn’t make me a lot of money, but certainly led me on a lot of interesting adventures. But that is a tale for another time.
It was at that point, around 1977, that I re-discovered the Pink Poodle, San Jose’s only club featuring nude dancers. The work I did left me with what I thought was a considerable amount of disposable income, which I proceeded to dispose. This was the era of Ian Dury’s classic single “Sex and d**gs and Rock’n’Roll” . . . if you were alive then, you should know the tune. Besides rocking out at night clubs, massage studios and strip clubs were especially enticing places to me at the time. I had been to that particular strip joint a couple of times back in my college days, much to the seeming chagrin of my more sedate dorm mates. The Pink Poodle had opened as a nude dance club in 1970, and is still operating to this day. Do a web search. . . you’ll find it and its eccentric history to be quite interesting. The ins and outs of local and California state law allowed for adult entertainment to be nude so long as no alcohol is served, and while numerous attempts were made to close this down from time to time, the Pink Poodle somehow beat the rap and was grandfathered in, and still operates in all its tacky glory on Bascom Avenue in San Jose. I have no idea what the shows are like now, nor if the facility has expanded from what existed during the seedier days of the late seventies, but it remains legendary to this day.
Again, you could operate a club with all nude entertainment if you didn’t serve alcohol. In Santa Clara County. The two most notorious establishments were the Poodle, and the Brass Rail in Sunnyvale, a bit North of San Jose on 101. There had been one along First Street in downtown San Jose in my college days, but that along with the Pussycat adult movie theater was closed down by the mid seventies, as the city fathers and downtown development agency worked on cleaning the area up. It may not be as cool as San Francisco, but it is thoroughly gentrified now.
In any of these places, on a given night. . . and maybe I should say shift, because I suspect the crew in the afternoons at the Pink Poodle varied a bit. . . you would have a cadre of three or four dancers, who also served as waitresses serving soft drinks and near beer between sets. The stage was elevated slightly above table height, with a round proscenium projecting into the room, and that was floored with stainless steel plates not unlike some of the clean room facilities I was familiar with from the factory. Small tables with the cliché red restaurant candle lamps on them were s**ttered around the stage and back toward the bar. A shelf at table height projected around the edge of the stage, where the hungry ones could hunker down on their seats, flashing their ones and fivers for that special smile. In between the dancers’ sets, the Poodle showed adult films on a small screen in back of the stage. The waitresses circulated and served drinks, but this was somewhat before the trend of the eighties and beyond where they would sit and chat you up and try to get you to buy more drinks. This was also before table dances and private dance rooms became any kind of norm. I think the public prurience laws precluded the more interpersonal contact in those days anyway.
Most of us young guys would have been scared shitless to try and engage them more anyway, although you could tell some of the older hands alternated between just shooting the breeze with them and being real assholes. There was one old geezer who showed up at least a couple of times over the five years I really patronized the place who called out in a gravelly voice that sounded a bit like Popeye, “Show no mercy, baby! Gimme all ya got! Let me die a happy man!” He sat at the bar, and you could tell he was actually kind of the dancers’ pet in a lot of ways. . . probably tipped well for his near beer, kept his banter light, and his hands to himself. But to the extent that any of the dancers tried to keep their cool onstage, he managed to crack them up with his growls of “Show no mercy, baby!” Like the waitress who calls you ducks, it was impossible to be angry with the garrulous old coot.
There is a format and a flow to how the shows operate at clubs like these. When a given seedy adult flick wrapped up. . . and these were the seedy productions, not classics like Deep Throat or Behind the Green Door . . . a DJ with a friendly baritone voice would announce the dancers one by one, who would each do a set of three dances. The DJ did a nice job of trying to gin up some enthusiasm, and he did this for the girls who were drop dead gorgeous and the ones who were less than perfect specimens, as he played each dancer’s selected tunes. I think the DJ and the doorman were also ready to eject anyone who showed the slightest sign of letting his asshole tendencies get the better of his sense of decorum. Because, believe it or not, there is a code of conduct in joints like this, and that’s part of keeping it light and fun and sexy.
Her stage name was Liz. . . remember this story is named for her. . . and she was definitely one of the ones who were drop dead gorgeous. She was long and lean, or appeared so on stage. I recall when she was doing the rounds between sets in her nightie that she appeared a bit more down to earth. But without being anorexic thin, she showed no fat except just a tad in her soft ass and her medium sized breasts. Her belly was taut, and she had long, strong dancer’s legs that she displayed to great advantage. Her hair was dark and straight, and hung down to the small of her back. Her mouth had that look, her full lips just slightly parted over straight teeth, as if she was just on the edge of passion. She had penetrating blue eyes, and she knew how to engage your undivided attention with them.
Liz would sashay on to the stage in a pale blue, translucent nightie, which she also wore while on the floor serving drinks. Her opening number was Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?” which had a nice catchy hook and beat, lending itself to her teasing removal of the nightie. Of course there would be the obligatory hiding of her breasts with the lingerie clutched across her chest, but that would eventually drop to the stage, and she would prance around and kneel before the hopeful men and boys flashing their tips of a dollar or five. . . In the bridge between verses, where a little paradiddle happens in the rhythm section of Wonder’s band, she would clutch her arms to her sides, project her titties and give them a little jiggle in time with that riff. . . letting us know they were perky but quite natural. They would each be a nice handful, with pale brown areolae, and when the AC was just right, her nipples stood up nicely.
Liz’s second tune was “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger, which represented as jarring a shift in tone as you could imagine. The slow, sultry, bluesy saxophone solo opening the song set a pace that was going to be languorous and down beat. Its description of the rigors and tedium of life on the road with a touring band may have been self-referential for a performer who unveiled her gorgeous body to the desperately leering eyes of her audience. Her moves were less bouncy, as she did slow, elegant, high leg stretches that indicated she had formal dance training in her background to my untutored eye. . . this was not the normal bump and grind of burlesque or even ”Live Nude Girls Live” that might beckon from the marquees of North Beach in San Francisco. I think Liz had higher aspirations, and yet here she was on the dusty steel stage of the Pink Poodle. At some mesmerizing moment, between the final verse and the mournful wailing of the saxophone in the coda, she lost her lacy panties and teased us with a rotating high leg lift revealing a neat triangle of dark hair and her slightly protuberant pussy lips.
She had us in the palm of her hands. . .
In those days, the third song in a stripper’s set is the cliché “Down-on-the-bearskin-rug-and-show’em-what-you-make-yer-money-with-baby” number. . . in a nude bar, the spread leg pussy show. So Liz didn’t have a bearskin rug, but that is the concept. Probably some sort of faux fur acrylic number: It has to be sturdy, but soft and comfortable, for she is going to be lounging around on that stage revealing her charms. Whether that surface is stainless steel, waxed hardwood, splintery planks, or dusty painted plywood, it is her platform, her protection, and her refuge, large enough to wrap herself in, providing coy cover and erotic reveals. Liz gracefully spread out her fuzzy rug, lay down on one side, and lifted one leg straight up in the air, with the slightly meaty but delicate lips of her vagina parted ever so slightly for the boys to see. . . and we heard the opening notes of her third song, the final orchestral fade of “Twilight Time” from the conceptual album by the Moody Blues, Days of the Future Passed, in a segue to the slow opening bass beat of “Nights in White Satin.”
Anyone who came of age in the late sixties knows this British band, one of the pioneers of what came to be known as Progressive Rock, which could encompass all manner of artsy pretensions and occasional profundity. Days of the Future Passed marked their transition from a struggling rhythm and blues outfit to a genuine cultural phenomenon, and the surviving members with various enterprising local orchestras around the world can still pack in crowds of nostalgic baby-boomers. Still, when recorded in 1967, at the very peak of the psychedelic music movement, the novelty of a rock band performing with orchestral interludes from the London Festival Orchestra, beat poetry, and all these elements occasionally melding together, marked at least as radical a departure as, say, Gershwin’s blending of jazz and classical in “Rhapsody in Blue.” We can quibble about how successful the recording is rendered, as many critics have. . . it worked for me. But suffice to say where this was going as Liz lay on that rug is another story.
This is not traditional strip show music. . .
I think doing that sort of dance has to be possibly the most difficult for a stripper. . . it’s not the revelation of the dancer’s intimate charms so much, as it is the assuming of positions that rarely have anything resembling dignity. Lots of squats or awkward v-shaped leg spreads on her back, and somehow doing this in sync with some musical number. I can see where the introduction of the dancer’s pole, which allowed for attempts at some sort of acrobatic grace, became such an innovation in strip clubs. But here was Liz, doing a floor dance with fluid, graceful moves of her legs. . . now up, now down, her arm sinuously d****d around her thigh as she raised it again, alternating sides, and rotating around on her rug so all the boys at the edge of the stage got their fair share of her view. All this with the sad ballad playing in the hushed club, with string sections weaving in and out of Justin Hayward’s reflection on love, what Wikipedia describes as being “about the changes between one relationship and another, using bedsheets as a metaphor.” Pardon the music criticism here, but they go on to describe that when keyboardist Mike Pinder “added a string line on the Mellotron to accompany Hayward's basic song framework, the group realised they had written something notable and a suitable ending for the song cycle.” And Liz stood at that point to continue her erotic posturing right through to the orchestral crescendo, more kicks and stretches, and then was upon the rug once more, her hand lightly tracing the contours of her breast, through the final denouement of poetry. . .
Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day’s useless energy spent
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
As this sort of musing played out against a gentle, almost Star Trek sounding accompaniment from the orchestra, Liz engaged our eyes one by one again as she showed us her delicate cunt, daring us to choose one or the other, her blue eyes or her living sex. As the poem concluded, and one more coda of soaring orchestra played out, she assumed a kneeling pose on the stage, no longer the stripper, but the interpretive dancer waiting for the final climactic crash and fade of the gong that completes the composition. . . and as that tone vibrated into nothingness the lights were cut, the stage in darkness as we sat in rapt attention. Then up came the backstage lights, she gathered up her rug and strode off the stage in an almost clinical fashion as our applause pattered after her. In a few moments she would be doing the rounds asking if I wanted another near beer.
In my younger days, in any kind of bar, I rarely tipped the waitresses. I learned after a friendship with a barmaid at the Bodega that tips really do make a significant part of their income, and I learned to tip appropriately. . . not excessively generously, like I was trying to impress her, but appreciatively. I got in the habit with girls at the Pink Poodle as well, even if I had already dropped some bills when they were on stage. I was scrupulously polite, too, although to tell the truth, I had a crush on Liz that was at least as hopeless and unrealistic as my crush on the barmaid at the Bodega, or my crush on Joni Mitchell. If she had actually started to chat me up, I might have made a complete ass of myself, but I hoped I might keep my shit together to not sound like a complete goof, even as a longhair who favored patchwork jeans and leather civil war caps. I did eventually grow out of it.
Some years later, with an adventurous girlfriend in tow, I revisited the Pink Poodle and Liz was still dancing. When she brought drinks around for me and Bonita, I suddenly blurted out “Hey, are you going to do the Moody Blues number tonight?” She gave me a kind of half smile, and sort of nodded, perhaps wryly amused that I would remember her for that routine. But there was also a look in her eye that suggested she had maybe tired of that some time ago. However, I had also spoken considerably above a stage whisper. Maybe it was going to be in her set anyway. . . she certainly had the other two songs in it. It is also possible that if she really had abandoned “Nights in White Satin” from her repertoire, that the manager gently suggested it might be a good idea for her to still do it since I had so clearly expressed interest. I’ll never know, but that night she did her seductive posing on the rug to the strains of the Moody Blues and the London Festival Orchestra. Bonita was impressed, and we had a lot fun later that night.
That was in 1979. . . and in a couple of years upon returning to the Pink Poodle, the crew had changed considerably. At least two of the dancers were refugees from a strip club up the Peninsula called The Lily Theater, where more contact with the dancers was a thing. . . and which had been busted and closed down. That kind of contact was not happening in San Jose, and the dancers may well have been glad that was over and done with. But Liz was no longer dancing at the Pink Poodle. I am hoping she managed to land a gig with some touring musical or a jazz interpretive dance troupe. She had the moves, by God. To this day, I cannot hear the opening tones of “Nights in White Satin” without being transported back to that seedy club on Bascom Avenue, where the girls were friendly, and Liz did something kind of different to the melodramatic music of the Moody Blues. I say she ruined the Moody Blues for me. . . but in a good way.
Hope all is well with you, Liz. . .
Ah, that I only had nights in white satin with Liz, but this bit of reverie will be about a dancer I followed with some regularity in San Jose in the mid to late 1970s. Like more than a few, I had a serious crush on her, but like bar maids in any joint where I was a regular, nothing would ever come to pass. And really. . . she never knew.
You can cover a lot of cultural ground in a piece like this, but suffice to say by the mid 1970s I had moved on from my days as an earnest journalism major at San Jose State. I had dabbled at novel manuscripts, underground comics, and singing with a garage band formed by co-workers of mine. Somewhere in the middle of all that was a helluva lot of pot, speed, and psychedelics, dosed and monitored in the atmosphere of twelve hour graveyard shifts at a microfilm factory in Silicon Valley which shall remain nameless. . . although they were known to have an innovative coating process. Yes, microfilm. The PC and Apple were barely the gleam in the designers’ and programmers’ eyes, and data storage and other material processes were only slowly moving beyond the analog realm. Much was still happening under amber filtered light cranking out 16, 35, and 105 millimeter base film rolls, and packet after packet of microfiche.
Hanging out with a crew that looked a good deal like the cast of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Freak Brothers comics, I learned it was possible to indulge in a heady realm of altered states, with progressive rock music blasting out of component stereos lugged in faithfully each night, and regular trips to the parking lot or “up on the roof” to partake of pretty good Colombian weed . . . and still function rationally, making production goals, getting raises, and enjoying paid vacations. Most of us roomed with fellow co-workers, since we all worked odd shifts, and were likely the only people who could tolerate each other. I roomed for a good year with the senior QC tech from my graveyard shift, living in a small cabin off Highway 9 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Our 45 minute commute could be contained in the entirety of Stephen Stills’ Manassas album on 8-track. Returning in the morning we enjoyed three sunrises over three different ridgelines as we headed back to our refuge in the redwoods.
Still later in the seventies, after some wild adventures in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a truck wreck, I was hunkered down in San Jose in another notorious bachelor pad with more guys from the same factory, all of us as indulgent as in my previous sojourn in the production clean room. We had a pool table in the middle of the living room, which pretty much filled the space. Sometimes, pool was played on it. At another time one of us was caught balling a particularly skanky woman upon it. That was not my claim to fame. I did spend a lot of time catching up with bands in the local music scene, particularly at a club called the Bodega, in the ground floor of an old Del Monte cannery in Campbell. Some years later I worked as a roadie for one of those bands, which didn’t make me a lot of money, but certainly led me on a lot of interesting adventures. But that is a tale for another time.
It was at that point, around 1977, that I re-discovered the Pink Poodle, San Jose’s only club featuring nude dancers. The work I did left me with what I thought was a considerable amount of disposable income, which I proceeded to dispose. This was the era of Ian Dury’s classic single “Sex and d**gs and Rock’n’Roll” . . . if you were alive then, you should know the tune. Besides rocking out at night clubs, massage studios and strip clubs were especially enticing places to me at the time. I had been to that particular strip joint a couple of times back in my college days, much to the seeming chagrin of my more sedate dorm mates. The Pink Poodle had opened as a nude dance club in 1970, and is still operating to this day. Do a web search. . . you’ll find it and its eccentric history to be quite interesting. The ins and outs of local and California state law allowed for adult entertainment to be nude so long as no alcohol is served, and while numerous attempts were made to close this down from time to time, the Pink Poodle somehow beat the rap and was grandfathered in, and still operates in all its tacky glory on Bascom Avenue in San Jose. I have no idea what the shows are like now, nor if the facility has expanded from what existed during the seedier days of the late seventies, but it remains legendary to this day.
Again, you could operate a club with all nude entertainment if you didn’t serve alcohol. In Santa Clara County. The two most notorious establishments were the Poodle, and the Brass Rail in Sunnyvale, a bit North of San Jose on 101. There had been one along First Street in downtown San Jose in my college days, but that along with the Pussycat adult movie theater was closed down by the mid seventies, as the city fathers and downtown development agency worked on cleaning the area up. It may not be as cool as San Francisco, but it is thoroughly gentrified now.
In any of these places, on a given night. . . and maybe I should say shift, because I suspect the crew in the afternoons at the Pink Poodle varied a bit. . . you would have a cadre of three or four dancers, who also served as waitresses serving soft drinks and near beer between sets. The stage was elevated slightly above table height, with a round proscenium projecting into the room, and that was floored with stainless steel plates not unlike some of the clean room facilities I was familiar with from the factory. Small tables with the cliché red restaurant candle lamps on them were s**ttered around the stage and back toward the bar. A shelf at table height projected around the edge of the stage, where the hungry ones could hunker down on their seats, flashing their ones and fivers for that special smile. In between the dancers’ sets, the Poodle showed adult films on a small screen in back of the stage. The waitresses circulated and served drinks, but this was somewhat before the trend of the eighties and beyond where they would sit and chat you up and try to get you to buy more drinks. This was also before table dances and private dance rooms became any kind of norm. I think the public prurience laws precluded the more interpersonal contact in those days anyway.
Most of us young guys would have been scared shitless to try and engage them more anyway, although you could tell some of the older hands alternated between just shooting the breeze with them and being real assholes. There was one old geezer who showed up at least a couple of times over the five years I really patronized the place who called out in a gravelly voice that sounded a bit like Popeye, “Show no mercy, baby! Gimme all ya got! Let me die a happy man!” He sat at the bar, and you could tell he was actually kind of the dancers’ pet in a lot of ways. . . probably tipped well for his near beer, kept his banter light, and his hands to himself. But to the extent that any of the dancers tried to keep their cool onstage, he managed to crack them up with his growls of “Show no mercy, baby!” Like the waitress who calls you ducks, it was impossible to be angry with the garrulous old coot.
There is a format and a flow to how the shows operate at clubs like these. When a given seedy adult flick wrapped up. . . and these were the seedy productions, not classics like Deep Throat or Behind the Green Door . . . a DJ with a friendly baritone voice would announce the dancers one by one, who would each do a set of three dances. The DJ did a nice job of trying to gin up some enthusiasm, and he did this for the girls who were drop dead gorgeous and the ones who were less than perfect specimens, as he played each dancer’s selected tunes. I think the DJ and the doorman were also ready to eject anyone who showed the slightest sign of letting his asshole tendencies get the better of his sense of decorum. Because, believe it or not, there is a code of conduct in joints like this, and that’s part of keeping it light and fun and sexy.
Her stage name was Liz. . . remember this story is named for her. . . and she was definitely one of the ones who were drop dead gorgeous. She was long and lean, or appeared so on stage. I recall when she was doing the rounds between sets in her nightie that she appeared a bit more down to earth. But without being anorexic thin, she showed no fat except just a tad in her soft ass and her medium sized breasts. Her belly was taut, and she had long, strong dancer’s legs that she displayed to great advantage. Her hair was dark and straight, and hung down to the small of her back. Her mouth had that look, her full lips just slightly parted over straight teeth, as if she was just on the edge of passion. She had penetrating blue eyes, and she knew how to engage your undivided attention with them.
Liz would sashay on to the stage in a pale blue, translucent nightie, which she also wore while on the floor serving drinks. Her opening number was Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?” which had a nice catchy hook and beat, lending itself to her teasing removal of the nightie. Of course there would be the obligatory hiding of her breasts with the lingerie clutched across her chest, but that would eventually drop to the stage, and she would prance around and kneel before the hopeful men and boys flashing their tips of a dollar or five. . . In the bridge between verses, where a little paradiddle happens in the rhythm section of Wonder’s band, she would clutch her arms to her sides, project her titties and give them a little jiggle in time with that riff. . . letting us know they were perky but quite natural. They would each be a nice handful, with pale brown areolae, and when the AC was just right, her nipples stood up nicely.
Liz’s second tune was “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger, which represented as jarring a shift in tone as you could imagine. The slow, sultry, bluesy saxophone solo opening the song set a pace that was going to be languorous and down beat. Its description of the rigors and tedium of life on the road with a touring band may have been self-referential for a performer who unveiled her gorgeous body to the desperately leering eyes of her audience. Her moves were less bouncy, as she did slow, elegant, high leg stretches that indicated she had formal dance training in her background to my untutored eye. . . this was not the normal bump and grind of burlesque or even ”Live Nude Girls Live” that might beckon from the marquees of North Beach in San Francisco. I think Liz had higher aspirations, and yet here she was on the dusty steel stage of the Pink Poodle. At some mesmerizing moment, between the final verse and the mournful wailing of the saxophone in the coda, she lost her lacy panties and teased us with a rotating high leg lift revealing a neat triangle of dark hair and her slightly protuberant pussy lips.
She had us in the palm of her hands. . .
In those days, the third song in a stripper’s set is the cliché “Down-on-the-bearskin-rug-and-show’em-what-you-make-yer-money-with-baby” number. . . in a nude bar, the spread leg pussy show. So Liz didn’t have a bearskin rug, but that is the concept. Probably some sort of faux fur acrylic number: It has to be sturdy, but soft and comfortable, for she is going to be lounging around on that stage revealing her charms. Whether that surface is stainless steel, waxed hardwood, splintery planks, or dusty painted plywood, it is her platform, her protection, and her refuge, large enough to wrap herself in, providing coy cover and erotic reveals. Liz gracefully spread out her fuzzy rug, lay down on one side, and lifted one leg straight up in the air, with the slightly meaty but delicate lips of her vagina parted ever so slightly for the boys to see. . . and we heard the opening notes of her third song, the final orchestral fade of “Twilight Time” from the conceptual album by the Moody Blues, Days of the Future Passed, in a segue to the slow opening bass beat of “Nights in White Satin.”
Anyone who came of age in the late sixties knows this British band, one of the pioneers of what came to be known as Progressive Rock, which could encompass all manner of artsy pretensions and occasional profundity. Days of the Future Passed marked their transition from a struggling rhythm and blues outfit to a genuine cultural phenomenon, and the surviving members with various enterprising local orchestras around the world can still pack in crowds of nostalgic baby-boomers. Still, when recorded in 1967, at the very peak of the psychedelic music movement, the novelty of a rock band performing with orchestral interludes from the London Festival Orchestra, beat poetry, and all these elements occasionally melding together, marked at least as radical a departure as, say, Gershwin’s blending of jazz and classical in “Rhapsody in Blue.” We can quibble about how successful the recording is rendered, as many critics have. . . it worked for me. But suffice to say where this was going as Liz lay on that rug is another story.
This is not traditional strip show music. . .
I think doing that sort of dance has to be possibly the most difficult for a stripper. . . it’s not the revelation of the dancer’s intimate charms so much, as it is the assuming of positions that rarely have anything resembling dignity. Lots of squats or awkward v-shaped leg spreads on her back, and somehow doing this in sync with some musical number. I can see where the introduction of the dancer’s pole, which allowed for attempts at some sort of acrobatic grace, became such an innovation in strip clubs. But here was Liz, doing a floor dance with fluid, graceful moves of her legs. . . now up, now down, her arm sinuously d****d around her thigh as she raised it again, alternating sides, and rotating around on her rug so all the boys at the edge of the stage got their fair share of her view. All this with the sad ballad playing in the hushed club, with string sections weaving in and out of Justin Hayward’s reflection on love, what Wikipedia describes as being “about the changes between one relationship and another, using bedsheets as a metaphor.” Pardon the music criticism here, but they go on to describe that when keyboardist Mike Pinder “added a string line on the Mellotron to accompany Hayward's basic song framework, the group realised they had written something notable and a suitable ending for the song cycle.” And Liz stood at that point to continue her erotic posturing right through to the orchestral crescendo, more kicks and stretches, and then was upon the rug once more, her hand lightly tracing the contours of her breast, through the final denouement of poetry. . .
Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day’s useless energy spent
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young
Cold hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
As this sort of musing played out against a gentle, almost Star Trek sounding accompaniment from the orchestra, Liz engaged our eyes one by one again as she showed us her delicate cunt, daring us to choose one or the other, her blue eyes or her living sex. As the poem concluded, and one more coda of soaring orchestra played out, she assumed a kneeling pose on the stage, no longer the stripper, but the interpretive dancer waiting for the final climactic crash and fade of the gong that completes the composition. . . and as that tone vibrated into nothingness the lights were cut, the stage in darkness as we sat in rapt attention. Then up came the backstage lights, she gathered up her rug and strode off the stage in an almost clinical fashion as our applause pattered after her. In a few moments she would be doing the rounds asking if I wanted another near beer.
In my younger days, in any kind of bar, I rarely tipped the waitresses. I learned after a friendship with a barmaid at the Bodega that tips really do make a significant part of their income, and I learned to tip appropriately. . . not excessively generously, like I was trying to impress her, but appreciatively. I got in the habit with girls at the Pink Poodle as well, even if I had already dropped some bills when they were on stage. I was scrupulously polite, too, although to tell the truth, I had a crush on Liz that was at least as hopeless and unrealistic as my crush on the barmaid at the Bodega, or my crush on Joni Mitchell. If she had actually started to chat me up, I might have made a complete ass of myself, but I hoped I might keep my shit together to not sound like a complete goof, even as a longhair who favored patchwork jeans and leather civil war caps. I did eventually grow out of it.
Some years later, with an adventurous girlfriend in tow, I revisited the Pink Poodle and Liz was still dancing. When she brought drinks around for me and Bonita, I suddenly blurted out “Hey, are you going to do the Moody Blues number tonight?” She gave me a kind of half smile, and sort of nodded, perhaps wryly amused that I would remember her for that routine. But there was also a look in her eye that suggested she had maybe tired of that some time ago. However, I had also spoken considerably above a stage whisper. Maybe it was going to be in her set anyway. . . she certainly had the other two songs in it. It is also possible that if she really had abandoned “Nights in White Satin” from her repertoire, that the manager gently suggested it might be a good idea for her to still do it since I had so clearly expressed interest. I’ll never know, but that night she did her seductive posing on the rug to the strains of the Moody Blues and the London Festival Orchestra. Bonita was impressed, and we had a lot fun later that night.
That was in 1979. . . and in a couple of years upon returning to the Pink Poodle, the crew had changed considerably. At least two of the dancers were refugees from a strip club up the Peninsula called The Lily Theater, where more contact with the dancers was a thing. . . and which had been busted and closed down. That kind of contact was not happening in San Jose, and the dancers may well have been glad that was over and done with. But Liz was no longer dancing at the Pink Poodle. I am hoping she managed to land a gig with some touring musical or a jazz interpretive dance troupe. She had the moves, by God. To this day, I cannot hear the opening tones of “Nights in White Satin” without being transported back to that seedy club on Bascom Avenue, where the girls were friendly, and Liz did something kind of different to the melodramatic music of the Moody Blues. I say she ruined the Moody Blues for me. . . but in a good way.
Hope all is well with you, Liz. . .
3 年 前
