1 photos
RIP Body Shop. RIP, my youth.
[QUOTE=LAmong;6604490]RIP -- closed earlier this summer, owners sold it. No idea what will become of it.[/QUOTE]Wow. That place has been there since the 1970's at least. It was the first club I ever went to, back in the early '80's. I hope it stays a strip club with the new owners. Back when I first went, the dancers wore pasties and costumes (and it was more of a cabaret club. They had an emcee who went on stage and told jokes, kind of like a vaudeville set. He would introduce the dancers, and they would come out and do routines, and spin the tassels on their pasties and stuff like that.
I was a mere pup. A kind dancer sat next to me and told me how strip clubs worked, and how I needed to put a dollar on the stage for every song. She told me how I needed to tip the waitress for bringing me an expensive Coke. (They also had alcohol, but I didn't have enough money with me for that.) She spent about 15 minutes explaining to me everything I needed to know, and then she went on stage, and I tipped her my last $3. (I had only brought about $20, and that was all I had left after the $10 cover and drink.) Then I left, and didn't return for over 20 years, and by then it had changed, a lot. (Becoming a nude club, for one.).
I didn't go back the the Body Shop, because shortly thereafter, I discovered a club called '77 Sunset Strip, where the dancers also had costumes and did routines, but they also got naked. I still have a coupon from that club! (See photo. Yes, I am fuckin' old, and kind of a hoarder.) I don't know when it closed. Those two clubs started me on my path of joyous depravity that has continued mostly unabated for 40 years.
Jesus. That is kind of pathetic. I can remember when there was an actual brothel in North Hollywood, literally a block away from the LAPD station off Lankershim.
From the Body Shop and Sunset Strip, it was Odd Ball (I think back then it was 8 Ball), and Star Garden, and all of the other ancient clubs in LA and the Valley. And then lap dances, alt. Sex. Strip-clubs, TUSCL, and ZBone really got things going in the 1990's, when we had the Internet. And now, I'm here, on this wild, weird, wonderful site, where reading about the closing of a club you first visited 40 years ago can set off a rush of memories and emotions that would make Proust proud. (But don't worry, I won't write a single paragraph with over 600 words.).
Crap, I am old.