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| Ed Wood is in a globetrotting mood today. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (Bear Manor Media, 2021).
The article: "Sex Around the World." Also known simply as "Around the World." Originally published in Spice 'N' Nice (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 1, February/March 1973. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "San Francisco, and especially the North Beach section, has long had a spectacular night life. However, the topless boom cut severely into straight entertainment. The fine clubs that lined Broadway and intersecting Columbus Avenue felt the bite no less severely than did the girl with the boa of the gay nineties. After all, visitors to the city can be forgiven if they passed up fine entertainment to spend their pennies on a topless fling."
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| A matchbook from the Blue Note. |
Reflections: I may have to revise what I said previously about prostitutes being far more common than strippers in the Ed Wood canon. In retrospect, I had not taken Ed's short-form nonfiction work into account when I said that. Prostitutes sill have the edge, but the gap is narrowing. Today's article, "Sex Around the World," is at least the third piece about stripping in When the Topic is Sex, and it's similar in tone and content to the others. (One of those, "To Produce a Lovely Creature," was also written for Spice 'N' Nice magazine.) Once again, Ed tells us about the kinds of girls who gravitate toward stripping and what they have to do to make it to the top in that profession.
Based on the title of this story, I had thought it might be about sexual morality or even popular sex practices and fetishes in foreign countries. But, no, it's just about young women taking off their clothes for money. Ho hum. The article isn't really even all that concerned with international strippers. As you can see from the excerpt above, Ed devotes a portion of this column to the topless dancers of San Francisco. The strip club circuits of New York, New Orleans, and Las Vegas are discussed as well. Ed's discussion of Vegas is at least sort of interesting. According to Eddie, a number of movie and television actresses got their start while dancing there, since Hollywood producers frequent the nudie joints looking for talent. Yeah, I'll bet.
To be fair, Ed does discuss the strip joints of a few other countries. For example, he singles out a venue in Amsterdam called the Blue Note, located "just off the Leidseplein," a busy square at the south end of the city famous for its theaters and bars. There definitely was a nightclub called the Blue Note in Amsterdam in the 1960s, and there seems to be a concert venue by that name in the city today, but I cannot confirm that the Blue Note ever featured nude or topless dancers. Did Eddie even visit Amsterdam at any point in his life and see the "high quality" entertainment he praises in this article?
UPDATE: Reader Shawn Langrick informs me that the Blue Note in Amsterdam opened on Christmas Day 1957 as a high-class music venue but was featuring topless dancers by 1970 due to audience demand. "Looks like it lasted into the early 1980s," Shawn writes. Thanks, Shawn. This confirms my theory that Ed Wood must've heard about the Blue Note second-hand, since there was no way he could afford to travel to Amsterdam by 1970.
There's another portion of "Sex Around the World" devoted to the strip clubs in Mexico. Here, Eddie may actually be speaking from experience, since he is known to have traveled to the land south of the border. He even wanted to film The Day the Mummies Danced down there. In this story, he writes with a certain wistfulness about the Plaza de Garibaldi in Mexico City:
We then look to the small burlesque houses in the Plaza de garibaldi, perhaps not what might be classed the top of the heap for around the world strippers . . . but it should be mentioned so the young girls will know it's there if they receive an invitation to work there one day. They put on a bewildering variety of performances in clubs that are nothing if not intimate. That's one of the nice results of the small sale of things in that part of town. Between the peso-a-dance girls, the bar girls, and the strippers, there's a nice display of flesh for the weary traveling man. In days gone by, the street named The Sixteenth of September used to feature cubicles right on the sidewalk where a gent could stop in and pass the time with a lady.
Eddie also talks about Tijuana, the border city that also provided the setting for his 1969 short story, "The Unluckiest Man in the World." His portrayal of Tijuana in that story was rather unflattering, but he's somewhat more complimentary to the city in this article. He says that a venue called the Torero has "a better than average floor show." and allows that "the quality of acts has been getting steadily better" at "flashy" places like the San Souci and the Panama Club.
Oddly, Ed Wood chooses to end this article with a lecture/warning for all the young women thinking of entering the stripping profession. He seems to want them to take stripping as seriously as he takes it and warns them against copying each other's acts. His little sermonette reads, in part:
The top jobs never come easy . . . and instead of attempting to copy somebody elses work ... look at it . . . study it . . . then throw the memory into the nearest ash can and come up with your own ideas. The business needs fresh ideas and routines just as much as it needs fresh talent.
Preach, Brother Wood, preach!
P.S. Here is the artwork that originally accompanied this article in the February/March 1973 issue of Spice 'N' Nice. Enjoy! (You can see why I didn't know if this article was called "Sex Around the World" or just "Around the World.")
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| Fresh from the pages of Spice 'N' Nice. |
Next: "Sex Oddities and the Newspapers" (1971)