I have an interesting story about another Patsy Cline song, "After Midnight," but I'm currently on my work computer so I'd best not linger. I'll tell it from my iPad mini where my big fingers make typos by the dozen.
As some of you may know I spent most of the ‘80s & early ‘90s seducing or trying to seduce topless dancers, but what I may have never shared is how put off I was the first time I went to a topless bar.
It was 1979, I was a senior in high school and had just turned 18. There was this kid in one of my classes who was just as homely and nerdly as I was but he had been held back so he exercised an air of authority, wordliness and sophistication. All he did was talk about how he drank beer, went to clubs, picked up women, seduced them all, went to topless clubs and X rated movies.
He was a disturbing guy and I would not’ve believed half the things he said had he not also been an incorrigible “smell my finger” kind of guy. You know the type. They usually have their first digits up your nostrils when they ask you to smell their fingers. I hadn’t had much experience. For all I know he had stuck his fingers in a can of tuna, or a catbox, or both. Nevertheless it gave him just enough credibility that a naive guy like me hesitated to call him a liar.
When he found out I had turned 18 too he started begging me to go out with him so he could show me the town. I finally relented one Friday so he picked me up in his mom’s Fairmont Futura and we went to The Yellow Rose. Yes, it’s been there that long.
So we go in there and the place disgusts me. It’s full of old, sweaty blue collar working stiffs, old hippies left over from the ‘60s, motorcycle gangs and freaking cowboys traveling through from one small town to another. They’re all smoking and perving the girls who are nearly all chubby, bubbly blondes. The music is rock. Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Blondie, whatever they were playing back then.
Absolutely nothing appealed to me but my friend strutted in there like he was Hugh Hefner. It’s a testament to how young and cheap and nerdly we looked that no dancers hit us up, only a tired, reluctant server. My friend ordered us Miller Lites “Less Filling Taste Great” and we proudly showed our IDs. We were men.
We sat there for 90 minutes, with my friend pointing out dancers he had nailed and how he’d like to do the ones he hadn’t. Of course, none of them acknowledged his presence. I was sitting there brooding, wondering whether I was a latent homosexual or a guilty Christian or a picky bastard when the blaring rock stopped and Patsy Cline’s “After Midnight” came on.
A dark headed waif in red slinked through the curtain, cartwheeled across the stage and ended up in a one handed spreadlegged handstand she held for 40 seconds.
The foul cigar my friend had pushed upon me fell from my lips where I had to swat out a potential fire. My friend said, “This one’s too skinny. There ain’t enough cushion for the pushin. I’d break her in two.” I told him to shut up.
And so I had my first crush on a topless dancer, the mesmerizing Megan.
I can’t remember much more about her except that she wore about 8 pairs of progressively smaller panties and each time she took one pair off the place fell silent cause we all thought we might see something we shouldn’t.
That and the fact that she hung out with me that night even though I only had about $13.
Yep. Ain’t been scared of or disgusted with topless bars since then, and “Walking After Midnight” still makes me smile and chub.
