She told dirty jokes. They stripped on stage. Welcome to Miami Beach’s Place Pigalle

As a boy, I remember a banner plane flying over the hotel where my parents owned a store. It advertised a comedian at the Place Pigalle.

I knew of this place from the outside. It was near the Miami Beach library where I did my research papers in high school, and Wolfie’s deli, where all the former New Yorkers got together for cheesecake. But the Place Pigalle was certainly no place for a kid.

The burlesque house featured a comedian telling the bawdiest jokes and a cast of women who stripped on stage.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, when Miami Beach was an entertainment capital, the Place Pigalle was the place to be. Even A-listers like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., fresh off their performances at the Fontainebleau, came through the doors after hours for a drink and to watch the show. The entertainment and liquor flowed until 5 a.m.

By the 1970s, Place Pigalle started to fade. And by the early ‘80s, it was all but dead. Not even a banner plane could help turn things around. Crowds got older, then dwindled. The star performer retired. The owner for three decades was tired.

Now, once a bawdy section of Miami Beach, the Collins Park neighborhood is filled with culture. A regional library. A ballet rehearsal hall. A park. An art museum. Boutique hotels.

Place Pigalle is long gone.

I have read about Pearl Williams, the comedian whom you will meet below. And I even saw Lee Sohn sing at the hotel where my parents had their store. But like many of you, I never entered the doors of the Place Pigalle.

Now, it’s time. For the sake of Miami Beach history, of course.

So let’s go together, led by the words and pictures from the Miami Herald’s archives.

The man behind Place Pigalle

Published Aug. 16, 1987

Harry Ridge has reached that rarefied stage in life at which he has attained the official mantle of wisdom, proof that his counsel is sought.

Harry Ridge has become a consultant.

Not any ordinary card-carrying consultant. Harry Ridge’s expertise ventures into the realm of the arcane, bespeaking special knowledge of a special field of human endeavor.

Stripping.

But don’t ask Ridge to take it all off, because that was never his style. Just call him a supervisor. For 31 years, Harry Ridge supervised all manner of strippers in his capacity, recently abdicated, as king of the Place Pigalle.

Now, where once stood the kingdom of Harry Ridge, which was located at precisely 23rd and Collins, there is a strip joint for the yuppified ‘80s.

It is called Million Dollar Baby and it has valet parking and a 10-buck cover charge and centerfolds in the flesh and an endless parade of undulating women with perfect bodies and women with large breasts who box each other and a blue limousine parked outside and a mural with 75 pairs of breasts -- large breasts, small breasts, perky breasts, sad breasts, breasts in pairs, breasts alone, breasts pointing toward each other, breasts looking out toward the cosmos.

It was not always thus.

The Place Pigalle represented the old order of stripping on Miami Beach. As such it went through several stages, which we will broadly define as follows:

THE STAR STAGE

Thirty-one years ago, when Harry Ridge had relinquished an earlier life as a Long Island supermarket magnate, his friend Sam Shanker suggested they open a strip joint in Miami Beach.

“I had no knowledge of the business. My friend knew the strip business from Washington, D.C. I think he did, anyway. He said he did.”

Those were, of course, the peak days for operating a strip joint in Miami Beach, that is, if you subscribe to the theory that there’s safety in numbers.

“The place was jumping all over. The place was like crazy. Between Miami and Miami Beach, there were 25 strip joints - big shows, big night clubs. Everything was big.”

Including the stars, people like Joe E. Lewis and Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor. They gave Harry’s strip joint a patina of class, if you will, while the girls did what the girls get paid to do.

Harry Ridge paid them to do exotic things, some of which employed animals. A Lady Godiva imposter would trot around on “a real horse,” as Harry likes to put it. Dogs would jump rope and birds would peck scarves off the strippers.

Harry hosted other stars as well, lights of the stripping world, the likes of belly dancer Little Egypt and early transsexual Christine Jorgensen, who earned the princely sum of $1,500 a week.

“People came to see her because she was something different,” Harry says. “Now they won’t because there are so many switch hitters.”

Others alumnae: A Canadian girl who took a bath on stage. “Very good,” Harry says. A roller-skating couple who danced on wheels. A Korean singer named Lee Sohn, who took requests for Havah Negilah and made ‘em cry with his rendition of Feelings. Princess Kitty and Sweet Richard, who would do the limbo wearing a big hat and chomping on a knife.

“He’d eat fire, too,” Harry says. “He was very nice, but he was wild. He used to drink a fifth of whiskey at one time. He’d eat with his hands. One day he choked on a steak and died. Walter Winchell was crazy about him.”

The Place Pigalle had its dark days in the early years - a dynamite bomb in a fuse box, a stripper who was busted for prostitution after she charged a customer $160 for two fifths of wine. Things like that would really get under Harry’s skin.

“What is this, Russia?” Harry would say.

Undue costs for cocktails nonetheless created problems. One night many moons ago, a Korean from Stockbridge, Ga., named Kun Wha Yoo bought a couple of drinks for a stripper named April March. The tab was $72. An angry Kun Wha Yoo left in a tiff and returned with revolvers blazing from each hand. He killed a singer named Tony D’Arcy.

But ultimately, Harry’s famed good heart conquered all. In the ‘70s, when Vietnam veterans would come in droves, they never saw those hefty tabs.

“Martha Raye would bring in 25 wounded soldiers. We’d never give them a check. She’d give me a check to cash to give them spending money.

“We didn’t charge them drinks. They were always on the house.”

THE CONDO STAGE

By the time the condo stage rolled around, Harry’s good heart was creating some business problems because some of the strippers from the star stage had stayed on through the condo stage.

“I think it’s my own fault,” Harry says. “I like to hire people, but I don’t like to fire them. Some of the strippers were there 15 or 20 years.

“Take T.T. Red. She was there on and off for 30 years. Baby Doll, on and off for 25 years. Take Sherry Champagne, she worked on and off for 20 years.”

By 1980 or thereabouts, much of the Place Pigalle’s clientele was even older than the strippers, condos full of elderly folk who came down in buses from Hallandale and points north.

The lure was another holdover from the star days - Pearl Williams, who was not exactly dainty despite her predilection for lighting on five telephone books covered in contact paper while she played piano.

Williams, now 73, specialized in a rare brand of comedy known as “venereal material.” It goes like this:

“There’s a madam in a house of ill repute. She hears her doorbell ring. She opens the door and there’s a guy with no arms and no legs. She says, ‘What are you going to do here?’

“He says, ‘I rang the bell, didn’t I?’

“Is that printable? I made it high class for you. I used to say whorehouse.”

Williams first made the acquaintance of Harry Ridge in the 1965 Christmas season. Her manager booked her there for a weekend.

“The night before I’m supposed to open I walk to Mr. Ridge and say, ‘Mr. Ridge, how are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the girl who’s going to open here tomorrow. My name is Pearl Williams.’

“He said, ‘I didn’t hire Pearl Williams. I hired Pearl Bailey.’ I said, ‘No, you hired me. You couldn’t hire Pearl Bailey. She wouldn’t work in this joint.’ “

Fortunately for Harry Ridge, he did hire Pearl Williams, who continued to work in that joint until a few years ago. But Pearl finally retired to a life of late mornings and daytime television. And when her tenure ended, so did the condo stage. And there was no stage around to replace it.

Harry tried to spark things up. He changed the name to Go Go 22. Then he changed it back to Place Pigalle. He painted the front dark blue. Then he painted it light blue. Nothing worked.

“It was like any place,” Harry says. “You go where strippers take everything off. Nothing special.”

By the time Harry got an offer to be bought out, he was tired. The strippers were tired. The waitresses were tired. Harry was 77 and he had had enough.

Don’t think Harry isn’t still around, though. Now and then you’ll see him at a special table from which he surveys the gutted and refurbished dominion that once was his. Harry, you see, is now a consultant.

“I work there part-time as a consultant, as an adviser or just for conversation. I’ll give them all the conversation they want.”

And has Harry learned anything after all these years?

“Nothing. I still have my marbles. But I haven’t learned nothing.”

The woman behind the comedy

Published March 29, 1984

By Andres Viglucci

Pearl Williams, that saucy old broad, needs a good, long rest.

Forty-six years in show biz, practically non-stop, night after night, week after week. That’s a lot of songs, a lot of miles trod on stage, a lot of dirty jokes.

At the height of her career, she pulled in seven grand a week doing Vegas. For the past 18 years, her stage has been the Place Pigalle, a faded strip-tease club left from the days when Miami Beach was still Miami Beach.

Her act still crackles. It’s a great, free-wheeling, uninhibited, improvised free-for-all:

Sitting atop five telephone books piled on the piano bench, she lights a cigarette and stares at the audience.

“My mother doesn’t know what I do for a living,” she deadpans. “She thinks I’m a whore in Chicago.”

Williams engages the audience in a fast-paced give-and-take. She disposes of a heckler effortlessly. She lets the audience sit back, let its guard down and then, wham, breaks a dozen funny bones with a well-timed four-letter word.

Some of the jokes she’s been telling for four decades. But when Williams tells them in her deep, raspy voice, they all sound fresh as today’s baked rolls.

The sharp tongue is still there. The timing, too.

But these days she navigates the Place Pigalle’s battered stage a bit unsteadily, her bulk teetering precariously on dainty feet. Half her onstage time, she leans against the back of an upright piano.

Williams will turn 70 soon. Though she doesn’t like to talk about it, she was sick for several months last year. She is overweight, she chain-smokes and she has been staying up late every night now for almost half a century.

Pearl Williams is tired.

So the last of the bawdy old-time comediennes - to whom Sophie Tucker supposedly once said, “You’re me at your age, only better” - is hanging up her mike. For good.

“I’m just going to rest,” Williams said. “I’m going to knit, crochet and rest. I want to live a normal life. I’m sleeping during the day when everyone’s up and around and the sun is shining. Going to see a show somewhere, out to dinner with a friend ... these are the things that you miss, all the good things, the personal things.”

But Williams doesn’t regret the years spent in hotels, in lounges and on the road. She has kept up the pace better than most.

“Look at all the stars like Bob Hope and George Burns. They couldn’t come here every night. They go on and on because they work once a year or when they feel like it,” Williams boasts.

On a recent night, the Place Pigalle was filled to capacity with senior citizens bused down from Palm Beach County. Mostly couples from the New York City Eastside Club of Delray Beach, they tittered when the red-headed emcee took it all off and began disporting herself on a low divan.

They sang and clapped when Lee Sohn, a Korean singer who has been working the Place Pigalle even longer than Williams has, sang Hava Nagilah.

But when Williams finally comes on - decked out in an orange dress accented with feathers, her green eye shadow reaching to the high, arched eyebrows she has painted on her forehead - the crowd screams with pleasure.

They yell and howl some more as she starts right in cracking less-than-subtle double-entendre jokes and uttering profanities with a totally unaffected relish.

Williams leans over the stage and eyes the women sitting with their husbands at a table.

“Laugh it up girls,” she says. “Or your husbands will go with whores.”

She laughs at her own jokes. Her belly shakes like jelly.

“Dirty old broad,” she says, after one particularly lewd joke. “Ha, ha, ha, you love it,” she cackles at the audience.

Then, after telling a dozen jokes using the word “tits,” she tells another one. But this time she says “breasts.” She stops herself.

“I almost said ‘tits,’ “ she says. “But I don’t talk that way.”

All the talk about whores and body parts is a throwback to another era and another place - New York City 40 years ago. The crowd remembers. They were there.

Pearl is one of them. When Pearl is onstage, they feel it could be them up there. Pearl talks to them, and they know what she’s saying.

“Hey Pearl,” one man calls up from a table at the edge of the stage, “remember me?”

Williams peers down at him and her big face breaks into a big smile.

“We were little kids together on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,” she says, then turns back to him. “I had a lot of fun with you when we were kids,” she tells the man, with a little hint of naughtiness in her voice.

The audience starts chuckling.

“It’s not what you think,” she admonishes, shaking a finger.

The moment Williams finishes her nearly two-hour act the old folks clear out like rabbits running from a forest fire, leaving the late-night B-girls to strip desultorily in front of two tables occupied by younger but sad couples too tired or depressed to look up from their drinks.

“We get all the condos. We get them from all over Florida,” Williams said afterwards. “They all moved down here. The people I went to school with all moved down here.”

But Williams only works weekends now and she’s giving it all up at the end of April. Place Pigalle owner Harry Ridge acknowledges he still doesn’t know what he’ll do when his star attraction is gone.

“I have no replacement for her,” Ridge said. “You can’t replace her. There’s no comedians like her anymore.”

“She used to pack in the place. She was just bringing business in. People kept coming back to see her. She wants to work, I’ll keep her on,” he said.

“It’s pretty tough for me now. Business is not as good as it used to be on the Beach,” Ridge said.

It wasn’t always that way.

William’s first Miami Beach engagement was in 1946 at the old Dempsey-Vanderbilt Hotel on Collins Avenue. The tailor’s daughter from the Lower East Side fell in love with Florida, with the Beach. She started coming back here every winter to work.

“That’s when Florida was gorgeous,” she said. “There were no condos, no tall buildings. You drove along Collins Avenue and you saw the beach. Beyond 23rd Street there was absolutely nothing until 65th Street.”

Those were the postwar boom years, when the great hotels went up, when the city was flooded with hustlers, eccentric millionares and film and stage stars.

Williams moved down to the Beach for good 18 years ago, when she settled into what was to be a long engagement at the Place Pigalle.

Ridge, then a rookie in the business, recalls: “Her agent called up. I said, ‘OK, I’ll take her.’ When she first started working for me, I paid her $2,750 a week. I thoughtshe> was Pearl Bailey.”

She lived on Harbor Island her first 10 years in Florida, but then the Beach started to lose its glitter and Williams moved to North Miami Beach.

Now she tells this joke about the Beach, which she calls “a cemetery with an ocean:”

“Miami Beach, I don’t know how long it’s been dead, but it’s laid out nicely.”

Williams never set out to be in show biz. She wanted to be a lawyer and a judge like her neighbor in New York, State Supreme Court Justice Birdie Amsterdam.

She had played the piano since she was small and knew “millions of songs.” But she was a 23-year-old legal secretary with big dreams in 1938, when the path she was following abruptly changed forever.

“In my lunch hour one day I went to play at an audition for a friend who was a singer,” she said. “The agent asked me, ‘Do you sing?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Don’t you sing for yourself.’ I said, ‘Yes, at home.’ ‘So sing for me,’ he said.”

“I sang, Margie, I’m always thinking of you Margie...”

She was hired on the spot and that same night she went onstage at The Famous Door, on 52nd Street, opposite Louis Prima’s band. She was a hit, but she had no intention of staying in show biz. Until she started adding some figures.

“People were giving me money to sing these songs and here I was working for $18 a week. My boss gave me $50 a week. I came from a poor family,” she said.

Williams knew she never was going to be a judge.

Soon thereafter, she began singing risque songs and making double-entendre jokes. But it took a heckler and 14 years for Pearl to stumble onto the style that made her big.

“I remember someone once was heckling me, annoying me to death. I said, ‘Oh, f--- off.’ The audience screamed. That was the start,” she said. “In 1952 no one was using that language.”

From then on, her career took off. She played the next 10 years at Maxim’s, a club in the Bronx. It was packed six nights a week. Then, in 1962, she released the first of her seven comedy records.

Soon she was making $3,500 a week, then $7,500 a week, headlining in the Aladdin and the Castaways hotels in Vegas and in clubs throughout the United States and Canada. The ‘60s were her best years.

Williams, twice married, twice divorced, now shares a bright and comfortable house in North Miami Beach with longtime friend Augusta Cohen, 68, two Chihuahuas, a Pekingese and several parakeets.

“She’s about as beautiful a friend as any human being could want,” said Cohen, a former waitress at the Place Pigalle.

Outside the house, two white Cadillacs, one vintage, the other a late model, sit side by side underneath a striped canopy. There is a swimming pool in the back.

The living room is filled with small ornaments and knick- knacks. The shelves of one wall unit hold dozens of items of Judaica that friends have brought her from Israel. She said she is very religious.

“Here’s a rabbi, here’s Moses, here’s David - you remember David and Goliath,” she said, pointing out the different figurines.

Odd thing coming from Pearl Williams, this devoutness, no?

“I’m not dirty,” she said. “The dirty things are on cable TV. Today the language, the dirty words, are everyday talk. I can’t stand the language, the filth.”

“Isn’t that incredible coming from someone who has a risque routine? I’m from another era, honey. I can see adults using bad language, but when I see a young kid ...

“I cannot see four-letter words used on stage unless it’s in a joke where it enhances the joke or you get a big scream from the audience,” she said.

Sylvia Kule, who traveled from Delray Beach to the Place Pigalle, was pleasantly surprised to find herself agreeing with Pearl.

“I heard she was so dirty, I didn’t come for seven years,” Kule said. “But you couldn’t be offended with her. She doesn’t make it dirty. It’s really comical.”

Williams hasn’t gone to the movies in years. She prefers to stay home and watch old TV shows.

Once she retires, Williams said, she’ll be spending some time with her relatives on Long Island. Her biggest regret, she said, is not having spent more time with her family.

Her mother saw her perform once. Her father, who died in 1942, never did.

“My three brothers loved me. They thought I was funny and clever. They used to bring me jokes,” she said.

Williams missed all of their funerals. She was working.

But she did have one thing to sustain her through the long years of slugging away at the jokes and the songs.

“I enjoyed the people, the audiences. They were beautiful. They were easy to work for. They responded so beautifully to my offerings. I loved every audience I ever worked for.”

Now Pearl Williams will be staying home, but she says she’s not sad. Just tired. And she has missed out on too much.

The performers

Published July 23, 1983

An old man in black loafers, one dirty green sock, the other one gray, is stretched out on a soiled red sofa backstage. He snores as naked women with rears beginning to sag and bellies going to pot brush past him.

Faded things, musty things, dwell here at Place Pigalle.

Tracey, a long-legged blonde in patched-up fishnet hose, sits in a cubbyhole of a dressing room brushing her hair.

“I’m a graduate of Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., with a degree in music education. I have also studied dance,” says the 37-year-old woman, who, like the other strip-tease dancers at the club, uses a false name.

She is a gregarious woman who seems constantly distracted. Long false eyelashes, on her top lid and bottom, frame eyes that keep wandering around the room as she speaks.

“I could have been an actress,” she says, watching herself and the reflection of a visitor in the mirror, “could have been another Marilyn Monroe. But I didn’t want to get involved with all that taking of pills and alcohol.”

Instead, she ended up in Place Pigalle for nine years and in clubs throughout New England stripping for five years before that.

“I really wanted to be a dancer. When you’re young, you think you have all the opportunities in the world. Now, if I had the money I’d have my own dance school. This whole world is passe.”

It is a world in which Lee Sohn, the “Korean singing sensation” has been belting tunes for 20 years. In a blue velour jacket, ruffled shirt and bell bottom trousers he sings Besame Mucho.

“Where are you from?” he asks a couple in the audience. Germany, they tell him. “Where are you from?” they ask.

“Well, I’m half-Korean, half-Japanese. That’s why they call me” --pause-- “Ko-Jap. Hah hah, hah hah.”

“I got an uncle,” says Sohn, “he’s half-German, half-Korean. Know what we call him?” -- pause-- “Ger-Ko.” Hah hah, etc.

“You walk through the door of Place Pigalle and you are in the twilight zone, catapulted to another time and place. If you get into that mentality, you can have a lot of fun. But the place is definitely a dinosaur,” says Pat Lee, a stripper known as “The Devil Made Me Do It Girl” and “Satan’s Mistress.”

This anachronism is reality for the strippers, however, and Tracey is in an eye-rolling, foot-patting huff about another performer copying her act.

“What is this? I come out dancing with a fan, she comes out dancing with a fan.” She points to a fancy headdress in the corner of her dressing room. “She’s wearing headpieces like mine, too.”

In her view, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.

“I pay a lot of money for my wardrobe. Let her get her own ideas.

“I think I may do a routine where I tap dance on my toes, something they can’t imitate. Maybe I’ll do the four seasons. You know, come out in a winter outfit like a ski suit, then you strip down to summer in a bikini with a beachball. I don’t know what I’ll do for spring, but for autumn, I’ll just have an umbrella and be in toe shoes. Yeah, I’ll tap dance on my toes.”

From a control room next to the stage, a petite blonde with a singsong voice picks up a microphone and announces, “I’m your mistress of ceremonies, Ms. Juanita,” pronounced Wah-nee-taaah. Ms. Juanita, a rhinestone doodad dangling from her hair, says she’s a 28-year-old University of Miami graduate with a degree in voice who taught school, sang in church choirs, then decided she wanted to become a pop singer.

And now, says Ms. Juanita, “may we have Whitey reset the stage for our next production.”

No Whitey.

Whitey is the old man asleep backstage.

Vivian Victor, a 62-year-old former Ziegfeld girl, now the “wardrobe mistress,” wakes up Whitey. Bleary-eyed, he stumbles to the stage and takes away a small table. No one really cares. The club, once a Miami Beach hot spot where stars such as Sinatra came after a performance to ogle the women over cocktails, is nearly empty.

About a dozen people are at the bar, and five men sit at a table. It is the middle of the week, but business is just as slow on weekends, says Arthur Ridge, the manager. His brother, Harry, has owned Place Pigalle since 1956. Arthur came to the club in 1960 from Washington, D.C.

“I was a stockbroker and a real estate agent there,” says the corpulent, 69-year-old manager. “I made good money. How did I get here?” he says. “I’m a horse player.”

Does he ever win?

“Don’t be silly,” he says, standing at the bar in seersucker pants and a polyester shirt. “Would I be working here if I did? I’m an old man.”

When he and the club were younger, Place Pigalle was known as one of Miami Beach’s infamous strip and clip joints. It was often raided for allowing B-girls to hustle customers for drinks, backroom stripping and prostitution.

Ridge pooh-poohs all that. He doesn’t even like Place Pigalle to be called a strip joint.

“What we’ve got here is primarily a variety show, excellent. Lee Sohn sings; Pearl Williams, great comedian.” Williams is semi-retired, he says, and won’t be performing at the club for another month. “Eddie, a very fine limbo dancer from the Bahamas, just left a week ago - had a fight with his girl friend. We would have kept him, a fine act, the best. We used to have Sweet Richard and Princess Kitty, a great dancing team. They were show stoppers. Eh, but that was from yesteryear. He died from choking on a piece of steak. She died of alcohol--”

“No, junk or something,” says Junior, the bartender.

Still, says, Ridge, “We got one of the top dancers in the business here, TT Red.”

TT Red, 45, is an exotic dancer, a contortionist, a stripper par excellence.

“She made thousands a week,” Tracey says. “Don’t know why she’s always broke.”

TT Red is standing in front of a makeup counter in a communal dressing area. On the counter, illuminated by a bare bulb, rests an ashtray with lipstick-smudged Marlboro butts, Rose Milk Skin Care Lotion, a torn red packet of Pamprin, Maximum Cramp Relief Formula, and the July 19 edition of the Star; the headline: “How to Flatten Your Stomach in Four Weeks.”

Her eyes belong in the head of a porcelain doll, they are so shockingly blue and clear. Her hair seems made of curled red silk. Her face is fair, freckled and etched with tiny lines.

She started stripping 25 years ago, the last 10 of those years at Place Pigalle.

“I started dancing in burlesque as an extra added attraction making $75 a week,” the Georgia-born woman says softly. But a stripper made more money. “All I had to do was take my clothes off in time to the music and the salary kept going up, up, up.”

At one point in her career, she says she was making “$1,200 a week.” She makes about half that now. She was married, has three children and left the business for almost 10 years, she says. But she had to come back.

“You might say my life has not been the greatest. I was taking care of my mother for years. She finally died of cancer last October. And my poor brother has an alcohol problem. I’m helping him get back on his feet now.”

Besides, TT has pancreatitis, colitis and a spastic colon. “I’ve been in the hospital frequently. That’s a lot of medical bills.” And now, one of her children is having severe emotional problems. “It’s because of my life style, the hours I keep” - 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. - ”I’m not home enough.

“I never finished high school,” she says. “If I could do something else I would.”

A woman comes backstage to tell TT her manager wants to see her out front. The redhead leaves, greeting a young woman named Annie as she goes.

On stage, Ms. Juanita announces the next act: “And now, keeping with our international show, here is Miss Annie from Paree.”

To music by the Rolling Stones, Annie strips down to a black garter belt. Several men come to the stage and stick bills in the elastic clinging to her thigh.

As the night wears on, the same strippers repeat their acts, and Lee Sohn treats the audience to his classic interpretations of Feelings, a repeat of Besame Mucho and, whipping off his jacket, breaks into a feverish version of Delilah, his accompanist lumbering along on an organ behind him.

While Lee Sohn wails on, Flora, a tall brunette with a somber face, gets ready for her act. She is the only stripper at Place Pigalle who expresses no illusions about being or ever wanting to be a dancer or an actress. She posesses no college degree.

“I’m from Warren, Ohio, near Youngstown. Unemployment is real high there,” says the 24-year-old woman. “My father worked in the steel mills all his life, then died of emphysema a few years ago. There are six kids in the family. My mother never worked. When I graduated from high school, the only job I could get was as a waitress. I wasn’t making much money.

“So I started go-go dancing because it didn’t require any experience. My boyfriend, he’s a mechanic, and I came here because we like the climate. The money I’m making is OK, and the work is easy. I just take off my clothes.”

Her family doesn’t know what she is doing, Flora says.

“My mother is very religious; she wouldn’t like it at all. But this place is mellow, more like old-fashioned burlesque.

“People say I never smile on stage, but I really like it when the 50- to 70-year-old crowd from the condos come. They are lots of fun. They’ve seen everything and really get into the show. It makes you want to work for them.”

Pat Lee, “Satan’s Mistress,” has got a table of geriatric swingers hooting. A silver-haired woman applauds enthusiastically and says, “Beautiful girl, just beautiful.”

At the end of her performance, Lee goes backstage to tell TT she has about 20 minutes before she goes on.

“I guess I better start getting ready now,” TT says. “It takes me a little longer than the other girls to get ready. I have a few more things to do. You know, stretch marks I have to put powder on.”

This story was originally published February 22, 2021 at 10:27 AM.