Aachoo Voo, Private Eye: 01/11/22

Fan Dance Music start now

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye

Episode 20

The Blue Flame Fan Dancer

And What Happened Yesterday

I remember it like it was yesterday. As a matter of fact, it was yesterday. My new pal, Man Nee Joe and my old pal Tom B. Ozo wanted me to take them to the Crystal Peacock to see my former school chum, Lee Lee Lovelady do her fan dance show which had become wildly popular but they were too shy to go as individuals so they went as a group. At the last minute Terrence and Mr. D'Sal joined our entourage with me leading the way while they hid behind me hoping no one would notice them sneaking in and reporting back to wives, girlfriends, pastors and mothers. I don't think anyone even noticed them as I was dressed to kill and slinging my hips like Lee Lee had taught me to do just for mean-ness as they followed behind me two by two.

As we reached the door to the club, I stopped suddenly and they all piled into me like Studebakers on a foggy highway. Crash! Fortunately, no one was hurt but everyone was embarrassed as it caused quite the scene and was flash bulbed and photographed from several angles by a newspaper hound who had the reputation of being in six places at one time. His name was Alec J. Oyershay. When the photos hit the Society pages (not the High Society pages but the...you know..the Society my mother wouldn't allow in her house) pages, two of my friends wanted to hunt him down and hurt him. Except for Man Nee Joe and Tom B. who posed for him proudly wearing exaggerated and goofy grins. I hid my face behind my purse but everyone recognized my legs so it did me no good. My mother would scold me like an angry wet hen later when one of her friends called to tell her my latest scandal but MiMi cut the pictures out of the paper and framed them. I brought her joy, she said.

Once we were seated up front at our long reserved table for five, I went backstage to say hello to Lee Lee and to tell her I had come with a bunch of boys that were full of.... anticipation. She was happy and excited and continued dressing in her...well, I don't know if you could really call it dressing....her blue feathery fans and whatever was or was not under them. She looked fantastic and sleek as a cat in her showbiz finery. The boys would lose their little minds. I watched as she did her hair and makeup thinking about how she had always said she was going to become a nun and live in a convent somewhere in the Himalayas or some place like that.

Why she had changed her mind and become a fan dancer, I did not know but I suspected it had something to do with discovering boys at some point because when we had been school chums together, we had hated boys and looked upon them as Neanderthals totally unworthy of our attention. That changed for me when I turned sixteen and fell in love with a stunning young man by the name of Paul. I drooled over him and on him until he finally noticed me and that was the end of my disdain for the male gender. He went away to college in the midst of my infatuation so I never got the chance to damage him very much. Though I really wanted to.

The house lights went down and the blue spotlights came on hitting the curtains at the right side of the stage as the audience began applauding and whistling. The band began playing music I was never allowed to listen to till now and I watched as Mr. D'Sal, at the end of the table, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. Geez! The show hadn't even started yet! What would he do when she hit the stage? The tension mounted, the mostly male crowd held it's collective breath. A waiter dropped a glass. Man Nee Joe who was seated beside me, put his hands over his eyes, shyly peeking out between his fingers. A cymbal crashed and there she was.......The Blue Flame in all her stimulating glory. Terrence gasped and almost fainted at the sight of her. (And it was not his first time.) He had the blue statue he had made of her displayed in his King of Things Shop window on a blue hand carved pedestal next to a painting of Louis the 11th or 14th, I forget which, and a nun's habit. It was quite the attention getter. (And an inside joke for those of us who knew about her former ambition.)

"Ladies and Gentlemen!! The Crystal Peacock is proud to present...the one, the only, the magnificent.......Lee Lee Lovelady...The Blue Flame!!!" The place went wild. Men stood to their feet. Some of them wept. I reached and pulled Mr. D'Sal back down in his chair and handed him a drink and tried to pat his flushed face but Joe got in the way so I patted his. I didn't know if he was going to make it through the show but I knew he would certainly try even if it meant watching from an ambulance gurney in the back. Bless his heart, to quote MiMi. I then had to pry Man Nee's fingers off his own face and shush him because he was mumbling something in some kind of language that no matter how you translated it, it just sounded dirty. He stood to bow in apology and spilled his martini all down Mr. D'Sal's back but I don't think he even noticed. I sighed. It was going to be an interesting night.

If you've never seen a fan dancer dance, well, I don't exactly know how to explain the performance. It involves bumping and grinding and teasing and taunting and raunchy music and lots of feathers placed just so to hide the fact that there's very little if anything behind them (in the way of apparel.) If done tastefully, it really is quite lovely and if not done tastefully, it really can be....on second thought, there's no way to do it right without doing it wrong. Let's just say that it's not a dance one would ever do in front of one's mother unless she, herself, was a present or former fan dancer. And no one wants to think about that.

Lee Lee had class, I had to say that for her. Although I don't think many men cared about her class but were focusing primarily on her.......posterior. I heard several praying that her feathers would blow away but I don't think God heard them and if He did, He was ignoring them. Several of the ladies that had given into temptation or had been persuaded to attend the performance wore shocked expressions and kept muttering "Oh, my heavens! That's simply disgraceful!" While some were heard to sigh, "My goodness! I wish I could do that!"

I was pretty envious myself of her grace and balance, knowing that I would have probably lost my feathers or flown away on them like some cartoon character, ripping the stage curtains to shreds and endangering the band or innocent bystanders. I couldn't even do regular dancing without breaking somebody's ankle. Joe still had a slight limp but was healing nicely though he seemed to limp much worse when I was nearby and needed me to put an arm around him and help him hobble here and there. T Wayne usually looked at him and gave a wry grin when he saw us. I eventually caught on though.

The blue lit stage was decorated with blue flames shooting up from the floor, whether real or not, I don't know. I hoped they weren't real because you know me and fire. Or maybe you don't. You know about me and rain but I don't remember if I've yet recounted my fire stories. Never fear, I rarely got badly burned up though several shotgun shacks in Voo Bayou did once as well as a candy store in New York. And a car dealership. Or two. But never mind. You want to hear about Lee Lee's backside and those blue feathers. It was rather remarkable the way she made her entrance and danced like Sally Rand and Isadora Duncan with a lot of Salome thrown in. She spun like a top, she twisted herself like a snake around a silver pole decorated like a tree, she leapt, she danced on her tippy toes, she charmed the pants off every man there. Well, hypothetically. She put on a show that would make your mother mad and Harold Clappsaddle proud. She was amazing.

The boys were still pretty well behaved at this point until I noticed Tom, sitting on my left, pulling things from his coat pockets and aiming and throwing them.They bounced and went skipping across the stage but The Blue Flame merely raised an eyebrow and kept on dancing. Everyone in the club glared at Tom and hissed until he stopped or at least until I grabbed his wrist and shook several round wooden objects out of his fist like he was a baby with a hand full of cookie crumbs and T Wayne picked them up off the floor and bit one of them.

"What is it?" I whispered to him across Tom's startled face. "It appears to be a wooden nickel." he answered, puzzled. "It is a wooden nickel!" Tom said proudly. "I invented them." "Oh, you did not!" I snapped at him. "Did, too!" he said petulantly. "Did not!" I huffed and we continued until T Wayne gave me a wink and patted Tom on the back. "Sure you did, buddy. Sure you did." So now you know where the wooden nickel came from. Or at any rate, those wooden nickels that were scattered all over the stage at the Saturday night fan dance show at The Crystal Peacock.

(That story would one day become legendary and those wooden nickels would become collector's items. Very hard to find. But I'm sure you can probably still find a few of them at The King Of Things Shop.) Oh, and by the way, we later discovered that the image of The Blue Flame herself in various poses, had been carved into exactly 45 of those wooden nickels. And yes, Lee Lee was indeed honored and unharmed by that sweet but senseless act. Tom B. went on to create the not so widely known plastic penny some years later though his wooden nickels became very popular as worthless tokens and advertising implements. He lost his fortune however, when he came up with the big idea of making dimes out of 24 carat gold. (No matter what they were made of, they were still only worth a dime, you see.) Sad, really. Thank goodness I had had the foresight to sell him my green stamp collection for a bag of those dimes.

After several numbers with the traditional ostrich feathers, Lee Lee came out wearing peacock feathers with dazzling rhinestones on them and threw blue roses to several moonstruck men. Mr. D'Sal almost broke his neck trying to catch one but it ended up in Man Nee Joe's hands and for a few awkward moments they wrestled violently over the thing until it fell to pieces all over the table as we stared at them in disbelief. Finally they gathered up the crushed petals and shared them with one another, however grudgingly. That scene alone was worth the price of admission. I leaned over and shook my head at them, kissed Man Nee Joe on the cheek and said, "Pass it on." And guess what? He did. (bless his heart) "Hey! What the hey!?" Mr. D'Sal shouted, rubbing his face and shoving Man Nee Joe away. I quickly stood up, pulled Mr. D'Sal over to my chair, moved Joe to his seat and sat down between them and put my arms around their shoulders. That seemed to diffuse the situation but every now and then I caught Mr. D'Sal glaring over at my sweet and still so very inexperienced, so very innocent Japanese/Portuguese friend. Men!! You gotta love 'em!!!!

The three act show ended with drum rolls and the stage going dark and the audience wondering where Lee Lee had gone. I wondered if she was angry about the wooden objects coming at her instead of roses. Tom B. had meant it as a token of affection and honor, I was sure but still, she could have slipped and fallen on her....class. There was nothing but anxious breathing for a few minutes and the drum rolls and blue lights flashing while we all looked around for her to appear. I noticed that Mr. D'Sal had stopped breathing altogether and Man Nee Joe had his head between his knees praying or something.Tom B. was mumbling "What have I done? She hates me now! She'll never come back!" And T Wayne had Tom's left arm in a death grip that was cutting off his circulation. Things were tense. And strange. Very strange. But normal.

Just as I was about to stand up to go check on my friend, the blue spotlight went to the ceiling while the room went dark again and with a flourish and cymbal crash of exceedingly high decibels, there came Lee Lee in her invisible underwear sans feathers sliding down that long silver pole sans tree to the astonishment of all who witnessed it. She hit the floor gracefully and swung herself round and around and up and down the pole as the crowd went berserk and stood to their feet applauding wildly. And that was the night that would go down in history as the night Pole Dancing was invented in New York City! Believe it or not.

Lee Lee came out to our table after the show and gave all the boys a blue rose and a kiss on the cheek, gave me a hug while they begged for autographs and then handed them 8x10 glossies of herself wearing a feather and a smile and charged them all three bucks a piece. Which they happily paid. They talked about it the rest of the night as if it was the highlight of their lives, poor boys, and guarded those glossies like gold. The Blue Flame was set to star in a Hollywood movie (of the same name) in the near future and would probably grow rich and famous and leave us all behind to pursue fame and fortune and Robert Taylor. But that was alright. I was happy for her. And my darling, sweet, pitiful friends would have something to brag about for years to come complete with many embellishments and several long smoldering kisses that I can tell you right now...... did not happen.