I lived next door to the back door of Chez Paree for about five years in the early 90s and on a couple of occasions paid the $2 to get in and the $5 for a beer so I could get at the free lunch buffet.
Strange thing - when you're hungry with a plate of food in front of you, women strolling about in bikinis don't even make a blip on your radar, so while I enjoyed the pieces of meat laid out in front of me, they were of the cold cut variety.
This longtime fabled showroom became a posh strip club in 1982 but bucked the strip club trend that allowed men to fondle and grope the dancer for double the price. Lap dances took hold everywhere else except for Wanda's.
Up until now apparently the only one ever to get a lap dance at Chez Paree was someone who needed a bit of warming up. In July 2004 Triumph the Insult Dog treated Bonhomme Carnaval to a lap dance at Chez Paree for a comedy bit on Conan O'Brien.
So apparently anybody can plop down a few bucks and get that same service starting today.
Here's a lap dance legal timeline. In 1988 police accused Robert Bourdeau of operating a bawdy house on St. Catherine East at a place called the Pussy Cat.
In 1993 the Supreme Court decided that the Pussy Cat was not indecent. Apparently men would pleasure themselves in front of naked women there.
So the practice became legal sorta but some campaigned against it, including a stripper named Katharine Goldberg. She was quoted as saying, "I just saw ugliness....I didn't feel clean even when I took a shower. I slept with a knife under my bed." (...doesn't everybody?...Chimples)
Mayor Pierre Bourque fought to have it banned, but that ridiculous Drapeau bylaw from 1966 was strick down in June 1995, it forbade bar employees from fraternizing with clientele.
In January 1998 Quebec Appeals Court banned the practice again, deeming it to be prostitution.
But in December 1999 the Supreme Court ruled it to be legal.
One manager named Florent said of lap dancing: "There's girls crying, taking drugs, doing cocaine and freebasing just to forget that men are touching them."
So that's why they're taking all those drugs.
Or you can start your "broadcasting" career at Chez Paree, meeting influential executives as Renee-Claude Brazeau did in the early 90s. Funny that the French media tends to gloss over her stint at Chez Paree, or as an independent escort, or as a welfare recipient, or as a cocaine addict, or as the mother of X number of children all with different fathers and having never been married to any of them. What a fine role model for our youth...and a sorry statement on what has become of the broadcast "talent" in this city. The land of Balcan and Sinclair, Cannings and Marquis, Nadeau and Bombardier...and now Brazeau, not even qualified to scrub the toilets of the afore-mentioned giants of the industry.
ReplyDeleteThe Pussy Cat wasn't a "bar" per se. It was a series of rooms, each about the size of a very large closet with wall-to-wall mattresses in which patron and hostess would strip to nothing. They could then lie next to each other or be in pretty much any position they wanted, but no coitus.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I suppose you could ask her to dance if you wanted to...but why waste your time? You could touch her everywhere except "down there" and she could touch you everywhere except "down there" and, of course, they had an ample supply of paper towels.
But there wasn't any "lap-dancing" going on there by any means.
Oh, and the fellow who started it, Robert Bourdeau? I believe he was a cop at the time, soon to become an ex-cop.
Is it still there today?
Oh, one more thing: I thought "Le Pussy Cat" was on Ontario East, not Ste. Catherine East...
ReplyDeleteOf course, if there were no lap dancing, all the strippers would be psychologically intact and drug-free. Right?
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of dancing, get a kick out of the article in the Los Gatos Times-Saratoga Observer of June 5, 1956, page 2: "Rock 'N Roll Dancing Ban In Santa Cruz".
ReplyDeleteThat and other similar stories in and around that date can be found
Fast-forward to today and how morals and attitudes and have changed since 1956, but perhaps the authorities back then were RIGHT after all in accurately predicting that their youth, and therefore society in general, was inexorably headed for depravity and doom--which, arguably, it has.