We were in Atlanta over the 4th of July weekend to see Tom Waits play on his rare and limited-date US tour, for which we drove down from Brooklyn.
After the show, a cute and rather innocent female friend suggested, almost offhandedly, that we might enjoy this place called the Clermont Lounge...
Shrugging in surrender and still not entirely conscious after that intense concert, we staggered into the Clermont sometime after midnight on a Saturday night, expecting to have a few beers and collapse. Instead, we were met by perhaps one hundred and fifty people, many of them couples in their 20s, rocking out on the dance floor and enjoying what even we had to admit was a great DJ. At the bar, we ordered a couple of PBR's with accompanying Jager shots, seeing as how we were at a world-class dive/dump. The bright red neon light that adorned every inch of wall space took us back to our most drugged out New Orleans evenings... or even back to that Factory scene in Midnight Cowboy.
Anyway, we were settling in, marveling at the local characters... when it soon became clear why we'd been directed to this place...
With no fanfare whatsoever and to the complete dismissal of everyone on the dance floor, a large woman wearing a sumo wrestler's outfit stepped up onto the bar and almost immediately exposed her breasts:
Aside from the fact that this low-quality, dim-lighting camera phone shot is basically useless in a blog post, this at least gives you an exact replica of what we were seeing. It turned out were in Atlanta's oldest and longest running strip club, complete with some of the finest area talent: the next act was an elderly Chinese woman in a green dress who raced back and forth across the slim bar and flashed each customer indvidually. According to this page, the strippers have to put money in the jukebox themselves if they want some theme music to dance to.
The outside kind of looked like this, although not really:
Yeah, not really. Anyway, it's well worth checking out when you're in town... or, hell, driving from halfway across a Hemisphere.
More on the Clermont Lounge online at this link.
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