By Jim Hagarty
I was busy loading up the car last night for a trip down to Delmont, Pennsylvania, when the thought struck me that the United States of America truly is the best nation on earth.
Where else could an entrepreneur imagine and then make real an idea such as the one Nick Fratangelo had for a drive-through strip club near Pittsburgh a while back?
In an age when it seems there are few things you can’t get passed to you through one of those pop-up windows, it makes perfect sense that cheap thrills should be included among those items. Because as things are, it is altogether way too difficult and even scary to be a practising voyeur in today’s society. To venture a visit to even the most upscale strip club is to rub shoulders with a lot of unsavoury types such as bikers and drug dealers, not to mention bankers, lawyers and high-school principals.
Putting up with the smoke, the loud music and the profanity has been awful and I’m just talking about the church-basement bingo hall I have to walk by to get to my local strip bar.
Yes, this is a real breakthrough and I applaud Fratangelo for adding this feature to his strip club at Delmont. No more the need to elbow my way up to perverts’ row along the stage to get as close to the action as possible. No more being drooled on by the loudmouth guy in the seat beside me who has trouble corralling the emotions set free in him when the dancer discards yet one more garment. No more summoning up the great courage needed to wander into the strip club’s men’s washroom which I’m very sure would make the Depths of Hell look almost livable by comparison.
Now, instead, for the price of a trip to Pennsylvania and from the comfort of my own old jalopy, I can gaze to my heart’s content at the wonderful scenes unfolding before me.
But, being a realist, I know the drive-through idea will be as flawed as are the drive-throughs which dispense other commodities. How long will it take, for example, until I am treated to a five-minute performance by a hairy male dancer, instead of a sleek and oily female, because the person taking my order had trouble making out my words through the cheap intercom system hooked up for that purpose? What if I order a short dancer and get a tall one? A brunette instead of the blonde I wanted? A big-boned gal instead of a slim one?
And how will I summon up the patience to sit in line behind a carload of young yahoos who have ordered a half-hour’s performance?
What sort of specials will be offered? And will there be a kids’ menu with toys accompanying?
I eagerly await the inevitable migration of this brainwave northward to Canada but I already feel a bit sorry for the dancers who’ll brave the elements when those windows slide open at the drive-throughs in Yellowknife, Edmonton, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump (real place) and other points up here in the middle of January. But if there’s a buck to be made, I can imagine the priciest item at the clubs in those locations will be the Frostbite Special. I hate to even speculate about the troubles of black-fly season.
Then again, I know that inevitably, some enterprising American wizard is working on the problem as I write.
