Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Copenhagen Room Found -- With Mike's Flashlight

Your Plainsman is nothing if not indefatigable in search of obscure of the etymology of Ticket references.  Unfortunately, I fear that this will expose me as the least-hip P1 in the Nation.

And, as I say in the following article (posted earlier tonight), many of y'all may already know where Michael Rhyner's reference to "The Copenhagen Room" in his introduction to E-News comes from.  I didn't.

As always seems to happen, the flashlight gave it away.

So -- Mike introduces E-News by saying "Whaddya say we get a little flashlight goin' here?"  And the undermusic is "Flash Light" by Parliament (next article).

And you take that clue and do a little Googling, and you come up with an essay by Wayne Ewing, a producer who was going to make a movie with Hunter Thompson about his stint as a "night manager" for the tragic San Francisco porn kings Jim and Artie Mitchell, who produced "Behind the Green Door" and many other features, and ran the notorious O'Farrell Theater.   Here is an excerpt from his article:

"Hunter insisted that Deborah and I take the full tour of what he called “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America.” On the first floor were three venues – the New York Stage where one girl would dance while others gave lap dances to the audience, the Copenhagen Room where patrons sat around the perimeter with flashlights and girls performed in the middle or on your lap, and the Ultra Room, a room with private cubicles from which you watched while the girls did each other in the box and you fed them tips through slots in the glass.

"'Be careful not to touch the walls,' one girl thoughtfully warned Deborah with whom I shared a cubicle."

You can read the whole article here.
 
Founders of The Copenhagen Room, Jim and Artie Mitchell
Jim would later shoot Artie to death.  Brothers Emlio Estevez and  
Charlie Sheen would later portray them in "Rated X."
 
So there you have it.  Get a little flashlight goin' and step into the Copenhagen Room.  I had always pictured Mike as an usher in a red blazer and black slacks with a flashlight to show you to your seat in a night-clubby kind of place.  Nope -- turns out the patrons are the ones who needed the flashlights.
 
The Hardline, bringing a little class to the culture-starved P1 Nation.

1 comment:

  1. I was listening last week's podcast and decided to Google "The Copenhagen Room" and found your post. This theory makes sense to me -- although it does show Mike's age.

    Nowadays flashlights are no longer needed in the jungle per this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/the-new-full-frontal-has-pubic-hair-in-america-gone-extinct/249798/#.TuwKI20d7Xo.email

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