A GASP FROM THE PAST: VAMPIRA

 

Vampira in her heyday

   I spent a lot of my teens hunting down  the legendary screen siren and horror movie hostess Vampira... I was completely obsessed with her. It took me quite a long time to figure out that the friendly older woman I used to sit next to at  Angel's Coffee Shop in Hollywood WAS  Vampira, Maila Nurmi herself!   

Just before this story was published, I arranged for Vampira  to make a  live comeback, by popping out of a coffin at a Cramps  show in Northridge, California.

This article was originally published in LA Weekly on October 30, 1981

I first discovered Vampira when I was twelve years old.  An avid fan of horror movies and monster magazines, I saw her pictures, and fell in love. Later, when  I discovered James Dean and started reading everything I could get my hands on about him,   Vampira figured prominently in many of the stories.  As an adult, I was still completely fascinated and  spent hours trying to look her up, cruising down Melrose Avenue looking for her store and mooning over every publicity still I could find of her.  Like me, many of the people obsessed with Vampira weren’t even born during her short career span … It’s only because of Plan 9 From Outer Space, a few scattered stories and the old stills that they even know she existed.  Apparently that was enough to trigger the mania.

Her five-inch-long fingernails were painted “hemorrhage red,” as were her cruel-looking lips.  Her skin had a luminous alabaster pallor, in direct contrast to her stringy raven mane and tattered black shrouds which clung to her body like wallpaper … and what a body - her measurements were a stunning 38-17-36.  Her face was angular, with high-jutting planes for cheekbones and black Gothic arch slashes of eyebrows.

 Her icy blue eyes glittered with come-hither invitation and sly menace as she’d say in a throaty voice at the end of the Vampira Show she hosted on Channel 7,

 “Bad dreams, dahling.”

She drove through Hollywood in a chauffeured hearse, maintained that she signed “epitaphs, not autographs” and drank nothing but Bloody Marys.  One fan who worked at L.A. Children’s Hospital even offered her a test-tube full of her “favorite cocktail.”  She was considered one of the original beatniks and hung out at Googie’s and other bohemian coffeehouses.  She took in stray cats as well as stray actors, like Marlon Brando and James Dean.  She sent “Jimmy,” as she referred to him, a postcard of herself in a coffin with the inscription “Wish you were here” - a week later he was dead.

In 1956, she starred in the triple-B movie and cult favorite Plan 9 From Outer Space along with Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson.  Although she admits to being “a terrible snob” and has little regard for that movie, it was Plan 9 and its frequent runs in revival houses that has spurred the renewed interest in the prettiest vampire ever.

Hollywood legends are made, not born, as the old saying goes.  And most of the legends are made, at least in part, by untimely deaths - witness Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and, of course, James Dean.  Vampira is not dead.  (Well, she always was, anyway.)  But she disappeared from the public eye over 25 years ago.  She not only dropped out of the limelight, she holed up and became a virtual hermit.  Why?  She says she  was getting a lot of crank phone calls and being pestered by bizarre people who thought she really was Vampira.  Notes written in blood would be delivered daily, and sometimes appetizing treats like decaptitated animals would appear on her doorstep as love offerings.  She was plagued with death threats by people who thought she’d be more sexually attractive as a corpse, and later, when Dean died, she was bombarded with people wanting to touch someone close to him.

Today, Vampira leads a quiet life in East Hollywood, working as a waitress and selling various items at swap meets and flea markets.  She shares her small apartment with three dogs and tries to keep a low profile.  In person, at the age of 60, she is still gorgeous.  Although she has a row of teeth missing on the right side of her mouth, her skin is clear and unlined, and the incredible bone structure is still there.  When she unwinds, she is animated and laughs easily.  She is extremely intelligent, not to mention well-informed on current events.

Vampira was born Maila Nurmi in Finland and migrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of two.  Her father was a newspaper editor and a temperance lecturer, and the family roamed around America before finally settling in Oregon.  Although Maila had a strict religious upbringing, she’d been acting since she was very young.  At the age of  seventeen, she moved to Los Angeles to stay with relatives and pursue a theatrical career.  In between too few acting jobs, Maila began doing exotic dancing up and down the West Coast.  At last, an offer to appear with a Shakespeare company just outside of Chicago came through, and Maila and a friend packed up and left on a bus for the “legitimate stage.”

“Well, we got off the bus,” she laughed, “and there was nothing there, only a field.  I saw a tent and thought, ‘This must be it.’  So we went over to the tent, and it turned out to be a carnival!  It was they who had hired us.  We were supposed to stand on these giant blocks of ice right outside of the hootchie-koo tent and wear ice-skates and hula dance!  We lasted about a week - it was a pretty rough place.  But the carnies were wonderful; they all pitched in for bus fare to get us back home.”

Back in L.A., Maila did cheesecake photos for Bernard of Hollywood, a well-known photographer.  His stable included Marilyn Monroe, Irish McCalla and Mamie Van Doren.  This helped to pay the rent until she moved to New York City to appear in Mike Todd’s Spooky Scandals, portraying, ironically enough, a dancing vampire.  Howard Hawks spotted her, brought her back out to Hollywood, and because he thought she had a rather sensuous Lauren Bacall type appeal, gave her the old “I’ll make you a star” treatment.  Things looked promising, but nothing ever came of it.  She lived in furnished rooms and generally weathered the starlet struggle.  She recalls waking up one night and having an experience with astral projection.

“All of a sudden I saw myself, but I was far thinner than I was then and about four inches taller.  I looked just like a vampire, and I was walking into Ciro’s with a blond young man following me.  He stepped on my train, and I looked back and stopped for a moment.  Then the vision went away.”

Eight years later, the vision became a reality. Maila and her  then-husband, producer Dean Reiner were to attend a costume ball. Maila  spent a lot of time  on her costume and made herself up as the wife in the Charles Addams cartoons, whose macabre work for The New Yorker  spawned The Addams Family television series. Maila’s appearance was so breathtaking that  Hunt Stromberg, Jr., head of ABC , spent two months  after the event searching for her to host the Channel 7 late-night horror movie show. She consented, and in 1954, Vampira was born.

She was an instant hit the moment the program aired. Red-blooded American males ( and of course, that was the way she liked them!) spurned innocent-looking blondes in favor of “The Ghoul Nextdoor”, who wowed ‘em weekly with vast expanses of cleavage, drinking “poison” from an ornate antique bar ans she lounged provocatively on  a sofa decorated with skulls. She’d open the show with a blood-curdling scream and croon,

“I hope you’ve all had the good fortune to have had a terrible week!”

In between bitingly sarcastic comments on the movies, which were generally just as horrible as Plan 9 but not nearly as humorous,  she’d make double-entendre necrophiliac jokes. Aside from a few housewives complaining about Vampira’s bosom and  licentious attitude, she was an all-around smash.  Life  magazine did a four-page spread on her, she was written up in Newsweek, and The Academy Of Television Arts And Sciences nominated her “Most Outstanding Female Personality” for 1954.  Offers for guest appearances poured in by the hundreds, and the fan mail was staggering. Newspapers did huge layouts on “The girl who put the HEX in sex appeal”, and Confidential, the most outrageous of the scandal rags, really played up the friendship between Vampira and “America’s Number One Teenager”, James Dean.

 Vampira befriended James  Deam when her star far outshone his. East of Eden  was doing well but wasn’t a hit. By that time,  Vampira  was making grand sweeping entrances into Hollywood hotspots like  Ciro’s.

“I was so sad because I was getting invited into such lovely places,” she laments, “And I couldn’t even eat an olive, or my waist-cincher would pop and I’d throw up!”

The pair met at Googie’s, the hip place  to see and be seen, and got along like gangbusters. The rest is  Hollywood history…but not  quite.

“ No one ever really got close to Jimmy, “ she recalls, “He was a loner. The whole ‘James Dean set’ was invented by the studios. I didn’t even know Sal Mineo. Natalie Wood was just a stupid little girl with a crush on him- she had a crush on everybody! Deennis Hopper was the only one who really admired him. People would fall in love with him at the movie theaters, but would’nt even recognize him on the street.”

 As far as their personal relationship goes, Vampira will only concede to telling short anecdotes like The Postcard Story. But she admits,

“We saw each other’s psyche reflected in each other, like Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles.”

Just around the time of Dean’s death, she was blacklisted by the ABC  Netwrok for refusing to relinquish the rights to the Vampira copyright to them. The day the contract was annulled,  she was planning on having a small party with Dean to celebrate her freedom, but it turned out to be the day he was buried.  Vampira went into seclusion and eventually passed through the public’s forgetfulness and imagination into nothing more than a puzzle-piece in the Dean legend.

“Jimmy died at the right time; he’s immortal,” she said, “His glory is bigger than valentino’s.”

Aside from a few pulp magazine articles with  lurid titles like Vampira And The Ghost Of  James Dean  Maila and her alter ego  vanished almost entirely.  The blacklist was in full effect and people in the biz  either wouldn’t touch her, or couldn’t get in touch with her.

“I was at the ABC offices and  one man said, ‘Do you know what’s in my bottom drawer? Over $60,000.00 worth of  offers for guest appearances for you, and we have refused every one of them.’  And that was just for the month of January! I couldn’t get any work at all- I was cleaning people’s houses and going back to my furnished room…”

In 1956,  hack director extraordinaire  Edward G. Wood met  Maila at a part at Bela Lugosi Jr.’s house. He was working on Plan 9 and wondered if she’d want a part in it.

“Well, I  asked how much, and he  was paying $200.00 for one day of work, so naturally I accepted- I was penniless. They weren’t a big movie company, you know. No limousines or anything like that. I went to the job every day on the RTD bus in my Vampira get-up.”

She launches into a gale of giggles before continuing,

“The dialog was terrible so I played the part mute. They were all amateurs. Wood was supposed to be wild- a transvestite, things like that- but they all just struck me as a bunch of half-assed backwoods people. I couldn’t imagine anyone believing it or wanting to see it, but it ran on 42^nd Street in New York for ages, and look at it now!”

At a recent  Los Angeles  screening at the Nuart Theater, Nurmi tried to attend but  was refused because the show was sold out.

“My friend was saying ‘But this is Vampira, don’t you see? She hasn’t ever seen the movie and she wants to.  She’ll stand in the aisle…”

 The man at the box office  replied, “Vampira is dead.”

Such was the extent of her reclusiveness.

Once in an interview, she lamented, “My whole life has been one big Halloween party!” and maybe  most of it has been. But  like a true vampire, she will live forever with her otherworldly beauty and  her image as  “The Girl Of Your Screams”.

Think of Vampira at The Witching Hour, and hopefully all of you  dahlings out there will have the good fortune to have wondrously bad dreams.

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One of my prized possessions: a signed poster  given to me by Maila  herself

  "The night owls will fly...the devils will brew

Halloween is the night for Vampira and you

The movies are Horrors at the stroke of eleven

Vampira's just dying to meet you on Seven!" 

 Find me on online:

www.princessfarhana.com

www.pleasantgehman.com

www.pleasantgehman.blogspot.com

www.princessraqs.blogspot.com  

www.facebook.com/pleasant.gehman

www.facebook.com/princess.farhana

www.twitter.com/PrincessFarhana

www.twitter.com/PleasantGehman1

www.instagram.com/princessofhollywood

  

THE WESTSIDE PIERS

CBGB in the late 1970's

Back in the late ‘70s, I lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in a sprawling loft at the top of a six-story walk-up  building. I’d gone to New York for a  short visit and wound up staying for months, living with Kristian Hoffman of the Mumps and  Bradley Field, drummer for Teenage Jesus And The Jerks. Their loft  had formerly been a silver plating factory, and for $25.00 a month in rent, a pre-Cramps and Gun Club Kid Congo and I moved in as their tenants.  Kristian and Bradley were Bowery homesteaders, the only tenants who actually lived in the building, which also housed some  sweatshops and Sons Of Italy meeting hall, as well as the office of the landlord  Yat Ting Moy, a Chinese doctor who giggled when he saw the loft bed Kristian and Bradley had constructed.

 “Bed in the sky!” Dr. Moy said.

Though Kristian and Bradley had made the place more than habitable, with a bathtub salvaged from the street,  a huge collection of vintage Halloween decorations, and moth-eaten taxidermy, the loft was pretty dirty… well, the floor was, anyway. No matter how hard we all scrubbed, it was always dark with old tarnish from the plating factory, and our feet were constantly black.  Bands would practice there almost every night: The Mumps and Teenage Jesus of course,  also James Chance and The Contortions, The Fast, and a side project of Lydia Lunch’s called Beirut Slump.  I was consumed with rock and roll and that was one of the reasons I was in New York to begin with, because you could walk five blocks down the Bowery and see The Cramps, The Deadboys, Television, The Talking Heads,  Richard Hell , The Ramones or Blondie  at CBGB’s, any night of the week. But sometimes  all of the bands’ practicing got to me, too much of a good thing.  I took to sitting up on the roof of the building, hanging laundry on the clotheslines we’d strung and then just hanging out, writing in my diary or surveying the endless sea of  buildings, a sea of  tar paper, pipes,   chimneys, laundry lines, and water towers spreading to the East River in one direction and to the Hudson in the other. For even  more quiet in the midst of the city, I’d take  long walks across the Village to the decrepit piers lining the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side under the highway.

 Kevin, my boyfriend at the time and the main reason I was in New York, was the one that introduced me to the piers.  He was wonderful: a kind, talented, funny sensitive man.  He played bass in the Mumps, and worked at a store that sold party goods and novelties.  He had giant blue eyes, chiseled features, and a slightly femme James Dean look.  He was also gay, but that didn’t really matter.  We bonded immediately – could read each other’s mind, had exactly the same sense of humor.   He was my boyfriend, we were in love, really, we adored each other—but we never actually had sex.  We kissed and held hands a lot, but that was it.  We’d spend hours at night at Max’s or at bars like The Ninth Circle, then take our separate subway trains.  I guess I was probably the only person he ever met at the piers during the daylight hours.

At night, the piers were overrun with drug dealers, hustlers, johns, and vicious, strung-out Puerto Rican drag queens who’d rob their tricks blind at knifepoint.  There were tractor trailers parked at the loading docks and the inky shadows surrounding them seethed  with anonymous night crawlers cruising for rough trade and older businessmen taking a Walk On The Wild Side, trying to buy some hot young ass, stepping over puddles of piss , slipping on spilled semen.

           

But in the mid-afternoon solitude, in the wintry sunlight or late summer golden pink  haze, looking across the  choppy, silvery river to the Jersey Palisades, the piers were beautiful and not dangerous, except maybe structurally.  Every so often you’d hear about one caving in. On the Jersey shore, there were ancient-looking factories blackened with the soot of their own belching smokestacks. Topped with grimy neon signs that appeared unchanged since the ‘50s, if not before then.

 CHOCK FULL O’NUTS…  THE HEAVENLY COFFEE, WISE POTATO CHIPS, SAVARIN, and ironically enough, USE CRISCO.

  Me and Kevin used to laugh about that one, wondering how many other pier-cruisers ever caught on to it.  There was always a faintly brackish smell of seawater mingled with the stench of the trash barges, the diesel fuel of the sightseeing Circle Line crafts, tugboats, and the Staten Island Ferry.  Seagulls wheeled overhead and pigeons cooed on the wooden pilings.

           

Depending on which pier you were on, you could clearly see the Statue of Liberty or maybe even the George Washington Bridge.  Once in a while, you’d be joined by a quiet derelict  looking for a place to crash or someone who wanted to smoke a joint in peace.  The piers were a good place to meetyou could get mugged or killed at night, but during the daytime people respected each other’s privacy.  Kevin and I would talk for hours about everything.  We’d meet there almost every day.

Kevin has been dead for many years, but I  still treasure those times.  In hindsight, I think we helped each other grow up out there on the river, two lost souls barely out of our teens, trying to make sense  of the insane world we were living in. We’d smoke a joint, and water would slap against the support beams; you could always see it moving as you stared down through the cracks of the weathered boards and asphalt-covered planks.  It was calming to face the Palisades and watch the afternoon slowly turn to lavender twilight, and to know you could be with someone, sharing the moment without words.  Sometimes it would seem as thought it was very early in the century; it was easy to imagine foreign steamers chugging into the harbor, bringing thousands of immigrants to Ellis Island…until the shrill horns of the rush-hour taxis or the rumble of the West Side Highway above and behind you cut into the illusion.

All the  crazed hubbub  of the city would almost, but not quite, muffle the moaning that was beginning to come from inside the long-unused warehouses, the early-bird rentboys gathering in the shadows, turning their first tricks as darkness fell. 

Kevin Kiely & me, 1978   Photo: Theresa Kereakes

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NOVEMBER 5th, 12th, 19th, 2014,  LOS ANGELES:

 IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU: MEMOIR WRITING WORKSHOP

 WITH PLEASANT GEHMAN

 Wednesday evenings 7:45-10:00 PM

1954 ½ Rodney Drive LA CA 90027

  Space is limited!

 For more info: https://www.facebook.com/events/749269365140806/

JUST A CRAZY LITTLE PLACE...MEMORIES OF THE SUGAR SHACK

 Sugar Shack coupon courtesy of Chuck Starr

 When most people think of their teenage years, they remember things like football games or the Senior Prom. Not me. The summer of 1975 was a highlight in my Peak Experience-filled teens.  And nothing is sweeter in my memory than the nights I spent at The Sugar Shack in North Hollywood.  The Shack, as we called it, was a refuge for  “adventurous” teenagers- oh,  wait, I really meant to say Juvenile Delinquents With Very Little Parental Supervision. If you imagine combining the degeneracy of the Weimar Berlin with an episode of Romper Room featuring  Jayne County as the hostess, and  a soundtrack by Suzi Quatro, you’ll get an idea of what an average night at The Sugar Shack was like.

I was Sweet Sixteen and had just moved to LA, a city that was in the throes of a strange musical limbo. The Hollywood club scene was in that  “no man’s land” between the end of Glitter Rock and the beginning of Punk; but let me assure you, there was plenty going on. While the rest of the world was grooving to the boss sounds of the latest Disco hits, there was a crowd of Tinseltown hipsters-although we would’ve abhorred being called that- going to see Toni Basil or The Tubes at The Roxy, Queen or Iggy at The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, or the Cycle Sluts, a theatrical drag queen troupe/ heavy metal band who were in residence at The Whisky A Go-Go. Since many of us were too young to drink legally, we’d prime ourselves for these gigs by scarfing handfuls of Quaaludes- the original Rorer 714 article- which could be purchased in The Rainbow’s  parking lot for a mere buck a pop.

Back then, rock music wasn’t the only thing that was caught in a gray area. My crowd and I were streetwise and sophisticated enough to be experimenting with drugs and sex, but hideously below the legal Age Of Consent. Since it was The Swingin’ Seventies, our nascent sexuality was also one big fat gray area…and it’s not like anyone was keepings tabs, either!  Our adventurous spirit fit in perfectly with the prevalent freewheeling attitude of the time. Mixed with the handfuls of pills we took combined with the Olde English 800 tallboys we guzzled in back alleys, it made any sort of sexual classification totally irrelevant.

We were a crowd of groupies, teenage hustlers, bisexual school girls and fringy sluts out, as the New York Dolls said, “Lookin’ For A Kiss”…or more, if we could get it…and usually, we could. Our favorite hangs were late-night coffee shops where trannie hookers turned tricks in the Ladies Room; places like Arthur J’s on Santa Monica Boulevard or   the two haunts on Hollywood Boulevard: Danielle’s and The Gold Cup which was immortalized in Black Randy’s song “Trouble At The Cup”.  Mostly we hung out at these establishments after hitting Westwood to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the millionth time.  None of these places served liquor, so of course they didn’t card anyone. You could be totally at home in your fishnets, heavy make up and Sally Bowles’ fierce Divinely Decadent attitude. After all, who was gonna to hassle you about your appearance…a stoned drag queen? Rodney’s English Disco had closed and The Masque wasn’t open yet, so these were our haunts…until The Sugar Shack opened.

Located in the depths of LA’s San Fernando Valley on Magnolia and Whitsett, The Sugar Shack was a juice bar where you had to show ID to prove that you were under twenty one…unless of course you were Kim Fowley or Rodney Bingenheimer or a visiting rock star. The place was tiny and wood paneled, with a long bar down the right side as you walked in. There was an upstairs lounge area that had a working fireplace,  clanging pinball machines, and couches were everyone eventually wound up  writhing around   with someone they’d just met.

 Main attraction was the dance floor, which took up at least a third of the club. Racks of colorful lights whirled around overhead, along with a Disco ball, a siren that sounded frequently, and strobe lights.  The notorious Chuck E Starr was the DJ playing Shack faves like Roxy Music’s “Do The Strand”, The Sweet’s “AC/DC” or “Fox On The Run” and   “Planet Queen” by T. Rex. He also favored hits from LA’s “grown up” (read: 21 and over) gay clubs, like The Andrea True Connection’s  “More, More, More” and  “Party Line” and Hot Chocolate’s  “You Sexy Thing”.    Ziggy Stardust look-alike Rick Ferris (aka Rick Bowie) would   jump up and lead an off-handed, infinitely hot Hustle.  Everyone in the whole place was in love with him, whether they’d admit to it or not.  But he big crowd pleaser was anything from The Rocky Horror Show – the entire dance floor would be filled with kids doing  “The Time Warp” in Busby Berkeley precision, and  “Cherry Bomb” by local gals and Shack regulars, The Runaways.  David Bowie was in a class by himself– “Rebel Rebel” and “Golden Years” were heard multiple times a night and no one ever got tired of them- everyone went insane. My late bestie Randy Kaye, (Co-editor of my punk fanzine Lobotomy and later an A&R man for Slash Records) remembers:

“No matter what Bowie song Chuck played, we’d all scream and run to the dance floor!”

 The main thing I remember about the dance floor- aside from making an ass of myself on numerous occasions by literally falling off my silver glitter platforms in a Quaalude stupor- were the mirrored panels that surrounded it on three sides. They were covered in a thick band of kiss marks in every conceivable shade of lip-gloss because everybody would   dance facing the mirrors and   kiss their own reflections. How very Seventies; we might’ve been messed up, but we sure didn’t lack self-esteem!

 

The Runaways

 “The Sugar Shack was a magical place,” sighed Cherie Currie, former Runaways lead singer, who, along with her twin sister Marie were the belles of the ball.

“Everyone would make a circle around Cherie and she’d…like…do her stage moves,” Randy said.

 Jane Wiedlin, who in the days before The  Go-Go’s was a Shack regular, remembers:

“ Me and my friends were all afraid of Cherie!  The Sugar Shack was fun, but it was full of teenagers.  I wanted to meet rock stars, so I liked Rodney’s and The Rainbow more.”

“The Sugar Shack was a great place to sort of…get over Rodney’s, where everyone was fucking three guys a night! ” said my former roommate Ann MacLean, who was in 11^th grade at the time.

“ You’d get there early, get really wasted in the parking lot, then hang out with gay guys and make out with your girlfriends. I remember a lot of chicks wearing those chubby rabbit fur jackets, which I thought were so cool! Money wasn’t important… everyone was running around screaming “GIRRRRL!” and “MISS THING!” and we’d all cram into the girl’s restroom to make out with each other.”

“There were a lot of bisexual girls,” recalls Rodney Bingenheimer, wistfully and with great relish,

 “I brought Roger Meadows-Taylor from Queen there and he loved it! When I brought all of Blondie there, they couldn’t believe what was going on- a club only for teenagers? They thought it was really wild!”

 Drama always ran high at The Sugar Shack. When the beautiful blonde bartender Vicki Ronald became the singer for Kim Fowley’s “punk” project, Venus And The Razorblades, everybody speculated in hushed whispers, wondering if it would cause a rift between her and Cherie.  They not only looked identical, they were best friends.  Date-stealing was common. If you lost sight of your paramour for even a few minutes, it was a safe bet you’d find them entangled with someone else in a parked car on one of the dark residential streets or in the alleys surrounding the place.

“God, I remember getting there really early to drink in the car,” Randy Kaye recalled, “…and then waking up on some side street, not knowing how I got there!”

 My close friend and bon vivant, the late Dennis Crosby (grandson of Bing) recalled:

“Sex in cars… sex on the couches upstairs… sex in the girl’s bathroom…French designer bell-bottom jeans that laced up the front and the back…Tuinals and Southern Comfort…  stumbling outside to puke across the street then going back inside to dance!”

 Because most of us were underage, the good stuff usually happened outside or after hours. The movie Foxes, which featured Cherie Currie, came close to what our secret teenage lives were like back then, but it didn’t quite cut it- outrageous as the film was for the time, it still whitewashed our real life experiences. We were rock n’ rollers adrift in suburbia, dealing with the adult-like harsh realities-and hardcore substance abuse as escapism-when most of us weren’t even old enough to drive! And as for driving: getting to the Shack was a nightmare that involved sneaking out of the house, and either hitch-hiking (which we all did then) or careening across Coldwater Canyon in a car with seven other people who weren’t old enough to drive yet either. 

Eventually, most of us stopped going to The Sugar Shack in favor of  a  gay club in Hollywood called Gino’s II…and then punk rock happened, dividing our crowd into two very distinct factions. Some of us saw it as the Second Coming;  the others preferred dance music, puka shells and feathered hair.

The Sugar Shack’s been closed for decades, but I still can feel the ecstatic sweat of the dance floor when Chuck Starr hit the siren and threw on “Suffragette City”; the enthusiastic and utterly wasted casual sex with someone whose name you didn’t know… and hoping all week long that you’d see them again the next Wednesday night. I remember my red heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses, kept on after dark and miraculously never lost.  I always wore my Carmen Miranda 1940’s style Kork- Eaze wedge platforms and “Drive-In” pants:  Chemin De Fer bell bottom jeans that  zippered all the way  from the front waistband to the back through your crotch so  they’d fall off you in two pieces. It was  such a rush to get out of the house on a warm, jasmine scented summer night…and watching Rick Bowie strutting  around in the strobes  on the dance floor like he owned the place.

I remember a lot about those Sugar Shack nights, and what it was like being a teenager in Los Angeles during the Seventies. To my own amazement, as these memories come flooding back to me in minute detail, I put on “The Timewarp”…and evidently  I didn’t kill too many brain cells  back in the day,  because my body remembered every move as though it  had been imprinted into my DNA.  Dancing in my living room , I take Just A  To The Left and  then  A Step To The Right  with  the sassy  flair I used to show off on the Sugar Shack’s dance floor.

 I’d gaze into the mirror looking myself directly into the eyes, slowly lower my lids, pucker up my Mary Quant Black Cherry glossed lips and   kiss my own reflection, just as the final chords of the song ran out.

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The   story you've just read is from my forthcoming memoir Good Girls Go To Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere , which will be published by Punk Hostage Press in early 2015.

 Saturday, September 27  I will be reading from  my book Showgirl Confidential: My Life Onstage, Backstage, And On The Road  with the women of Punk Hostage Press at Beyond Baroque,  681 Venice  Blvd, LA, 90291  at 7:00pm. Info is here:  https://www.facebook.com/events/345505825625345/

  Get a signed copy of Showgirl Confidential here:  http://www.princessfarhana.com/shop.htm