At long last the discussion has turned to an area I have
researched! First of all I have never heard B-Girl used in
real life. My sense was always that it translated to
prostitute but I admit that may have been wrong when
referring to earlier eras. Nowadays my impression is that any
girl encouraging customers to buy them drinks for a profit is
either a prostitute or a dancer or waitress in a strip club.
The prostitute would be more likely to be paying off the
bartender for allowing her to operate rather than getting a
rakeoff from the drinks.
Beyond that, many jurisdictions in the U.S. have laws against
giving waitresses/dancers or whomever a percentage based on
drinks sold. It is against the law in the District of
Columbia. A quarter of a century ago in Atlanta it was legal.
I know because I had a friend from high school days who
became a dancer/waitress in a couple of places including the
Clairmont Lounge, which would be flattered to be called a
dive. I used to go see her there in the company of her
husband...it's a long story. Anyway, she collected the
swizzle sticks in order to keep track of the drinks.
It always amused me that this dismal basement dive, mentioned
several times in Ralph Dennis' novels, had a rule that only
champagne could be purchased for the ladies. By the way,
before I forget it, I also used the Clairmont Lounge in a
novel but to read it you have to read French as it was only
published by Gallimard as Serie Noire #1933.
To backtrack a bit, my first overseas knowledge in this area
came in Vietnam.
I did not frequent the bars there but as my comrades in
arms returned to our hooch at night they would sometimes
interrupt my Bible studies with stories of their exploits.
Saigon tea was served up to soldiers nodding yes to the
question "You buy me drink? You numba one GI." From the
stories I suspect the girls received a percentage for the
sales of "Saigon Tea."
But back to the "our girls only drink champagne" dodge which
spans the globe.
In Europe, the champagne-only rule is quite common and
to enter one of those establishments is to find yourself in
the hands of the Philistines. Six friends of mine (two each
from the U.K., U.S. and Australia) were a little too
celebratory in Brussels about a year before I moved there.
They woke up the next day and badly hungover they added up
their various credit card receipts and discovered they had
spent over $16,000. This is an amazing amount to me
considering that no one got laid. While it is true that two
of the participants were Australian, which will skew the
number up, at least one and perhaps two of the number were
gay and one would think they would have been somewhat immune
to the blandishments of the ladies. I asked one of my
friends, a Brit, how on earth could they spend that much
money on a pure bar bill. "You have to understand," he told
me, "When you are pouring it over their bodies, there is
considerable wastage."
Thank God that happened before I arrived and thus warned was
able to avoid such traps in Brussels where I lived for a
time. My only related personal experience in Europe came in
Rome when one evening I was searching for a Christian Science
Reading Room and through a miscalculation discovered myself
in an establishment with the picturesque name "Chica, Chica
Boom."
But all of this is so off-topic, I will let the veil drop
over that particular misadventure.
Richard Moore
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