[ed. I've never thought much to how the "cocktail generation" might have been a precursor to the drug-drenched, free-love hippie ethic of the 60s, but it makes sense. The comments on this essay also brought up an old memory: The Glades in Honolulu. The women there (transvestites, or mahu's as they're called in Hawaii) were so beautiful, at least the ones we'd banter with and whistle to outside at 2 am (always the last thing to do before heading home after a fun night of partying). Life was grittier and more dangerous back then, but also more interesting.]
Carol Doda’s death came to me via the same mechanism as so much news comes to me these days – Social Media. It was Veteran’s Day when I saw the article on SF Gate. I had enjoyed a much-needed day off work though I spent much of it working on things for myself and my kid – artwork, writing, laundry, dishes.
In the evening, I logged onto Facebook and found myself glutted with streams of posts about the passing of Doda at age 78. I read the SF Gate story on Doda’s death which opens with the preposterous statement that “Carol Doda . . . helped take stripping out of the shadowy margins of American society.” My first response was fury and outrage. Really? That is a rather grand and sweeping statement. On what facts are writers Kevin Faggan and Sam Whiting making this assumption? Clearly they haven’t spent a lot of time (or any time) working in strip clubs in America, or more specifically, North Beach. I can’t really blame them. They are writing about their perceptions, what has been fed to them from media and what they have experienced as onlookers.
The SF Gate article was just the tip of the iceberg (or of the nipples in Doda’s case). These writers represent a very small fraction of the hundreds of people who I read voicing their opinion on Doda. It seems like everyone, especially those living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60s and 70s, had a story or opinion to share. Her tits were mythic! She revolutionized stripping! She was an icon for female sexual freedom! She changed the landscape of San Francisco’s North Beach from sleaze-ball sex alley to neon lit tourist destination! She put the S in Silicone and pioneered bending sexuality as an act of sexual liberation! She was hilarious! She was a riot! She was iconic! Bigger than her big neon tits glowing over Broadway and Columbus!
People recounted their encounters with Doda, which in the end mostly weren’t encounters at all, but restatements of myths of Doda which were perpetuated by the image of her plastered in the media as a representation of San Francisco’s ribald history and its reputation as a leader in sexual freedom. But these stories weren’t “real.” They were recreations of urban myths that took a real person – Carol Doda – and turned her into a phantom legend. People writing about Doda mostly experienced her from the point of view of spectator and tourist. Few of them had ever really met her, and none that I read had actually worked for her.
People fondly remembered seeing Doda descend to the stage of the Condor while standing on a pristine white grand piano. Doda donned in slinky glitter and high heels belted out songs and jokes to a riotous audience while she made her tits pump up and down and sideways. Or they remembered driving past the large red neon sign outside the Condor and gaping in awe at Doda’s neon-lit larger-than-life-size-tits and blinking incandescent nipples pointed to the San Francisco skyline. Others recounted stories of the barkers standing outside the Condor inciting tourists to step inside and checkout Carol’s show. Real live Carol Doda tits! Woo hoo!
As I read through these stories, my insides churned. I flashed back to a time nearly 40 years ago when I was a fifteen-year-old runaway girl living on the streets of San Francisco, and I happened to land a job in the Condor Club working for Carol Doda. My story is a different story then the ones I have read in the news this past week. Sure, when I walked through the doors of the Condor, I was as aware of the legend of Doda as anyone else growing up in San Francisco at that time. She was, after all, a television icon. Her slinky voice – “This is Carol Doda, and you are watching the Perfect 36”—was the soundtrack to late night TV, her voice accompanied by the ever present snap of the tab on my dad’s beer cans as we watched movies together and he drank down six packs of Budweiser or Olympia.
So yeah, I thought I knew damn well who Carol Doda was when I walked into the Condor in April 1977 looking for a job, but actually, I didn’t know her at all.
I grew up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, and Carol Doda was a regular household name. My parents and uncles and aunts were part of the Cocktail Generation, the generation that thought getting drunk and wagging your tits was revolutionary. Sure Doda’s face was a staple on the TV in my house, but she and her tits were also emblems of a whole culture that centered on getting wasted and humping each other as some sign of being sexually revolutionary. My parents played Herb Albert albums, the covers featuring naked women covered in whipped cream. Playboy magazine arrived in the mail regularly, and my mom used Mod Podge to decoupage all variety of household items with the images of naked women and their large Hugh Hefner-endorsed tits. My parents, uncles, aunts and their friends frequently headed to North Beach to play the scene.
During the day, my mom was a bookkeeper and my dad was an ironworker. On the weekends, they were transformed into out-of-control hyper sexual drunks, and Carol Doda incited them to push boundaries while North Beach gave them a place to push them. My parents came home with black eyes, hangovers and tales of public displays of debauchery. They came home saying they saw Carol Doda’s tits.
On my 12th birthday, my Uncle Jerry gave me a dog-eared copy of Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker (1971) as a present. It was the copy that he already read, and I really don’t want to think about what that meant. I think Uncle Jerry thought he was passing along some kind of baton of liberation, but really it was just another way in which the Cocktail Generation fucked up their kids. I was supposed to look to a hooker as a hero? I read the book front to back cover, mesmerized by the story. That book, along with every other piece of sex and booze propaganda thrust on my young self, probably helped pave the way for me to walk into the Condor and ask for a job when I was a fifteen year old girl who barely had lost her virginity.
In my mind, Doda was wrapped into the entire stinking cocktail that soaked through my parents’ generation. They were part of the Rat Pack generation and its taste for excess – booze, sex, and cigarettes – for no other reason than they could do it without any perceivable repercussions and that they felt momentary escape from the confines of their ordinary lives. To them, it was like flipping the finger to the Establishment they worked for but were also part of. Regardless of the myth of San Francisco as some kind of sex-crazed free for all, during the time of Doda’s reign, much of the city was still populated by working class families, like my own, who would head to North Beach as if they were going to Disneyland for the weekend.
This was well and fine for the adults who were exercising their new sense of liberty, especially for the cocktail generation who coopted the ideals of the hippy free love movement into a nightmarish bastardization that included believing it was okay to have orgies in front of their kids, engage in wife-swapping, and feed their children booze because “it was safer in the home than outside.” In this skewed world, these drunken sex-addled adults thought they were doing their kids a favor by removing taboos, when really for a lot of kids like me, growing up at that time was like living inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
That was my San Francisco. The era when kids were oversexed before they could crawl. The era that sent a lot of young girls, including myself, fleeing home and landing on the streets with nowhere to go and no way of knowing how to get there. And in the background, Carol Doda reminded us all that we were not only watching but living the world of the Perfect 36.
Of course the first myth to bust (pun intended ) is that Carol Doda’s tits were 36s. They were 44DDs the last time I checked. And I saw Carol Doda’s tits, many nights, as she pumped them up and down and sideways on the stage of the Condor. Those taut globes were the size of bowling balls. Ludicrous orbs ready to burst from their overinflated seams. As a kid looking at those things, I felt like I was watching what happened to Barbie when she took a wrong turn. Holy shit! So much for Disneyland. I was in the seventh circle of Plasticine Hell.
Perhaps my uncle knew something about my future that I didn’t when he handed me The Happy Hooker on my 12th birthday, or perhaps he was writing my future. In any case, my future led me to Carol Doda, and my memories of The Condor and the North Beach strip club scene (where I spent much of my fifteenth year on the planet ) are nothing like the mythic nostalgic recollections I read about Doda when she died last week.
The road that took me to The Condor Club is a long and winding one, to quote a song from the background of my childhood. But through many events in my early life – from alcohol-drenched parents to a strung out brother and a lot of Very Bad Shit – I ended up alone in San Francisco, a fifteen year old girl without a home and nowhere to go. Perhaps it was the fallout of the Cocktail Generation that shook my foundation so hard it threw me onto the streets when I was just a kid. I landed hard, and it was a tough fall, but somehow I learned how to survive, which is certainly obvious by the fact that I am sitting here writing my Carol Doda memories at age 53.
Carol Doda’s death came to me via the same mechanism as so much news comes to me these days – Social Media. It was Veteran’s Day when I saw the article on SF Gate. I had enjoyed a much-needed day off work though I spent much of it working on things for myself and my kid – artwork, writing, laundry, dishes.
In the evening, I logged onto Facebook and found myself glutted with streams of posts about the passing of Doda at age 78. I read the SF Gate story on Doda’s death which opens with the preposterous statement that “Carol Doda . . . helped take stripping out of the shadowy margins of American society.” My first response was fury and outrage. Really? That is a rather grand and sweeping statement. On what facts are writers Kevin Faggan and Sam Whiting making this assumption? Clearly they haven’t spent a lot of time (or any time) working in strip clubs in America, or more specifically, North Beach. I can’t really blame them. They are writing about their perceptions, what has been fed to them from media and what they have experienced as onlookers.
The SF Gate article was just the tip of the iceberg (or of the nipples in Doda’s case). These writers represent a very small fraction of the hundreds of people who I read voicing their opinion on Doda. It seems like everyone, especially those living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60s and 70s, had a story or opinion to share. Her tits were mythic! She revolutionized stripping! She was an icon for female sexual freedom! She changed the landscape of San Francisco’s North Beach from sleaze-ball sex alley to neon lit tourist destination! She put the S in Silicone and pioneered bending sexuality as an act of sexual liberation! She was hilarious! She was a riot! She was iconic! Bigger than her big neon tits glowing over Broadway and Columbus!People recounted their encounters with Doda, which in the end mostly weren’t encounters at all, but restatements of myths of Doda which were perpetuated by the image of her plastered in the media as a representation of San Francisco’s ribald history and its reputation as a leader in sexual freedom. But these stories weren’t “real.” They were recreations of urban myths that took a real person – Carol Doda – and turned her into a phantom legend. People writing about Doda mostly experienced her from the point of view of spectator and tourist. Few of them had ever really met her, and none that I read had actually worked for her.
People fondly remembered seeing Doda descend to the stage of the Condor while standing on a pristine white grand piano. Doda donned in slinky glitter and high heels belted out songs and jokes to a riotous audience while she made her tits pump up and down and sideways. Or they remembered driving past the large red neon sign outside the Condor and gaping in awe at Doda’s neon-lit larger-than-life-size-tits and blinking incandescent nipples pointed to the San Francisco skyline. Others recounted stories of the barkers standing outside the Condor inciting tourists to step inside and checkout Carol’s show. Real live Carol Doda tits! Woo hoo!
As I read through these stories, my insides churned. I flashed back to a time nearly 40 years ago when I was a fifteen-year-old runaway girl living on the streets of San Francisco, and I happened to land a job in the Condor Club working for Carol Doda. My story is a different story then the ones I have read in the news this past week. Sure, when I walked through the doors of the Condor, I was as aware of the legend of Doda as anyone else growing up in San Francisco at that time. She was, after all, a television icon. Her slinky voice – “This is Carol Doda, and you are watching the Perfect 36”—was the soundtrack to late night TV, her voice accompanied by the ever present snap of the tab on my dad’s beer cans as we watched movies together and he drank down six packs of Budweiser or Olympia.
So yeah, I thought I knew damn well who Carol Doda was when I walked into the Condor in April 1977 looking for a job, but actually, I didn’t know her at all.
I grew up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, and Carol Doda was a regular household name. My parents and uncles and aunts were part of the Cocktail Generation, the generation that thought getting drunk and wagging your tits was revolutionary. Sure Doda’s face was a staple on the TV in my house, but she and her tits were also emblems of a whole culture that centered on getting wasted and humping each other as some sign of being sexually revolutionary. My parents played Herb Albert albums, the covers featuring naked women covered in whipped cream. Playboy magazine arrived in the mail regularly, and my mom used Mod Podge to decoupage all variety of household items with the images of naked women and their large Hugh Hefner-endorsed tits. My parents, uncles, aunts and their friends frequently headed to North Beach to play the scene.
During the day, my mom was a bookkeeper and my dad was an ironworker. On the weekends, they were transformed into out-of-control hyper sexual drunks, and Carol Doda incited them to push boundaries while North Beach gave them a place to push them. My parents came home with black eyes, hangovers and tales of public displays of debauchery. They came home saying they saw Carol Doda’s tits.
On my 12th birthday, my Uncle Jerry gave me a dog-eared copy of Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker (1971) as a present. It was the copy that he already read, and I really don’t want to think about what that meant. I think Uncle Jerry thought he was passing along some kind of baton of liberation, but really it was just another way in which the Cocktail Generation fucked up their kids. I was supposed to look to a hooker as a hero? I read the book front to back cover, mesmerized by the story. That book, along with every other piece of sex and booze propaganda thrust on my young self, probably helped pave the way for me to walk into the Condor and ask for a job when I was a fifteen year old girl who barely had lost her virginity.
In my mind, Doda was wrapped into the entire stinking cocktail that soaked through my parents’ generation. They were part of the Rat Pack generation and its taste for excess – booze, sex, and cigarettes – for no other reason than they could do it without any perceivable repercussions and that they felt momentary escape from the confines of their ordinary lives. To them, it was like flipping the finger to the Establishment they worked for but were also part of. Regardless of the myth of San Francisco as some kind of sex-crazed free for all, during the time of Doda’s reign, much of the city was still populated by working class families, like my own, who would head to North Beach as if they were going to Disneyland for the weekend.
This was well and fine for the adults who were exercising their new sense of liberty, especially for the cocktail generation who coopted the ideals of the hippy free love movement into a nightmarish bastardization that included believing it was okay to have orgies in front of their kids, engage in wife-swapping, and feed their children booze because “it was safer in the home than outside.” In this skewed world, these drunken sex-addled adults thought they were doing their kids a favor by removing taboos, when really for a lot of kids like me, growing up at that time was like living inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
That was my San Francisco. The era when kids were oversexed before they could crawl. The era that sent a lot of young girls, including myself, fleeing home and landing on the streets with nowhere to go and no way of knowing how to get there. And in the background, Carol Doda reminded us all that we were not only watching but living the world of the Perfect 36.
Of course the first myth to bust (pun intended ) is that Carol Doda’s tits were 36s. They were 44DDs the last time I checked. And I saw Carol Doda’s tits, many nights, as she pumped them up and down and sideways on the stage of the Condor. Those taut globes were the size of bowling balls. Ludicrous orbs ready to burst from their overinflated seams. As a kid looking at those things, I felt like I was watching what happened to Barbie when she took a wrong turn. Holy shit! So much for Disneyland. I was in the seventh circle of Plasticine Hell.
Perhaps my uncle knew something about my future that I didn’t when he handed me The Happy Hooker on my 12th birthday, or perhaps he was writing my future. In any case, my future led me to Carol Doda, and my memories of The Condor and the North Beach strip club scene (where I spent much of my fifteenth year on the planet ) are nothing like the mythic nostalgic recollections I read about Doda when she died last week.
The road that took me to The Condor Club is a long and winding one, to quote a song from the background of my childhood. But through many events in my early life – from alcohol-drenched parents to a strung out brother and a lot of Very Bad Shit – I ended up alone in San Francisco, a fifteen year old girl without a home and nowhere to go. Perhaps it was the fallout of the Cocktail Generation that shook my foundation so hard it threw me onto the streets when I was just a kid. I landed hard, and it was a tough fall, but somehow I learned how to survive, which is certainly obvious by the fact that I am sitting here writing my Carol Doda memories at age 53.
by Kim Nicolini, Anderson Valley Advertiser | Read more:
Image: uncredited
