AS IT NEVER WAS

My exposure to the giddy world of nightclubs is minimal. The exciting environment shown in the movie 'Cabaret', the songs of Zhou Xuan, the strip clubs on Broadway near where I lived for a while, a few dives south of Market Street, and scenes in Shanghai Triad, which I saw the year it came out.

The only one of those that has any appeal is the gilded age of hot spots shown in Shanghai Triad, but voiced in the song repertoire of Zhou Xuan. One song I heard early on was 真善美 ('zhēn shàn měi'; truth, goodness, beauty), a sprightly tune cheerfully evoking cynicism and bitterness.
As sung by someone with a girlish voice.
It was lovely.


Two of the environments listed above are sad and skeevy. The dives south of Market, of course, are rife with drug-use and bad music, hard to say which is worse, the chemicals or the noise.

From what I've heard, the backstage world of the strip clubs is very similar.

Zhou Xuan (周璇) may have been aware of similar things. Pre-war Shanghai was, if anything, a little rough and rambunctious around the edges.


We tend to glamorize the past. In movies, nightclubs are shown as happy brightly lit places where stylish people are having fun. Only rarely is a hard undertone exposed, usually in murder mysteries and gangster flicks. San Francisco Broadway, with its row of depravity, of course boasts about the fifties with performances by comedians and singers who later became famous, plus poetry recitals, or kvells over jazzclubs long gone.
Carole Doda was an artist who pushed boundaries!
There was no killer piano.

The El Cid is now an innocent Hong Kong style restaurant.

For the rest, Broadway at night is sleaze in the flesh.

No fine dining, followed by a show.
Nor good music or performance.
The cutting edge of skeevy.



This ain't Casablanca.




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