Steak & Shake
Stalking the Elusive "Boobalee-Oobalee"
By Meredith Phillips, Fri., Feb. 13, 1998
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Kate and I started the adventure on a Friday afternoon. The Yellow Rose's $5.95 lunch buffet prepared by chef John Randall (former executive chef of the acclaimed Green Pastures restaurant) piqued my interest, and naked women piqued hers. We talked big about going, but on the drive there I was a little quivery, and I'll bet Kate would say the same. Once inside the door, our eyes didn't even get a chance to adjust; flashing lights and about 10 measures of Loverboy's "Workin' for the Weekend" were the only stimuli we took in before the hostess refused our patronage politely but directly. We would need to come back with a man.
Deflected but not deterred, we moved on to Sugar's Uptown Cabaret; we were going to get cheap steak and a table dance if it took all day. Plus, we knew that Sugar's doesn't have a bring-your-own-man-if-you-aren't-one policy.
Sugar's is right next door to the old Pandemonium Family Funplex, and it almost makes sense when you step inside. The disco balls, Foreigner on the stereo, neon signs, and plastic silver streamers on the ceiling of Sugar's smack of Seventies' roller rink, and makes you wonder if adult entertainment venues' design was inspired by skating venues, or if it's the other way around.
We positioned ourselves at a table with a view of two of the stages. A waitress in a white button-down and business-length black skirt presented menus and asked for drink orders. Kate ordered a Jameson's, but for a moment, I was too busy not believing my eyes. There were naked women everywhere. Everywhere everywhere everywhere. Mostly naked, at any rate. Women breaking my important fashion rule that you don't wear shoes if you're only wearing underwear, especially underwear so small it doesn't even really count, except for legal purposes and maybe hygiene. Women negating the rumor that topless dancers don't have to be attractive; each of these women was beautiful. And perhaps most shocking, women challenging my conviction, at least temporarily, that pubic hair is a fact of life. (It's obvious that these smooth-skinned dancers showing acres of flesh have some privileged information in the depilatory department.)
Women on table-dance duty were standing next to the fake marble tables with their posteriors, cleft in twain by mere wisps of string, at food-level. Already in a state of sensory overload, I remembered that we were there to eat lunch, and defaulted into food-writer mode. Kate, who seemed more at home than I because she'd been to places like this in Florida, and probably because her lifestyle choice requires spending more time in the company of naked women than mine does, had already decided on a $7.95 16oz. sirloin special. I chose a 10 oz. New York Strip for $10.95. Both steaks arrived exactly medium, as we had specified, but entirely unseasoned. When asked about the chef, all the employees we spoke to raved about "Dan" but didn't know his history or last name. Bottles of A-1, ketchup in a plastic cup, and some uninspired mushroom gravy with my mashed potatoes confirmed all suspicions that eating at Sugar's is not a highbrow experience. Which doesn't mean it isn't good food at bargain prices; a cut of meat like that anywhere else would be considerably more expensive, and I'll be the first to admit that sometimes a shake of A-1 is just what you need to get you through the day. We struck up a conversation with Evan and Javier at the table next to us - two perfectly respectable 21-year-old-looking college students out for lunch. They'd planned on eating at Souper Salads, but decided on Sugar's at the last minute, and raved about their food.
Meanwhile, there was a constant turnover in dancers on the stages in front of us. Here's one in a mesh dress, there's one in a leopard-skin bra and panties suit; another woman is wearing the fashion equivalent of a spiderweb.
The schtick at both Sugar's and the Yellow Rose, I found out later, is for the most part the same. The dancers arrive on the stage in giant heels and some type of little dress or theme-oriented costume that covers the breasts (no fun without the element of mystery, right?), dance around the pole for a bit, remove the breast-concealing snippet, and attend to any of the men who have approached the stage.
The floors of the stages are at waist level, and men wander up through the maze of tables to visit the dancers. A dancer will usually squat on her haunches and give the man a big hug, maybe whisper in his ear, give him a kiss, probably rub her breasts in his face (we call this move the boobalee-oobalee), accept a tip, and move on.
Of course, there are slight variations in personal style. My favorite dancer, an amazing woman from the Yellow Rose - stunning at six feet tall, athletically healthy, huge white platform shoes, high-fashion platinum blond hair, with a white bra hiked up over her considerable, but natural-looking, breasts - clearly had a fondness for bending over and smacking men on the forehead with her bottom. Not exactly headbutting - something more like buttheading.
She, like the rest of the dancers, was usually smiling and looked immeasurably more at ease than the men. For the most part, a woman's demeanor is happy and friendly rather than sultry or seedy. The men didn't seem to mind the butt action one bit - it actually seemed to loosen them up a little, which was a welcome change. Men in the midst of lap-dances were scattered throughout the room, and each one of them had a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look about them; there isn't any established protocol for the expression you should have on your face during a public sex act. (I'm not saying I did any better - the etiquette for voyeurism is a little sketchy, too.) Be he a cowboy, computer programmer, or business man trying to cut a deal, a man in a place like this never looks like he knows what he's doing, in large part because he doesn't know what to do with his hands or mouth during a lap-dance or a boobalee-oobalee. Texas law decrees that he's not allowed to do anything.
"Dancing is not a contact sport," says Howard Lenett, who seems to manage Sugar's Uptown Cabaret (and serve as president of the Jewish Community Center of Austin) in good conscience. He described Sugar's as a "relatively legitimate business," and pointed out several bouncer types who monitor the room for illegal proceedings. Admittedly, plenty of kisses and gropes slide by. But all things considered, the seediness factor seems lower than I expected.
Every once in a while, between a 12-minute rendition of "Firewoman" or "Barbie Girl," a hidden deejay, who must've lifted his lines straight from Austin Powers, announced a two-for-one sale on table dances. The whole time we were there, men all around were buying dances, but no one had approached our table for that purpose.
Kate didn't seem too interested in getting a dance from a woman who looked like she'd just stepped out of a tanning capsule, or one with enormous breasts that didn't bend over when she did, but her choices weren't limited - all kinds of body types and styles were represented. She was most interested in our fully-clothed waitress, who was not available for that type of antic, and a petite, small-breasted woman in her early 20s with fair skin and short, spiky dark hair, who was. Kate requested a $20 "PG" (Kate's rating system, not Sugar's) dance from "Donna." "Donna" went to clear with her supervisor that table dancing for women was allowed. It was.
While the physicality of Kate's dance was similar to those that the men got, the dynamic was entirely different. It was friendlier, maybe because Kate knew she was being watched, maybe because we'd made fast friends with "Donna" in the moment before she began (she said she'd be nervous doing it for an article), or perhaps because it was between women. "Donna" took off her blouse and long skirt. In the course of the dance, a slow, sensuous affair, she performed a common table-dance maneuver - the dancer stands with straight legs, facing away from the dancee, and slowly bends over such that the dancee gets a real close-up of the dancer's butt. Whereas most of the men looked in the throes of the worst karaoke moment of their lives at this point, Kate smiled and commented: "A work of art." During the dance, both of them laughed intermittently, not entirely nervously, and each genuinely seemed to be enjoying the other's company. It was easy to forget that "Donna" gets paid to act like that.
After about two and a half hours, we emerged, nearly snow-blind from midday glare after the dim, clubby atmosphere of Sugar's. Kate and I had enough adult entertainment to last for quite a while, and we both wanted to go home and disinfect our bodies and our souls. But I was still intrigued by the food at the Yellow Rose.
The next night, a Saturday, I went to the Yellow Rose in the company of two more gay women, a couple with whom I am friends. Presidential aspirations on both of their parts dictate that I don't use their names. Since Yellow Rose policy decrees that we be escorted by a man, we took a straight one called Jeremy.
After paying a $7 cover and ordering bourbon, I started looking around for good things to eat. At first, my friends were all as shell-shocked as I was the day before. Finally, we settled down and decided on a Rose Burger ($2.25), Broiled Salmon, ($8.25), and a Steak and Lobster Plate ($9.95). Toothsome, perfectly seasoned filet mignon, lemony salmon in a horseradish and mustard glaze, premium burger, and buttery sautéed green beans were offset only by an underdone potato and lobster tail that should have been slightly less tough. Nonetheless, we were fairly impressed, especially considering the view. Across the room, a woman in pajamas that Santa might wear, were he a stripper, had catapulted herself such that she was hanging by her feet from a vertical pole. But after we'd been there for about 30 minutes, no was paying too much attention. Jeremy was scoping out one of the fully clothed waitresses, because he really liked the pair of wing-tips she had on. Lesbian A was involved with her hamburger, and Lesbian B occupied herself eating our steak, being very careful that her fork never touched the surface of the table.
Atmosphere accounts for an enormous part of any eating experience, and any detail that calls a restaurant's cleanliness into question can ruin an entire meal. According to our food editor, when told about this story, Chronicle editor Louis Black said he wouldn't eat at a strip bar: "I can't have naked people around my food!" To my great surprise, it didn't bother me nearly as much as I had expected.