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The
distinctive front windows of the Bearded Bros.,
black
lights and Dayglo-painted panels (1969).
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As the doorway into show business opened for me, 50 years ago, I entered gladly.
At the time I had a sales job I was itching to quit. What I wanted was to be a cartoonist/writer and eventually a filmmaker. So serving sandwiches and beer in a Fan District dive then seemed like a step in that direction. At least more so than
continuing to sell janitorial supplies.
Thus, when a
friend, Fred Awad, offered me work at the restaurant he was operating
my coat-and-tie job was history. Actually, my coming aboard as a
bartender/manager was part of a larger plan we had cooked up to convert
what was then a typical blue collar neighborhood beer joint/eatery into
the Fan
Distict's most happening night club.
The restaurant belonged
to Fred's parents, who wanted to retire. Toward that goal, they had turned it over to
their sons, Fred and Howard. The brothers changed the name of
the place from Marconi's to the Bearded
Brothers. It was located on the southeast corner of Allison St. and West Broad St.
Growing beards was easy, but as it happened the Awad boys
couldn’t agree on how to run the business, so the younger brother,
Howard, left to pursue the quest of opening a place of his own.
In a series of conversations Fred
and I had talked ourselves into believing the fun-loving baby boomers in the Fan
District needed a place to enjoy cold beer, hot food, live music and a
psychedelic light show. That, together with the edgy spectacle of go-go
girls on stage -- dancing
topless. At this time, in 1969, such "dancing" was going on in Roanoke. But it had yet to make its way to
Richmond.
And,
speaking of booming babies, at this time my wife, Valerie, was six
months pregnant. Fred’s wife, Mary Ann, was seven months along. So while Fred and I were brimming over with youthful confidence that the new scheme for the restaurant would pay off, in truth, it was under pressure to do so right away.
It took us a couple of weeks to paint the
walls of the interior flat black and build the stage for the dancers and light show apparatus. We also painted the front window panes that faced Broad Street
in Dayglo colors illuminated by black lights. While I did most of the window painting, a handful of volunteers also painted a few of the panes.
Fred booked a couple of local rock ‘n’
roll bands. They performed maybe three or four nights a week, and that went over well as the '60s wound to its conclusion. As we had planned, the live music immediately brought in a fresh nighttime crowd. A four-man group calling itself Natural Wildlife became a regular attraction.Then it came time to hire the go-go dancers. So a help-wanted sign went
up in the restaurant.
A few young women came in asking
about the dancing job. Eventually, we settled on two. One of them had
some go-go girl experience, the other didn’t. But only the dancer new to the
exhibitionism trade could be there for the first night, which we
advertised in the local newspaper. The ad art was my work; it featured a
pen-and-ink rendered silhouette of a female dancer and a new Bearded
Bros. logo I had designed.
By 8 p.m. the place was
packed, wall-to-wall. We were selling beer like never before. The only
problem was that our featured dancer with her new sequinned costume, which included
tasseled pasties to cover her nipples (Alcohol Beverage Control Board regulation), was scary
late. She hadn’t called, either.
With the crowd
clamoring for the promoted dancing aspect of the show to get underway, a woman
with a sculpted hairdo, wearing shades (at night), waved to get my attention. As the joint was noisy, I motioned to her to come around to the end of the bar I was behind. In a what was maybe a Queens accent, she asked something like, “Do you need another dancer?”
Trying
to hide my pure glee, I called Fred over. She told
us she had noticed the Bearded Bros. ad in a discarded newspaper on the counter of the
Greyhound bus station’s coffee shop. She claimed she had been dancing in a club in Baltimore.
She was chewing gum. Fred promptly offered her $50 to alternate sets with the other dancer.
That
night’s experience gave me new faith in the power of advertising. The
Greyhound Girl even had her costume with her in her suitcase. Fred paid
her in advance and suggested that since the other woman was running
late, she could go on right away.
It
all went over like gangbusters. Up on stage, with the lights and music,
she danced like the pro she actually was. Natural Wildlife was cooking and the beer taps stayed open.
After
the dancer’s first set was over, she put on a robe and found Fred and me behind
the bar. She laughed, “There ain’t no other girl, is there?”
Either Fred or I probably said, “Hey, we don’t know where she is.”
“I’ll need another fifty bucks to go back up there,” is about what she said ... firmly.
The money was put in her hand
without hesitation. She
agreed to do two more 20-minute sets. Yes,
a hundred bucks was a lot of money for about an hour's worth of work, then, but there was no use in
quibbling.
After that night we never saw her again. Other women were
hired, pronto. The show went on.
It became my duty to paint the dancers
with Dayglo paint. I painted vines curling around their arms and legs,
stars and stripes on their torsos, etc. Yet, after a few weeks of that,
it seemed the most vocal of the customers didn't care much about the artsy aspects
of topless dancing, such as they were. They preferred bare skin. So,
the Laugh-In-style body decorating stopped.
Although painting the
dancers was a pleasant enough task, hanging out after work was the best
perk of the Bearded Bros. job (which wasn't always paying me as much as I needed to make each week).
Frequently friends, some of them musicians, stayed around late, jamming, smoking pot and playing
pinball games. The most notable of the
musicians who passed through was Bruce Springsteen, whose band occasionally played in Richmond then. He was a skinny, quiet guy
who didn’t stand out as much then as he would later.
When
my daughter was born in January the Bearded Bros. scene was lively. Then, as the
weather warmed up, the crowds began to thin out. Other clubs opened up
offering live music, some of which were closer to VCU. Gradually, the
restaurant began to drift back toward being what it had been before it
had been painted black.
The restaurant's daytime crowd of regulars from the neighborhood didn't always mix well with the hippies coming in at night for the music. Then the topless angle turned out to be mostly a fad that sort of clashed with both crowds. So it was discontinued.
In the spring I had to
look for a real job again. After short runs at a couple of forgettable jobs, I landed a sales position at WRNL AM/FM. Richmond Newspapers still owned the two radio stations then. Once again, I learned
it paid to advertise. And, on that job I did my first professional writing, when I
began penning commercials and dreaming up promotions for my advertising
clients.
Eventually, Fred's mother took the restaurant
back over. About a year later Howard Awad opened up Hababa's on the 900
block of W. Grace St., where he had a lot of fun making large money
(1971-84) serving cold beer and playing canned music on his popular
bar’s monster sized stereo.
In the years to come topless dancing morphed into a creepy form of entertainment aimed at an entirely
different audience. A narrow audience. Truth be told, since the time of the Bearded
Brothers I've never had any interest in
the places that feature that form of entertainment.
Although I saved copies of the aforementioned newspaper ad, the logo I did for Natural Wildlife their cards and handbills, etc., I
haven't seen any of that stuff in a long time. The only remaining souvenirs from my initial stumble into show biz are a few black and white photographs, like
the shot above of the Bearded Bros. distinctly 1969 front windows,.
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