Trad Ivy Tuesday: Cabot Lodge, Jr. and Cotton Poplinosity

I’ve already written rather extensively on the role of seersucker in my sartorial life and I gave Haspel their due in one of my New Orleans reports. But one of my lengthier posts on poplin was lost when my blog crashed and I accidentally deleted forever the first one hundred-plus stories that I’d ever written. The good news is that a loyal reader was able to send most of my stories back to me for re-posting. My poplin post wasn’t one that could be resurrected. Probably a good thing though. It was a gut wrencher of a story—NOT the poplin part—the parts about my two years in New Orleans and the circumstances regarding my departure. So it’s poplin proper time y’all.

Poplin…probably the only fabric in a Trad wardrobe where a hint of synthetic fiber in concert with cotton is acceptable. Why? Because one hundred percent cotton poplin shatters with wrinkles like spun sugar Hollywood prop glass. You look at it on a hanger from a hundred yards away and an instantaneous spider web of wrinkles cascades before your eyes. Don’t believe me? Go to J. Press and purchase the all-cotton poplin suit offered above. It will look like crumpled legal pad paper before you get out of the store with it. And it’s not the “guaranteed to wrinkle”… the desired and expected creased subsets of fabric topography shifts that are de rigueur with seersucker and linen. Wrinkled poplin is uglier and less desirable. Phyllis Diller for some reason comes to mind.

I love linen and my summer sportcoat line-up includes four of them. But linen is that anti-poplin and seersucker is poplin's cousin who attended slightly better schools. Linen is more elegant and less provincial than poplin and if you want the skinny on linen from someone who loves it more than me, go over and visit my best buddy Toad. He’s always tinkerin’ with flax but in the shot above, he's sporting poplin from Cable Car Clothiers. Oh, and my “poplin is provincial” bias pretty much gets debunked towards the end of this story.

 So the standard poplin suits of my earliest Trad years had just enough synthetic fiber content to play the wrinkle blunting Sargeant-at-Arms to the Grand Master Cotton. Brooks the Brethren of course, was the go-to source for the poplin suit color trifecta…tan, olive and navy blue. Brooks wasn’t in every shopping mall when I got my first poplin suits so mine came courtesy of the little Trad shop that I grew up in. And they were private label house brands made by a little factory in Georgia. That same factory by the way made for years, the Nantucket Brick Reds that the Murray family sold/sells in their Toggery shop. It always kinda cracked me up that this New England Yankee iconic trouser was made in Crackerland. And leave it to LFG's pal Alan Flusser to offer a snazzy alternative to the formulaic poplin with a button down collar edict. Here above is Flusser's rounded collar interpretation in tandem with the standard.

These mostly cotton utilitarian poplin things I reckon, came to light amidst the same utilitarian desperation that spawned seersucker and pincord suits. The pre-air conditioned South was beyond oppressive from late June till Labor Day and men had to find options for business attire that wouldn’t have them fainting from heat stroke. Folks, I grew up in the air conditioned version of that world and I can attest that the heat at its most humid peak, is nauseating. Nowadays of course, men just wear wife beater t-shirts and butt-crack winking shorts and rubber flip flops to work. I mean it’s all about comfort, right?

And poplin suits at least to me, seemed more utilitarian and less stylish than seersucker. In an “it’s ok neighbor, we are all just trying to trudge through the dog-days intact” kinda way. Seersucker, even before you segregate it into style centric categories of single or double breasted options, has more syncopated swagger just lounging there as a bolt of cloth. The alternating colors and the warp-weft deliberate looseness that creates its seersuckling piccolo washboard of texture is gonna dictate more élan than poplin from the get-damn-go. Seersucker begs seven additional minutes of thought about whether to wear white bucks, spectators or some other shoe. Poplin says “either put your damn Weejuns or your Alden Tassels on and let’s get this over with.” Seersucker says “top me off with a Panama”. Poplin says “you might wanna grab an extra cotton hanky…not for show…but for brow wiping.” Shut up.

So the poplin suit ain’t steerage but it knows better than to show up on the upper decks, even as an employee. TinTang over at the Trad mentioned showing up for work one hot London summer day at Lloyds in some heat forgiving cotton suit and was at once interrogated about whether he was going on Safari that day. I can’t remember but they might have sent him home to change. Bottom line is that a poplin suit has its place and its limits. Fancy styling options? Not so much. Bespoke? Why in the world would you do that unless you had more money than sense?

 So what about styling? The construct and options for poplin is about as basic as the fabric itself. Three button sack—hook center vent—flat front trousers…hemmed with no break. A slight puddle of extra linen cloth on trousers a bit too long might be forgiven till you can get back to the tailor for a tune up. Poplin trousers with a break…poplin gathered in non-puddling, poly-cotton accordion-osity can’t be allowed out of the house. And…No ticket pocket no open breast pocket no double breasted nonsense. Get it? The Brooks interpretation did have patch and flap lower pockets but that's about it-styling nuance-wise. Remember the objective here. We are trying to avoid heat stroke, not win a preening contest. I’m all about having at least a white cotton handkerchief in my breast pocket. But a poplin suit seems to be an exception to even this basic sartorial rule. Poplin…the anti-fuzzy. And thanks to my buddy over at Heavy Tweed Jacket for the image above  that I stole from his site without permission.

 I wore the hell out of my tan and olive poplin suits when I was a sales rep in the Carolinas during my mid-twenties. I’m not sure what happened to them but by the time I moved north and worked indoors all day, they were absent my closet. I had plenty of lightweight tropical wools and as always, one seersucker suit, but no poplin. And it seems that my olive poplin suit was always rigged with an Argyle and Sutherland rep tie and a blue button down. I rarely wear button down shirts with suits but anything but the OCBD classic with poplin seems wrong.

And then I moved to New Orleans. Oy. I grew up in the South but had never set foot there. I agreed to a two-year assignment that would have me visiting state agencies and legislatures and legislators and advocacy groups and spending more time in and out of places than sitting in just one. All of that previous shit is code for being a lobbyist and shill for big pharma. Kinda of a Daumier version of Robert Macaire or a "reverse Ratapoil." I was fairly streetwise before rolling into New Orleans but nothing…and I mean nothing…prepares one for doing THAT kind of work in THAT kind of city and state and in THAT kind of heat. I think I’ve mentioned before that it was time to leave my thirteen year career after this assignment. I couldn’t shower long enough or often enough to rinse off the smarm.

But until the smarm calculi became unbearable I shilled. In poplin. It was May and things were already uncomfortably warm and sticky humid. I commented to an office worker who had been there all her life that even in our plush, hyper air-conditioned office, everything seemed “wet.” I’d pick up a memo or a report and it seemed limp like overcooked pasta. She just laughed.

By this time my Flusser bespoke habit was well in place but I couldn’t wear even my lightest weight tropical wool suitings. There was a Joseph A. Banks on St. Charles Avenue and over there I went. This was by the way, before Banks lost their way…before they became the Men’s Wearhouse…back when a reasonable but declining argument could be made that they were the “poor man’s Brethren.” I hadn’t yet discovered Perlis and I was in one of those “any port in a storm” predicaments so Banks set me up with one tan and one olive poplin suit. These two options that became my uniforms for that summer and the next one. Trad icons, yes. Fuzzy style preening platforms? Nope. Not poplin. Plus, the last guy who preened excessively in the Baton Rouge Capitol building got shot.

So what motivated a poplin post? Unequivocally I can say that the young man above, one Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was the catalyst. Obviously not the exact photo above but I’ll start with it because it speaks volumes of an era and a man who like all of his ilk…cared about what they wore and how they looked. But not too much. Point collar. Pinned thru and anchoring a woven, grenadine maybe? …tie. Strong. Lodge passes typical WASP Ascendancy muster including a St. Albans and Harvard legacy, World War II distinction as well as a long history of public service. The only tweak I'd have made to this WASP's ensemble would be to tuck that white breast pocket linen in just a bit more.

I’m not interested enough to learn too much more about Lodge Jr.’s one-year stint as JFK’s Ambassador to South Vietnam but I can speculate that it might not have been his easiest year. I will at some point, enjoy listening to Lodge Jr.'s firsthand account of  his South Vietnam tenure over here at the WGBH Media Archives.

What I will say is this. The man sported one hell of a poplin suit while glad-handing those who might overthrow the corrupt puppet leader and while reconnoitering the local terrain. I suspect that Lodge Jr. probably felt that there were days during this year-long assignment when he couldn’t rinse away the taint of South Vietnam instability and corruption. Puppet leaders and protracted instability post Lodge Jr.’s one year visit didn’t seal South Vietnam’s fate but it didn’t help it. But I digress to more world changing topics. Let's get back to the superficial. If duende could ever manifest in poplin, this would be exhibit one at the Duende Poplin Possibilities Trial. Open patch pockets all the way round. 

Sleeve linen showing just so. Trousers hemmed short but not Thom Browne child molester short. High middle button stance vectors the three-two roll. Trousers appropriately covering a middle age paunch but in no way tries to hide it. Those may not be Belgian shoes but damn they look close. The swagger here says "South Vietnam is headed down the shitter and I've got a paunch. Wanna make something of it?" This is poplinessence all to be damned.

So do you think he had this one made in Hong Kong or back home by some east coast purveryor? Three-two roll. Open patch pockets. It’s way too Yankee for me to assume that anyone on Savile Row would acquiesce to such requests. And it defies the formulaic edicts of Brooks, Chipp and J. Press poplin. It says "Where I'm headed is hot in more ways than one." It says that "Even though these straw man scenarios and puppet leader whatevers are gonna test me, I'm at least gonna have trace elements of style amidst the drudgery."  Style he had. And I like it.

Finally, this is off the poplin topic grid but Happy Birthday two days ago to George Frazier. Happy Birthday to the man who won the Bowdoin Prize courtesy of an all-nighter at the typewriter. Happy Birthday to the man who wrote scorching, edgy stuff for Downbeat Magazine when he was in his mid-twenties. Stuff that smacks of what Rolling Stone editors would have lapped up like catnip if they’d existed in the 1930’s. Happy Birthday to the man who wrote Esquire’s epic treatise… The Art of Wearing Clothes…a treatise on men, some of  whom most probably wore poplin when appropriate and who cared about how they looked. But not too much.

Onward. Sans poplin and will probably remain so. Because I don’t wear suits very often and you never wear poplin as a sport coat. And five gets ten that Frazier never wore poplin of any ilk. Maybe shorts on Nantucket. Maybe.

ADG II

 And speaking of puppets.

New Orleans Installment Four: Higgins and Haspel

Here’s Andrew Higgins and Harry S. Truman. I’d like to think that Truman is wearing a Haspel suit. Lore says that he preferred them and God knows, summers in Washington D.C. can be as Haspel requisite as almost anywhere in the world. Except New Orleans…Haspel’s hometown.

My hometown haberdashery—my Trad Instructional Dojo, sold Haspel seersucker, pin cord and poplin suits. I’m not certain where they were made by the time I began working there but assuredly, since my hometown Trad shop opened in 1927, most of their Haspel receipts originated from the old Haspel plant in New Orleans. Speaking of the Haspel plant, John Kennedy Toole worked part time there at some point and it’s said that the Levy Pants factory in Confederacy of Dunces is loosely based on his brief Haspel plant experience.

As clothes crazy as I’ve always been, my college cache of rags was predictably, for a college boy with no money, a bit limited. But I did have a few Haspels. Three actually…olive poplin, blue seersucker and a blue pin cord. And my summer internship in Washington D.C. affirmed why men like Harry Truman would prefer a Haspel or three in their wardrobe.  D.C. can be a dreadful place during some summer weeks. Not quite as challenging as New Orleans but close. To quote Eugene Morris Jerome in Biloxi Blues… “It was hot. Africa hot. Tarzan couldn't take this kind of hot.” Haspel’s unstated strategy, I think, from the beginning was something like…cotton clothes for when it’s too hot to wanna wear ‘em.

After college I drifted away for a while from the ultra Trad flat front three button sack suit…trousers hemmed slightly too short…Weejuns on the rig’s south end. You see, I’d fallen under the influence of a book…Clothes and the Man written by a guy named Alan Flusser. While I couldn't yet afford his clothes, I began to order Corbin suits with pleated trousers and would pick up a Polo suit on sale from time to time with more shape and drape than what Haspel would allow. My Weejuns were reserved for the weekends and my shoddings began leaning fuzzily towards brown suede wing tips and cap toe lace ups. By this time I’d seen photos of the Prince of Wales wearing them and Tom Wolfe allowed Tommy Killian to sport them in Bonfire of the Vanities so why not? 

But Cary Grant proved that Haspel and elegance weren't necessarily bi-polar. Grant was wearing Haspel in Charade. On the other hand, Cary Grant looked elegant in anything.

But then I moved to New Orleans. My poplins and seersuckers were long ago lateralled off to someone or simply lost in one of my moves. And by the end of my first May in the Crescent City, I found myself miserably swathed. Surely, if I had to be in Baton Rouge at the legislature for something or at a meeting with the Louisiana Healthcare Authority, I’d wear my tropical weight navy blue suit. But I was still miserable. By the way, whatever one would wear back then, to a meeting with any stakeholders in the above two Louisiana deliberative or administrative bodies, would be covered in graft and taint by the time you got home and “smelled something kinda funny” on yourself. I think I mentioned in my long ago  and best to have been lost, post on moving to New Orleans, that one of the reasons I resigned and left was that I couldn't shower enough to rid myself of that taint.

Ok, so I digress. What's your point? Shut up. I needed cotton suits and I needed them fast. So I went immediately to Perlis…the Uptown go-to haberdashery for all things cotton and Trad. “One tan and one olive poplin please.” In an instant, I was as cool (temperature…NOT style wise) as one could be when having to dress for work. Flat front trousers hemmed with no break…Alden tassels on the south end. What comes around goes around or whatever. Sort of a Haspel Saṃsāra I reckon.

So Haspel is to warm, humid weather like Andrew Higgins is to D-Day. An essential ingredient. Ike was a bit more enthusiastic in his characterization of Higgins... "Andrew Higgins ... is the man who won the war for us. ... If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different." Even that maniacal bastard Hitler had something to say about Higgins. “Hitler recognized his heroic war efforts in ship production and bitterly called him the "New Noah.””

And I assume that Higgins was a Haspel man as well. It’s obvious from photos that even though he probably ambled around boatyards and production lines with regularity, he always seemed to have dapper flair. Bottom line is that this shallow-draft watercraft genius…a man who struggled to get the Pentagon to take a serious look at his craft and his crafts…played a vital role in the success of D-Day. Or should I more accurately say that the thousands of workers who built Higgins boats at a frenetic pace in New Orleans, played a vital role.

I’ve always known about Andrew Higgins but I’d never seen a Higgins boat. And until my visit to the WWII Museum in New Orleans the other week, I hadn’t known the Higgins was also one of the manufacturers of PT boats. 

Peering into the Higgins LCVP conjured chilling thoughts of all the boys who stepped off of these vessels, never to return. More than twenty five hundred of the boys who plopped into the Omaha beach water once the bow front opened, died before sundown.

My mentor, another surrogate father to me and love interest of LFG, landed, courtesy of Higgins, on Omaha Beach D-Day plus one…June 7^th 1944…sixty seven years ago today. Here he is after making it all the way to Paris. God only knows what kind of carnage he stepped over as he made his way beyond the surf. And he made it home...forever shaped by what he saw and did after being dropped off by Higgins. He only spoke about it during the last few months of his life and surely, I got the highly edited version of events. 

More on that later but for now, I’ll end this little ramble on a happy note. He and LFG genuinely loved each other. And I feel so fortunate that they were able to revel in each other’s company for her first and his last six years of life.

Onward. Haspelating in the heat. I said in THE heat. Not IN heat. Shut up.

ADG, II  

Redux: Weejuns Redux-Again-With Roofing Tar

I’ve decided that I’ll probably never be finished blogging about Weejuns. After sharing the Navy Blue Weejun lore with the world I figured the Weejun story bucket was empty. Alas, here’s another one.

Certainly I’m not the only one who has returned to their childhood home only to have mom say … “either you take this stuff from the attic or I’m throwing it away”. Well, LFG and I just returned from the home of my upbringing with a trove of random artifacts from my earlier years. Several other things will make their way to future blog posts but for now-my checkbook from college sparks this Weejun entry.

What a trip down memory lane my checkbook register was. I’m amazed at the number of checks I wrote for five and ten bucks…beer money-going out money. ATM machines were just getting traction back then and I was and remain a Luddite when it comes to technology. So I wrote a butt load of small dollar checks.
The most intriguing entry that I found was the Navy Blue Weejun purchase. A whopping $39.69 when I only had $62.39 to my name. I’ve always had my priorities in order. There are few things that I’ve managed to hold onto since college. Funny enough, both pairs of college Weejuns remain in my closet. They’ve been re-soled scores of times and I suppose one could argue that the cost of resoling has long since surpassed the cost of a new pair. The Navy ones aside, I recon I could buy another pair but these babies are original-made in the USA. God only knows what contract vendor makes Weejuns today.

The Weejuns made today just don’t look “right” to me. They look too shiny. Almost laquered. My brown Weejuns caused me to recollect a story that I won’t be able to accurately portray in a blog post. It’s one of those… “You had to be there” kind of things but here goes. I graduated from college and frankly, didn’t know what I wanted to do….sound familiar? I toyed with the graduate program in Architectural History at the University of South Carolina. My late father’s best friend admonished me to go to law school and promised to get me in if I’d go to summer school and tweak my grades a bit. I thought that I wanted to teach school for a year or two-one of the most honorable professions in my opinion. The starting salary for South Carolina public school teachers in 1983 was $9,600.00 a year. Any wonder why my home state is always 48th or so in education? The saving grace is that we are always in the top three for reported cases of gonorrhea. I don’t think we have more of it-I just think the epidemiological reporting prowess is greater in the Palmetto State.

Ok…back to the story. The owner of the clothing store-my after school haberdashery job said that I could work there for as long as I wished while figuring out next steps. He was a surrogate father and mentor….great guy. At the time, I was driving an orange 1970 Super Beetle convertible. Fun car…looked pristine…looks though can be deceiving. While esthetically eye catching, the bottom pans-floorboards were rusted almost completely out. For those who’ve owned VW’s, you know what I’m talking about. This car was a deathtrap-you could see the highway through the holes in the floor board.

The sartorially elegant-shade tree car body repair man in me prevailed. My buddies and I would get old license plates or sheet tin scraps and sandwich a piece inside the car and a piece on the bottom and screw the pieces together. Damn, it’s a wonder I’m still here. Then, I’d take roofing tar and smear it around the edges both on the inside of the car and on the bottom in a feeble attempt to keep water out. Plop the carpet back on top and I’m good to go. This photo says it all...The Inevitable-Proverbial....VW floorpan rust out.

Carpet-like a full lining in a suit-hides a multitude of structural sins. Ok…so I’m working at the clothing store and a regular customer said, after realizing that I was in the post graduation-no job prospect twain, “Dust, you would be a natural in the pharmaceutical business”. This was before big pharma was the devil and when repping for a big pharma was an almost guarantee for a life of upper middle class existence if you plied your wares in the South. However, I was under the assumption that you had to be a pharmacist to work for a drug company. I’m a liberal arts man through and through…a marketer and historian by training so how the hell am I gonna land a job in pharmaceuticals? The regular customer-a pharma exec arranged an interview for me.

Bottom line is this. I interviewed on a whim-not thinking that I would be offered the job and therefore, not being uptight about the interview. Not caring too much is a great modulator of adrenaline and cortisol. I know, you are wondering what the hell this has to do with Weejuns. Hang with me.

I am scheduled to interview for this position on a June morning at nine am. June can be hot as blazes in South Carolina and this June day was no exception. My VW bug had no air-conditioning except the breeze when the top was down. So I dressed for the weather, not for the interview. I can remember exactly what I had on that day-Haspel Olive Poplin three button sack suit. Flat front trousers-hemmed a bit too short as most South Carolina preps are known to do. Identical suit to the one above except for a blue shirt and regimental tie.

Blue oxford cloth button down and a 1st Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders regimental tie. Finally, I’m shod in the very pair of brown Weejuns you see in these pictures.Everything is fine. I’m cruising over to Columbia for the interview-not really giving a damn because I don’t think I’m qualified for the job.Driving back roads because I know them and prefer driving them in the early mornings. I’m speeding a bit-as much as a VW can speed and I bottom out in a large body of standing water on said back road. I almost hydroplaned but not quite. All is good after I gained control of the car with one exception. When I hit the water, the force of pressure caused water to gush at lightning speed through the gaps in my sheet metal-roofing tar repairs. Muddy water with pellets of roofing tar blew all over my pants legs. The velocity scared me. I’m now an olive poplin pile of mud and tar. Flecks of tar are all over my suit pants and that shit doesn’t come off.

By now I really don’t give a hoot about the interview. I get to the hotel and try to towel off as much of the mess as I can. The tar ain’t budging. The Weejuns have to this day, little black flecks from that incident. I rolled into the interview, explained my condition and then engaged in two hours of irrelevant discussions. The irrelevant discussion ultimately landed me a job offer.

The hiring manager is to this day, one of my mentors and surrogate fathers. I went on to be blessed with a 13 year career and various professional responsibilities that took me all over the world and afforded me graduate education at fancy name schools-courtesy of my employer. I gained the skills that allow me to practice my craft as a consultant today. God bless roofing tar.



I had to throw the trousers away but the Weejuns will be with me forever.

Onward

The Chinese Disco

“Let’s see if we can get an internship in Washington this summer” my fratty brother WHS said to me one day. After about thirty seconds of deep thought….you know….measuring pros and cons and all the other stuff that a beer soaked college junior would engage to make such a decision I said…”ok”. One of the real motivators of WHS’s suggestion that he and I apply for an internship was that I had a really good relationship with this old fella-a legendary alumnus who had connections in Washington.

“Call EFM and see if he’ll help us” …and again I said…”ok”. Now you gotta realize that EFM by this time was like about a hundred and fifty eight years old. Great southern drawl and could entertain you with stories all day long. But at a hundred and fifty eight-he could be crotchety. I don’t mind admitting that I was nervous as shit dialing his home phone number and like all these situations-my well rehearsed lines clotted and clabbered as soon as I heard his voice. I eked out the statement that WHS and I would like to go to Washington for the summer and all EFM said was “you will go” and hung up.

A week or so later WHS and I both got a packet from the Senate Judiciary Committee of which the guy we would work for was a member. We were told when and where to show up and that we had to wear coats and ties every day. We were on our way to being flunkies for a few months. WHS drove a Duster and we packed it with a few navy blazers-poplin suits-starched button downs-Weejuns and some walking around money. These jobs don’t pay too much you know.

Housing was another issue. The coordinators of these Intern programs suggest options for where to live but you are on your own regarding securing such billeting. No worries-we just asked others who had already done the summer Intern thing and they put us on a place in Alexandria called the Presidential Gardens Apartments. Pre-internet and pre any kind of worldly savvy; we sent our deposits to the landlords at this posh place after they mailed us a pamphlet showing “artists renditions” of what the buildings and interiors looked like. Lesson learned.

We roll in on a hot Friday afternoon and as well pull into the Presidential Gardens parking lot to greet the landlord and get our keys I’m thinkin’ that this ain’t good. It’s dumpier than the fraternity house. Trust me when I say that the photo that I found on google a moment ago is one of recent vintage-reflecting a massive renovation. Our deposit has been paid and we’ve no other options so making the best of a bad situation is our option. Then the cloud of despair lifted. Two gals rounded the corner-they were all cotton-all madras-espadrilles and drinking beers. They were from Alabama. They had just moved in an hour earlier. That’s when I knew everything was going to be all right. Bottom line was that this dump was THE place for Interns from all over the country to live during their summer jaunt. Nirvana-with poorly working window unit air conditioners. I drove by there one day recently with LFG and told her that I used to live there and she just said…eeeeew. 

The Blue line of the Metro system didn’t extend out to where we lived that summer so we took the bus every morning. Some cute gal from Agnes Scott College took me by the hand the first morning and showed me where to get on the bus and how to navigate to the Senate. She’d already been there for a week. I had a crush on her the entire summer. This would be me about the time that said Agnes Scott cutie walked me to the bus stop.

We get situated and then connect with said girls who knew other people in the apartment complex and before long we are amongst a pile of madras and Weejuns. Then someone announces that it’s about time to go to the Chinese Disco. Now understand me when I say that I would have gone anywhere with this fun crowd but the Disco scene was never mine and I had never been around Asians in my life. Some of these folks-the guys especially, were intimidatingly cool and so if they declared that some Asian social club was the happening place to go then WHS and I were right behind them. I wasn’t going to enjoy it if indeed it ended up that we would be making fun of hard working Chinese doing culturally specific dances that were dear to their homeland.

Funny. The Day Lily a Chinese restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue was transformed every Friday and/or Saturday night. By nine o’clock it became The Chinese Disco and it was anything but. To this day folks-I’ve never had any more fun in my entire life. I would like to tell you that being an errand boy in the Senate was riveting but frankly-I didn’t give a shit. 

What I craved after that first weekend at the Chinese Disco was another night just like that first one there. And I had those nights-every time the doors opened-every weekend-all summer long. We were the first in line and I was one of the last to be thrown out every time. 

You walked in oxford starched-madras swathed and Weejun shod. You staggered out soaked with Washington D.C. summer sweat and beer.

I’m not going to debate the genesis of the southern regional dance ritual-the Shag. It’s kind of like arguing about North Carolina versus South Carolina barbecue. It’s all good. But these rituals have nuances and before I met anyone at the Chinese Disco on the first night it was obvious who was from the Carolinas and who was from Virginia. The Carolina Shag is a dance of precision manifesting movement from the hips down. Lots of cool footwork and Weejuns are perfecto for the slippy slidy demands of the Carolina Shag. 

Not much action from the waist up and you only hold one of your partners hands with few exceptions. The Virginia aberration is something else. Now don’t get me wrong-those who did the Virginia whatever were having JUST as much fun as the rest of us. But that Virginia Dance is more of a two handed-sling your date around the floor-epileptic-above the waist unrestrained seizure. Ok I’m biased.

It is fairly undisputed among those in the know that my childhood buddy J.J.'s dad was one of the two or three individual forces that evolved the dance back in the 1940's. That's him above...somewhere down at the beach-cuttin' it.

Here’s a You Tube clip that demonstrates the elegance of the Carolina Shag…

I think the guys who concocted the Chinese Disco venue were some entrepreneurial fratty boys with a collection of 45s that would be the envy of anyone who loved that stuff. Here’s a link to a web page created for what looks like a reunion from a few years ago. Sorry I missed it. All I know is that in the Chinese Disco I found my element and my sole reason for being in DC for the summer. Other nights had their trad-prep crowd destinations as well and indeed those were fun. Third Edition-J.Pauls-Déjà Vu … but nothing and I mean NOTHING could top the Chinese Disco.

But you had to be able to dance this ritualistic thang if you were really going to have fun there right? Of course. But I’d already mastered the Carolina shag by this time…after all I’d completed three years of college and had accumulated thirty credit hours of academic work and a zillion hours of shagging at the fratty venue and other honkey tonks. As soon as I realized that pretty girls would talk to you and would go out with you if you could do this particular dance-I figured I’d learn it. The best evidence of this was watching J.C. dance with girl after girl at fraternity parties. I kid you not when I say that they literally lined up for a go with him. J.C. was about five feet six and weighed close to three hundred pounds. After one dance he would have already manifested an untucked button down shirt and sweat thru evidence on said khakis and button down. Still the gals loved him.

My D.C. summer was a blast and the Chinese Disco set the bar for the fun that could be had back then. I moved to Charlotte N.C. after graduating from college and found a slightly attenuated version of the Chinese Disco on Morehead Street. Good times were had there too but nothing like the Chinese Disco in D.C.  The Cellar had long passed its zenith of the 1960’s…I mean look at who you could have seen live at the Cellar back then.

Here's Billy Stewart at the Cellar in the 1960's. Damn. Another great memory lane trip for me. I’ve found some You Tube clips of songs that you would have heard if you’d been with me at the Chinese Disco or the Cellar.

The Intrigues-In A Moment

Thank You John-Willie Tee

I Do Love You-Billy Stewart

Cheaters Never Win-The Love Committee

*Apologies for nicking pictures here and there from other sites. I’ll take ‘em down if they are yours and you get something sideways in your butt about me using them.