Double-D Doda

It has been commented on before in these postings that I am now seeing adults who were near contemporaries when I was growing up pass away.

And if the passing of a topless dancer seems like someone who no one would, or maybe even should remember, well then, you weren't around when Carol Doda came on the scene with her 44DD topless chest when you were fifteen. And male.

Aside from the passing of the first showing of Twin Peaks, we also have yet another example of how the British excel at obituaries. Ms. Doda passed away several weeks ago, and her obituary was duly noted in the NYT. A topless dancer gets a bylined obit? You weren't around in the 60s, I can tell.

Ms. Doda wasn't even British, and they give her a story-filled sendoff that includes Liberace and the perils of grinding away on top of hydraulic piano when there is no safety switch. The incident of the club manager who relieved himself and his partner of body heat on what in a nightclub is their version of a desk, only to accidentally have his foot hit the UP button on the levitating piano of course reminds me of another story.

When I'm in Penn Station and I see a pantograph-rigged passenger car over on the lower numbered tracks, I always think of the company that rented a railcar for their Christmas party one year, only to have an amorous couple take their passion outside to the top of the rail car and subsequently get electrocuted. Never was the phrase 'get a room' ever more good advice.

Apparently in the case of the levitating piano at the Club Condor, only the male was crushed to death. There is no mention of whatever injuries, if any, might have happened to the female. It is therefore safe to assume what position they were in when they ignored the fact that they were suddenly really being sent heavenward.

Ms. Doda was BIG news in 1964. I told a like-aged friend of mine that Carol Doda passed away, and he said, "who?" Figures, he was sequestered in a Pennsylvania military school at the time, and probably got absolutely no news of the outside world.

Ms. Doda really started something. Soon after her breakout performance, the Metropole Cafe in Times Square featured topless dancers. Not that I could get in. Or anyone else my age. That's not to say you didn't try and peek in through the open doorway that offered a sliver of a view of the stage if you stood just right and could jostle a favorable angle around the Goliath bouncers that stood at the door. Getting to the sweet spot to see that sliver was the thing. There were always rubber-neckers of all ages clogging the sidewalk at all hours of the day. You needed tickets, if there was such a thing.

Read the obituary from The Telegraph carefully. You'll come across a word "embonpoint." Never heard of it, which also shows you there can be literary excellence when writing about topless dancers. If only I could have used the word in an English class in high school. I probably could have gotten a higher grade.

The OED defines it as "plumpness," which indeed Ms. Doda achieved artificially. The OED further uses a line of text from someone named G. Clare: "A good paunch...or a bit of embonpoint, added dignity to a man." Silicone certainly added bucks to Ms. Doda, and certainly removed some dignity from several men.

The 60s.

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