By Heidi Matz

I’m sitting in a bar on Lankershim Blvd. It’s shortly after quitting time: 5:15pm, I’m the only person in a crowd of about 30 who is of the female gender. It’s an oddly quiet group, mesmerized by what’s on the small triangular stage in the middle of the room.

It is a very dark bar, illuminated by neon beer signs and a couple of dim stage lights. The only decor is a spinning disco ball circa 1974, and some aging silver tinsel on the rafters.

It’s cold inside, air-conditioned, but I’m sweating. We’re watching a show, a song/dance number performed by a girl/woman (“Miss Bambi” they say is her name). She is very tan all over. I know this because she’s clad only in an orange postage stamp-sized bikini and crimson spike pumps. Her honey blonde curls fall over her face, revealing a teasing smile. She’s made up red-neck pleasing Texas style, with blue eye shadow, pink cheeks and light pink frosted finger-nail polish and lipstick.

ZZ Top ‘s “Cheap Sunglasses” booms out over the crackly P. A. system. She seems mesmerized by the music: She dances. She poses. She writhes. She spins round and round. She shakes it for the boys.

I relax. It’s not that bad. After all, it’s just a person dancing. In a dark bar. In the middle of the day on the fringes of North Hollywood. Welcome to The Star Garden, where your pleasure is their business.

Open for 12 years and run by the friendly and avuncular Frank Czarnecki, the Star Garden boasts more than 30 dancers, ten DJs and bouncers, and a handful of comely female bartenders who serve up beer and wine.

The name Star Garden evokes a sense of the old-time, Chandleresque Los Angeles. The days when the lithe and the beautiful and the sometimes talented came here from points East, bound for celebrity. However, this particular garden has fallen. And as seasoned natives know, the so-called glamorous life in Los Angeles in general and the Star Garden in particular is fleeting at best, and always specious.

At any given time of the day or night the place is filled with a seemingly satisfied and well-behaved crowd; drinking longnecks, shooting pool and watching the dancers. “The regulars come at lunch to escape their bosses, and at happy hour to escape their wives,” Czarnecki jokes.

Czarnecki — tall, burly and fortysomething — runs the place for the silent owner, Doreen Rosenberg. Over Czarnecki’s seven-year management of the Garden, he claims never to have had a problem with customers or employees. “The [customers] respect our girls and treat `em as people” he says. And his staff is just as forthright —
“I’ve never had to pull a girl off stage for being wrecked.”

Czarnecki promised me three interviews with three different types of his dancers: “Career dancers, single mothers and the kind who are into other things like nursing, acting and singing.” Unfortunately, as of this printing, only one girl was interested in talking to the press. As Czarnecki put it. “the other ladies had problems with their unions and such.”

Robin spoke eagerly, perhaps since she was proud of her job and fit into the career dancer category. Born in Lancaster, California, 23 years ago, she got into the business after answering an ad for a bikini dancer.

Blonde, busty and bubbly, Robin fit the stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold stereotype. Dressed in a red floral sundress and high heels, Robin showed me some of the jewelry –anklets, bracelets, charms — that her fans have brought her over the years. “I’ve gotten candy, stuffed animals. They love me but it’s all platonic,” she says. Robin claims she’s so popular because, “I love the men; I’m friendly — and it also might be my breasts,” she says.

Although Robin makes good money (from $150 to $300 for a three-hour shift) and is seemingly happy with the Star Garden, the profession has its problems. Apparently men like Robin, who is divorced, to “take it off” when she’s onstage but not in life. “A lot of guys who I date hate it when they find out what I really do,” she says, “it causes a lot of trouble with relationships.”

Miss Bambi removes her bikini top to reveal an ungodly sized bosom with an amazing amount of elasticity to it. The men — big, beer-swilling, manly men — dressed in shorts and baseball caps erupt in howls and screams. I suddenly remember where I am. Suddenly I have to deal with a lot of paradoxes. I feel offended and I feel fascinated. I want to run and I want to see more. I am reviled and I am compelled.

There is a big blowing fan upstage. Bambi’s hair blows about as she kneels in front of it and begins to do some very suggestive hip grinding on all fours. Almost as if she enjoys this. I mean enjoy!

I manage to cope by becoming an armchair anthropologist. I watch the hypnotized male humans who sit circling the stage with their mouths agape, and think of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. I’d like to believe in God and creationism and all that good stuff at this time, but at the Star Garden I find it impossible. Here man is reduced to beast, erect descendants of simians; the high-falutin’ species Homo Erectus, still possessing vestiges of a time long-gone with his low hung brow, hair covered arms and hands, guttural grunting and moaning, and an
insufferable obeisance to his lower drives.

Funny, I think as I watch the avid audience leaning into the stage — her moves, her static punctuations, the fan, the costume — it’s almost as if she’s posing for a camera rather than engaging an audience. It’s a picture without words, a girlie magazine set to life. The Male Fantasy is epitomized as life imitates Hefner’s art right here in North Hollywood.

During my interview with Robin, several of the other strippers darted in and out of Czarnecki’s office to clock in. They avoided eye contact with me, perhaps afraid of being recognized as a stripper by a woman, perhaps they were intimidated because I was writing a story about their “place.” All I know for sure is I was intimidated by them. After all, they were beautiful girls, the ones that men want, the ones men pay to see.

Why is physicality so important to and for women? It’s all so mutable and fleeting anyway, as is stardom, Hollywood-style. Perhaps it is women’ s own neurosis, vanity, ego. Perhaps it’s men who impose impossible standards upon our gender. From a superficial standpoint it’s men who literally and figuratively wear the pants at the Star Garden — a man’s bar in a man’s world. But don’t forget, it’s a female, Ms. Rosenberg, who is the long-time owner of the successful Star Garden.