The stripper as media icon

Queen of Spades, originally uploaded by trexfiles23.

One of the things I enjoy about taking breaks on this site is that way that serendipitous patterns tend to emerge. For example, the Alpha Mummy link & conversations at Yale Law yesterday tied together several random things I saw last week concerning costumes and charity.

Which reminds me of one of my all time favorite Marshall McLuhan quotes, memorialized on the McLuhan playing card above. I don't have time to recount the full story behind it & what it means, but here's a partial contemporaneous account of the time some folks took Marshall McLuhan to a topless bar. If you ever wonder why I have this ingrained habit of explaining the historic and linguistic roots of everything I encounter, consider this:

FLASH: In town is Prof. Marshall McLuhan, fabled, fabulous, revered, and even sainted by the New Intelligentsia, Director of the Center for Culture and Technology at University of Toronto, author of "The Mechanical Bride," "The Gutenburg Galaxy" and "Understanding Media," darling of the critics ("Compared to McLuhan, Spengler is cautious and Toynbee is positively pedantic" - New York Herald Tribune), the man who stands "at the frontier of post-Einsteinian mythologies."

Hot on the trail of this titan, I thought to myself, "Where is the last place in town you'd expect to see Marshall McLuhan?" and that's where I found him--at Off-Broadway in North Beach, lunching amid the topless waitresses with Writer Tom Wolfe, Adman Howard Gossage and Dr. Gerald Feigen.

* * *

A TOPLESS fashion show ensued, commentated by a young lady who was fully dressed and in good voice. "Now here, gentlemen," she said, "is the ideal opera gown for your wife." A gorgeously-endowed blonde appeared in a full-length gown open to the waist. The audience, composed mainly of Tuesday Downtown Operator-like types, gaped silently. "You're all dead out there," chided the commentator. "Where's the applause?"

"Now the word applause," interjected Dr. McLuhan, "comes from the Latin 'applaudere,' which means to explode. In early times, audiences applauded to show their disfavor; they clapped their hands literally to explode the performer off the stage. Hence you might say that the silence here is a form of approbation, at least in the classical sense."