Girlz N the Hood

This is a column about nudity, sex, human indecency, animalistic emotions, moral outrage and orange juice. It could get rough. Kids and editors should leave the room.

It has to do with an application to open a juice bar and naked dance club in an otherwise peaceful, and no doubt virtuous, neighborhood in Northridge.

In fact, the old ‘hood abuts Chatsworth, which is well known as the most moral community in L.A. County. If there is any nudity at all in Chatsworth, it is either in the shower or under the covers with one’s lawfully wedded mate of the opposite gender.

God, if he were forced to live in the Valley, would live in the Chatsworth-Northridge area.

A company called Seven for the Money has asked the city for a permit to open the juice bar/nude dance club at the corner of Nordhoff and Corbin.

No alcohol will be served, due to a section of the municipal code which says you cannot drink booze and watch total nudity at the same time. This is based on scientific evidence that the combination can turn you into a member of the Kennedy family.

Both Hal Bernson, God’s best friend on the City Council, and the Northridge Chamber of Commerce have come out against the application, following a meeting by a chamber ad hoc committee on juice and nudity.

I had a spy on the committee but he left when the discussion turned to the dangers of public masturbation. “It was too much to take at 8 o’clock in the morning,” he said.

Efforts to contact the president of Seven for the Money proved, pardon the pun, fruitless. Therefore, I have no idea exactly what the company has in mind for its proposed venture, other than serving up naked women and orange juice in nicely balanced proportions.

Community activist Walter Prince says so little is known of the proposal, he isn’t sure who will be nude, the customers or the dancers. Sgt. Ken Kreider, an LAPD vice officer who attended the ad hoc meeting, has also been unable to reach those proposing the club.

However, he assured committee members that the Police Department will insist on adequate lighting for the club’s parking lot and the removal of doors in the men’s room stalls, for reasons that should be obvious.

Nude dance clubs, he pointed out, are covered by Section 12.70 of the L.A. Municipal Code. The section regulates cabarets featuring entertainment that tends to expose, as it says, “specified anatomical areas.”

In this case, of course, all anatomical areas will be exposed.

Prince, among others, hasn’t made up his mind whether he is for or against such a place in Northridge. “It depends,” he says, “on whether the juice is fresh or frozen.”

Another local resident, Al Hecht, who runs Sir Speedy Printing, isn’t bothered by the idea of a nude juice bar in his neighborhood as long as it doesn’t attract perverts.

“What goes on at a City Council meeting,” he says, “is probably more obscene than anything a nude woman can do on a stage.”

He went to a nude dance place in Florida a long time ago, he says, and was disappointed. The women were lousy dancers.

That is also true in L.A. There’s a club called Oddball on Sepulveda that features nude dancers, and while the women aren’t exactly hags, they aren’t prima ballerinas either.

The Oddball is in a windowless, pink and green building with a Nude! Nude! Nude! Live! Live! Live! sign out front which leaves no doubt as to what goes on inside.

You pay a dollar at the door and $4.25 a pop for ersatz beer, juice or mineral water. The stage and bar are trimmed in blinking colored lights reflected in mirrors, all of which gives the club a kind of cosmic, Twilight Zone appearance.

The dancers, who double as waitresses, strut their stuff on a runway only a foot away from the customers, most of whom wore shirts and ties the day I dropped by in the name of original research.

I expected the place to be loaded with cowboys and dry wall subcontractors, but that wasn’t the case. The patrons at the Oddball were more like insurance adjusters and encyclopedia salesmen.

Each dancer started out in a gauzy, semi-transparent covering and ended up wearing only heels and bobby socks. I guess there are some things a girl never outgrows.

After displaying their specified anatomical areas in a series of distorted dance steps that tested human flexibility to the breaking point, the women picked up their tips, curtsied in most unusual ways and danced off the stage.

If that’s what in store for Northridge-Chatsworth, I wouldn’t worry too much. There are more stimulating women to be seen on the beach than on those stages. They’re probably better dancers too.