Peter Stringfellow, London clubland's legendary striptease pioneer, loves spending Valentines Day in Paris, but this year he has more than just romance on his mind.
The man who persuaded Britain's staid licensing magistrates to allow naked table-dancing and sparked a fashion for in-your-face floor shows is about to open up his first nightclub in Paris, the capital of the can-can.
"I'm absolutely in awe at the idea of opening up a club in what is my favorite romantic city," Stringfellow said from his London headquarters.
"I've spent about eight Valentines Days in Paris, with five different girlfriends. Last year we had dinner at the Eiffel Tower, which was a lovely experience."
The 61-year-old millionaire was hoping to bring his latest twentysomething love to Paris again this year -- "she adores the Ritz hotel" -- but instead he was kept back by business in Britain.
France will not have long to wait for his next appearance, however, as he plans to be back by the end of March when, if all goes according to plan, he will open Stringfellow's Cabaret of Angels, the Paris branch.
Stringfellow opened his famous London club in 1980 but only began providing what he calls "adult entertainment" in 1996. In his early days battling with prudish British ways he looked to Paris as an example of what could be done.
"We often looked to Paris with great envy," he said. "Whenever you went to Paris you of course went to the Moulin Rouge. We'd go to the Lido and the Crazy Horse Saloon, which was one of my favorites. We had nothing like that."
The London strip scene which developed in the 1950s and 1960's in Soho was dominated by seedy basement dives with untalented performers, Stringfellow explained. "In Paris it was high glamor," he remembers wistfully.
But London's best known club-owner is proud to be bringing his act to Paris and confident that thanks to lessons learned in the US, the British club-scene has a lot to teach its better known cross-Channel rival.
"Paris was and always has been more liberal-minded when it comes to the idea of very beautiful girls being entertaining to customers in nightclubs," he says.
"Now, because of my constant efforts to change this, here we are. We've jumped over the Moulin Rouge and the Lido, and left them standing as somewhat archaic.
"The idea of what I'm talking about is clubs that are more modernistic in their attitude, where the male species gets to sit much closer and see the girl an awful lot closer. Taking her clothes off," he explains.
When the Cabaret of Angels opens on Avenue Niel just north of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris' plush 17th arrondissement it will be a victory in a decade-long campaign to educate European audiences to the delights of table-dancing.
At the start of the 1990s Stringfellow was a successful nightclub owner on both sides of the Atlantic, with clones of his London club -- known simply as Stringfellow's -- in New York, Miami and Beverly Hills.
"It was the forerunner of what was to become the classic nightclub, which means a cocktail bar, piano stage, high class top-line restaurant and discotheque. I had a glass dancefloor and all the whizzing lights," he says.
But with the advent of recession in the early 1990s the public's taste for expensive entertainment waned, and Stringfellow had to start looking for a way to keep his dream alive. He found it in Miami and Houston.
"I discovered a new kind of entertainment which was thriving in Florida and Texas, which was known as adult entertainment clubs," he remembers.
"Clubs where beautiful girls went round on stages, poles and tables at the invitation of guys for what was, in those days, ten dollars to take their clothes off."
He quickly converted his New York nightspot to incorporate topless dancers and it quickly became his most profitable club.
It was not enough to save the US side of his operation, however, and he returned to London determined to make striptease work. Almost immediately, however, he ran into trouble with the authorities.
"The police couldn't envisage how 350, sometimes 500, males could sit nicely together with untold numbers of beautiful girls circling them on stages and tables and not have a problem," he sighs.
"In their experience girls taking their clothes off in front of men who had alcohol meant chaos, Until I'd seen it in Florida I wouldn't have believed it would work either."
But he persisted and after persuading the police and magistrates that he would employ strict rules -- no-one touches the dancers or gets to leave with them -- he finally won permission to take his club topless in 1996.
Taiwan’s Lee Chia-hao (李佳豪) on Sunday won a silver medal at the All England Open Badminton Championships in Birmingham, England, a career best. Lee, 25, took silver in the final of the men’s singles against world No. 1 Shi Yuqi (石宇奇) of China, who won 21-17, 21-19 in a tough match that lasted 51 minutes. After the match, the Taiwanese player, who ranks No. 22 in the world, said it felt unreal to be challenging an opponent of Shi’s caliber. “I had to be in peak form, and constantly switch my rhythm and tactics in order to score points effectively,” he said. Lee got
EMBRACING TAIWAN: US lawmakers have introduced an act aiming to replace the use of ‘Chinese Taipei’ with ‘Taiwan’ across all Washington’s federal agencies A group of US House of Representatives lawmakers has introduced legislation to replace the term “Chinese Taipei” with “Taiwan” across all federal agencies. US Representative Byron Donalds announced the introduction of the “America supports Taiwan act,” which would mandate federal agencies adopt “Taiwan” in place of “Chinese Taipei,” a news release on his page on the US House of Representatives’ Web site said. US representatives Mike Collins, Barry Moore and Tom Tiffany are cosponsors of the legislation, US political newspaper The Hill reported yesterday. “The legislation is a push to normalize the position of Taiwan as an autonomous country, although the official US
‘CROWN JEWEL’: Washington ‘can delay and deter’ Chinese President Xi Jinping’s plans for Taiwan, but it is ‘a very delicate situation there,’ the secretary of state said US President Donald Trump is opposed to any change to Taiwan’s “status quo” by force or extortion and would maintain that policy, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Hugh Hewitt Show host on Wednesday. The US’ policy is to maintain Taiwan’s “status quo” and to oppose any changes in the situation by force or extortion, Rubio said. Hewitt asked Rubio about the significance of Trump earlier this month speaking with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) at the White House, a meeting that Hewitt described as a “big deal.” Asked whether the meeting was an indication of the
CHANGE OF TONE: G7 foreign ministers dropped past reassurances that there is no change in the position of the G7 members on Taiwan, including ‘one China’ policies G7 foreign ministers on Friday took a tough stance on China, stepping up their language on Taiwan and omitting some conciliatory references from past statements, including to “one China” policies. A statement by ministers meeting in Canada mirrored last month’s Japan-US statement in condemning “coercion” toward Taiwan. Compared with a G7 foreign ministers’ statement in November last year, the statement added members’ concerns over China’s nuclear buildup, although it omitted references to their concerns about Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. Also missing were references stressing the desire for “constructive and stable relations with China” and
RSS