Having woken up from a sound sleep at 04-Dark, I remembered an old watering hole in Ottawa. Don’t ask why my brain went there; it just did.
The Chez Lucien in the Byward Market. The Times Square building is on the site now, as the Chez Lucien was torn down a number of years ago.
There is also a legit (and apparently very good) restaurant/pub called the Chez Lucien in the Market on Murray Street. Let’s be clear, this is not the Chez Lucien I’m considering: We’re talking about the Original on Clarence and Parent street, with a truly skeevy bar and the Salons Dianne and Colette. Rather than sully the reputation of the current Chez Lucien, I will refer to the one I remember as the Original Chez Lucien.
The Original Chez Lucien, also known as the Lucie, like most bars in the Byward Market of that era catered to the class of drinkers known as either gifted-amateur or professional-grade. The Original was a two storey building last painted an exciting grey in 1946. The top floor had rooms that one could rent, presumably by the hour, as the Original Chez Lucien was Known to Police.
There were three reasons to go to the Lucie: First, to get drunk. Second to watch the Le Go-Go Danseurs who performed topless. There was no food that I can remember at the Original Chez Lucien, aside from bags of potato chips.
Back in the Day I worked as a mobile disk jockey doing weddings, parties and stags for a local company. Each month there was at least one booking for a wedding reception at the Original Chez Lucien in the Salon Dianne or Salon Colette, which were the two reception halls for the place. Invariably there would be a couple of hundred guests in their finest finery celebrating the wedding of a family member in a dive that hadn’t seen a mop since the beginning days of the Pearson government.
Of course, there were also fights, as the Original Chez Lucien seemed to have that kind of impending-violence edge to it. For that I blame the Le Go-Go Danseurs.
The bar proper was down the hall from the two reception salons. There were the traditional dark arborite tables, tobacco-stained walls, wooden chairs, ash trays and smoke-shrouded customers who favoured having a back to the wall at all times. None of the regulars sat in the middle of the bar for good reason. Along one wall was a juke box and a six-inch tall platform the size of a table top, upholstered with a biological experiment of a carpet. This was the stage.
Every hour one of the female servers, who were also the dancers, would go over to the bartender and demand a quarter. She would toss the quarter in the juke box and punch up three songs. This was the musical accompaniment for her demonstration of the Arts of Terpsichore.
Song one: March in place fully clothed. Song two: March in place without one half of one’s top. Song three: Twitch in place, having exhausted all dance skills, without the top altogether. And that, gentlemen, is your entertainment for this evening.
The server would rearrange her costume, pick up her tray and continue serving the now thirsty patrons who had been deprived of beer for close to fourteen minutes. For many of the customers, those fourteen minutes were as close to quitting cold turkey as they could stand without the onset of DT’s.
I have seen my share of naked human female breasts. I am an avowed leg man (and make no apologies either), but even an average pair is a beauty to behold as proof that God, as a designer, does Good Work. Damn Good Work.
Except in the case of the Original Chez Lucien servers. Several were tattooed in the days before tattoos resided on every second suburban soccer-Mom. One female server who danced looked like she could physically assault a moving freight train and had successfully demonstrated her railway brawling prowess more than once with a 12-2 record over her career. Another server looked like my Aunt Lillian in a bikini top and threadbare baby doll, which may explain things that only an Adlerian counsellor can appreciate.
Nonetheless, many of the male guests of the wedding receptions would skulk out of the reception down the hall to gawk once an hour. When the men returned to the wedding reception, there would be a significant increase the volume of discourse at the tables, usually in female voices, using language that cannot be reprinted here.
At one wedding reception the groom, paralytically drunk, was carried chair and all to the bar by the best man and the ushers to observe the goods on display. When the groom, chair and male half of the wedding party returned from their observations, the Matron of Honour and the Bride’s Mother took matters into their own hands.
The police arrived within five minutes and obtained promises. There would be no more chair transportation of the Groom to areas outside the Salon Dianne. The other promise was the more active members of the distaff side of the wedding party would stop breaking quart bottles over the heads of the Best Man and Ushers. Satisfied with arrangements, the police left and festivities resumed, celebrating the union of Julie-Claire and Hubert in Holy Matrimony.
The Original Chez Lucien. Alas, long gone.
RoadDave 