Old-timey dinner and dancing

i love the night life

OP, linked below is a good thread from a couple of years ago on DL. Among the posts, someone had posted old menus and such from long-gone clubs and restaurants. Just an FYI for comparison to today.

"How much did dinner and a floor show cost in the 1940s-50s"

I wanted to open a realio, trulio dance hall on The Shore like these! A REAL dance hall, where people must dress-up, a real dinner is served, a big band plays music, there's a veranda and moonlit grove to walk in, all of it! I would live at it, if it were up to par. And I don't just mean some snooty, artisan joint, I mean a place where even working class people can go if properly dressed and polite.

PBS always has these specials with this kind of stuff.

Dancing to pop standards and classics, things like that.

Where would they go to do it? Most larger cities used to have an old Ballroom--usually downtown or in a past its prime neighborhood that would try to draw this crowd. They mostly died out in the 80s or 90s when the last cohorts of their started dying out in big numbers. Supper clubs died out in the 60s--and many before that. The cost of providing entertainment became to great and the demand for that kind of music declined The blue hair crowd stayed home and watched Lawrence Welk.

R5, I think you're right, but why did the demand decline with the younger generation? Don't younger woman like that stuff?

Unfortunately, those that remain are caught up in the Wedding Industry and every horror that implies.

But yes, they still exist.

Others are involved with dance teaching industry

Men were only going to get fucked good and a bj of appreciation when they got home. The men could have cared less about dinner and dancing.

You can get that for a Taco Bell burrito nowadays.

It is also dance knowledge that's old timely and conservative. Didn't you see Dirty Dancing?

There are still supper clubs in Dallas.

7 spots to dine and dance in New York City

R9 timey

See, they are in Texas.

R1, those places all sound horrible! The list is basically restaurants attached to or just near the typical modern shitty bottle service/hip hop douchebag clubs that for some reason everyone under 40 thinks are "amazing".

No, I really don't want to be fleeced for $500 bucks for a poorly served dinner which is inevitably cold small plates slapped down after an hour with a silverware roll-up, by a disinterested model who doesn't know how to wait on a table, and won't need to because the 20% tip has been added along with the ubiquitous "bottle service" charge of 400 for a fifth of Grey Goose! Who has that kind of money for a vulgar, eardrum-splitting evening? Drug dealers?!

Just head down to the Tropicana or Club Babalu!

Users up thread are right - the closet equivalent these days are night clubs with bottle service owned by Jay-Z, wedding venues and ballroom dancing events.

What I experienced were barn dances and country and western nights with a hot car very buffet.

I personally would love that shit. Jacket and tie, evening gown, a small jazz orchestra.

Some place that serves afternoon tea in London has or had a service with dancing once per month. Brown's, perhaps?

Try a cruise ship.

Interesting, R2. Thanks for the link.

Rainbow Room is still around, and so are a few other such places; but they have changed since pre-WWII or even 1950's.

Upheavals caused by 1960's onward began to make such dinner/dancing places seem rather old fashioned, As the fox trot gave way to the boogaloo outside of country clubs and some other select places society simply changed.

We touched on this before when discussing film "Metropolitan", and debutante balls. There was a time when all young people of a certain class (and or those who aspired to), went to dancing classes to learn the basic ballroom steps (waltz, fox trot, etc....). This was normal because events they would attend as teens into adulthood that had dancing.... well that is what they danced.

First rebellion was the lindy-hop; which post WWII became rather accepted since it was the dance of "young people" back from the war and so forth. But people still knew the basic slow two-steps.

Again by the 1970's disco was in, and supper clubs/slow dancing went out. Ironically many of the old supper/dance clubs ended up becoming discos like the Copacabana night club.

As Barry Manilow sang in that song Copacabana...

"Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl But that was thirty years ago, when they used to have a show Now it's a disco, but not for Lola Still in dress she used to wear Faded feathers in her hair"

Plaza Hotel's Persian Room....

Here you go OP.

Oh God, most of us EGs (and maybe younger DLers) are here because of slow dancing and supper clubs. That was a once-a-month maybe twice-a-year treat for our parents when they were married. Before that, they attended 'ballrooms' or formal clubs on dates and held each other close.

Now that beautiful first touch is gone.

P.S.

As we also discussed in another thread; tastes in music changed as well.

Singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughn, Dianah Washington, and so many others made their bread and butter singing various "standards" at supper/dance clubs. Singers and their bands traveled the country and world performing at (supper) and other clubs performing not just for persons to listen; but they danced.

And this is what they danced, or some version of it.... the foxtrot!

Finally OP you asked about gays and supper clubs or "old timey" dancing. Well have you ever heard of a "tea dance"?

[quote] Do housewives no longer beg their hubbies to take them dancing?

That's the key question, because it was women who were the driving force behind them. Why did they stop liking them?