Read South Philly: Women \ South Philly: The Italian Market
NOTE: I don’t want to make fun of the denizens of South Philly in these stories. So if it seems like that’s what I’m doing, you must be bad at reading, because I just told you the score, i.e., no.
In this one you might notice a lack of description of my and my friends’ reactions to the show we witnessed. That is because: We didn’t really have one. We tried to just blend in and then we left. Cultural tourists, interlopers… I mean, what do you want me to say? What can I say about Mickey & Joey?
Former Mayor Frank Rizzo looms over the northern border of the stinking, sooty free-air market on S. 9th St. in a mural some 30 feet high. I asked a co-worker once to tell me about Frank Rizzo. I sat on her lap as she told how he used to come up and talk to them on their stoop when he was running for mayor. “What was he like, Grace?” “What can I say?” she shrugged. “He was a paisan.”
This large, no-nonsense Son of Italy once showed up at a race riot, jumping out of his self-driven LTD, stomping out his Kent cigarette on the ground, and walking into the middle of the melée carrying a billy club in his left hand and whacking it in his empty right hand to let certain people know he meant business. Yuz might recognize the name Frank Rizzo as one that the Jerky Boys used often in their phone pranks.
One block from that mural is the setting for this story.
During a few years of patronizing the Italian Market, I passed a windowless basement bar named after a woman with a small sign advertising “live entertainment.” Lovely brickface façade, sun-bleached with a few weeds growing down at the seam with the sidewalk. Never saw anyone come in or out. The “decay is A-okay” vibe of South Philly reminds me somehow of AM radios playing in thrift stores.
“It might be something,” I thought to myself, like, a mob front, like most of the businesses in my neighborhood are, I thought, as I lugged home rapidly putrefying produce from the Italian Market in heavy plastic bags hanging on each arm. Mental note: Someday I’ll go in to this bar.
Saturday, 1999, 12:40 PM. Two girls had come to visit me from out of town, the type of girls who wear feather boas and get away with it, girls who like a good show and some drinks, some flirting, blackjack if it’s available. They gave me a reason to venture into the basement bar.
We descend the stairs. A few blasé (but don’t test them) drunks are seated at the bar. On a TV a movie plays, which the drunkards are watching. The scene is straight out of the ’80s, I think. You could bring some people in here in the 1980s and they would not blink an eye. “Yep, this is a bar!” they would say.
Yet those people would be slightly wrong. They would not notice that something is off.
That’s because Philadelphia has its “own” decade that it lives in; it’s a decade the rest of us didn’t experience. And never will.
A drum set and organ sit atop a little stage. There is seating for about 30, plus the horseshoe-shaped bar. We inquire about the nature of the “show.” The girl behind the bar answers us Philly-style, looking just to the left of our heads without making eye contact. “Yeah, Mickey & Joey — maybe you’ve heard of them? They do ’50s, ’60s, ’70s [music]. And some comedy, you know.” Some comedy? “Yeah. You know, comedy.” We nod cooperatively, gamely.
_____
Same Day and Year, 9:00 PM. Someone has hung a white banner out front of the bar that says “TONIGHT: MICKEY & JOEY SHOW.” It has little silhouettes of two men’s faces.
Our party, fortified by some pre-drinking and protected by our invisible ironic veneer developed through years of watching David Lynch and John Waters movies, enters the lounge dressed in our idea of loungewear. It’s not this place’s idea of loungewear, we are about to discover.
We are greeted heartily by a tall, portly middle-aged man in a tuxedo leaning on the bar rakishly. Two other people I am afraid to look at flank him. I can’t tell you what they looked like, because I didn’t look at them.
The man directs us to sit wherever we want. The long table is reserved, he adds. We sit, as we were bidden. The place is quite empty at 9:00 PM.
The fist-faced, tired but patient waitress takes her time approaching. “What can I get yuz?” We order some drinks. There is no menu, no food. I swallow my meekness to stammer out a touchy question: Can I bring in a pizza? She goes me one better: They do serve one food product, and it happens to be pizza! We order one, which turns out to be just a frozen pizza. That’s okay!
We are drinking orange drinks and eating the clownish pizza and hoping this evening won’t be a complete bust. Things usually are. Also hoping we won’t be ejected for not being born in South Philly.
9:40 PM. A man we know has joined us. There are now three men and two women. I am worried about whether this imbalance will make us suspect by ruining the appearance of a double-date. We are, after all, infiltrators. Not only are we not from or of the neighborhood, we’re not from Philly and we’re not from New Jersey and we might as well be from Pluto.
In front of the Hammond organ, we notice a box of props.
10:00 PM. In the meantime, more people have trickled in. They are all white, ranging in age from 30 to 70, roughly, as best I can tell. They could all be 40, Philly style. They are dressed in well-thought-out outfits from the Philly Mystery Decade.
Two middle-aged fat men — the man who “sat” us and his partner, also tuxedoed — take the stage without any ado.
A few bars of music stream out from the organ — Joey Pal, the banner on it reads. He is studied in his Sinatra-esque-ness. His partner is on the drums. Unlike Joey’s, Mickey’s hair appears to be his own; it is also gray. We are trying to figure out the purpose fake glasses with plastic nose he has just donned, when Joey Pal announces: “We’re just a couple of faggots here to entertain you,” to boisterous laughter and applause.
10:03 PM. We confer with each other: Are we in danger? Should we leave now? But the moment of decision has passed, the pace will not lag from here on in. The place is filling now. A too good-looking, too-young blond man with something wrong with him is wildly requesting songs, approaching the stage to whisper conspiratorily with Mickey and Joey, who basically ignores us.
Mickey’s fake nose attached to plastic hornrims is actually a dangling prosthetic penis. He stares dead at us for a few long moments.
“Anybody want to blow my nose?” he asks from under the weenie glasses.
This is a place where people wept openly in the streets when the Chairman of the Board, Ol’ Blue Eyes, Francis Albert Sinatra, went to the big casino in the sky to be with all the popes from history.
These “faggots” are pretty good singers. They can carry a tune. They really seem to like Frank Sinatra and Kenny Rogers, whose songs they are covering in alternation.
One of the girls in our group gets her courage together and makes a request she thinks they’ll like: “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”! Dick-nose replies, “Smoke gets in your thighs?” They do not play her request. You have two choices: Frank or Kenny.
10:27 PM. The dance floor has filled with arthritic South Philly mamas, an inexplicable leather-clad couple and some of the most honest, natural dancing I’ve seen in a while. These people are not here to impress anyone! One couple’s “dance” consists solely of messy making out.
A very young, very bored/innocent-looking girl is sitting at a small round table with an older man in a black blazer. They haven’t said a word to each other since arriving.
10:34 PM. To the tune of “Goin’ Out of My Head,” Mickey sings “And I think I’m gonna give you some head.”
One older married lady at a table near the stage must suffer the following: “Yeah, Barbara here was the model for these [Mickey is wearing a cap on his head with large, perky breasts on it]. No, just kidding. These are hers [he pulls out a wrinkled, saggy pair of rubber boobs].” Uproarious laughter for a moment, then the music continues. Her husband doesn’t look too pleased, and he gets up in umbrage and leaves, maybe for awhile, maybe forever.
In quick succession, we hear jokes about: 1) a man who punched out a nun thinking she was Batman; 2) an apocryphal friend of Mickey’s who bred an apple to taste “like pussy” and, when asked why the apple tasted “like shit,” responded “Turn it around! Turn it around!” Lots of laughs. It should be noted that a mafia joke receives a cold response, comparatively.
He is always staring at us during the music-playing, trying out different naughty-body-part apparel.
11:10 PM. Without warning, again, Mickey goes for broke, though not in his mind, maybe. He steps off the stage to introduce a song, carrying an empty tin pizza tray, which he “steers” like a steering wheel. He is playing a bus driver. Bourbon has been consumed, by him. He shouts, “All you n*ggers get to the back of the bus!” but people are too tired to muster much shock now, so he just chuckles and waves his hand dismissively at the audience.
11:30 PM. As a closing act, birthdays are celebrated. A cake is brought out, all lit up with candles, for the young girl with the older man. As the candles pass under his face, I notice that he is far older than he appeared in the merciful demilight. Our group decides he is her father after all.
Suddenly, through the door stream a series of other girls her age (late teens). They march decisively over to her, not smiling, and hug her obligatorily in turn. A signal had been given so they knew when in the show they were to appear. They all resemble Vanity and/or Appollonia — high piles of dark curly hair, high boots, some lace and leather. All six girls stream back out, taking the weird date couple with them. Daddy comes up the rear coolly, the last to exit. He winks degenerately back at the “family” inside the bar, like, Look at me and all these girls!
Mickey and Joey disappear for a few minutes as dancing resumes.
Without warning Mickey bursts out from the back dressed in Mummer drag and does the “Mummer strut” as the big finale.
Oh, okay!
Tags: Appollonia, David Lynch, Frank Rizzo, Frank Sinatra, Italian Market, Jerky Boys, John Waters, Kenny Rogers, Mummers, Philadelphia, South Philly, Vanity