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In Praise of the Rose — The City Without Foreplay pg98
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
Just before midnight in the dead of winter in the vast, almost empty cavern of Le Folies Bergere showroom.
The tiny audience in the 1200 seat theater hadn’t had to tip the maitre’d for a seat down in front. They certainly didn’t want a four-dollar rose from the hotel’s flower girl. My tray of roses were still fresh in the frigid air.
The other pretty hucksters had long since departed this chilly room. The camera girls came up empty with their stobes fully charged, and the cigarette girl couldn’t sell a pair of lighted dice earrings on a bet. I acknowledged their tired eye-rolls and eraser hard nipples as they trudged up the aisle past a thousand empty cheap seats, heading for a final try at the casino’s dispirited bars, keno lounge and a cabaret where even Rodney Dangerfield could sometimes get respect. Not tonight. Huh, I observed, it’s possible to trudge in four-inch platforms. You would think goose bumps could show through spandex that thin. — From Chapter 5
Roses have nourished me most of my life, and they made me gleefully solvent in the late 70s. First I sold them as a flower girl at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Then I designed them into carpets for casinos.
