SINISTER SUNDAYS
Jumbo’s Clown Room
Los Angeles
Oct. 6, 2024
If you ask any fun-loving person in Los Angeles who the best Jumbo’s Clown Room dancer is, they’ll be able to come up with an answer. On Sunday night, I find myself partial to Topaz, who, while speaking to me, gives me the nostalgic sensation of eavesdropping on my cooler older sister’s sleepovers as a child. She learned to dance on the job, she tells me while fiddling with a jukebox. My friend jokes that she belongs in a Tarantino movie, but instead, she is here, materialized in front of me in a glittering white jacket and red lipstick. She is funny, charming, and beautiful. She is also a writer. She asks if I would come to her play reading. Yes, of course. At that moment, I would do anything she asked of me. I briefly wonder if this is how men feel all the time. An hour later, I overhear a man mutter: “I no longer believe in God. God is dead. I believe in Topaz.”
It’s almost Halloween at Jumbo’s Clown Room. The bartenders slide tequila sodas across the bar under the glow of red lights. An ATM sits in the corner on a checkered floor, turned towards the stage foregrounded by a mirror. Upon entering, patrons are told two simple commands: “No photography, and don’t touch the girls.” Every Sunday in October, the bar advertises dancers in costumes and drink specials in a series titled Sinister Sundays. Yet tonight, in the bar, there’s no reason to be spooked. It’s business as usual, except for the two bartenders wearing clown makeup. One dancer shuffles across the floor in an oversized Dodgers jersey, Ohtani’s name spelled across the back. Another woman sways onstage to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” dressed as a fallen angel in black lingerie. To the crowd’s delight, one dancer, Pantera, makes balloon animals and pantomimes having sex with them. For my money, it’s the best act in Hollywood — a witty mix of vaudeville and sex. She’s destined for the silver screen, only she seems too interesting, too cool to have show business ambitions.
“There’s always a big party,” says Topaz of her workplace of over 10 years. I ask her about the camaraderie between the dancers, and she nods: “No one is trying to haze each other.” It’s a sentiment that has kept me returning to Jumbo’s after all these years: the dancers seem as entertained by their antics as the eager audience tossing bills. When they’re not onstage, they wander through the dive bar and banter with the grace of a bride on her wedding day.
“Everyone thinks they can do this job,” a friend tells me while watching a dancer glide across the stage. She traded numbers with a man she met while ordering a drink, and our friends are amusing themselves, crafting a response to his text under the red glow of light. We’re excitedly squealing at the prospect of a new flirtation — a man who has not hurt us yet. Another friend returns from the back and blurts out: “I just got into a Chappell Roan singing match in the bathroom.” We feel clumsy — a group of straight women giggling at a burlesque bar — and we subdue our self-consciousness by throwing singles onto the stage, grinning maniacally at the dancers. There is something girlish about us, fawning over these women at their jobs, professing our fondness for them under our breath — an undying admiration that almost mutates back into objectification. After all, they are celebrities to us. Halloween is coming, and we want a thrill.
