Jack’s Nest was a roadhouse a few miles outside of Farmville, Virginia, which I frequented while teaching composition at Hampden Sydney College.  During one month, the bar buzzed with anticipation about the up-coming Four County Fair, which I was told was a big deal, and I should be sure to go.  Especially, I was told with smiles and knowing nods, I should check out “the hoochie-coochie girls.”

How quaint, I thought.  These simple yet somehow engaging yokels.

Naturally, I did in fact go to the Four County Fair, taking along a cheap camera which I hung on a cord around my neck, so I could send photos to my stylish friends in the world’s most elegant cosmopolitan urban centers.  For example, Wichita, Kansas.

Once at the fairgrounds, I meandered casually among the various amusements—mainly ring-toss and coin-throw games that you might find at the average PTA fund-raiser.  I took lots of pictures of these manifestations of rustic southern pop culture, and especially of the primitive, primary-colors artwork festooning the premises.

Eventually I worked my way to the back end of the fairgrounds, where I found a big tent with a banner announcing “Hoochie-Coochie Girls.”  I had thought that the gang at Jack’s Nest had been kidding me, but there it was.  So I paid and went in, much as an anthropologist might decide to dwell among a newly discovered Amazonian tribe in order to document its primitive ways.

Inside, a very large group of men, many in bib overalls, were standing in front of the stage.  Before long, recorded music started up, and four or five women climbed onstage and began to gyrate to the music in unexpected yet complicated and interesting ways.  Pretty soon, they were doing so nude.

Not burlesque house “nude.”  Not Sally Rand Fan Dance with pasties and g-string and artful feathers nude. Nude nude.  Right then and there, a couple of miles outside of Farmville, Virginia, in 1980—years before coeds going wild at wet T-shirt contests on DVDs, before show-us-your-tits-for-a-string-of-beads, before instant porn on your iPhone, before teenagers parading around malls in thongs—young women were totally naked and gyrating in explicit representations of sexual congress at the Four County Fair.  It was like going to a movie house to see “Meet Me in St. Louis” and they show “Debby Does Dallas.”

Eventually, some of the dancers invited physical participation by a couple of members of the audience.  I choose my words carefully.

At the end of the show, I think it accurate to say “dazed and confused,” I left the hoochie-coochie tent—and within four steps found myself face to face with three of my Hampden-Sydney College students.  Heads nodding, we said hello as we passed one another.

The next morning, when I walked into my 8:00 o’clock class, I was stunned to encounter a roomful of fully awake and widely grinning late-adolescent schoolboys.  Soon, one of them broke the silence by politely asking, “Get any good pictures, Doctor Broadhead?”

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Another of the barmaids at Jack’s Nest was a chatty young woman in her mid-to-late 20s. In contrast with Pernell’s sister-in-law, she was very, very white—freckled, but very pale.   I believe the word “blowsy” was coined on her behalf.  I guess I probably mean “blouse-y,” in the sense of zaftig.

In any case, she was very pleasant, and she and her boyfriend once had me to an early dinner and cards at his dairy farm so I could see how such an operation worked in south-central Virginia.  I think that guy was so strong that he didn’t need gates in his fences.  To get a cow into another pasture, he’d just pick her up and toss her.  Nice folks.

Back at the Nest one afternoon, as I started to leave while she was tending bar, I said with what I thought was a comical melodramatic sigh, “Well, I guess I’ll go try to pull together the tattered shreds of my life.”

 

“Oh,” she said without a trace of guile, “Doin’ your laundry?”