Dessert and Dancing

Like any good gay neighborhood, Wilton Manors has an array of nightlife offerings. I went to three of the bars along the main strip.

Georgie's Alibi is a sprawling video bar, sort of like the first floor of Sidetracks in Chicago but with lower ceilings. It felt like the type of small-town bar that by necessity attracts all types, but the main clientele seemed to be Chelsea boys gone to seed -- 40-and-up white gay men who clearly look like they used to party and take care of themselves but who can't quite keep up the appearance anymore. (Yes, I freely admit it: that describes me too.)

Around the corner, in the same strip mall, is Boom, a small smoky room about the size of the new Pavilion that appears to be a dance club but was pretty empty at 11p on a Saturday night. So I walked down the block to the third and main venue of Wilton Manors, The Manor.

It's a remarkable place. You walk in and the first thing you see is a bakery counter full of desserts for sale. There is a cabaret room for drag shows, a small dance room in the corner playing Latin music and an open-air lounge area in the back. Once you've passed through two or more of these spaces, you can make your way to the main dance floor, which is in a brick building that looks like it might once have been a church, but larger and of much more modern design than the Limelight. There are balconies at either end of the dance floor, and a long outdoor balcony on this level as well.

The crowd was quite mixed, including a fair number of lesbians, but overall was much closer to what you'd expect at a big-city nightclub than the Georgie's Alibi crowd. (In other words, it included a fair number of young hotties.) The music was upbeat, vocals/keyboards, fun if not profound. I liked it, even if it didn't seem to be going to those deep places we rarely visit anymore.

The one incongruous part of the dance room was the video screens on the walls advertising upcoming events. It seems the Manor is a restaurant as well as a nightclub, and so you had non sequiturs like this sequence, all from the same screen:

But do you know what that means? They're using the space more thoroughly than nightclubs of a previous generation did, and that means the place is more likely to last. With Friday and Saturday night dance parties and maybe a midweek roller skate, the Roxy was closed for 148 hours or so each week. That's not tenable in today's economy. So we may be seeing more of that in the future.