Where: 22nd and M streets
Dress: no bra
Cover: Ladies free, men $10
Carded: by a bouncer and two police officers at the door
Belle Rating: 1 bell
Just when you thought Lulu’s couldn’t get trashier, Tuesday night’s “Girls Gone Wild” competition took sleazy to a whole new level. The free drink ticket handed to each girl who walked in should have been my first clue that “girls gone drunk” would have been a more appropriate theme for the evening.
The setup was perfect: a free drink to get started and three hours of anticipation (i.e. drinking) building you up to loosening the bra straps a little. The event was publicized to start at 9 p.m., but no breasts were bared, on stage at least, until about 12:30 a.m. At $4.50 a beer, Lulu’s marketing team was right on the money with this one.
Under normal circumstances, the 10-to-one male to female ratio would have been a girl’s dream. But factor in the number of ponytails and beer bellies and the result wasn’t pretty. This damsel in distress was lucky to have three guy friends around her at all times to rescue her from unwanted advances, except from them, of course. About 30 seconds alone on the dance floor would bring bead-toting men of all ages flocking to anything with breasts. They were like frat boys to a keg, eager to see just what she would do for their sparkling plastic necklaces. Read: more beads around a man’s neck equals more sketchy. The Bar Belle politely declined such offers but managed to snag some beads from a few easily persuaded gentlemen.
Now for the part we’ve been waiting (and waiting and waiting) for: the boobs. A man in a “Girls Gone Wild” T-shirt, screaming “These girls want to get naked!” paraded about 13 not-so-well-endowed young ladies to the stage to compete for a chance to represent D.C. in a spring break competition for $25,000 and a spot on a pay-per-view video. While this is any self-respecting, twenty-something girl’s lifelong goal, alcohol seemed to be the motivation for most of these ladies to get on stage.
For journalistic purposes, the Bar Belle decided to watch the competition from the floor and give the other girls a fighting chance to win. What ensued was pure, unadulterated … OK, skip the adjectives, they were taking their shirts off. The rowdy, testosterone-filled crowd booed if a girl didn’t bare it all. The emcee repeatedly shouted at the advancing throng of groping hands to “take two steps back.” The high point came when the host asked for male volunteers for the lap dance competition, sending the already-charged room full of hormones into a frenzy.
The winner, a thin, thong-clad woman with a light-up lip ring swept the lap dance competition and answered the emcee’s question of what she would to change the world with a crowd-pleasing “make prostitution legal.” Need I say more?
