The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [112]
Then Aaron and his girlfriend stumbled into Show World, and Nada Show World was born. Aaron loved the place—not the way Richie Basciano did, but not exactly ironically, either. Aaron, thirty-seven, was of the generation that grew up watching The Gong Show and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and whose artists, like Jeff Koons, practiced a deadpan appropriation of schlocky household objects. “My generation thinks of cheesy as fabulous,” as Aaron put it. Aaron came along too late to see the scumatorium in full flower, and perhaps he might have felt differently if he had; but as it was, he identified with Richie Basciano, whom he saw as an entrepreneur who had brought a marginal activity into the mainstream, and succeeded by mainstream standards. Aaron talked about Basciano as he walked me through the Big Top Cabaret and the former Peep Room—“the sanctum sanctorum,” Aaron said, semi-mock-reverently— and then upstairs to the dance studios, which Basciano rented out. “He was the Ziegfeld of his day,” Aaron said. “He created an industry; he was the person who really put it together, maximized the floorspace. Ultimately, Richie Basciano is a master builder.” Aaron, too, saw himself as a master builder, a Hammerstein of Alternative Broadway. Hadn’t he built the Ludlow street scene, and the Fringe Festival, and Pure Pop? He had dreamed of hooking up with a modern equivalent of the nineteenth-century impresario—Ted Turner or Time Warner. Instead, he got Richie Basciano.
Aaron had been much influenced by the theater of spoof, camp, and pastiche associated with the late Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. He described Ludlam’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom as the “defining play of the 1980s,” which might come as news to devotees of Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, or Terence McNally. Like Ludlam, Aaron was deeply versed in classic drama, and loved the idea of running old plays through a kitschy modern sensibility. He had invented something he called Super-Theatrics, based on the insight that “you could deejay or sample any style of theater onto any text.” One of his first productions at Show World was Pervy Verse, which he described as “a retelling of The Bacchae in fetish gear.” He put on a production of Waiting for Godot, as well as all twelve of Anton Chekhov’s early comedies, which Chekhov had called vaudevilles. He staged a “Ridicu-fest” to honor Ludlam’s work. Nada Show World’s first hit was God of Vengeance, a 1910 Yiddish play by Sholem Asch that takes place in a brothel. The play had attracted a supremely odd combination of blue-haired ladies and Hasidic Jews; the latter invariably arrived without their identifying hat or overcoat, for God of Vengeance was a notorious play that had been banned for blasphemy. Besides that, it was being staged above New York’s most famous sex shop. This was the kind of incongruity Aaron lived for: he and Times Square were a match made in heaven.
Over the next few months, I periodically dropped in on Aaron and his expanding empire. Getting there was always half the fun. Show World had a kind of nonadult foyer or antechamber with animal sculptures propped on pedestals; a sign near the front door said, “No Live Girls.” (Aaron had also staged a “No Live Girls” festival.) It was extremely discreet by Eighth Avenue standards. Straight ahead, beyond a pair of saloon doors, were the peeps; downstairs was the big sex supermarket, with videos and every kind of dildo known to man, and more booths. You could walk upstairs from the foyer, or you could go around the corner to a separate entrance, where the risers on