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By Root 687 0

the shirt and tie in favor of a black turtleneck. It was snowing heavily the afternoon I visited, but Marc took me out to the Eighth Avenue sidewalk to make a point. Here, just north of the Show World entrance, was the $75,000 LED sign announcing the new cabaret space, Le Club at Show World. Show World here, Le Club at Show World there—two separate entrances, two separate places. “It’s got a different address,” Mark explained, as if that said it all. “One is 673, the other is 669. Show World is a different place. It’s just like I have a Duane Reade next door.” We went back upstairs to the cabaret, which was state-of-the-art everything, from the six giant drop-down screens to the “intelligent lighting” system ($328,000), the sound system ($220,000), the cappuccino machine ($6,000), the “ventless cooker” ($10,000), and the plasma screens in the bar providing “total video continuity” (no price given). It was a dream. “We’ve got smoke, we’ve got lights, we’ve got dancing, we’ve got movement,” Marc said. “This place rocks.”

The walkie-talkie buzzed. It was Richie Basciano. Marc seemed flustered. “I’m giving a gentleman a tour of the facility,” he said. Apparently he hadn’t cleared my visit with top management. Richie’s disembodied voice was urbane and measured; he didn’t probe. They agreed to meet later in the day, and nothing further was said of the Man Who Is Show World. But it was Basciano, of course, who had agreed to throw what he hoped was good money after bad. After Marc had noticed that professional dancers could get a sluggish dance crowd up on its feet, he had put together the Le Club Dancers—“real dancers, not go-go trash.” They were drop-dead gorgeous, they had their own special outfit of sequins and bustiers, and they were trained by a professional choreographer. “Think of the Playboy Bunnies,” Marc said, “but without the Playboy.”

Marc had done his best to transform the interior into an Eighth Avenue version of a Playboy Club. The walls were red and black with bands of mirror tile, in homage to the Show World tradition, and the tables, the chairs, the VIP banquettes, and pretty much everything else was red and black as well. The foyer had been turned into a photo gallery, with big blowups of Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn, as well as the Statue of Liberty and the Flatiron Building. The bigger of the two theater spaces, where Aaron had staged God of Vengeance, was now a dance space, while the smaller GoGo 2—now “Theater 2”—featured improv and stand-up comedy. Thanks to advanced soundproofing technology, Marc could have one deejay playing salsa in one space, another playing reggae in the second, and a third playing hip-hop. Marc referred to this in his own private lexicon as “the tripaletic effect.”

But the more Marc talked about the plasma screens and the fully automated micros, the more I could sense the desperate frailty of the whole enterprise. The facility was trapped between identities. “I keep trying to tell people it’s not Show World anymore,” Marc said plaintively. “It’s Le Club at Show World. We’re keeping that name because it still has the stigma of Show World. But it’s mostly a negative, I promise you. You say ‘Show World,’ and people think ‘nude girls, live acts.’ That’s long gone. It’s decades old.” The name was driving away the upscale crowd—Asian girls, in particular, didn’t want to have anything to do with the place—and attracting the wrong kind of attention. Law & Order wanted to shoot a murder scene on the premises; Sex and the City wanted a sex scene. Marc wasn’t interested. “No sex, no murder, nothing negative.” But where was the positive going to come from? Marc admitted that he was hurting; the promoters he booked in weren’t making the bar minimums he charged, and he was being forced to shift to a different pricing mechanism. The economy was killing everyone.

Maybe this bid for respectability would crash, and Show World would end with racks full of kung fu videos like everyone else. But I was rooting for Marc. It was obvious, in retrospect, that Todo Con Nada at Show World