@Dove
Yeah, my mother celebrated her 80th birthday last summer.
COVID killed my father summer before last. He was 86. Because of the lockdowns and travel restrictions, I couldn't make it back east. Anyway, his wife chose to forego any kind of ceremony or funeral. To this day, I have no clue where his remains wound up, as I have no recent contact with those people.
You know, Dovey, me Ma is a weird gal. She grew up in a convent, so she was, as she herself says, a "Great Innocent" about many of the wicked, wicked ways of the world. My grandmother, so the story goes, put both my mother and her younger sister in that convent to shield them from my grandfather's predatory violence. To this day, my mother denies that physical violence was in any way sexual but her siblings (she also has an older brother with whom I'm still in contact) claim otherwise. Regardless, I can tell a lot of psychic damage was done to these kids.
So, it's as that "Great Innocent" that my mother ventured out into the real, post-convent world, nabbing a job at the tender age of 16 as a "soda counter girl" at a Woolworth's department store in the nation's capital. That's where my father, who was a student at the local university, first met her. He ordered a root beer float from her and, decades later, here I am.
A couple of years after the family moved to Montreal in the mid-60's, she applied to work as a server at this new "Playboy Club." She did so basically "blindly," still quite free of any hint of worldliness, and mostly at the urging of her friends, who kept telling her that her beauty made her a shoo-in for the position and that much prestige would come her way if she landed the gig. Well, she landed the gig. The way she tells it, after several months of employment nobody--not management nor even the other girls--could figure out "what the hell a girl like her was doing in a place like this." She always rejected sexual advances from the managers, from patrons, and even from some of the other girls. In fact, such advances always flustered and embarrassed her, she says. She was basically a prude in a Bunny costume.
The way I see it, this gig was her ultimate form of revenge on all the letchers out there (including her own father): the club enforced a very strict "Please Don't Touch the Bunnies" rule. Guess she had the last laugh, in a way.
The club closed in '71 when the hardcore Montreal Italian mafia tried to muscle in on the action. I still have her letter of acceptance and her first paycheck; my brother still has my father's Playboy Club Key Card (because, of course, he became a member of the Club).
She still talks fondly about those times, though. She made lifelong friends during those years on "the hippest scene around."
Of course, at the time, we kids had no clue. Or so she still thinks.