There goes the bride, with a baseball cap anchoring her veil, a disembodied phallic object for an escort, and “Play That Funky Music” thumping accompaniment as she is marched down the aisle.
If she’s blushing, it’s probably because of embarrassment. Her friends have affixed lollipops to her T-shirt and indelicately advertised them for sale, not to mention she’s wearing battery-illuminated vinyl underwear over her jeans to collect the proceeds.
Soon enough, though, Sheila Yager, 30, of Chicago sees she is not alone in her humiliation. The people waiting at the door to admit her to Polly Esther’s, a ’70s and ’80s retro dance club, have seen it all before. At the height of the wedding season, as many as 50 bachelorette parties will hustle through on a Saturday night — so many that the club had to establish a separate admittance aisle for the groups, who phone in their reservations and are usually distinguished by one mercilessly accessorized woman in white.
“They come here because we treat them well, and the atmosphere is silly,” says Robert Delcano, security manager at the club, 213 W. Institute Pl., who usually welcomes the bachelorettes at the door, where they are given garters, buttons and drink coupons, as well as free admission for the bride and half-off discounts for her friends.
“If you go to clubs like Karma or Crobar, you have to dress up and stand around and you don’t even move. Here, it’s like you put on an Afro wig, dance on a table and be yourself. The management encourages wackiness.”
So no one looks particularly surprised when Mike Santangelo, 26, drops to his knees before a Lifesaver-laden bride and waxes poetic: “It’s easy to grin, when your ship’s come in, but a woman worthwhile is a woman who could smile, when her underwear are too tight in the seat.”
He is speaking these lines, adapted from the movie “Caddyshack,” in an attempt to satisfy one of the requirements on a to-do list written for Chicago bride-to-be Chris Glade by her maid of honor: get a man to write a love poem for her. Among her other errands: Get a kiss from a bald man, get a hair off a guy’s chest, get a signed roll of toilet paper from the men’s room.
Just now, though, Glade, 26, is distracted by a line of suitors seeking the privilege of paying a dollar to orally pluck a Life Saver from her shirt. She obliges them until “You’re the One That I Want” from the movie “Grease” engages her in a spirited singalong with her friends.
“She’s been really stressed. This is the first time I’ve seen her smile in two months,” says Kristen Kelly, 26, Glade’s maid of honor and friend since 3rd grade. “This kind of thrusts her back to her college days.”
The appeal of a retro club bedecked with a Partridge family bus, the Love Bug and a Twister-patterned floor is self-evident for these women, whose friendships often began sometime around the first screening of “Saturday Night Fever” and have endured through this year’s “The Last Days of Disco.” It’s clear from the crowd shaking booties here on two recent Saturday nights that those last days haven’t yet come.
Lori Hughes, 41, of Cicero is one bride-to-be who saw the throngs respond to songs like ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” when they first came out — and she’s wearing an old purple polyester pantsuit, along with a turquoise T-shirt and white veil, to prove it. “This is Captain & Tennille,” she informs her daughter, Lisa, age 21, as “Love Will Keep Us Together” plays. “I didn’t know that,” Lisa acknowledges, “but I know the words” — and the two sing them together.
A few feet away on a platform, Jason Herrera, 24, of Hobart, Ind. — something of an unofficial club mascot in a gold satin jacket and black pants — momentarily transfixes the crowd with his solo freestyle dance performance to Michael Jackson’s “Working Day and Night.” After a moment, he hoists up Tracie Lyons, 28, of Warrenville, her veil trailing, and spins her around to squeals of delight from her party.
“I love this bar,” proclaims Yager — who later would become Sheila Trossman. “It’s one of the few places where most of the guys will dance, and you never see a fight break out.”
A bachelorette party hostess beckons the bartender for a potent potion to force upon the bride. Will it be a Raging Bullwinkle, perhaps, or an Exorcist shot to make her head spin? She decides on Brady Punch, which is plopped down on a stretch of wood plastered with clippings of memorable teams such as Tony Orlando and Dawn, Seals & Crofts and Starsky and Hutch. Bride-to-be Danielle Robbins, 26, from South Bend, Ind., already holding a beer, reluctantly accepts the drink from her friend.
“This music reminds me of a lot of the songs I used to make fun of,” she says, then grimaces after a gulp of the melon-colored concoction. “My God, this is nasty!”
It isn’t all Bradys and Bee Gees at Polly Esther’s. Downstairs, in the darker ’80s domain known as the Culture Club, “Good Vibrations” from Marky Mark loosens up the crowd while black lighting makes the smattering of white veils glow periwinkle. Bowing his head, a stranger gently extracts one of the lollipops protruding from the point of Yager’s V-neck — a deluxe treat that her friends announce will cost him $5 instead of the baseline buck for a sucker just anywhere on Yager’s shirt.
Bob Watman, 33, who co-founded Polly Esther’s in New York in 1991 with Tim Ouellette, says the ’80s are beginning to gain on the disco era in popularity at the clubs, which can be found in places such as Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Denver, Houston, Austin and Washington, D.C.
“It started with the ’70s being the main draw,” Watman says, “but it’s pretty split now. We have some people there, believe it or not, who didn’t experience the ’80s. It’s a novelty for them.”
Because of that decade’s increasing allure, the ’80s area in Chicago’s club, a 10,000-square-foot space that opened in April 1997, probably will expand by about 2,000 square feet in the next few months, Watman says. Right now, it’s about half the size of the ’70s expanse upstairs. New clubs in San Francisco and St. Louis will be more equally divided.
When those clubs open, Watman expects the bachelorettes to invade immediately.
“For some reason, the phenomenon with bachelorettes just started and snowballed. It’s the same all across the country whenever we open a new city. It’s the very fun, upbeat, colorful, bright atmosphere bringing people back to their growing-up years. They go crazy when we play the theme songs — `Love Boat,’ `Good Times,’ `The Jeffersons.’ They’re all singing along in unison and having a great time.”
He has no complaints about the bachelorettes, but their inflatable dates, with names like Big John, are another story. They’ve been known to shatter a disco ball or two or cause a ruckus because of their clumsiness on particularly congested nights. “Sometimes, we have to charge them a cover,” Watman jokes.
In most cases, the more gear the bachelorette parties carry in — squirt guns, balloons, boas, party blowers, anatomically correct dolls — the less likely the women are to end up being carried out. They’re too busy juggling props to chug shots. Yager, for her part, stuck to beer most of the night, with allowances for a lemon-drop shot or two.
“Ten percent — not even 10 percent — 6.5 percent are trouble,” Polly Esther’s general manager Mark Neal says of bachelorettes who overimbibe. Neal and Delcano say they can sometimes see it coming when the limos spill out their well-primed passengers.
Although strip clubs such as Sugar Shack in Wisconsin and drag-queen establishments such as Baton Lounge in Chicago remain popular destinations for bachelorettes, Yager maintains that “by far, Polly Esther’s is the best place. Everyone’s in a good mood here.”
Of course, her fiance at home wasn’t so elated to hear about the lollipops at her party, she says.
“I told him, `Wait a minute; you had yours in a private room with a topless waitress and a stripper. Everything I did at my party was so tame.’
“And I definitely had much more fun than he did.”
