Tainted women in Vistavision perform for out-of-state kids at the late show

Summer in Pennsylvania often means county fair time, which takes me back to sno cones, spending all day walking around the track, agricultural exhibits, hot sausage sandwiches, throwing up after riding on the Tilt-a-Whirl, and naked women.

Yes, naked women.

All these years later it seems, unbelievable, unfathomable and just ridiculous.

But it's true.

Part of the fair experience at the Lycoming County Fair growing up included the "girlie shows," which were traveling, decidedly seedy extravaganzas just off the Midway, typically located somewhere between the Himalaya and the Glass House.

Each night, as it got a little later, say 9 p.m. or so, recorded stripper's music would start playing and several scantily-clad women would step out from behind the dime-store curtain and shimmy and shake for a few minutes. An emcee, who often doubled as the ticket taker, would give the typical, "step right up to see the most beautiful girls in the world, performing just for you. Please note that this show is for gentlemen only." For a few dollars, you could then go backstage and see, what we called a "hootchie show." In other words, a striptease.

Really.

If a show was about to begin and you happened to be anywhere on the fairgrounds, a murmur would go through the crowd when the girls came out; everyone would hurry to see the sin that awaited you if you could muster the courage to get in line with your $5.

Of course, you supposedly had to be 21 to go behind the curtain. That didn’t stop any self-respecting boy from trying to get in any time after he was 15 or so. One night, with several of my buddies, we stood up tall and got in line like we had been there before. I quickly handed over my $5 without making eye contact, in hopes that he wouldn't see the 17-year-old innocence and extreme curiosity in my eyes. I hurried past, waiting to be called back and told to go home. The call never came.

I won't describe in any detail what I saw, but it was unforgettable, for all the right and wrong reasons.

For most teenage boys, it was a rite of passage, the first time many of us saw a naked woman. This was of course, way before the Internet, when you still had to pay to see nudity. Mysteries were revealed on those hot, steamy nights, only a few steps from the cornfields just south of town.

Looking back, this all was startling. Obviously, it was indescribably inappropriate for such a family scene, but also because it was in small town America, smack dab in the Central Pa. Bible Belt.

Girlie shows are obviously gone now, disappearing, I think, sometime in the 70s.

Bob Seger was spot on when he sang of working on mysteries without any clues.

For a lot of us, the hootchie show provided some of the first clues to the biggest mystery of all.