I'd heard much about the showcase, and seen half a dozen dumps like it. It was one of those phonily “artistic” dives, where pale poets quote blank verse to blank people, where bands honk “modern” dissonances as background to sonorous verbiage. Here gathered painters and writers and poets and sculptors and all sorts of people who talked in lower case, like the showcase sign outside. It wasn't much of a place for laughs. Elaine and I went down the cement steps and stopped at the bottom. The place was dimly lighted, but I could see a long bar stretching from a point directly ahead of us to our left for about forty feet. The wall facing the bar, the wall alongside which we stood now, was covered with paintings and drawings, and beyond the far end of the bar at our left were more paintings. On our right was a small room in which couples and groups sat around tables covered with black-and-white checked cloths. Candles stuck in empty wine bottles provided wavering illumination. Straight ahead of us, at this end of the bar, was an open doorway.
What do You think about Over Her Dear Body (1959)?
