The Morbid the Merrier
Updated Playboy Club returning to Chicago
Reimagined attraction that was born in Windy City looks to open with high-end restaurant, lounge early next year
Chicago Tribune
Located between the Western Union Office and the Humphrey for President Headquarters, the Playboy Club offers all the luxuries and pleasures to its sophisticated clientele. There is valet parking for your wheelchair or walker. Let our beautiful Bunnies serve you a Metamucil martini, or let our sommelier show you our list of vintage Lipitor. And you certainly will want to move and groove through our holographic exhibit; it is just like standing next to Stella Stevens and Jan Murray….
Can you sense my excitement? Neither can I, and I still have my prostate. Hugh Hefner indeed was a liberating spirit of the Sixties and Seventies. Playboy Magazine saved a generation of teenage boys the trouble of having to imagine a naked woman. (And many of those naked women ended up the trophy wives of Texas oilmen.) But by the Eighties, there was nothing left to liberate. Nudity had become prosaic. Every actress since the Seventies has gone topless; yes, even Judy Dench. The Playboy centerfold had lost her distinction as well as privacy. Then technology made Playboy a complete anachronism. “You have a message. A Russian prostitute wants to marry you, and here is what she has to offer….” The capacity of Google as panderer and pimp far surpasses the tepid offerings of Hugh Hefner.
If you believe feature writers, the Sixties are back in fashion. I can appreciate the nostalgia for solvency, competent Democrats (come back, LBJ) and literate Republicans. But the appeal of the Playboy Club? There is as much interest in seeing the 75-year-old Stella Stevens as a centerfold.