“We don’t cause trouble, we don’t bother nobody.” Few of the barflies whose acquaintance either we or the staff of the Double Deuce have the good and/or mis fortune of meeting adhere to Rick the Ruler’s public proclamation of good behavior as closely as Table Dancer. Played by Sylvia Baker, she’s the character who dances on a table. Here are things that, based on the conduct of other barflies in the film, she could reasonably be expected to do instead:
- Pull a knife and threaten to stab someone at a moment’s notice
- Pull a knife and attempt to stab someone at a moment’s notice
- Pull a knife and actually stab someone at a moment’s notice
- Agree to grope a woman’s breasts for money without actually having the money
- Wallop the shit out of someone who groped a woman’s breasts for money without actually having the money
- Offer her breasts to be groped for money without first doing due diligence
- Have a fistfight on the floor with a sibling
- Propose getting nipple to nipple
- Lob a beer bottle at a blind man’s head because he says he has to urinate
- Laugh like an imbecile
- Drink until incapacitated
- Have sex with an employee in the storeroom
- Be part of a team sent by a local businessman to assassinate a bouncer
- Not wear a shirt
- Purchase and snort cocaine, though somehow not in that order
- Deface the walls with vulgar graffiti
- Locate the vehicle of a bouncer, slash all its tires, break its radio antenna, smash its windshield, and shove an entire stop sign through the window
- Say “dirtball” or “moose-lips”
- Wear a very loud shirt
All Table Dancer wants to do is gyrate spasmodically on a table to the Jeff Healey Band, occasionally lifting her skirt to show that her silver-black bodysuit goes all the way down. It’s her rat-faced boyfriend who decides this is worth committing murder in a room full of witnesses for, not her. She doesn’t even get upset when Dalton rams her boyfriend’s skull through furniture solid and steady enough for her to dance on. She’s just like “Oh! Party’s over I guess” and takes Dalton’s extended hand to climb down off the table, then looks him over like the snack he is as she leaves.
Table Dancer represents the joie de vivre to which the rest of the film’s barflies should aspire. Would Dalton have been so quick to send Hank in to break up the party if this were the worst of the behavior one could expect of the Double Deuce’s clientele? I think not. She falls victim to broken-windows policing more than anything else, like how Giuliani used to shut down all the clubs where black people went to listen to hip-hop to make the city safe for oligarchs, somehow. Am I saying Dalton gentrified and Disneyfied the Double Deuce?
Am I?
Tags: barfights, barflies, dalton, knife nerds, road house, sylvia baker, table dancer, the double deuce