All the excitement of a mayonnaise sandwich
Golden Banana is on US 1, but you may miss it because they hid it behind a Gulf station. There's plenty of parking. When I got there around 6:30 on a Tuesday night, three of the spaces were occupied. Ten dollars and a strangely thorough examination of your license gets you in the front door. Another ten gets you a Coke.
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Compared with the dives I usually review, the main room is almost upscale, with good lighting, spotless restrooms, and anodyne furniture. Actually, a lot of furniture; it's hard to get around, even if you're sober. There are about 20 seats around the T-shaped stage, all of them vacant when I got there.
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I think there were five dancers on the roster, of whom I actually saw three. All white, trim, late twenties, and 6s or 7s. (All those adjectives were approximate. There might have been one marginal exception to each.). The first dancer I saw on stage was performing to no one. I sat down and put a couple of dollars on the rail, but she continued performing to no one for a minute or two. She eventually came over, took my money, and went back to mid-stage. Eventually another customer sat down, and she spent the rest of the three-song set conversing with him.
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After about 10 minutes of this, she finished her set and a second dancer came out. This one had some actual personality, so we did a quick job interview. GB was her first club, and she had been there less than a month. As luck would have it, she was free for a dance after her set, so in the interests of providing some review details, we went to the cubicles at the far end of the club.
There are three of them, reasonably comfortable, but if anyone -- a bouncer, for example -- tried to see you, he could. The bouncer was at the entrance, but he took my $60 (two songs) and immediately lost interest. Even by Massachusetts standards, the dances were tame: topless, repetitive, and limited contact. She shewed me out of the cubicle at the end of the second song, and ignored me when she got back to the front room.
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I stayed around for a few more minutes, but by this time I understood why there were so many empty parking spots, and decided that once every five years was about the right frequency for my visits to the Golden Banana. There's nothing actually wrong with the club; but there's also nothing that stands out enough to make me go back. It seems I'm not the only one who thinks this. There's another club 400 yards away. (Because it's on a divided highway, it's a three mile drive.) Passing it on my way home, I saw the parking lot nearly full, but I was out of time for the day. Next time I'm in the area, I'll revisit the Cabaret instead.
