Hot and Efficient: PO At Its Best

Decided to take a slight detour on my way to catch an evening flight from PHL. Purple Orchid is a squalid looking purple cube at the intersection of two thoroughfares in industrial southwest Philadelphia. It sits at the base of the Passyunk Bridge which, City statistics show, is traversed primarily by people engaged in buying cars, parking cars, junking cars, or mongering. PO shares a massive parking lot with a comparably squalid strip center.

Enter through a small vestibule into the main room housing a small, two-pole stage surrounded by an eight-sided bar. No cover in afternoons. Guy at high counter next to entry counts songs for private dances, which happen either in a communal room immediately to the left of the entry ($20/song) or in one of two private rooms with doors against the front wall to the right of the entrance ($30/song). The communal room is dark and you and your dancer can do the same thing in there that happens in the more “private” rooms. Still, I always opt for the private rooms so there’s no ambiguity about my intentions. They installed small eye-level windows in the doors of the private rooms following some kind of raid a year or so ago, but the windows faze nobody. Dancers used to hang their purses in front of the window but more recently don’t seem to bother with it.

I don’t consider myself to be a regular, but I do have a regular spot at the bar immediately in front of the doors for the private rooms. That location paid off in this case.