The Go-Go Bar
Hey lady dancin’ on the bar
Can’t help but wonder
Who you are
Sippin’ a beer
Watching your reflections
Sway in the mirror
Other drinkers watchin’
Your sways to the music
Heads are bobbin’
Your expression unaware
Freely groovin’
Like you’re not really there
As I fall under your spell
Can’t help reactin’
While passions swell
Hey lady dancin’ on the bar
Can’t help but wonder
Who you … are
–LE – 9/1977 (updated 9/10/25)
PS: This is not the original poem; lost it over the years, but as close as I can remember it. I even put it to a tune, and our band played it in bars and venues around northern OH for a couple of years before the band broke up. I was sitting in a Go-Go bar on Euclid Ave., on the east side of Cleveland, a ways east of ‘midtown’, after a gig one night, about 1:AM in the morning. Wasn’t ready to go home yet; needed to unwind after our show… It was a long way home to my empty house, as I was recently divorced, and there was no one there now but me…
No, I didn’t stay for a chat with the dancer, as I was a real ‘outsidder’ there and certainly NOT ‘welcome’. Even with my years of MA training, I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I’d stand a chance if I were to try and ‘chat-up’ the most beautiful girl there, the object of everyone’s attention and adoration… I’m not stupid… When I’d finished my beer, I took the long drive home; was living in an old farmhouse just outside of Oberlin at the time; -)
CynOp 
3 responses to “The Go-Go Bar – Memoir Addendum”
A lot of guys, now and in the past, think they’ll be rejected, so never ask. Who knows what might have happed if you’d taken a chance. 😉
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I agree with you. But here’s a little more context. At any rate, I wasn’t really looking for any new entanglements, having been very recently divorced. Yes, I was interested in the dancer, as the poem suggests, but I really was in the ‘wrong’ part of town and the wrong bar for a long-haired, very tired after our show, white boy, in one of the most volatile sections of Cleveland… at that time. The Hough riots weren’t that far in the past. And everyone in the bar, with the possible exception of the dancer (who couldn’t help but notice me, the white glare at the end of the bar), were staring dagers at me, even as I departed…; -)
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lol…I now understand.
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