Last July, I wrote about a favourite place in Second Life, called the Pino 1951 bar:
I have a voluptuous 1950s-styled avatar named Coupon Clip (pictured above), whom I quite often take out to the Pino 1951 bar to dance for tips. The Pino bar is all red crushed velvet curtains, smooth jazz vocals, dry martinis, cigar smoke, and spotlit stripper poles. The dancers try their best to entice tips from the clientele. Being able to keep up the witty banter often had more to do with getting a good tip than actually stripping off your clothes, and I do have to confess that I was pretty good at the repartee with the customers. (My favourite line was “This is just a side gig, honey…I have a Ph.D. in breast physics.” Don’t worry; that link is safe for work.) It was harmless fun, and I just assumed that the bar would be around forever, whenever I felt the urge to slap on a slinky outfit and role play a Fifties exotic dancer back in the old Rat Pack days.
Well, the Pino 1951 bar shut down unexpectedly, due to a dispute between the management and the owner. The original proprietor then went and set up The 1969 Bar (a.k.a. The Wrong Hole), which still exists to this day.
But there was something special about the 1951 Pino bar. It wasn’t just a stripper bar; it was a place where people would gather and have conversations of all kinds. It had a real neighbourhood bar feeling, as rare a thing to find in real life just as it is in Second Life!
So you can imagine my happy surprise when I recently discovered that the Pino 1951 bar has made a comeback, looking very much the same as it did before. The new name is the Pino 1971 bar, and it appears to be under new ownership. As before, your landing point is a dark, rainy alley just outside the bar’s entrance, complete with the Live Nudes neon sign:
You enter, and the smoky, slightly seedy, dated interior is just as I remembered it: all crushed red velvet, a yellow neon jukebox, a constant music stream of jazz vocalists, a small bar and couches to sit and talk:
At the far end of the bar are three round pedestals with stripper poles and chairs, where the strip-tease artists keep up a running banter with the customers, hoping to extract a few tips from the gentlemen observers.
I think it’s the attention to details, and the atmosphere that sets this place from so many other places on the grid, the evocation of a particular, long-gone era, an era well before the pandemic that is currently weighing so heavy on everybody’s minds. A refuge. An oasis. An escape.
If you want to visit the Pino 1971 bar for yourself, make sure that you have set your avatar account to be able to access Adult content (because sometimes naughty things can go on upstairs in the motel!). If you don’t know how to set that up, press Ctrl-P in your Firestorm viewer to pull up your Preferences window, then click the General tab, then hit the drop-down menu under “I want to access content rated:”, and set it to General, Moderate, Adult as shown here (see the red arrow). Remember to save your changes!
Once you’ve done that, you can visit the Pino 1971 bar at this SLURL. (Be sure to accept the recommended windlight settings offered on arrival, which add greatly to the overall atmosphere. And also be sure to find and ride the elevator and explore the entire building! The attention to detail, especially in the penthouse, is astounding. The designer did a fantastic job.)
Vanity Fair (or one of her alts) is usually here most evenings, listening to the music stream, sedately sipping a coffee or a cocktail, and chatting with the working girls and the other patrons. We’d love to see you there! Please drop by for a visit and experience a bygone era.
