At Coyote Ugly, It's Bellies Up On the Bar
But Can It Turn Washington Into an Unbutton-Down Town?
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 13, 2004; Page C01
Yeeeeeeeeeeeee-haawwww! Hot babes dancing on the bar! Tight jeans, tank tops, taut bellies, sassy lips . . . slingin' the whiskey, drizzlin' cocktails into gaping mouths. You can see them from the street, silhouetted in the second-floor windows, clogging away till the cows come home. It's a hot-babe bonanza!
They're the Coyotes, the bartenders of Coyote Ugly, Washington's newest, loudest and least undergarment-friendly nightspot.
A news release says the Coyotes will taunt bad tippers, spray the crowd with water "and aim to get the tamest female visitors to dance on the bar and donate their bras."
You're thinking: Unlikely. Not in Washington. The women are too conservative. And yet right here, on a Wednesday night, even as Disney on Ice conducts family-friendly business across the street at MCI Center, that's what's happening: A mysterious babe in black sidles up to the bar and "donates her bra."
Her husband applauds. She slips the bra from underneath her jacket in a deft maneuver, and hands it to the Coyote on top of the bar. The woman in black soon mounts the bar herself and gets in touch with her inner Coyote.
Somewhere along the line, the reporter has forgotten to find out the name of the organization on behalf of which the bras are donated. The Salvation Army?
Now a Coyote is poised over the edge of the bar, pouring "Sex on the Beach" into the mouth of a publisher who is leaning back with her face aimed at the ceiling. She definitely does not want her name in the paper.
"Don't put me in there, I'll get in trouble with my job," says another woman, a lawyer, who has no intention of getting up on the bar. "You got a good job in town, and you come in here and dance on the bar -- you'll look like an idiot."
This has never been a Coyote Ugly sort of city. It's a martini lounge town, a hotel lobby-bar town, a warehouse-size dance club town, but not an in-your-face bartop-babe whiskey-saloon town. This is not a city where you go to work in the morning and say, "Sorry I'm late, got totally trashed last night at the Ugly and danced on the bar."
There's a wildly successful Coyote Ugly at the New York New York casino in Las Vegas, but Vegas is a city that boasts, "What happens here, stays here." The slogan in Washington is more like: "What happens here may be grounds for a special prosecutor."
The federal government is the official schoolmarm of America, constantly holding hearings to fret about a problem, citing folks for regulatory violations, imposing sanctions. The Democrats disapprove of the Republicans and the Republicans disapprove of the Democrats. Everyone disapproves of the Super Bowl halftime show. Disapproval is an industry here. Untoward nocturnal behavior is fodder for scandal, and thousand-page reports with footnotes. The rule here: Cover your butt. Don't shake it on top of the bar.
That's the theory that Coyote Ugly wants to debunk.
"I had no idea what I looked like," a petite data analyst says after she dismounts the bar, "but I had a great time."
What did she think about up there?
"I didn't give a [hoot] about anything," she says.
"Every girl loves being the center of attention," says advertising saleswoman Vicky Pettinaro, who also danced on the bar. Coyote Ugly may trade on women's sexuality, she says, but "there's a difference between sexy and trashy."
The mysterious woman in black reveals herself to be Cassandra Eckert, who runs an online social-event publication. How did she feel onstage?
"Wanted. Desirable."
"Coyote Ugly" was a movie based on the antics at a bar in New York, and the film has spawned several Coyote Uglys (Uglies?) across the country. Jennifer Worthington, owner of the Las Vegas franchise, will have her official grand opening here in Washington tonight, after a couple of shakedown nights for media and VIPs.
Is Washington too conservative for her bar?
"That's precisely why we're going to work in Washington. We came into this market because there's nothing like it. This is a place where girls can go crazy, guys can go crazy. It's like the ultimate fraternity party on steroids," Worthington says.
She insists that even the most conservative-looking women will unleash their inhibitions when given the chance. She notes that her old boss, action-film producer Jerry Bruckheimer, used to call movies the transportation business, saying, "We're taking people out of their world for 21/2 hours." True for movies, true for Coyote Ugly.
Does she dance on the bar?
"No," she says. "I'm the worst dancer in the history of mankind."
With all due respect, isn't this basically a PG-13 strip club?
"It's provocative and it's sexy, without crossing any lines. Absolutely no nudity, no stripper-style dancing," Worthington says.
Which is a cue to get back to the Coyotes. There are 30 of them, and they're all fabulously attractive, selected from a thousand applicants, Worthington says. She wanted strong women, sassy, smart -- "tough, sexy broads." She describes the perfect Coyotes: "The men want to sleep with them, the girls want to be friends with them."
See, it's really a feminist thing, according to the PR pitch. It's not about giving guys something to gawk at, or women a chance to be quasi-strippers for a night. It's about women taking charge. It's practically a matriarchy. One rule is paramount: Only women can dance on the bar.
"It's about making women feel like they're in control," says Cristi Meyer, one of the Vegas Coyotes imported to help the local Coyotes get into gear. "It's all about women. We embarrass guys, we cut off their ties." The Coyotes, she says, "don't take [guff] from anybody."
They are not skimpily dressed, at least not exactly. They wear long pants, for gosh sakes! That said, the jeans are so tight, they're epidermal. There is no flashing of thong straps, but that carries with it another tantalizing implication. This one lass, she's got a horizontal tear in her jeans right at the rump line, and one begins to ponder the possibility that some of these young ladies aren't -- how to say this politely? -- wearing much in the way of drawers.
(Face it: Just reading this story is a form of misbehavior. There will be repercussions.)
If one could make a complaint, it's not that the Coyotes haven't worked out all the kinks in their dance routines, it's that they all have pretty much the same body. Another oddity: Coyote Ugly has no lower gears. No downshifting allowed. It's always in overdrive. The dials on the sound system go up to 11. Tired of loud music and dancing Coyotes on the first floor? Go up to the second floor and there's more of them, and more on the third: Three full floors of go-go-Coyote. You will have fun, you must have fun, and if you don't have fun you'll feel guilty for not having fun.
And then there will be congressional hearings on why you didn't have fun.
