Recent Stories with tag in the northern lights

Tuesday night just past seven, I wandered into Ballard's Copper Gate, a 64-year-old Scandinavian bar on 24th Avenue NW. I'm no doubt late to this, but the Copper Gate's an odd but incredibly charming place: immaculate and well-lit, with a copper-topped bar built into a replica of a Viking boat, the relaxed, mostly middle-aged crowd of diners sat sipping wine and eating Scandinavian classics, surrounded by classy erotica. The walls are covered in places with vintage nudes and tame fetish shots that are somehow sexy but not dirty. It turns out that when new owners took over several years ago, they found the former owner's wife's stash of pictures, and took that as inspiration. A painting of a pretty young lass on the main wall, I was told by a helpful bar manager, has been there since the bar opened, and is supposedly the erotica-collecting woman herself back in the day.

The point is, as pretty much everyone who's written about it has noted, the Copper Gate, for all the naked ladies, is still the sort of place you could take your grandma (and I'm pretty sure there was one there). And much like the main bar, "the Pussy Room" in back is not nearly so dirty as it sounds. That said, you get to it by walking through a narrow, rounded passage painted deep red that leads to a room blocked off by red velvet curtains. Ahem. Pussy Room, indeed!... (more)