Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2006 | Page 90

86 Popular Culture Review Riviera refused to remove the billboard and City Hall acquiesced. The Riviera erected a bronze sculpture of the Crazy Girls derrieres on the Strip in front of the casino; patrons walk by and rub the bronze image for good luck. George Knapp and the National Organization for Women did protest the sculpture, as Capehart observes (3). A current billboard displayed at Bally’s Las Vegas is similar; it shows a chorus girl in headdress and rhinestone attire, clad in expensive furs and a thong and very little else, shot once again from the back so that the woman’s face is nonexistent or shot in profile with the woman’s face in shadow and her buttocks thrust towards the camera. Another billboard resembling the Bally’s marquee is currently displayed on Tropicana Avenue advertising the showgirls from the Follies Bergere show at the Tropicana Resort and Casino; the showgirl’s face is de-emphasized and her body is clad in a black and red feather headdress, boa and g-string; her bare back and nearly naked posterior is of primary focus; in other words, everything that connotes sexuality. As Las Vegas historian Mike Weatherford indicates, “the female ana F