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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