Hence we are getting eight weeks of Peaky Blinders filming here in the broad acres this autumn, to add to our own, home-grown gangsters (Red Riding), strippers (The Full Monty and The Calendar Girls) and other alluring cinema types.
But The Girlie Show is particularly strange - a red-headed stripper strides brazenly across a stage in silver shoes, her face curiously masculine, her cartoonishly round breasts topped by bright scarlet nipples.
A bright red sports car, a stripper and knee-length 24-karat gold chains: those accouterments define the sweet life in Miami in the feverish fantasies of Raúl (Dariel Arrechaga), a hotheaded, hormonally overcharged Havana teenager in "Una Noche".
The models-turned-entrepreneurs strutted down the red carpet with "golddigger," "stripper," "slut" and other racy terms painted all over their nude ensembles to promote Rose's upcoming Slut Walk in Los Angeles, California this October.
The doorman nonchalantly directed us to the basement, which looked like a sex club in a Hong Kong action film, with pin-size red lights and sealed Plexiglas stripper booths.
Eric then passed me something that resembled a red plastic clothespin – a "tail stripper" – which I clamped around the tailbone.
(Who would have thought then that the pasties look would go from stripper pole to red carpet to high fashion runways, as seen in Tom Ford's spring 2015 collection, then back again?).
The collection includes all of the typical images you'd assume -- Rose's face, Rose's butt, Rose twerking on a stripper pole, lips, red carpets -- along with some images that are sure to cause a little (or a lot of) controversy. .
The menu is just as varied at Hell's Kitchen Lounge, (150 Lafayette Street; 973-465-4422; hellskitchenlounge.com), which opened six years ago with a bordello theme: a red-and-black palette and a stripper pole.
