Noir Night in Vesterbro

A couple days ago I volunteered to check tickets for the ASSITEJ International Play Festival for Young Audiences. It was an easy enough job: ripping tickets, counting them, and eating pizza meant for the performers. My job was made that much easier by the extremely low attendance. No more than 30 people showed up for either performance, which was a Brazilian play done entirely in Portuguese.

The play was being done in the Meatpacking District. It's a maze of rundown brick warehouses that look like scenes from a zombie apocalypse video game, or West Side Story, your pick. The stage was incredibly difficult to find amongst all the former slaughterhouses, and many of the audience came late and often ready to argue with any volunteers stupid enough to ask how they were doing.

I managed to stay up through an entire showing of the 2-hour play entitled "The Poem of Roses and Thorns." It was surprisingly entertaining, there was a lot of yelling, funny expressions, and the actors were exceptionally talented at balancing object of their heads. People who sat in the front row were given stage lights fashioned out of tin cans that turned on whenever the lights dropped, giving the dark scenes a cool campy vibe.

The show was OK considering I couldn't understand a word of it, but what I really enjoyed was getting a chance to explore Vesterbro after midnight. This area of Copenhagen has a reputation for being frequented by hookers and has more sex shops in a four block radius than I have cumulatively seen in my entire life. Theres a homeless shelter conspicuously placed on the busiest street in the area, a couple blocks from Copenhagen Central Train Station. Its windows are boarded up and the entrance is surrounded by a mob of old men showing varying degrees of depression and cleanliness.

I walked past the shelter and a man began walking at my side. He was eating what looked like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I knew it couldn't have been that, it's Denmark. He asked me if I was looking for "anything," which of course meant cocaine mixed with baking powder. I laughed uncomfortably and said no, thanking him for the generous offer.

Probably because it's the area containing central station, there are many many hotels in Vesterbro. I could hep but imagine all the times people must take advantage of the close proximity the hotel share with sex shops, prostitutes, and cheep Vietnamese restaurants. It seems like the perfect place to have a date witha lady of the night. First dinner, then a romantic walk to pick up a 20-inch silicone penis, then finally to the hotel that redoubtably smells strongly of vaginal fluid and sweat.

I walked past some hardcore S&M shops that proudly showed off their ball-gag and whip selections in their front windows. I only entered one of the shops, which appear to be open all night. A bronze statue visible from the main entrance caught my eye and I had to give it the quality attention it commanded. In case you

can't tell, it's a man, penetrating a rabbit, penetrating a sheep, penetrating a pig, penetrating a cow, some more penetrating... then a dog is eating out a very pleased woman at the end. Great art. I'd expect nothing less from a Danish sex emporium.

One of the main reasons I decided to walk after hours in such a seedy neighborhood was because I wanted to find some real-life hookers in the wild. Not, looking to be a John for the first time, rather, I wanted to finally be exposed to a line of work I had never seen before outside of movies. My first sighting was a woman who looked to be in her fourties and wore black stockings with a suggestive skirt and flattering heels. While her outfit made her look merely like another Danish woman who was comfortable with her body, she walked around indecisively and paused in the middle of the sidewalk at random intervals to look around. I passed her and she began speaking Danish to a man who was walking behind me. Sounds like a hooker to me, but I still called her a "maybe."