The Krazy Horse Diorama
Sculpture in Fabric
(see additional pictures below)

When I was a small girl in Erie, Pa., back in the 60's, I would regularly spend some time cooling my heels on a park bench in Perry Square while waiting for my mother to pick me up after dance class. Across from me would be the Avalon Restaurant, where I would later work as a waitress, and, down on the corner, to my right, there was the Krazy Horse Saloon; and I was so fascinated by the suctomers coming in and out of these two institutions that they would become my first dioramas.

I've read that civilaization happened abouth the time that alcohol was invented. Maybe the only thing that could have turned wandering hunter-gatherers into sedentary farmers was the perk of inebriation. After all, one had to settle to brew the stuff, and one had to grow the grain to have a reliable supply. Maybe farmers first planted grain to make beer, and only later started to grind and eat the stuff because they were so hungry.

During the days of the wild west, the first real building in any new town was always the saloon. Churches and schools would come later, if at all. Boozing and brawling can exorcise the wildness of a new community, and its back rooms will define it, and we are still the essence of these raw forces which I explored in my college days, and put on film. Of course, I could just have fallen in love with the complexities of its aroma - cheroot smoke and leather, powder, sweat, saw dust, perfumes, unwashed feet, and old wooden surfaces long pickled with beer.

I went home for a while in 1980 when my father was sick, and visited my old haunts around Perry Square. The Avalon Restaurant had closed, and the side wall of the Krazy Horse was gone, as that building was being demolished to make way for an insurance center. Just a few feet behind the wrecking ball was the bar, with its stage, and dressing rooms, having all their furniture and drapes still in place, including the bar fixtures, and even the piano. I had time to really see the place because of a current labor strike, and was amused to note that all the upstairs rooms were painted purple and red.

I've heard that the Krazy Horse had been in that spot for four generations, and before the stone building there had been a wooden one which could have been from colonial days. People had been carousing on that spot with booze and show girls for quite a while, so, in 1983, I celebrated its memory by making it my second diorama.

Most of the characters were from my childhood in the 60's, but a few were from similar bars I'd known from my college days on South Street in Philadelphia. When I resurrected the display for this show, some of the characters had found new homes, and needed replacements, like "Bubbles," a fond memory from my childhood when Vaudeville still walked the bars.

Lisa Lichtenfels

Lisa Lichtenfels