COLORADO SPRINGS- At the Ritz Bar and Grill on Tejon St. downtown, waitresses have to bend over the counter to convey drink orders to the bartenders. There’s a raised platform to assist them in their short skirts. If the show outside is too tame for you.

I remember learning in high school that all the roles in Shakespeare’s plays, even the female characters, were portrayed by male actors. We were left to assume that women in Elizabethan England were not permitted on stage for the usual discriminatory reasons. But that was a simplification, which obscured the origins of sexism like the Burqa.

In Old England it was not that their gender was not talented enough, nor, directly, that women’s power challenged the men. Elizabethan rulers deemed it imprudent to let women advertise their wares on public stages. Women who were not at home with families, serving the domestic sex trade let’s say, were free-agent professionals. Inn keepers and barmaids had job descriptions not far removed from prostitutes, and a stage gave them too much marketing visibility. No doubt, obviously power.

I suppose sex also threatened to obscure the art of the theater. A favorite author once wrote he could only aspire to create a poem as immediately compelling as a pornographic photograph.

A friend of mine used to work at the Ritz, and assured me the skirt length was voluntary. Likewise the bar step at the center of everyone’s attention. Both great for tips she said.