This is an archive - these pages are no longer updated!
Some information will be out of date.  Some of this writing goes back to 1995.
See Tiki Road Trip (2007 edition) for the most up-to-date information.

Aloha Gloria's
Pueblo, CO

November 2005: The basement mystery (see below) is now solved! "I just came across your web site, specifically Aloha Gloria's in Pueblo, Co. I was a bouncer there in 1996. Sorry Man.. I don't remember anything special about the basement. Sorry to hear the place closed though. -Gene" Thanks, Gene! May 2003: Tiki Road Trip update: Aloha Gloria's is now closed. November, 1999: I have never been a real fan of strip clubs.  I'm one of those pragmatic types who feels that it is kind of a waste of money to pay some girl who is completely indifferent to me and who would rather be at home doing her laundry to writhe all over me with a bored look on her face and then walk away without, er... finishing the job (sorry ladies, there was just no polite way to express that).  There's nothing erotic in that experience for me - it's just sort of pathetic and sad for both involved parties. Still, when my pal Mike told me that this old Tiki Bar in Pueblo had been turned into a strip club, all of a sudden the word "Exotica" was far more valid than ever before. I never really had any plans to go to Pueblo though, so I figured that Aloha Gloria's would be another one of those fabled Tiki joynts that I would never get to see for myself. In May of 1999, I happened to be driving from Denver to Amarillo (to pick up Rt. 66 in Texas after a trip to Denver and to therefore have a 'fun' drive back to Chicago. It sucked.).  Always Tiki-concious, I decided to cruise by Gloria's as I passed through Pueblo, to see what was happening.  It was closed when I arrived. In November of 1999, I was in Pueblo again, playing a show with Royal Crown Revue.  Having been on tour with these guys for about a month at that point, they were pretty tired of me talking Tiki all the time, and the list of candidates willing to follow me to random unseen Tiki Bars was growing thin, particularly after the disaster of dragging one of them to Bert's in Salt Lake City. When I mentioned that it was a "TikiTitty Bar", I got a few of the guys (the single ones, natch) to follow me over, along with a (female) fan of the band, and her 17-year-old brother.  This poor guy had never been in a bar before, let alone a strip club, and to be honest, I'm not really sure how he was able to finagle himself into the place.   Most of the Tiki action is outside.  There are virtually no traces of Tiki inside the place anymore, as all of the walls are now covered with rather grimy mirrors.  Part of one wall is still covered in good ol' thatch and bamboo, and a lone Tiki stands in the corner.  If you look in any direction other than towards that corner, all you will see is a run down crappy strip club, and probably some run down crappy strippers. Tropical Drinks?  You jest, surely. One thing that was most intriguing was a dark stairwell leading to a basement.  There was a chain and a 'Do Not Enter' sign across the top of the stairs, and it was so dark at the bottom that I could only see halfway down.  But the handrails were bamboo, and for some reason I was almost certain that the lower level was an off-limits Poly-Paradise.  Maybe it is a party room, or perhaps this is where the old Tikis of yesteryear are stored.  I could almost smell the Tikis down there  though.  I was sure I needed to get into that basement. Alas, one doesn't cause trouble in strip clubs, because the gorillas they hire as bouncers are probably not interested in my own brand of urban archaeology, and probably wouldn't believe me if I tried to tell them that my real motives for sneaking into their basement had nothing to do with the girls(?) dancing on the stage upstairs.  I didn't need to land in a heap on the sidewalk, so my normally fearless intrepid journalistic snoopiness was put aside for the remainder of the evening. pics courtesy of TikiMike

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