Madonna Inn

I hope you can come see this.*

When I was there, this Monday, the dance area was filled with soft-soled teenage San Luis Obispo Rug Cutters (their actual name), grooving to too-soft swing music and drinking iced water from the bar in Styrofoam cups. That was not the most intriguing part.

Imagine this (the dining room), but it had more flowers, more lights, more butterflies. MORE! MORE!

The bar area is carved - dark, yellow-orange wood - with faux Germanic grapevines - everywhere, and there are copper chairs and tables, and fake stained glass inserts in the window. There is NOWHERE for your eye to rest. The pillars, the ceiling - everywhere - is that carved wood, and it's painted in the few places where the wood is not carved, the flat bits, with even more grapevines. And then they added pastel leather high-back chairs. The dining area is as you see above, but with manymanymany fake flowers, and little white lights. Everywhere. Flowers on walls, in the middle of the room, strung on light fixtures - HUGE six-foot-wide sprays of flowers with white lights. And then in the one spot where they didn't stick flowers, they stuck a gigantic fake pink butterfly.

The excess is astounding.

Add gilt mirrors, and flocked hot pink velvet chairs, and more flowers, and an animatronic doll on a swing hanging, to and fro, from the ceiling. And for good measure, they shoved a truckload of gold cherub statues into every open corner.

It's like your tacky, drunken, Great Aunt's parlor came monstrously alive and set about feeding 100 people whipped cream soup.

UPDATE: Here is what it looks like today:

* Umberto Eco wrote, "The poor words with which natural human speech is provided, cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn...Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli."