The right to dance at the Pink Pussy Kat

What do two nude go-go dancers and a pissed-off sheriff have in common?

Not much—unless you count a 1969 criminal trial involving an Orangevale strip club that is lost from memory.

The Pink Pussy Kat was a local bar and strip joint that regularly tested the boundaries of public decency laws, described by a prosecutor as “sleazy” and possessing “the pungent odor of a latrine.” Sacramento County Sheriff “Big” John Misterly, hell-bent on purging his jurisdiction of prurience and degeneracy, regularly raided the bar to discourage patrons.

In 1969, Susanne Haines and Sheila Brendenson were arrested at the club for performing fully nude—or engaging in “lewd conduct” and “indecent exposure”—along with bar owner Leonard Glancy.

The trial drew national attention. Judge Earl Warren, Jr., son of then-California Gov. (later U.S. Chief Justice) Earl Warren, presided over the case. Because there were no recordings of the dance at issue, there was concern that the jury wouldn’t have the information to deliver a well-reasoned verdict.

So the trial moved to the scene of the supposed crime, where Haines, 22, danced naked in front of 12 jurors to Creedence Clearwater’s “Suzie Q”—for free speech.

Recorded accounts of the trial and bar are rare. For Ed Fletcher, a former Sacramento Bee reporter, it’s a story difficult to forget, one he’s been determined to tell for the past decade.

“I grew up in Orangevale. When I first heard of this trial, I was flabbergasted that this happened, because it’s not the image you have of Orangevale,” Fletcher says. “I went to look for it and I couldn’t find almost anything on the internet.”

He started diving into old Bee archives to read more about the trial. Eventually, he turned to the Sacramento Center for History for local TV station footage.

Now, Fletcher and co-producer Damen Quincy Hayes are close to completing a documentary, Do the Dance, an examination of the trial and its relationship to the First Amendment.

Hayes, the film’s director, found himself drawn to the story for its feminist undertones as well. “It was a woman’s journey,” Hayes says. “This story needed to be told about women standing up for what they believe.”

Hayes and Fletcher met at Burning Man several years ago. In 2012, they began developing a short script based on the Pink Pussy Kat Trial.

“I read the short story,” Hayes recalls, “and we’re sitting there, and I looked at [Fletcher] and said: ’Look, we have a feature-length film here. We need to broaden the story, make it more of a feature screenplay—we could make money off this.’”

Fletcher started writing a longer script for a dramatic retelling called Pink.

After multiple workshops and a trip to the American Film Market, Fletcher and Hayes seemed well on their way to making Pink happen.

That is, until one of the trial’s key real-life actors passed away in 2015.

“Carol Doda died, and I was like, ’Oh shit, I need to get some of these people on camera before anyone else passes,’” Fletcher recalls.

Doda rose to fame as the first public topless dancer. As a witness, she performed a dance in front of the jury—in addition to Haines’ dance—to make a case for artistic expression. Fletcher and Hayes decided to work on the documentary first.

After the trial, Haines and the others were acquitted. A couple weeks later, the county banned fully nude dancing and topless waitressing. Glancy, the bar’s owner, tried different workarounds, including showing live strip dances via closed-circuit broadcasts. Eventually he challenged the ban, but it was upheld by the California Supreme Court. The decision set a precedent, affecting other states’ laws on nudity.

Even today, California prohibits serving alcohol at fully nude strip clubs.

“It ultimately led to the demise and fracturing of that environment,” says Fletcher. “Even though society has evolved and changed in regards to nudity, we’re still stuck in a sort of puritanical culture.”

Half a century has passed since the trial. While Misterly and the district attorney had already died, Fletcher and Hayes managed to interview some of the remaining figures, including Judge Warren and the journalists who reported on the trial.

Then there’s the woman of the hour. After the trial dance, Haines went on to win Miss Nude Universe 1972 and racked up several more arrests performing across the country. She retired from the public eye, moved to Florida, became a Christian and wrote an autobiography, Take it All Off, a cautionary tale about life in the fast lane. As part of their final chapter in filming Do the Dance, Fletcher and Hayes hope to meet her. But it’s not going to be easy.

“She doesn’t respond to phone calls, and she doesn’t talk to her sister, either,” Fletcher says. “We talked to her sister and her brother and some of her family, and she’s estranged herself from them.”

“So it’s gonna be one of those things where you get in a car and go knock on the door, and you visit the church and you try and make an appeal,” he added.

Despite the hurdles, Fletcher and Hayes are inching closer to seeing their story on the big screen. Since raising $10,000 through a 2017 Indiegogo campaign, they’ve secured additional funding through two investors, who they wouldn’t name. Their company, Perpetual F Entertainment, also recently partnered with the Los Angeles-based Framework for post-production. The documentary is slated to finish in July.

As they prepare Do the Dance for distribution, the duo will also continue working on Pink, which Fletcher describes as “The People vs. Larry Flint meets American Hustle.”

“Free expression is the extension of the right to assembly and our First Amendment rights,” he says. “I see that some of our freedoms are under attack, and there are those that are trying to push [us] into a protectionist mode, and I think we need to push back. I think this can be a good conversation piece.”