I hope you like our new banner photo (above)! Its one of the nicest ads from the "El Mundo" newspaper's "Dance Guide." The ad announces a series of shows by bandleader Lucio Demare and his new singer, Raúl Berón at the Palermo Palace in early 1943.
The Palace is a bit of a mystery. It hosted many important acts like Demare with Berón, Angel D'Agostino, Alberto Castillo, Orlando Goñi, Roberto Rufino, and many others, yet I haven't found anyone who knows anything about the place. And the building itself is long gone...
I've seen two pictures taken at the Palace, but none of them are reveal much except that the audience was overwhelmingly male! You'll have to look really hard to find the female faces in the picture shown here, which was taken during the debut of the singer Carlos Tagle in 1945. Women were admitted free, but the incentive doesn't seem to have had much effect. It might be that, like the cabarets of the time, the place employed coperas, that is, women whose main job was to get male customers to buy expensive drinks for them (which usually consisted of nothing more than iced tea). In that case, respectable women would have been loath to attend without an escort, and even then, it was considered questionable. The few women we see in the photo may be coperas, or they may be free-spirited milongueras who were plucky enough to go wherever they like.
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