Ballpark Blues

It's too noisy in here to talk, Carroll said, and pulled us into a small closet filled floor-to-ceiling with liquor. Whatever inventory isn't consumed tonight, he said, will be held by the alcohol and beverage commission while the club looks for a new home.

He opened a package of mints. "I feel awful," he said of the closing. "Just all the memories, all the people. They always come back. People I haven't seen for years, somehow they always find a way back down here. I should put it all in a book -- no names, though."

A lot of it actually has all been recorded, in the written histories of gay culture in Washington. Driven by an unfriendly police chief in the '70s down to the blight of the Navy Yard, the seamier clubs thrived here. It became the opposite of more mainstream, ho-hum homo club life. Going down to Navy Yard made you feel a little dirty (or a lot dirty), in an adventurous or perhaps even anonymous way. It never felt completely safe. Parking was plentiful but dicey. Razor wire and cinder blocks -- it was a look, and it is perhaps irreplaceable. It may be hard to understand Half and O as a lost gay authenticity; harder still to assign it any civic value.

So come back inside Ziegfeld's. Understand it, at the very least, as home.

It was not a big club. The carpet was threadbare. There was a small stage, and a stair leading up to the holiest sanctum -- the performers' dressing room. There was a retractable disco ball over the scuffed-up dance floor, and a lethargic smoke-belcher for occasional effects. The cocktail waiters were shirtless. The walls were garishly lavender. There was a big U-shaped bar in the back, and a door leading into Secrets and all that it might hold.

A drag-queen customer in a purple velvet dress and "Hart to Hart" hairdo, who goes by the name Stephanie Bunns and stands 6 feet 8 in her platform sandals, ordered another in a string of White Russians and said she had no idea where she'd go out next Saturday night. "I've been coming here every week for 10 years," she said. "I'm staying till they throw me out, till the bitter end."

As the queens performed their numbers, mayoral candidate Michael Brown arrived with an aide, handing out fliers deploring the "disservice to the gay community by not assisting the O Street clubs in relocating." While performers Billie Ross and Vicki Voxx (both channeling Diana Ross) did a version of "I Will Survive" (which was Gloria Gaynor -- we know, stay with us here), Brown shouted above the music that the closings are just another failure of the District "to have a plan. This never should have happened this way, and it happens to all kinds of businesses."

Past closing time, John Parks, the club's longtime manager, told people to keep partying: "Drink it so we don't have to pack it tomorrow."

Around 2:30 a.m. people mobbed the floor to hug Ella Fitzgerald goodbye and ply her with still more dollar bills. She performed "The Party's Over": "They've burst your pretty balloon," she mouthed along. "And taken the moon away/It's time to wind up the masquerade/Just make your mind up/The piper must be paid." It felt like it would go on forever.

But Monday afternoon, in the harsh light of day, Ella came back and cleaned out her things. "One more trip up those stairs," she said, "and I'm gone."