That night we did the video Wan was having a farewell party.  My girlfriend of 7 years was there that night.  So were a number of girls who had never worked in a bar before.  Skytop had been a guesthouse with an Internet cafe, and I had stayed there for 11 months waiting for my condo to be finished.  My best friend ever, in Pattaya, had been the Skytop owner.  He was Australian and his name was Peter.  He died, and from then on it was up to Wan to run the Guesthouse and the Internet Cafe.

When you see her in the Pattaya Bar Dancing video you will think that you are only seeing a Pattaya bar girl.  But she had been Peter's wife, and in my opinion she was a damn sight better at running a business than Peter ever was.  Among other things it was Wan who decided to start up a Pattaya beer bar just outside the Skytop Guesthouse front entrance. 

Most of the  Pattaya bar girls dancing in the video had been working  for Wan for 1 or 2 years.  Unlike most Pattaya bar owners Wan was that very special kind of person who could insure that kind of loyalty. 

Today, Wan and her Skytop Guesthouse and Internet Cafe would be an overwhelming success.  But as happens too many times in Pattaya events had moved completely out of her control.  The greedy landlord asked her to pay too much money to keep her lease up.  The same greedy landlord asked everyone else in the immediate neighborhood to pay outrageous sums of money to stay in business also.

Now I don't know about the details of that wonderful doctor who had her office just around the corner from Skytop.  That's Doctor Belen who had been my doctor.  Dr. Belen was very successful as a doctor.  She was so successful that she even had her own private ambulance to take her patients to the hospital.  Now, she has her office over on Third Road so I can only assume that the landlord had asked her to pay outrageous money to keep her business close to Wan's. 

That entire area where Skytop used to be is now all boarded up waiting for the next useless big business to be put up there.  Another condo development perhaps?  As if Pattaya doesn't have enough of them already.  It's been boarded up for over two years now with the greedy landlord getting absolutely no rent whatsover.  

But when I shot this Pattaya Bar Dancing Video a lot of good people had jobs here, and it was all on account of Peter, and then Wan.  There was Georgio, who owns Georgio Fashions, who still is my tailor--my only tailor. It was Wan who had convinced Peter to subdivide the Skytop Internet Cafe into two sections.  The second section she had rented out to Georgio.  There was also DA who had her little  taxi shop right in front of the Guesthouse-Internet Cafe.   I had been using DA for all my taxi needs and I could always count on her.  And of course, there was the little beer bar in front of Skytop.  Being centrally located it had been a favorite gathering spot for my friends and me.  But now, the Skytop beer bar is no longer, and we no longer have a special meeting place either.

Wan was and still is a very special friend.  While I was staying those 11 months at the Skytop Guesthouse, Wan and Peter were living in a room just across the hall from mine.  So they both got to see me at my best and at my worse.

I had what I thought was a wonderful idea for Wan after Peter had died, so my girlfriend and I took her over to the Soi Eight Best Bar

where they have a lot of Pattaya Bar dancing going on.  They had some pretty hot Thai bar girls dancing in that bar back then, and still do.  So I explained to Wan, "You should have some special dance contests at the Skytop Beer Bar and I am just the one to help you do it."  I was full of it, of course.  After all, I'm Jack Corbett, professional photographer and writer of the American adult industry.  I've written for three adult magazines in the U.S.  I've covered all the topless dancing action from Las Vegas all the way to Philadelphia so I thought I knew what was best for Wan.  "Wan, you can have a special dancing contest at your bar every month and during the week you can have tryouts.  Each month you can give the winner four or five thousand baht.  The hottest women in Pattaya will be jumping at the chance, and not just for the money.  You can give them recognition for being the superstars of Pattaya--perhaps even of Thailand.  Nobody else is doing it."

Wan didn't seem to be very interested.  She told me, and I'll never forget this:  "All those very beautiful women, they really aren't worth anything.  They grow up knowing they are beautiful, and most of them don't do anything.  If I had them in my bar, maybe they come, the next time they' won't be there. "

So that was that.  We did that video with the girls already working for Wan.  There were several girls who had come because they were friends of Wan, and there was my girlfriend.  A couple of the Thai women had been working in reception for Skytop while Peter was still alive.  But there it is--that Pattaya Bar Dancing video was good enough to be getting over 6000 hits a day.  The mystery still is, why was this video so successful in the first place, and second, what happened to cause it to nosedive in 48 hours?  Come to think of it, it took just 24 hours for this video to fall off the cliff.  The only thing I can think of is You Tube suddenly decided to restrict the video as an adult film.  

That's exactly what happened.  This video was age restricted.  That meant that anyone wanting to view the video had to sign out of You Tube, verify his age, and then go back into You Tube.  Hardly anyone will go to so much trouble to see this type of video.  I can only guess that a God fearing card carrying member of the MFBN (Mothers for a More Boring Nation) complained to you tube because his (her)  puritanical values cannot withstand the assault of any pictures that show any "skin" whatsoever.