My fellow Offender Alfredo reminded me in his last post of how hot Debbie Harry is. And that made me think of the time I saw her live at a small Los Angeles club called Madame Wong’s West which I can pinpoint as the night I entered puberty (more on this later). But I would not have had that experience if it were not for Esther Wong a.k.a. the “Godmother of Punk.”
Born in Shanghai in 1917, Wong immigrated to the United States in 1949. In the 1970s and ‘80s, she owned two restaurants/clubs—Madame Wong’s in L.A.’s Chinatown and Madame Wong’s West in Santa Monica—that became the beacon for some of the greatest punk and rock n’ roll bands of the era.
