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Brothel Diet: Ideal For Excess Poundage

December 29, 2009

If the glamour mannequins at the Oasis Bordello Museum are to believed — and why shouldn’t they be? — all of its resident prostitutes were model-perfect proportioned. How did they manage to stay so leggy, curvy, and thin with their exhausting work schedule?

The answer might lie in the food that the ladies left behind when they ran away from the brothel in 1988. It seems that they subsisted on a diet high in CNC: caffeine, nicotine, and carbohydrates.

A bag of groceries left on the kitchen counter, peeling with age, revealed its contents: Minute Rice, egg noodles, and Campbell’s soup. A four-slice toaster and a copy of Kenmore Microwave Cookery suggested quick meals and nutrition as flimsy as a French nightie. It’s an impression boosted by the coffee mugs and ash trays (with cigarette butts carefully left in place) found in every room of the brothel.

Michelle Mayfield, who owns the museum, told us that if a customer wanted to buy his prostitute a dinner, it had to be delivered and eaten in the brothel, probably at the yellow Formica table in the kitchen. This unsexy setting — and the limited selection of take-out food in Wallace, Idaho — no doubt added to the general lack of eating that seems to have gone on here.

The bordello was abandoned for five years before Michelle and her husband opened it as a museum. One of the women on our tour asked what the inside of the refrigerator was like after all of that time. “Oh, god,” Michelle said. “We sprayed it and shellacked it, but we still have to keep a note on the door: ‘Do not open.’ It was a mess.”

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