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Profile: Terri Lynn Raridon of Forbidden Fruit
People look at Terri Lynn Raridon kinda funny when they discover she owns and operates the Forbidden Fruit erotic shop, which will close Aug. 27 after 30 years in business just off East Sixth Street.
“It never fails,” the Austinite says huskily. “Most tend to arch an eyebrow and I can just see the images going through their minds: That my home has some kind of magic door, like in the movie “10” that flips around to produce either a heart shaped bed with mirrored ceilings or a dungeon!”
“Despite it all, I’m pretty old fashioned on most fronts,” says the mother of one, married to software marketer Richard Maddox. “Family and friends come first with me.”
Stripped of the contemporary context, the first-time observer might associate Raridon’s bold silhouette, billowing mane and full lips with the noblewomen and actresses painted by Thomas Gainsborough in the 18th Century.
And, in fact, the California native once trod the boards regularly. The first valedictorian from Houston’s Alternative Learning Center, a confirmed hippie chick, moved out on her own at age 16. Then, in 1978, a friend in Austin told her: “You gotta come up here. This is where it’s happening.”
Well, two things happened. Raridon won a scholarship to study dance at the University of Texas. And she transferred cultural allegiance from the hippie tribe to the punk, hanging out at the legendary Raoul’s, Club Foot and Duke’s Royal Coach Inn.
“I was going to musicals and modern dance shows, too,” she says. “I loved it all. Why limit yourself?”
The dance connection won her roles in musicals, which then led to choreographic and directorial duties, working with leading lights such as Joe York, Rod Caspers, Bil Pfuderer and Ken Johnson. In a bit of foreshadowing, her first gig designing dance moves was for “Gypsy,” the classic musical about the life of a burlesque queen.
She even dated the same guy as classmate and future Oscar winner Marcia Gaye Harden.
“She was a hellion back then,” Raridon says. “This is the girl who wouldn’t wear shoes to class. And look at her now.”
She acted in dramas like “Burn This” and performed modern dance with Dee McCandless and Gene Menger during the 10-year history of Invisible. Inc. She spent two exhausting years helping put together Club Sandwich, a cabaret variety show housed mainly at the Esther’s Follies location now occupied by Coyote Ugly.
Her final formal stage assignment was choreographing “Fame” in Zilker Park in 2003.
During the 21st Century, Raridon has roared to the forefront of the still-insurgent burlesque revival, serving as consulting artistic director and guest choreographer for the Kitty Kitty Bang Bang troupe.
“During the past decade, we;ve seen a cultural craving in the areas of sexuality and sensuality,” she says. “There’s a yearning for nostalgia, a harking back to when dancing was blue, but not that blue. There’s more mystery and artiface in burslesque than in contemporary stripping. Women aren’t really dancing in topless bars any more. I don’t want to say it’s pornographic, but the moves are much more explicit.”
Raridon’s theater background helps her coordinate related events such as the Texas Burlesque Festival and the annual Extravagasm Fantasy Ball.
“He felt like there ought to be place for women and couples to comfortably shop for intimacy-enhancing products,” Raridon says.
Garfinkel, a saxophone player for the band Sharon Tate’s Baby, knew Raridon from the punk scene. When she made a presentation to gain sponsorship from his shop for a movie at the Varsity Theatre, the art house on the Drag where she then worked, Mark reportedly said: “You need to come work for me.”
Two years later, she became one of the first presenters of “naughty but nice” home party sales for Forbidden Fruit, itself one of the first of its kind in the country.
“Before that, you had to go to a porn palace,” she says. “We broke a taboo.”
Raridon eventually purchased the booming business in 1987 on a Sixth Street that today’s tourists might not recognize.
“Back then we actually had more retail on the street,” she says. “And we saw the rise of the fern bar and more restaurants. There were great dives, too, and Steamboat was the venerable rock venue. The street had a more eclectic feeling. Some felt it was more dangerous. I never did.”
Raridon’s unthreatening displays of toys, lingerie and other erotica soon colonized Las Vegas.
“I tell people I bought my Harvard MBA on that one,” she jokes. “I lost enough money and learned enough about business to have gone to Harvard for two years — in 1992 dollars.”
After that came an outlet in the back of a clothing store on the Drag, then a store near Room Service and Musical Exchange on North Loop. It proved an instant and ongoing success, especially after moving across the street to a building she wisely purchased. It will remain open.
“It has everything to do with the bohemian neighborhood,” she says of the retail curve on North Loop. “One of the last bastions of true Austin independence.”
Raridon tried to expand to a larger venue on Sixth Street, but the City of Austin wouldn’t give her a zone variance on the building she purchased, so it became a tattoo and body piercing parlor, one of the first in Austin to introduce professional piercing methods.
She felt she couldn’t compete with the cut-rate parlors that followed her onto that section of Sixth, so she closed Body Arts and now leases the building to another parlor operator.
So why close the iconic Forbidden Fruit shop, with its familiar three-dimensional apple sign, now?
“It’s the parking and the transients,” she says of the cobbled together former residence and seamstress shop. “And it’s a 200-year-old building that I can’t afford to fix up.”
Still, she’s throwing a closing party Aug. 27.
“The history and the camaraderie,” she says. “That’s what I’m going to miss down here.”
Photo of sign courtesy of Downtown Austin Blog.
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By Jay
August 26, 2011 5:48 PM | Link to this
Terri Lynn Raridon is awesome. Great person, and great businesswoman. If you want to support a real Austin business, this is the way to go.
By Eugene
August 21, 2011 6:04 PM | Link to this
Love Terri. I banked her purchase of the store from Mark