3 naked ladies talk about their view from the stages and laps of the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s and today.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: You know, I always used to feel that there was this stereotype, that girls get into the business because we’re uneducated, or that we come from “the wrong side of the tracks.” That kind of thing.
Jodi Sh. Doff: I think that’s the general population’s consensus – that if you’re smart or educated you don’t need to work in the sex business. It’s only for girls with no other options.
LS: Ha! I certainly didn’t grow up in the ‘hood. I grew up in a wealthy, competitive town on Long Island. College was expected, and lots of my classmates were headed to Harvard. Of course, I dropped out early into my undergrad and started stripping almost immediately after that. Is college the norm these days?
Educated Tart: I was working on my masters when I started stripping, but most dancers I’ve worked with don’t have college degrees. They’re immigrants supporting families or girls who didn’t finish high school. There’s often a college girl or two in the mix and nobody is surprised by that. They’re usually either putting themselves through college or out of work/between jobs.
JShD: In the 70′s, women who went to graduate school were few and far between. I was in honors classes up until high school, those girls went to college and beyond. But most of the girls from my high school were happy to get married and start making babies right after graduation. My fancy pants community college degree made me the “smart” girl in the strip clubs.
LS: I mean, I knew some undergrads. Not many. And Tart, you’re a stripper with an MA? Are people surprised? Do they think you should have moved on by now?
ET: It’s usually the customers who try to make me feel like that. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
JShD: Paying the bills! That’s what we’re doing, paying the bills.
ET: Exactly!
JShD: Damn though if men don’t always seemed to be looking for girls they can feel superior to — I couldn’t play that game. I always felt that my formal education and rather large vocabulary were liabilities.
LS: This is really interesting to me, because like I said, I didn’t finish my formal education. Does having a degree put up any kind of social barrier between you and the girls at work who don’t have one?
ET: Not at all. Fellow dancers understand how convenient stripping can be compared to other jobs, even if you’ve got lots of education and options.
JShD: Agreed, the girls themselves never held it against me. Just the opposite, it was like they felt I had a way out if I wanted it, that they didn’t. Most of the girls I worked with came from homes where education was not only not a priority, it made you an “other”, an outsider. They were blue collar all the way. Their parents had jobs, not careers. No one was putting money away for school, there was no mention of school loans. And in ten years, I never saw a single book (not even a novel) in anyone’s dance bag or purse.
LS: I knew very few strippers who’d actually finished a degree.
ET: I think it’s easier to justify stripping while you’re working on your degree than years after you’ve finished one. Most of the college girls I’ve known have felt pressure to move on and get a “real” job after they graduated.
JShD: Hells, yeah. Why bother with grad school at all if you’re going to stay in the Naked for Money business? Grad school is hard work, its not like some Learning Annex Adult Ed course where you breeze through. I think I’d want to cash in, to justify my degree and all the hard work. I’m amazed at all these grad school girls today who are strippers, escorts and pro doms.
ET: When I started grad school I wasn’t planning on being a stripper for the next seven years. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Overseas grad school is a LOT cheaper than it is here, so it didn’t seem like such a huge deal. It was only once I started working on my art projects that I realized I wouldn’t be able to make it happen unless I kept stripping. I’m not some super-human who can work a 9-5 then come home and do something creative on the side — I need to sleep!
JshD: So for you, for most of the grad school girls, stripping is a means to an end – to support your art, put you through college, etc. In the 70s and 80s you didn’t see that. Well, you did, but the end was different. It wasn’t education — it was money and drugs.
ET: College girls tend to work in the upscale bars, and there’s definitely a class system — college girls who can present themselves as smart and sophisticated can make money by just talking to customers for hours without even letting them touch them, while immigrants who speak less English or girls who can’t present themselves as “classy” can’t pull that off so easily.
LS: That bit only works because customers seem to expect that none of the girls are smart or educated. When they find a girl who’s either, she’s like a trained seal, or a chimp that knows sign language.
This entry was written by , posted on October 29, 2009 at 4:55 pm, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
This week on Three Naked Ladies, Essence Alexander sits in for Rachel Aimee.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Lauri, I loved your piece in Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys about coming out to your mom — but what was it really like?
Lauri Shaw: In Mother-Daughter Day, a stripper tries to win her mother’s love and approval by taking her out for the afternoon. Mom bulldozes over countless boundaries, makes a colossal pest of herself, and finally demands to know point blank what her daughter does for a living. When she gets the answer she never really wanted in the first place, she goes completely ballistic, and any warmth that was left between the two women unravels in full.
The story isn’t quite verbatim, but it’s close. After that day, my mother did her best to pretend the whole thing never happened. When I tried to bring it up, she changed the subject. If I persisted, she said, “I don’t want to hear about it.”
My father was a different story. He didn’t speak to me at all for several years. Which was a neat trick, since my parents are still married and living together. My father’s a complicated man–extremely religious and very controlling. He was also an officer in the military, a reservist, but I spent some time on Navy bases as a child.
I never had a good relationship with either of them. Stripping was probably beside the point. As a child, I got my ass beat for eating non-kosher food. So anything at ALL having to do with sex? Are you fucking kidding me? I was out of that house by the time I was 15.
JshD: Just the opposite, my dad had worked in the burlesque houses and the carnival side shows, so I somehow thought down ‘n dirty was my birthright.
LS: What sort of things did your dad say about strip clubs?
JshD: He’d always glamorized burlesque, Bettie Page, and even the underworld. My mother blamed all my wrong moves on his stories and truthfully, they were a bit of an inspiration. They knew I tended bar in a skimpy leotard, but not about the stripping until after I’d quit. Even so, they hated me working the clubs. They couldn’t separate my drug abuse and the strip clubs. But then, neither could I.
I’d wanted them to see that it wasn’t so bad, that the flames of hell weren’t licking up from the floor, so I forced them to come have a drink at the Mardi Gras where I worked. My mom had been a “good girl,” she’d never even sat at a bar before and here she was, music blasting, creepy men hunched over their drinks and naked women everywhere. I was all la-ti-da about it, but it was pretty traumatic for them. They saw seedy people & scary things. But, in the 80s, that’s exactly what it was: seedy & scary. It confirmed all their fears.
LS: Sounds like it was traumatic for them because they loved you.
JshD: My mom kept a Rolodex card listing my height, eye color, scars & tattoos — so she could claim the body when I was found dead in the streets. Seriously. She also worried about appearance. She didn’t want anyone to say anything bad about me. At 79, she still worries about that with my writing, god bless ‘er.
Essence Alexander: Writing was the catalyst for me telling my mother that I stripped. I had been writing my show about stripping. My mother knew I was working on a play, but I was cryptic about the particulars whenever she’d ask about it. When I was finally ready to workshop the piece, I told her the dates, not thinking anything of it. Then she told me she planned to come to the reading. YIKES! I knew I had to tell her now, but how?! My mother is the queen of good appearances from the conservative British West Indies. As a child, she went to church six days a week. This is a woman who didn’t allow me to have boyfriends until I was in college and she had no way of stopping me anymore. I gave the script to my “cool” aunty, her sister, to read first. “Uh, this is kinda my true story and I’m going to tell Mum.” Her first reaction was a concerned, “Does she have to know?”
JshD: I’ve totally used my writing as a way to let my mom know things. After spoiler alerts and disclaimers, she reads. Then if she’s up to knowing more, we talk.
EA: Yes, I wanted her to hear it from me and have time to digest the info before seeing the adventures of her first born in America as a stripper on stage. My aunt called me the next morning and said, “It’s your life to live and she’ll be OK or not. I love the script by the way!”
So I called my mother and said, “Soooo, while I was writing my show, I worked as a stripper off and on. But I don’t do it now.” My mother replied, “Well, why aren’t you still dancing now? Your legs broke?!”
LS: Ha! Your mom’s got serious character.
JshD: Amazing. Obviously, you expected worst…
EA: I wonder if my aunty padded my fall. I told my sister and she burst into tears because she had the movie Player’s Club as her only frame of reference. She came to work with me one night: watched, ordered Chinese food, got bored and went home. I’ve never told my father and I’m not sure my mother did either. I think parents can be OK with other people doing something but NOT their child. I would have taken it to the grave and not told my mother were it not for the show.
This entry was written by , posted on October 21, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged family, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: At Dangerous Curves, the manager would fine us if we started groping each other onstage, even if there was a packed house cheering us on! I never understood why it bothered him so much.
Rachel Aimee: Managers always seem to be weirdly uncomfortable with girl on girl shows. They claim it’s because they’re worried about getting shut down but I think sometimes they’re just jealous because they think the girls are having too much fun. They can be weird about female customers getting lapdances too—a bouncer once refused to let some guy watch me give his girlfriend a lapdance. He made him sit at the bar until we were finished!
Jodi Sh. Doff: There wasn’t a lot of girl on girl action on stage in the clubs when I worked, but there was always an undercurrent. You can’t help it with that many naked and half dressed women in one place. There’d be little intimations but no actual touching. The State Liquor Authority had very specific ideas about obscenity and girl on girl would’ve put us in the category of the live sex shows and risked the liquor license.
RA: Do you think it’s more common for women to go to strip clubs as customers now that the industry is less taboo?
JShD: Well, single women weren’t allowed in my day–they were assumed to be prostitutes cruising for johns–and couples were discouraged.
LS: Yeah, women had to be escorted by a man. Managers worried that a woman on her own was someone’s angry wife or jealous girlfriend.
RA: Some bouncers are still weird about letting single women in. The women who do get in are usually straight–either business women with male colleagues or girlfriends/wives with their partners–and I hate to say it but most of them are really annoying. They don’t tip, talk deliberately loudly about how the dancers are ugly or fat, take their clothes off and dance all over their boyfriends like they’re trying to compete with us (as if we care!), then get up on stage and dance around like they think they’re really cool. The customers are usually more excited to see a civilian getting naked than a pro so they end up with all our tip money too.
LS: Thankfully I never remember women coming in and doing any of that, but I did see other strange behavior. I’ll never forget this customer at Runway 69. She was a schoolteacher, the spitting image of January Jones. She swore she was straight, and was pretty defensive about the whole thing. Then she started drinking the fake beer.
She thought she was getting drunk. She asked for a lapdance while her husband watched. When I danced on her, she started breathing all heavy and begging me to touch her everywhere. The dance room at Runway was only semi-private. The bouncers were watching. I started getting really nervous that this woman would get me fired.
After the dance, she followed me into the ladies room. She blockaded the door and begged me to get her off! “Please, I’ll pay you, I’ve never done it with a woman,” etc., until her husband pounded on the door and yelled at her that they were going home.
JShD: Girl on girl was pretty unusual even in the dumps. Guys weren’t inclined to pay the cost of buying bottles for two dancers to get them both into the back rooms. It wasn’t my thing, but occasionally I’d work with a girl named Carrie, we looked like sisters. We rocked that “sisters are doing it for themselves” scene one night with a high roller who was pretty drunk by the time we got him.
LS: This girl I knew had been fired from the Blue Angel for making out with a female customer. She claimed the customer was Drew Barrymore! And that it was worth it. My own celebrity experience was almost as cool. Jenna Jameson featured at the Zebra Club in Connecticut. She dived into the crowd and sucked on my tits in front of 400 people.
RA: No way, really?!
JshD: Real girl on girl action was a different story. At the Mardi Gras, Cheryl the bartender was a total butch dyke and her girl, Roxy, danced there. I don’t think you see that anymore, stone dykes working straight strip clubs.
RA: Lots of lesbians work in strip clubs these days. They’re usually femmes, but not always. I worked with a girl whose butch girlfriend would hang out at the club every night, drinking with the customers and encouraging them to tip her girlfriend. Or sometimes she would just pocket their money while her girlfriend distracted them from the stage. They made a pretty good team.
LS: I met plenty of dancers who fucked girls, but fewer that identified as lesbians. Or they’d say they were lesbians, but then they’d go home to their man. I never saw a single girl, either stripping or behind the bar, that I would describe as “butch.”
JshD: Like I’ve said, there was a lot more latitude back then. At the Butterfly, Billie and Loretta were young, gorgeous, and totally hot for each other. I remember walking out of the upstairs lounge one night. They were buck naked on the floor, locked mouth to cooch and cooch to mouth. I liked to bust my neck tripping over them but they paid us no mind. They weren’t thinking about anything but getting off. So everyone got a free show. A pretty hot one.
This entry was written by , posted on October 14, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: I was a 19-year-old barmaid in Yonkers, NY at this crappy dive topless place, City Lights…
Jodi Sh. Doff: Legal drinking age was 21 in NY by then, so you were flying under the radar…
LS: I fell in with one of the dancers, who dragged me along to her shift at Runway 69 in Times Square. I couldn’t believe it — nobody danced, they all just crouched in front of the men, showed cooch, and got paid. The girls got a kick out of me. I was trying to be streetwise, like I saw this shit every day.
JshD: My first cooch sighting freaked me out. I was a cocktail waitress in a joint called Winks. I’m not sure I even finished my first shift!
LS: I wasn’t fooling anyone either, but they decided to dress me up and turn me out. My friend thought it was a riot. Before I knew it, I was wearing someone else’s dress, and shoes two sizes too big. They pushed me right out on that stage. I was terrified, but I was determined to follow through, because I was being dared.
It was truly horrific. I didn’t know how to dance. Three customers walked away the minute they saw me. I didn’t dare let go of the pole, I knew I’d wipe out. I was up there for three songs and the only tip I got was from a guy who said, “I’m only giving you this dollar ’cause I feel sorry for you.” If there was ever a moment in my life I wanted to die of shame, that was it.
Rachel Aimee: I wasn’t even thinking about money when I auditioned. One guy held out a 5 pound note but I was too scared to get close enough to take it.
LS: When I came off stage, the manager was laughing his ass off in the corner. He told me I was hired. Later I found out they didn’t even have auditions at Runway. I’d been an elaborate practical joke for the whole staff. In the end, though, I had the last laugh–I stayed for the rest of the shift and made $300 in just a few hours.
RA: I started when I was 23 and living in London back in 2003. I was so naïve I took a stripping class before I auditioned–I thought I actually had to be able to dance! What a waste of money—we learned all these old burlesque moves…
LS: Oh, that stuff is so hot now, the revival of old school burlesque. Jo Boobs, The World Famous Bob, The Pontani Sisters…
RA: …but completely irrelevant once I saw how real strippers danced. I started at a little club called Boulevard in Soho. It was one of the few clubs that was stage dancing only. I thought tabledancing meant dancing on a table, which I was sure I couldn’t do in heels, and I was afraid of lapdancing because of the contact—as I said, I was very naïve back then.
LS: What made you even think of stripping, then?
RA: I was a total cliche–a gender studies major interested in the feminist debates about whether stripping was empowering or degrading and figured I’d see for myself! (Of course, I soon realized it was just a damn convenient way to pay the rent.) I had an elaborate audition outfit which included a skirt, button down shirt, stockings, and even a cardigan…
JshD: A cardigan? That’s classic!
RA: The dancers just laughed at me. I had no idea most girls went out there in a bikini or minidress. They tried to get me to at least lose the cardigan but I almost started crying, saying I had to wear the outfit I’d practiced in or I’d forget my routine! After that they left me alone, but they teased me about it for months after I got hired.
JshD: I was still living at home when I got fired from my job as a file clerk. The ad in the back of the Village Voice said, “barmaid, no experience necessary”. I had no experience, so I was eminently qualified.
RA: It’s funny how many strippers start as bartenders, or at least intended to…
JshD: Bartending really was a “gateway drug” for me. The Mardi Gras was the largest topless bar in the city, with three stages, a dozen cash registers and Jake La Motta as a bouncer. Total big time. Me & my no experience made more in one day than I had in a week at the office.
It didn’t take long before I auditioned as a dancer. I was already the girl who ripped her clothes off in public when she drank. I realized recently that I wasn’t a stripper who drank, I was a drunk who stripped. What I wasn’t, was a girl who ever felt pretty. The glamor of the bars and their willingness to pay for what I was already doing for free held a lot of allure. I borrowed a nasty g-string, just a scratchy swatch of fabric and a pair of borrowed heels as well, and suddenly I was the center of the world, lights flashed, everything switched from black & white to Technicolor and I was beautiful.
RA: It’s amazing how being on stage for the first time makes you feel like that, even if you’ve never had any kind of aspirations to be a performer.
JshD: It was great…until the manager yelled “Let’s see some floor work! Pretend you’re on top.” I was 17! I’d never been on top. So there I was, a chubby teenager doing naked push ups in front of strangers.
RA: Floor work killed me when I first started–my knees were so bruised and scratched up I couldn’t kneel or bend my knees for at least a month.
JshD: That manager never asked me to dance again, but I was sold. Those few minutes sealed the deal for me.
This entry was written by , posted on October 7, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Rachel Aimee: Stripping can be a really difficult job to do sober: dealing with rejection from assholes, struggling to make back your house fee, working till 4am every night, and all the while having to act happy and flirty with each new guy.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Tried it sober. Couldn’t do it.
RA: I know plenty of girls who’ve gotten seriously into drink and drugs because of the pressure of the job.
JshD : Zoe Hansen mentioned a girl who couldn’t get work because of her track marks.
Lauri Shaw: I had plenty of friends who did dope. You could usually spot the junkies, they wore evening gloves or dozens of bracelets. Or you’d get tight with someone and realize she was going home and shooting up between her toes.
RA: At the same time, I hate to propagate those stereotypes about stripping messing up people’s lives, because I also encounter plenty of Wall Street bankers whose jobs are clearly driving them to drugs too.
LS: Listen, stripping doesn’t make girls into addicts, but it’s an environment where it’s more acceptable to be off your face than, say, an office. It’s also easier to procure your favorite high there than it would be in the 9-5 world. That combination can be the tipping point for someone who already has tendencies.
JshD: I discovered heroin working at the Mardi Gras. I sniffed the first time thinking it was coke, but within a month I was fixing with one of the floor managers. He taught me about saving the twist tops off the champagne to cook the doojie. But coke was all over the place. A few of the girls dealt coke but no one was dealing dope in the clubs–too scared of serious mob consequences. Smoking pot, on the other hand was like smoking cigarettes & everyone smoked cigarettes.
LS: Yeah, pot was de rigeur. Coke was harder to find, you’d be more likely to get it from a customer than another girl. Girls who went to after hours did Ecstasy and “Special K.” But usually not at work. And drinking? A girl taught me about bringing vodka to work in a Sprite bottle, and I immediately started making more money. You wanted a small buzz on while you worked, but not enough to make you careless. I saw this one girl at a fairly upscale club pass out onstage. The “house mom,” who was actually a gay guy, came out of the dressing room, lifted her up and carried her off. Someone else got on in her place, and no one said a word.
JshD: I remember a dancer, Jessie, ODing in the basement locker room of the Lollipop Lounge on West 46th. The other girls robbed her before telling management she was unconcious. I didn’t occur to anyone that she could’ve died. She didn’t, but no thanks to the “Sisterhood of the No Pants”! It sounds awful, but stripping was a tough girl’s game.
RA: I’ve seen a girl pass out onstage too, but at my club it’s quite common for us to just lie around on the stage if the customers aren’t tipping (it’s a dive) so nobody really noticed until she was supposed to get down!
LS: Management didn’t care if your liver fell out of you, so long as it didn’t happen in front of the customers.
JshD: Oh no, you could be fucked up, but you were being paid to hustle. Once, when I didn’t want to dance, I sniffed a little extra dope and threw up right in front of the manager. It got me off the stage for the night, but not off work. You hadda be dead to get the night off.
RA: Unless they were looking for an excuse to fire you, right?
LS: I don’t recall anyone ever getting the sack for being too wasted.
JshD: More than anything it was the booze for me and clubs watered down their liquor. I always cracked a fresh bottle of vodka, just to be sure.
RA: Did you get commission on the drinks? I’ve never worked where dancers got paid to drink but it sounds like a really bad idea.
JshD: It was a great idea!!!
RA: In most clubs I’ve worked at, you have to accept a drink if a customer offers to buy you one but it doesn’t have to be alcoholic so there’s no pressure to get drunk if you don’t want to. Except sometimes from the customer. Sometimes I’ll order a real drink even if I don’t want it because I think the customer will stop tipping me if he thinks I’m boring.
LS: Girls who wanted to stay sober drank juice. We let the guys think we were getting drunk. In the nude joints, they didn’t serve alcohol, just fake beer and fake champagne for the customers, both of which tasted god-awful. You brought your own booze. In some clubs they kept vodka behind the bar for the girls who got their customers into the VIP. If you were the thirsty type, it was one more reason to go back there.
JshD: I loved the fact that I could drink & drug to my hearts content and get paid for it–commission on every drink. You could get a non-alcoholic drink, or use a spit glass, but what was the point of that?
RA: I never really let myself get too drunk at work, even though I know I’d make more money if I did. I just don’t want to be out of control in that environment. Although the few times I worked at high pressure clubs with big house fees I’d get so stressed out I’d sit with customers just to get a drink, even if they weren’t buying dances. (Another reason I don’t work at those clubs anymore!)
This entry was written by , posted on September 30, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged drinking, drugs, strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Jodi Sh. Doff: I was always either in the clubs or after hours. I never met regular people, I was always fishing in polluted waters. Everyone in my life was shady. My guys were loan-sharks, bookies, bikers, gangsters. Anyone I slept with for free was my “boyfriend.” But truthfully, I slept with a lot of men who didn’t think twice about me.
Lauri Shaw: I had a DJ thing for a while. They didn’t even need to be all that attractive, just charismatic. Bouncers were standoffish (and usually too burly. At the time, I liked my guys corpse-thin). The managers and owners treated us like property. If I was going to screw around with anyone in the business, a DJ seemed like the best choice.
Rachel Aimee: I’ve never dated customers or anyone in the business, not on any kind of principle but because I act like a different person at work and couldn’t imagine how I would relate to someone I met at work if I saw them outside the club. Also, I found that the only customers I liked enough to consider dating were too cool to think a stripper would want to date them so they never asked!
JshD: Occasionally, for someone special, my heart opened along with my legs. There were two guys who weren’t in the business. Gabe was a comic book artist, slightly shady, insane and kinky in ways I liked. Hank was a handsome troubled drunk—him I wanted to save. I was crazy about them both. I couldn’t imagine dating a real civilian. Civilians made assumptions about who I was that weren’t necessarily wrong, but I hated the presumption and condescension. That slick act just made me want to rip you off.
LS: I didn’t go near the slick guys unless I was working, but that’s not to say my head was screwed on straight. I had horrendous taste in men. Dancing did not help. I picked some phenomenal creeps and losers on my own time, simply because they didn’t behave like the average customer. It probably goes without saying that my self-esteem left a lot to be desired.
RA: So many strippers have problems dating because most people—not just men—who date strippers either want them to quit the business…
JshD: Oh God, save us from the Captain Save-A-Hos of the world!
RA: …or want to take their money, or both. I know it’s a stereotype but I’ve seen it again and again in the relationships of women I’ve worked with. Dancers hustle all night then go home to a guy or girl who makes them feel guilty about how they’re paying the bills but doesn’t have a problem with spending their money.
JshD: That was my husband! Abusive, even violent at times, over the work. But he didn’t get a job so I could stop and had no problem with me paying the bills. Obviously, that was a very short marriage. When I fell in love, L.U.V., it was a hustler named Bear who worked at O’Neals, a gay bar in Times Square. We thought we were Bonnie & Clyde, but we more Sid & Nancy. We were so in love, neither one wanted the other to work anymore. He’s what finally got me out of the business.
RA: I’ve seen lots of dancers quit the business for partners but, they usually come back when the relationship goes bad.
LS: I knew this girl who had a deal with her hubby and never went near those back rooms. She was the hardest working stripper I’ve ever seen—she did 25 lap dances a night while everyone else was taking their shoes off in the VIP. On any given night, two thirds of the girls were making twice as much as she did. Yet, she had a great attitude. She must have been married to an awesome guy.
JshD: I’m amazed when I hear about married dancers. You have to have your guard up when you’re working or they’ll eat you alive. How do you open your heart in your life and close it in the clubs? I can’t turn it on and off like a light switch.
RA: I know plenty of women who have been married for 10 or 20 years and dancing that whole time. It’s just how they support their families. I don’t know if hearts have much to do with it after a while.
JshD: 30 years later I still struggle with keeping an open heart.
LS: I felt that way too. I solved it by deciding intimacy was to be avoided at all costs. It took me ages to unwind from that mindset. And my libido was the first casualty. I was barely out of my teens, my hormones were climbing the walls 24-7. Stripping solved that problem. Within a year of becoming a stripper, my sex drive was in a coma.
JshD: Oh, I rarely had sex for pleasure. Except for those three guys, it was mostly a currency, a power struggle or a way to kill time.
RA: I’ve always put up really strict boundaries between work and “real life,” mostly for the sake of my sanity. I don’t even take customers’ numbers to ask them to come and see me at work because I can’t handle the emotional labor it takes to keep the hustle up outside of work. It’s a trade off though: the girls who really make money are the ones who throw themselves into the hustle.
Editors Note: Gabe, my crazy comic book artist is saving kittehs out in Indiana. If you can adopt one, great. If you can’t please donate a buck or two.
http://www.powerslamcollectibles.com/PowerslamPowerpussycats.html
This entry was written by , posted on September 23, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged dirty boys, strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Lauri Shaw: In 1997, I averaged $2200/week, four nights. Good hustlers could make $1000/night. Never mind what they promised the customers or did in the back rooms — we’re only talking about money, right? The money was there.
Jodi Sh. Doff: Barmaids made $15/shift in ’75. I’d been making $80/wk in an office and suddenly $85/day in tips, plus shift pay, just being behind the bar in a leotard! When I left in ’84 dancers made $75/shift, plus tips & commission, but rent was only $200/month and cigarettes, less than a dollar. Two shifts a week was more than enough to make crazy money.
Rachel Aimee: Unfortunately those days are over. Money is still better than your average office job, and really good hustlers or girls at high end clubs can make a LOT, but there are also girls struggling to make $50 or $60 for an eight hour shift. And even those clubs charge the dancers to work now! The introduction of house fees has been an awful development in the industry.
LS: Every club I worked in charged a house fee or tip out. Topless clubs made money off house fees and the bar, so they didn’t take a cut of your dances. In nude clubs, house fees were low ($15 – $35) but then they’d take a large percentage from your sales: 50 – 75% of your lap dances, drinks, and champagne room money.
RA: Some of the high end clubs charge $300 a night! I can’t imagine having to do fifteen dances just to break even. I’ve worked at semi-upscale clubs that charged $100 a night — I spent the whole night in a panic, terrified of going home in debt to the club.
JshD: I love that I worked before house fees, tip outs or fines. You showed up and got paid. The options were make money or make more money. Even on a slow night you left with cash. I averaged $150-$300/night and was never expected to give anyone bribe money. My best night was bartending at a club called the Butterfly. Barmaids hustled the same as dancers. I sold one guy the same bottle so many times I lost count. He spent $5000 that night on half a dozen girls, finally, at 3:45am, he went upstairs with me and a girl who looked just like me–we played off the sister angle. Five minutes into that bottle it was last call and they hustled everyone out. I left that night, 1983ish, with $1000 in commissions & tips.
RA: Damn, I wish I could go back in time and work in the 80s!
LS: On top of house fees, tipping the DJ was mandatory. And more than minimum, or he’d cut your throat next time. Cashiers tried stealing. They’d run someone’s card, then swear to your face you’d never been in the VIP room with him. They say they made “mistakes” while cashing you out. I always stood my ground and got my money, but it was not a pleasant working environment.
JshD: Dancers and barmaids got commission on drinks, bottles, shift pay and tips. All the clubs had multiple girls on stage–the DJs just tried to keep things moving. Places like the Mardi Gras, the largest topless bar at the time, there were half a dozen girls on stage at the same time, but if you could get someone to buy you a drink, you could come down.
LS: You faced social consequences if you didn’t tip everyone. The bouncers wanted a cut. The champagne hostess expected one. Bartenders, waitresses… even the janitor had his hand out, refused to do his job unless the girls tipped him. Every night, cabbies waited outside — they expected you to double the meter. Costume ladies sat in the dressing room like vultures. Absolutely everyone got a piece of us.
RA: That stuff still goes on. At my club, the tip out is low and I don’t get hustled to tip out managers or anyone because I’ve been there a long time, but I know other girls do, especially if they’re new or the manager doesn’t like them.
LS: We made our money asking men for large tips — up front — on everything. A $20 dance was really $40. If you got your tips, you could do very well. But on a slow night, you took whatever you could get. The house made more than you did, which was the best case scenario. Worst case, you went home broke and owed money.
JshD: I was an awful hustler, just awful, and even so, I was making rent any night I worked. We paid for our costumes and you did your best to get a tip for the barmaid or the waitress, but that’s it.
RA: The stigma around dancing really fuels the clubs’ ability to charge house fees. Dancers exaggerate how much money they make, because we have to justify doing a job that most people think is degrading. It’s more difficult to justify stripping for the amount of money you could make bartending or working an office job, so we play up the good nights and play down the bad ones. When everyone thinks we’re making hundreds of dollars every night, nobody really believes it’s a big deal for us to tip out $100 or so for the privilege of making that money. It takes a lot of courage to say “I paid $100 of my own money to spend eight hours grinding against strange men and had to go to the ATM to take out money to get home.”
This entry was written by , posted on September 16, 2009 at 9:17 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged dirty money, strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Jodi Sh. Doff: Lauri, you worked in the 90′s, by then there were house fees and implants were a big thing. The top shelf joints of the 90′s seemed like an Evening Gown Barbie factory. I know it’s a response to public demand, but some girls considered implants a reasonable work expense, like a uniform. I couldn’t have gone to those surgical extremes.
Lauri Shaw: I mostly avoided those evening gown clubs. I do not look like Barbie. I’d need more than just a boob job to look like Barbie. Among other things, I’d need to have my skull reshaped, and longer limbs sewn onto me like a Frankenstein monster, if I ever wanted to look like Barbie. I couldn’t relate. By contrast, the nude clubs were an easier environment. I went into Scores once, not to audition but with some guy, and the place just felt cold to me. Emotionally sterile.
Rachel Aimee: Most of the high end Manhattan clubs hire girls that all look the same: 90% white, 70% blond, always skinny and a lot of silicone. It’s possible to get hired at the semi-upscale clubs just by being reasonably attractive if you’re white, but women of color have to have really “perfect” bodies and be absolutely stunning. The divey places hire a more diverse mix and some of the outer borough clubs hire exclusively black or Latina dancers, depending on the neighborhood and clientele.
JshD: I felt the same about Scores but was also fully aware that there was a LOT more money there. It’d take me a week to make what they make in a night.
RA: There definitely is the possibility of making a LOT of money in those high end clubs, but you don’t just need to look the part, you need to hustle like crazy too. They schedule as many girls as possible every night because they want their house fees, so even if you did look like Barbie, you’d be competing with 60 other Barbies. Personally, I find it easier to make money at the more diverse clubs–there are always the guys who will like me by default just because I’m one of the few white girls.
LS: I auditioned for VIP once and it was incredibly humiliating. It felt like a cattle call — they had me put on a costume, strip down to my g-string, and stand in a line with three other hopefuls. The manager, or whoever he was, told me to turn around once, then he said “Okay, thanks. You can get dressed.” I said, “That’s it?” And he said, “We have too many girls,” which of course is code for, “You don’t have the right look.” I took it to mean, “Get the hell out of my club, you butt-ugly skank.” I went home and cried.
JshD: Ouch! An 80′s “audition” was the same strip and spin, but just to be sure you could be naked and not freak out! Clubs still had a generous idea of what a real woman should look like.
LS: There were middle-brow clubs too. Places like Private Eyes or Legz Diamond. Not everyone was drop-dead gorgeous, although most of the girls were attractive in some way or another. And all types of girls — black, white, Latina… not usually many Asian girls… but tall, short, chunky, and skinny girls, as old as forty-five and as young as eighteen. They would check ID. They were not fucking around with that.
JshD: The class system wasn’t around when I was working, that grew out of Cache Escorts & the Mayflower Madam. We had no high end/low end, no questions, no ID (I was 17 when I started) just real live girls in all their glory. I don’t recall any Asians and only one black dancer in ten years.
RA: Do you think the clubs were more segregated back then? I’ve gotten that impression from customers who have been going to strip clubs for years and say that back then all the girls were white. I wonder where the black girls used to dance, or if there were just fewer black girls in the industry in those days.
JshD: In the 70s, generally, black girls worked the streets, white girls worked the bars. We were Latina, white, occasionally transgendered (aka ‘sex change’) and all shapes, like the Armour Hot Dog jingle? Big girls, lit-tle girls, girls who climb on rocks, fat girls, skin-ny girls, ev-en…well, even Grandma Peggy, probably only in her 40′s but her daughter danced too.
RA: I’ve definitely worked with women in their late forties, grandmothers and mothers who worked alongside their daughters, as well as women of all (or at least most) body types, although I’ve never come across a club that hired transgender women. I think the myth that all strippers should look like Barbie comes from the media focus on the upscale clubs. It makes the industry seem more glamorous than it really is.
LS: But if a Barbie girl goes slumming at a lower-tier club, she makes bank.
JshD : Some men are looking for a specific fantasy and status of the unattainable woman, they’re willing to pay high. Others want a “real” girl and frequent smaller clubs. People pay for what they want. That said, the mentality of the men who pay women to dance for/ drink with them is so much more complicated and convoluted than just one or two lines can cover.
This entry was written by , posted on September 9, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
For as a long as there’s been music, women have danced for the entertainment and titillation of men. Scheherazade. Minsky’s Burlesque. Cage dancing go-go girls in the psychedelic 60′s. Times Square strippers, pole dancers and lap dancers. Women dance….Men watch.
Naked Ladies get around! Look for the 3 Naked Ladies and a new topic every Wednesday on laurishaw.com, $pread magazine online or thedirtygirldiaries.com
Rachel Aimee: I think there’s this myth among dancers that the industry is “going downhill” and that dancers across the board are expected to do more than they used to do. I know women who have been working since the 90s and refer to that decade as the “golden age of stripping,” when dancers got paid tons of money just to dance on stage and didn’t even have to touch the customers, but it seems, from what I’ve read on both your blogs, that dancers have been doing more than just dancing for a long time.
Lauri Shaw: Yes, and in the 90s there were girls who said the same thing about the 80s. Jodi, in “Lele” (your story from Soft Skull anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, & Rent Boys), a customer is going down on a dancer while she sits on the stage, collects his money, and otherwise ignores him. Was it common for dancers to allow so much contact?
Jodi Sh Doff: In the late 70′s there was a lot less regulation. It was years before AIDS reared its ugly head. Tourists, particularly Japanese men, could come off the plane at Kennedy airport, hand a cabbie a slip of paper with just the word “Cookie” on it. Places like the Cookie Jar and Winks were standing room only, bottomless, with stages no higher than, well, than your dinner table. Girls were there for your dining and dancing pleasure, hot lunches they used to be called. The money was insane and there was no hustle. You couldn’t sit and drink with a customer — there was no room. Unfortunately for me, I got my first close up look at a vagina that was not attached to me and took off on the first day. Had I known, I’d have gotten real comfortable, real fast. By the early 80′s the Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) code called the shots and if a club served booze, the girls had to be a minimum of six feet away from the customers and they had to have g-strings. No pulling aside the g-string (although girls did), no touching yourself or them (of course we did that too). That’s when a lot of stages moved behind the actual bar. Diamond Lils was a renegade bar, hence the lack of register tape or financial records of any kind.
RA: Yes, you couldn’t get away with anything like that at clubs I’ve worked at, but I think it’s the norm for lapdances to be pretty heavy contact and sometimes include “extras” (hand jobs, etc.), especially in private rooms. Then of course there are plenty of dancers who just dance and don’t do anything illegal.
LS: All of that’s true, in fact last year Scores lost its liquor license after getting busted for prostitution in 2007. But in the 90′s, blatant tricks didn’t happen out in the open like that, out on stage for everyone to see. The rule was generally “no touching the girls onstage.”
RA: I’ve also heard cops arresting dancers just for allegedly agreeing to perform an illegal act. In cases where dancers get busted, of course the clubs never take any responsibility, even if they knew perfectly well what was going on and may have been making money off it.
LS: I do remember one place where a scenario like at Diamond Lils might have flown — the Harmony Theatre. I was only there once. They kept it really dark and made no pretense of being “entertainers.” I don’t think they even bothered serving drinks. I do not remember there being a bar at all. Men sat in those theatre seats and haggled with the girls over the price of a lapdance, which was often a euphemism for a hand job or more.
JshD:The original Harmony was uptown, on 48th Street, right by the Gaiety Burlesque. The Gaiety was an all male dance house with live sex shows and a lot of action going on back stage between sets. Working girls used to hang out in the back rows just to get off their feet for a while. It was a blast, I had a few guy friends who worked the Gaiety. But the Harmony used to be specialty acts, old school star strippers and girls that could pick a dollar up off the table with their cooch. Very impressive if you ask me. I believe the name was changed to the Melody Burlesque and then the Harmony re-opened downtown and it was that free-for-all you’re talking about. All lap dancing, no pretense of being “entertainment” at all.
LS: Exactly, it was a free-for-all. Men could buy anything they wanted at the Harmony, and working girls could buy the freedom to give the men whatever they wanted. There wasn’t a bouncer in sight. The shift manager sat in the coat room, away from all the action.
RA: I’ve never worked at a place that was that free and easy, but I’ve definitely preferred working at clubs where management was more hands-off. At some of the big corporate “gentlemen’s clubs” that have taken over modern day Manhattan, management are constantly micromanaging everything the dancers do, policing lapdances and pressuring dancers to take customers to private rooms (because they make a huge cut). I think most dancers prefer the freedom to decide for themselves what they’re comfortable with. But in general I find it’s very difficult to have open conversations about who does what in strip clubs because it’s so easy to offend people. There’s so much stigma attached to sex work that it’s easy to unintentionally make someone feel bad if you’re not willing to do something that they are willing to do. Everyone has different boundaries, so I think that tension is always going to exist in the industry.
This entry was written by , posted on September 7, 2009 at 2:24 pm, filed under three naked ladies and tagged strippers. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
