in person
10.07.09 KGB-RADIO-HOUR podcast : Reading “KILLING TIME AT DIAMOND LILS” part of “Lele” with hosts Ratso Sloman & Mark Jacobson (a link to the edited podcast, until I figure out how to embed it here. ‘Bare’ with me my lovelies, it’s a big learning curve).
10.01.09 Reading “DOYLE” for the crowd at Happy Endings!
08.06.09 Reading “LELE” for the crowd at Happy Endings!
appearances
as Scarlett Fever
Bedtime with Susie – interviewed by Susie Bright & Audible.com
Breasts – interviewed by Meema Spadola
Strip City – by Lily Burana : chapter profiling my unique historical perspective Minx.com - guest on Minx@Pseudo.com
in print: anthologies
Hos, Hookers, Callgirls and Rentboys (SoftSkull, July 2009)
Tiger Beatdown : Wednesday, August 26, 2009 Lady Business Book Review
Still, if the anthology doesn’t offend you at one point or another, it’s probably not doing its job. And that is absolutely fine, considering that it contains so much great writing.…Jodi Sh. Doff, in “Lele,” shows that she can get a whole world – the world of “the pre-Disney Times Square topless business” – across in a few pages, or even a few sentences: a stripper is stabbed by her husband, while she dances; the bartender wipes blood off the bottles and keeps serving.
The common allegation against radical feminists is that they cast all sex workers as victims, regardless of what sex workers themselves say about that; the common allegation against sex-positive feminists is that they insist on seeing everything in terms of sunshine and sparkles and empowerment, even when the facts are brutal. This book is what it is – and it is excellent – because it explicitly rejects party lines.
New York Times : Sunday Book Review cover : Sunday, August 23, 2009 Meet, Pay, Love / By Toni Bentley
“Lele,” a piece by Jodi Sh. Doff, who “grew up in the suburbs as someone else entirely,” recalls Henry Miller’s in-your-face exposition. She tells of a night at Diamond Lil’s on Canal Street, where “Viva’s sitting onstage, legs spread wide.” While her customer is buried and busy, she holds a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, and chitchats with a girlfriend about another girlfriend. “Every two minutes or so Viva taps him on the head and he hands her a 20 from a stack of bills he’s holding, never looking up.” We see in this wonderful set piece the whole money/sex connection enacted with raw charm and an immediacy that reaches far beyond this strip club, as the man’s stack of 20s, one by one, becomes hers. Multitasking Viva holds them “folded lengthwise in her cigarette hand.”
Chicago Now : Saturday, August 15, 2009 Tale of two cities: Sex Worker Literati / By Anna Pulley
The sex industry is often glamorized (like the new HBO series “Hung”) or villainized (by many). Rarely is there any in-between on what the sex industry actually looks like, so it was fascinating to see the scope of performances [at Sex Worker Literati, a new reading and performance series hosted on the first Thursday of the month in New York City's SoHo district], the wildly different experiences and the inspirational messages that sprang forth from each of the performers….The humorous requests and political gripes were tempered by Jodi Sh. Doff, who read a beautiful, heart-breaking piece about a 15-year-old stripper, once vibrant and innocent, claimed by what she referred to as “the machine” – the underworld of drugs, sex and violence in the 80s, where one’s own survival outweighed all else.
New York Press Review : Tuesday, August 11, 2009 The Happy Hook Book /Sex workers spill the beans in smart new anthology
“At a packed house at Happy Ending, former stripper and prostitute Jodi Sh. Doff, reminds us that she worked during an era when the term “sex worker” hadn’t yet been invented. Her writing is hardboiled; Diamond Lil’s on Canal Street “stinks of stale beer, cheap whisky, smoke and cunt.” Doff recounts the tragedy of the brutal murder of Lele, a beautiful young stripper she worked with at a topless bar in “the Deuce,” as 42nd Street used to be known pre-Disney. It was an abandoned, litter-choked lot, full of “dog shit, broken bottles, neon, used condoms, freaks, vermin, predators.” Ah, the good old days.“
Bearing Life : Women’s Writings on Childlessness (Feminist Press, 2000)
Kirkus Reviews, 2000
Over 50 women contribute to this engaging collection of essays, fiction, and poetry exploring childlessness. American Book Review editor Ratner (The Lion’s Share, 1991, etc.) proposes to discuss and legitimize alternatives to motherhood through the work of outstanding female writers. While the expected topics of abortion and infertility are central here, dozens of less-discussed scenarios of choice and circumstance are explored as well. In Jodi Sh. Doff’s “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Off” a young woman, afraid she has inherited her father’s abusive tendencies, chooses hysterectomy. …The collection does not want for depth or imagination, and its sprawling content helps shape a topic defined in name only by absence. An intricate and important anthology, ultimately using childlessness to develop a study of art, female identity, and self-understanding.
as Scarlett Fever
Penthouse-Between the Sheets (Grand Central Publishing, 2001)
The BUST Guide to the New Girl Order (Penguin, 1999)
Best American Erotica 1995 (Touchstone, 1995)
in print : periodicals & digital
Tear : Premiere Issue 2001
Bust : Summer/Fall 1998
Cosmopolitan : June 1997
Playgirl : June 1997
Penthouse : December 1995
Stim.com : Issue 9.4
Just watched your reading of “Lele” and you’re such a gifted storyteller…
You know something? No one can describe it as well as you…it’s so dead-on accurate. The way we seasoned club girls used to think about someone new and fresh and innocent and clueless in the night-world we inhabited. How it destroyed them. This story reminds me of someone I worked with in the downtown rock clubs.
There was a beautiful girl named Eve fresh from New Mexico who came to work there as a cocktail waitress with us. All the guys couldn’t take their eyes off her. I remember all us girls saying the same thing about her that you girls did about Lele. What the hell is a girl like this doing in a place like this? We’d never met someone as pretty and naive and sweet and affectionate and innocent and childlike-giggly. You wanted to protect her but at the same time, you thought, she came here of her own volition. We used to tease her about being Rebecca from Sunnybrook Farm and she laughed too. She got me home once. I don’t know from where or how, but all I know is when I became aware, I was vomiting into my toilet, and she stayed with me to make sure I was okay, always maternal, very much the caretaker. She didn’t do any drugs yet, nor did she drink much. But then came the downslide. And a year later no one saw her again. By then she’d left and became a hooker to support her dope habit. As opposed to Lele, she did lose her looks within that one year…
Very moving story, and so was your reading of it, poignant, uncomfortably funny, real….