Sunday night
Susan and Jordan’s tour of Dallas Strip Clubs

The first club we checked out was the Cabaret Royale, the most beautiful club I’ve seen. It has a fountain and plaza in front, a large clothing boutique, and an entryway that reminded me of Fonda San Miguel, an interior Mexican restaurant in Austin. Inside there’s a large VIP section, plenty of champagne rooms, and a separate dining area. It was gorgeous but dead when we were there, and the girls were OK.
Next stop was the Clubhouse, the nude club famous for being partially owned by Pantera and as the preferred hangout for various Dallas athletes and touring rock bands. It’s off of the Northwest Highway hidden amongst a bunch of warehouses in a particularly unlovely industrial section. It was busier since Sunday nights are $10 dance nights, and the girls were lovely for the most part. It was extremely clean. We just got a brief tour and were told to come back.
The Penthouse Key Club had just celebrated its grand opening recently. It’s immense and also a gorgeous club, with a fabulous dressing room and a very professional system of dealing with the dancers. Again, we weren’t so impressed with the girls, though there were several hotties. The tour was great, though, and it has these skyboxes in lieu of champagne rooms that are each themed and sit up on the second story of the club. It looked like a blast up there.
Our last stop was the Fare East, a club recommended to us by another dancer in Austin. It was packed and raunchy and rowdy – the dancers were definitely not the A-Team, likewise with the clientele, and the manager told us “We have a long history of beating the shit out of people that misbehave, so let us know if anyone gives you shit.” He also said, “On a busy night, you can go ‘Wanna dance? No? Fuck you. Wanna dance?’ ‘cause it’s so busy you don’t have to stop to talk.” I told him I liked to maybe not say “Fuck you” to the guys that didn’t buy dances, but I have to say I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those gals did. It was packed in there, but we didn’t see a lot of dances going on, and it was very loud and smoky. We did see the lamest “fire show” ever – some girl got on stage, in a regular old bikini, and basically waved some flaming torches around her body. That was it. That was the “fire show.” I could have more fun with a matchbook and a bottle of Everclear, thanks. There was one totally fantastic dancer named Dee that we loved. She was 5’nothin’ and a little flexible fireball onstage. So if you’re ever there, get a dance from Dee.
I actually had some SMU kid come up to me and tell me not to work there if I worked in Dallas – glad a manager didn’t hear that, kid. We figured we could put up with that atmosphere anywhere and that if we were going to work in Dallas it should be somewhere nicer than we’d find in Austin. Jordan did say, “I wouldn’t want to work here, but I would definitely bring my boyfriend here to hang out!”
So she picked Cabaret Royale and I picked the Penthouse. I figured the clubs in Dallas would be pretty picky, but at each and every club we visited on Sunday, as soon as we said we were interested in working, they said, “When do you want to start?” I mean, we’re good-looking women, but I assumed they’d want to at least see us in dancerwear before hiring. What if we had hideous scars or gang tattoos?