Hope you all had a nice holiday. Cincinnati is apparently a very porky town, so I bought and cooked a delicious fresh pork tenderloin and made all the sides. It snowed a little, even.

My flight up was awful. I am so pissed at Continental right now; they were doing some code share thing on my flight and supposedly would ferry us to the appropriate gate on time to catch our flight; after being assured we'd make it, four of us missed our flight, which left right on time, and got bumped to one two hours later. Which ended up being seven hours later as weather delays hit. Fuckers.

Last night:

"Hey, I feel like a chili dog.'
"Do you want to go to Skyline? That's the big chili place here."
"They do that weird thing where they serve it on pasta, right?"
"Yeah, but they do Coneys, too."
"All right."

"Hey, look, they have a low-carb bowl. It's three hot dogs, chili, and cheese."
"Mmm. Health food."

"This 'chili' is kind of sweet."
"Yeah, I was looking at one of the Cincinnati recipes and it calls for cinnamon, cocoa."
"This is less spicy than a can of Wolf Brand Chili."
"It's less spicy than a Clark Bar."

Cincinnati chili: free of actual chiles. Whereas my favorite recipe calls for three different kinds and three tablespoons of cayenne pepper. And I'm not even a heat queen.

I ventured out to a couple of clubs yesterday afternoon, figuring I'd hit the one actually in town first, the Deja Vu. "In town" is kind of a stretch; it took me about twenty-five minutes to get there from downtown. I walked in and told the doorgirl I'd like to talk to a manager about working there. She looked at me and said, "Are you comfortable with fully nude?" Oh, god, no. Stripping where I take off my clothes? Say it isn't so. And what the hell kind of question is that to ask a potential hire?

The manager was a little better, though they weren't really friendly here. And you have to do an amateur contest to get hired. And it's an evil Deja Vu--"Dances are $20 and we take $7 of that. There's also a base house rent of $10." So if I do $400 worth of dances, I get to keep--$250. Plus tips come out, too. That's insane. You could leave with only 50% of what you make. I mean, if I leave with $500 every night, it might be acceptable, but if I net $300 and leave with $185, that's ridiculous. I'm ok with handing out about 20%, total, of what I make. The nice thing in Texas is that you pay your house fee, which is usually between $20-$40, tip your DJ and manager, and that's it. So while it might suck to hand out $50 on a slow night, on a really good night you get to keep a much higher percentage of what you make. I clear $200? I leave with $150, having tipped out 25%. I clear $500? I'll tip out more, so say I leave with $425. I'll have only given away 15% of my earnings. At a Deja Vu, it's a lot worse. Clear $200? That's $130, minus, say, $10 house rent and $20 in tips, so take-home is $100, with 50% staying behind. Clear $500? That's $325 you keep, minus $30, which is $295. 40% going to the house. Ridiculous. As the guy was explaining the Vu policies to me, he said, "Bear in mind we're the only club in the area." No, that's not why you take the dancers, it's because that is, across the board, the way Deja Vu does business. And of course, my calculations are based on all of the money coming from dances. They don't take a cut from tips from stage or on top of the dance price. If I work there, I'm sure I'll be telling every customer, "Dances are $20. I get $13 and I have to give the house $7," in hopes of tips. Which is shitty for the customer.

But, fuck, what else is in the area? Well, there's a smaller club, and by smaller I mean the size of my living room, over in Indiana by the casino and--get this--the ski area. Hee. it reminded me of Mary's in Portland, though they had an actual live DJ who happened to be a girl. She said, "Suit her up!" when I walked in. The woman behind the bar, a former dancer, was excesively friendly, poured me a soda, and took out her little yellow legal pad and proceeded to make me a list of the local clubs. This place, Concepts, is tiny. They do their lapdances on benches in an area behind the DJ booth. Benches against the wall, no kidding. And the dancers, upon receiving cash, turn it into the bar and are given a receipt for it. At the end of the night--yup--they get it back minus 20%. Then you tip the DJ 5% and the barmaid. However, dancers get paid an hourly wage here and they get kickbacks on the $8 cokes they want the customers to buy you (why they would do this when $15 gets a lapdance is beyond me). So, 20%? And that's of all tips, stage and everything. I wonder if the dancers hold back cash here? So anyhow, off of $200 you give out 25% (20 to the house, 5 to the DJ), so that's $150 you leave with. Let's add $10 to the bar--$140. Off of $500, it's $365. Marginally better than the Vu--unless you get good tips there.

Oh, the Vu is nude and a juice bar, not even BYOB like Texas. Concepts is liquor--and latex on the nipples. The girls I saw there were really cute, surprisingly so for such a tiny little bar, cuter than the ones I saw at the Vu. And this was at 2 p.m. So maybe it's the place to check out? I'm also going to take a look at a club down in Kentucky before I leave, and decide which one to try first. If they suck, I'll go to Dayton or Columbus.