Do the holidays make me sick?

Let me share an interesting fact about my recordkeeping. I'm not the most consistent blogger or journalist, but I do keep pretty good financial records of how much I made and where and when I earned it. So if I am trying to remember when it was I got the flu one winter or when I was out of work sick, I can look for the weeklong gaps in my incoming cash flow.

Some strippers are much more anal about this than I am and create amazing Excel documents breaking down their earnings by the hour and customer. I only break it down by weekly, daily, monthly and annual averages, average earnings by club and by the shift within the club.

I'm under the weather today; I could feel it coming on yesterday morning with a cough and a tickle in the back of my throat and immediately started with the Emergen-C and Super Lysine. I was just now wondering if I got sick after Thanksgiving last year and looked at my records; I wasn't sick. My car went into the shop, I sold some stockings on Ebanned and did some sewing work for a friend, but I wasn't sick. Also, the Sunday after Thanksgiving was four times more lucrative last year than it was this year! The little club was as quiet as could be last night, and that combined with my desire to huddle in the dressing room knitting and feeling ill rather than socialize contributed to one of my lowest-earning nights of the year.

Oh, also, the lightbulb inside the jukebox is busted, so we're using a tiny flashlight to read the track listings when we pick our music. It's pretty funny, standing up there nearly naked and peering into the jukebox with a small, fading flashlight in your hand looking for that Goldfrapp track you want to play.

Thanksgiving was my holiday payoff day this week, thanks to serious understaffing at the big club and one really good customer. Hooray for working on holidays! Though the bonanza is kind of cancelled out by me being ill and not working tonight.

So, T-day customer was enjoying some dances with me when I suggested that he'd really enjoy the VIP room more. He agreed, but needed to use a credit card. Normally this is not a problem at most clubs as they realize that a $250+ purchase may require more cash than typical patrons have on hand, especially if they've been in the club a while (or aren't experienced clubbers and know to hit their own bank's ATM before coming so as to avoid extortionate ATM and credit card service fees). But they must be working out the kinks here, because here's how this went.

Me: "We're going to do a VIP and he wants to put it on his card."
Manager 1: "Well, the only way to do that is to do a cash advance at the bar."
Me: "But he can, right?"
M 1: "Yeah, he has to go to the bar with the card and his ID, though."

Wow, that sounds hard. Forget it, $250 isn't worth that.

So I go get a waitress to come handle this. But she can't. So I ask the bartender. Who directs me to manager 2. Who has to get the customer's ID and card, take it to the office, photocopy it, get the cash, bring it back, hold on to the room fee and my fee for the VIP, and have the customer sign. This process takes at least twenty minutes to complete.

It is not supposed to be this hard to spend money in a strip club. Oh, and they are collecting a 20% service charge on his cash advance, as well. Now, I like that they aren't doing to me what most clubs do, which is taking a 10% bite from my end. I am getting the full fee. But 20% is really, really bad. That's just, well, usurious. I think 5% (or a service charge equal to that charged by the card company) is acceptable. Charging the customer 20% on his cash advance -- on the cash advance he's getting to spend in your club is downright hostile.


And pretty common in most clubs; 10-15% is probably the average. I really, really recommend always taking cash to the club. Don't put lapdances on credit. I mean, I won't stop someone from doing it, believe me, because of course it's worth it, but seriously, use cash. It's smart.

Were I in charge I would seriously streamline this process. The manager himself wouldn't have to come to the damn table; just let the waitress get the card and ID, take it to the manager, bring the cash back. There. Done. Manager or bouncer can collect VIP fee when we check into the room. Simple. Charge at most a 10% fee, preferably 5%, so that the customer doesn't feel that he's being squeezed at every turn. Dude just paid $4.75 for my soda pop, is paying the club $100 an hour to sit on a different couch, and enriching me by $400, part of which will supplement the inadequate salaries of the bouncers and DJs at the club via my tips to them. Make it easier on that customer to spend that money! Does it need to be more obvious?

This guy was so laid back. I was worried he'd get annoyed by the delay and rigamarole of all this, but he stayed pleasant the whole time and was a doll during our VIP. Thanks!

Friday was devoted to football (the embarrassment that was the Texas--A&M game) and a fabulous massage. I do so love my massage therapist; he has done wonders for my body, and is not afraid to do the really hard work. Any dancers in the Portland area, contact me for a referral; he's great with leg and knee issues and also "pole arm," which is the name I've given to the stress you get in your dominant arm that pulls your body weight onto the pole.

Oh! I forgot about this, but one of the nights I was in Missoula I danced for a hottie physical therapy student. I suggested that dancers would be an excellent population to use for a study. He looked at me for a minute, and then said, "I think you've just given me a great idea! I will have to do a thesis next year . . . " So, I really hope he decides to study repetitive stress injuries in dancers relating to pole and stagework, and if he does, I want to hear about it. Yankee Montana transplant, I hope you email me.

I will pass through Missoula again in about three weeks and hit the other club in that town; it's supposedly right next to a truckstop and really a sight. I can't wait.

I am also interested in suggestions on the best kind of long underwear to wear in subzero temperatures as I head back to North Dakota on Saturday. I think I am crazy, but I want a house and they keep paying me well, so into winter I will go.

I like music, and do not manage time well

All of July when I was in Alaska I was listening to the latest Maximo Park record. I was going to treat myself by seeing two of their shows, one in Seattle and one in Portland. I ended up extending my stay in AK and missing the shows, which sucked. The last time I saw them was at the Reading Festival in 2006, which was wonderful. I love seeing the Brit bands in England because I can see them with crowds like this (not just like this; I was in this actual crowd):



as opposed to the 100 or so people who turn out to see them here. Not that I don't love having them all to myself in a small venue, but would it kill us all to sing along and dance? I credit the far younger drinking age, in part, for the greater enthusiasm of UK crowds.

They rolled back through town on Sunday, opening for Travis, of all bands, and played a perfectly respectable set at the Crystal Ballroom. One that I ran into late because of taking too long at Loyly on coed night with Mr. W. I could hear them playing from the street and thought "Fuck! Why do they start right on time in Portland?" Fortunately we only missed one song, as I found out from a glance at the set lists pilfered by some Reubenesque Maximo fans.

The Crystal isn't the best venue in town and in fact kind of irritates me; the sound and the layout of the room just are off. But they rocked, Paul danced around so enthusiastically, and I got hot. I know he wears that hat because his hair is thinning but I don't care. Charisma, baby, that's the name of the game. I have had "The Coast is Always Changing" and "Our Velocity" on the jukebox at the little club for a while now and they always, always, make me so happy when I play them.

Not even 24 hours later I didn't retain the lesson about "Shows start early in this town." More than ten years of Austin timing -- three bands? First one will go on around 10:30 and the performances will run until the bar closes, at 2 a.m. Bigger venue? Opening band will go on about a half an hour or 45 minutes after the stated show start time. Never, ever fails.

Charalambides were to play the Someday Lounge. Show at 9, two opening acts, I figured 10:45 was a perfectly good time to get there. And it was, if all I wanted was the last five minutes of their set. I tried to see this damn band several times in the 90's and shit always went wrong. I drove to Houston to find they'd cancelled and the Mountain Goats were already playing. This time the slow folkie was Alasdair Roberts and though I can get into a Drag City mood sometimes, this wasn't the time for Scottish folk. I was in the mood for noise and psych.


Alas, I was destined to relive 1996 all over again, and not in the good way.

Not everyone's a racist or weird!

I noticed some hits from ND and wanted to assure my readers from there that if you have this blog address it's because I think you're cool and thought you might enjoy reading. There are some sweet, cool people in your town and I don't want to paint the whole place with one brush; like every community it is made up of many different parts. I come back because of the good ones (and let's not lie, the cash money).

hic

Damnit, I have the hiccups right now and they are harsh. It's not from drinking because, you know, I don't. So, I have two personal hiccup cures that work for me. The first is to take a full glass of water and drink it from the wrong side -- the part of the lip that's opposite your mouth -- so that eventually, as you drain it, you're bending forward. The other is to take a giant gulp of water and swallow it while simultaneously plugging your ears and nose. Index fingers in the ears, pinkies on either nostril. Nothing graceful about it. The few times I've gotten hiccups at work I've retreated to the dressing room to do one of these, and I swear no one has ever known what I was doing. They stare at me like I've grown a third tit until I explain.

Hey, it works.

Tonight wasn't quite the bonanza we were expecting; it was a pretty unremarkable night. Personally, I was saved in the most wonderful way possible, by doing a half hour's worth of dances for a beautiful blonde former dancer and being paid nearly double what I was owed by her boyfriend. I was happy and relaxed after spending time curled up on the couch with her and so the rest of the night was just fine. What I remember of it. That was definitely the highlight. God, former strippers make some of the best customers ever. And I know they had fun tonight after leaving.

The club opens at 4 p.m. tomorrow and I'm more than willing to try my luck. And I will again on Black Friday; this week has to pay off sometime.

Biggest bar night of the year

Or so they say. Everyone has to go out and tie one on before spending Thanksgiving with the family.

I haven't been back at the big club in Portland for a month and a half and reports are that business is spotty at best, but I'll be in tonight and tomorrow. Nope, no big holiday plans, so I'll swing my hips for the entertainment of groups of guys who are related and decided to get the hell out of the house, and out-of-towners who couldn't make it home. The impending holiday makes them all very generous.

Last night was dead as hell at the little bar, though thankfully one decent customer made my night not suck. And during one set when one of the customers started tipping fives the guy next to him followed suit. I love it when they all want to keep up with the higher standard of tipping.

It was unremarkable otherwise, though it's always nice to be home there with the combination of insane street people wandering through and out-of-towners from the downtown hotels.

Blog Warm Fuzzies

Hobo Stripper gave me this lovely Wonder Woman Award, with the directive to pass it along.

Grace is fabulously interesting; down in Texas, she labors for truth, justice, and Benjamins. It is a wonder to me that she has the energy to do all she does.


Diablo Cody is, of course, a stripper hero. I love the fact that she got her boobs done not as a stripper but as a screenwriter.


Stripaholic is one of two dancers with whom I had one of my favorite dressing room conversations; mocking the college one of the other strippers graduated from. She's bright and funny and figuring out what the hell she wants to do with life, so I feel right there with her.


Jo Weldon is my all-time stripper hero. She is the Genius Stripper.

Casual Racism in the Heartland

In North Dakota, the woman who books the dancers is herself a dancer; she fills in at the club on occasion and works at other clubs from time to time. She's great; funny and friendly and nice, and also quite hot when she cleans up. She has the scoop on a hundred traveling dancers that pass through her club and dishes with other club owners; good gossip, meaning that you're easy to work with and make money, can get dancers better bookings and pay rates (these are some of the few clubs that pay you to show up). Bad gossip, such as drug problems, unreliability, or a shitty attitude gets you, well, the opposite.

I was in the dressing room with ND Madam when she took a call from a club owner a couple of hours away. She'd been helping him out a lot with booking dancers for the first months of the club, and had sent along one of her friends who she described as "a walking Barbie, but crazy."
"I had to fire her! She called a girl a nigger!" the club owner told ND Madam. "She's crazy!"
It's pretty damn awesome that he did that, I have to say. There's a lot of weird race relations out there. A great percentage of the dancers passing through these rural Midwestern clubs are black. Almost none of the customers or townspeople are. A great percentage of the black dancers work for pimps. This is fact, not conjecture on my part. ND Madam knows who's who, but as long as there is no illegal activity in the club, she won't or can't do anything about it. But it's a fact, and kind of a nasty one, that for the majority of the men in these clubs, black woman = whore. When you're somewhere that treats its whores with respect that's not so bad; whores should get the same respect as any of us sex workers. And as any woman; that goes without saying.

This also sucks for the non-hooking black dancers as they must deal with every customer assuming they're hookers and therefore treating them as such. The white dancers get propositioned too, of course, and certainly there are traveling dancers of all ethnicities hooking on the side, but we deal with far less harrassment than the black dancers.

I know I have written some potentially terribly offensive things above and feel I must qualify some statements.
1) Not all black traveling strippers in the Midwest are hookers.
2) Enough are that the customers assume that all of them are.
3) Hookers or not, I like them fine as long as they don't do anything in the club and are nice. I don't care how consenting adults spend their time or earn their money.
4) Hookers or not, every one of us deserves to be treated with respect and a bare minimum of decent conversation, not to have the opener be "How much to date?"

It's a weird microsociety. The vast majority of the traveling dancers I've met have been sweet and kind, not crazy and flaky. After all, they have to make plans a week, not a day, in advance.

On one of my last nights in ND some customers from North Carolina were at the rack. There were two of them and they both bought dances from me, but before I could get to them I had another customer waiting. While I was dancing for him I heard a commotion at the rack (the dancer was black, these guys were white).

"You have to tip up here if you're sitting at the stage, honey."
I didn't hear the response, but hear chairs scooting across the floor.
"Oh, you're only going to tip the white girls, huh? You don't like me?"
"Hey, I'm married, I'm just here with mah buddy."
"Well, if you're married, what are you doing in here? If that's your excuse not to tip, what's your excuse for being here?"

I take North Carolina guys back for their dances, in order. The first one is quiet and polite. The second one is not so quiet, but nice enough. First we discussed our sobriety; I don't drink, you don't drink, then he started talking about twelve-step programs. This is an interesting good ol' boy, I thought, and then I asked him if it was them the dancer had been chewing out.
"Yeah, she got mad we weren't tipping. But I only like one flavor, you know?"
Oh. god. "You can like whatever you like but you can't act like that in the bar." And, you know, nice contrast that the recovering alcoholic is a big fat racist jerk.

Apparently the North Carolina guys simply moved their chairs back from the stage and declined to tip the dancer, as rude a thing as can be done stageside. We understand that not every customer is into every dancer. The polite thing to do is to remove your ass from the stageside seating for a table further back, not push away as if from a table from which you don't wish to dine. It's pretty damn rude, and I'm not surprised the dancer snapped.

It is unimaginable to me what these dancers put up with. I know that I deal with a lot at times. They take on everything I do, and then add to the mix: wondering if they'll be the only black girl in the club, if the club has a quota and will only hire so many non-white dancers, if the hotel will rent to them (that's right, sometimes the hotels will magically be booked up if the voice on the phone sounds ethnic and is calling from Milwaukee or Minnneapolis), if their base pay will be less that that offered to white dancers, if all the customers are going to be racist jerks or if it will just be a series of small, ignorant remarks, like, "You're sure pretty for a colored girl." I cannot imagine how thick their skin must be.

People are friendly out there, no doubt, and I've had a good experience. But racism and intolerance are still a mighty force. I admire those who stick it out there; every lesbian who stays in the small town, every tattooed kid, every black military guy who stays in a town where his family might be one of two nonwhite ones. Those people know from xenophobia and they are stronger than dirt.

Alive and well in Montana

Though not raking it in as much as in North Dakota, I'm enjoying my time in MT. A friend from Portland has joined me and I'm worried she's not doing well enough to justify coming out here, though. The money is respectable enough if not fantastic and I think I can safely say it's better than what I'd be making in Portland right now. Especially considering that when traveling I always show up at work, whereas I blow off two out of five shifts when I'm at home, working at a club where there aren't any repercussions for doing so. This club needs dancers so badly that when a couple canceled last night, the booker offered $100 to anyone willing to cover the shift. I was getting a great massage when the message came and so couldn't take that offer, though you bet I would have.

These Montana clubs are something else; as with the late, lamented Buffalo Station, the current club is gorgeous inside. It is also equipped with the dreaded spinning poles, but this one is 20' tall. It's truly something to watch a dancer climb to the top then slide all the way down, hanging on by an ankle, and spinning on well-greased ball bearings.

The customers are also remarkably well-trained, too, keeping their hands by their sides while we dance, even in VIP.

The club's got some really strange cash handling practices, though. At most clubs we hang on to our money. Mine stays in a purse or a garter, depending on where I am. Singles get cashed in for bigger bills after stage sets. It's simple. At the end of the night I count it, pay my house fee, and decide how much to tip out based on how well I did or who helped me out.

Well, remember my time at Concepts in Indiana? Where we had to turn in all our cash to the bar and they handed us little receipts?




This place runs a little like that. Instead of taking a straight 20% of every single dollar, though, it's a bit more complicated.

Stage money: When I come into the dressing room after a stage set, the dancer manager counts my money (I usually do it first, or along with her if there's a lot). It goes into a bank bag kept up front in the cash cage with the doorgirl. I initial a little sheet of paper with the amount written on it. 15% of my stage tips go to the dancer manager and the doorgirl. Apparently, I am paying them to count my money. Also, this means each dollar I'm tipped on stage is the equivalent of $0.85. Hee.

Table dances: Dances done on the floor are topless and cost $20. The house keeps $5 of this, meaning I get paid $15. After a set of dances I turn in the money to the cash cage. It goes into the bank bag and the doorgirl keeps track of the number of dances with a little hash mark next to my name on the dance count sheet. After every five dances I initial the sheet. I didn't know this until a few days in, because it hasn't been anything close to an issue, but there is a five-dance-a-night quota the dancers are supposed to meet each night.

VIP: The house charges a $50 fee for each half hour spent in VIP. We set our own prices, though the general consensus is that it's $500 an hour, $250 a half hour. The VIP is the key to having a good night here as it's hard to rake it in making $15 a dance, especially in a not very full club and doing stage sets every hour. So here we can net $200 for a half hour, $400 for an hour. We keep all of our VIP earnings. I've sold the VIP almost every night I've been here and without it this club would be a lot less financially rewarding. The one really awesome thing they do here is the small service fees for credit card charges. Most clubs charge the customer 10% for any credit card cash advances, and then turn around and charge the dancer 10% on her take. Which would mean that $500 would cost the customer $550, and the dancer, out of her $400, would receive $360. Here, they do not charge the customer anything, and charge us a less extortionate 5%. So they pay less and we keep more, which is good all around.

Miscellaneous tips: Anything we are given by customers while sitting with them or on top of the price of table dances are ours to keep. No percentage is taken from them.

Other fees: There is a $10 house fee, a $10 minimum DJ tip, and on the weekends a bouncer we tip whatever we like.

So, at the end of the night we receive a little piece of paper with everything calculated and added up, folded and paperclipped around our cash. VIP money gets its own little slip. I'm going to have to ask them how this affects their tax reporting. I know the VIPs on credit cards are since there's a big sign in the dressing room to that effect.





It's all been in line with my own notes (what, you think I turn over cash without writing it down each and every time?) except for once. One of my stage sets was missing in my totals and had been added to another dancer's. It's unpleasant when you're in the position of asking another dancer to hand you cash, even if you do make the dancer manager, who'd thrown her notes away for the night, do it. "I would grab them out of the trash but it's already out in the dumpster and I can't climb in there!"
"I will," I said, kind of kidding.
"Well, hey, if you want to over $52," she said.
Are you kidding me? That's naked money you're talking about, and the money you earned dancing naked is the hardest kind of money to lose. My fellow dancers know what I'm talking about. And it's $50, come on, I don't care if I made $1000, that's still enough for me to care about.

They took care of it well, though, and that's the only screwup I've seen. It is starting to give me a headache, thinking about this convoluted system, so I'll leave for later my happiness with the staff. They are really nice and the other dancers are a very nice bunch to work with. I do like it here and hope to return in December.

All Tomorrow's Parties Festival - my bloody valentine

I'm going to London in June. I know reunion shows always suck but hey, as with Slint I am going since I never saw them back in the day. Would you like to know why? I missed a Dinosaur Jr./MBV show in Austin in, like, 1991 because I was away at a debate tournament. In retrospect I do not know what I was thinking.

So far north I'm listening to the CBC

So, obviously I wasn't somewhere so remote I couldn't send email on my phone. Though the service is iffy out here. The week has been respectable so far; Monday was good, Tuesday was quiet, and Halloween was dead (hah) until 9 p.m. when it got so busy I made as much as I had on Monday in three hours. I dressed as a pirate wench and danced to Firewater and Gogol Bordello, and, of course, Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys, two bands that aren't in my personal collection but are indispensable for any kind of seafaring theme set.

Driving out here took so very long. As much as I like to travel, for as much of it as I do, I don't really enjoy the actual traveling, the part you have to do to get from one place to the next. Airports are annoying, long plane flights tire me, and driving also wears me out. This time of year it's still sunny in Montana, which is the bulk of this trip, but I still get very anxious in the mountain passes. It's as if some atavistic urge deep inside me is screaming to get closer to the inside of the mountain, to the ground, that we were not meant to spiral up and then down from the Continental Divide on an interstate highway. It's coming from the same place that tells me it might be nice to have a bunch of sheep out in Montana somewhere. But then it flattens out and becomes the highways I loved in Texas, a long, flat, mostly straight ribbon of asphalt through not much to look at.

The prettier the scenery, the hairier the drive.

The little club in the little town is friendly as always, though I have to be conscious of being a smartass or talking too fast or making the wrong jokes, because then some folks will think I'm stuck up, the same way people in the Midwest think New Yorkers are rude, or how New Yorkers think Southerners are slow, when they're not, they just communicate differently. Not to say there aren't idiots out here; it is a bar, after all. I have dug my fingernails into the wrists of frisky hands several times already, and it's mostly the 60+ set that offends here. The younger guys are generally much more restrained, bless them. And there's a fulltime bouncer now monitoring the lapdance area. When he's not playing pool.

One young, drunk girl approached me at the bar last night. "My friends have been trying to get me to go up there on the stage all night," she said. "But I don't want to take my bra off!"
Not a problem. As soon as you tried to get up there the bartender would be getting you pulled down. "Why don't you go ask the bartender about that?" I told her. The bartender rolled her eyes appreciatively at me.

Later she sat at the rack, "I don't understand this," she said. "It's pretty simple. Watch and learn." After dancing and collecting tips for a few minutes I returned to see if she'd pulled out any bills yet. "Do you see how it works?" She put her hands on my shoulders and I moved them off. "You can't touch."
"Yeah, I think I understand. I'm appreciating what you do."
"Yup. I dance, and people tip me."
"And how does that make you feel?"
Oh, goody! Someone's just taken her first feminist theory class in college!
"A hell of a lot better than when they don't tip," was my predictable response. I sure as hell didn't feel like trying to catch her up on 20 years of opinions about stripping, sex work, feminism, and gender relations, or listening to her. Not when she was as drunk as she was, at least. Had she been sober I might have made an effort to educate. But it was busy and I was occupied with trying to make myself feel good by collecting folding money in my orange plastic pumpkin.

I would have thought that in North Dakota of all places I wouldn't have a comment like that pop up, but then I also wouldn't have thought that a sweet blonde mom would be one of my most complimentary customers. All kinds, people, all kinds.