Black Velvet Beauty

Some of the best strip club art I've ever seen. New batch of photos up on Flickr today.

Gorgeous corsets

I am so pleased that the woman who made me this gorgeous corset finally has her retail site up and running. I love Lisa's corsets because she's willing to combine work of an extremely high quality with the considerations of performers (zippers for easy on-and-off being the main feature I appreciate). Waisted Couture -- go check it out, and tell her Susan sent you.

"I'm gonna get a Chardonnay right now."
"Well, I'm gonna get a big double shot, since we can only have one drink an hour. I only have three or four a night, though."
"I tried that, but I'll drink a double and only stay buzzed for 20 minutes! But if I have a wine or beer I can sip it for an hour and stay buzzed. If I have a double, like, 15 minutes later, or if I go on stage, I'm sober again."

"My customer is bringing in this hormone stuff that makes your boobs bigger! I'm so happy, I'll get bigger boobs without a boob job."
"Wow, that must be why no one ever gets boob jobs anymore."
"They don't?"

"Ugh, I'm so sweaty. I think they like it when we smell a little, though."
"Oh, yeah. You won't believe this, but one of the best nights I ever had was after I'd been hunting and butchered a mule deer and didn't have time to shower before work. This one guy couldn't get enough of me, he bought 17 dances and four VIPs."

Happy Birthday to Grace

Grace Undressed, happy 28th. 28 is when I got married, and you are already paired, and you have 364 more days to be 28, so you may be officially mated yet and not violate Vulcan tradition.

And thanks for bestowing the Arte y pico award (whatever that may be -- an excuse to spread blog love around, I assume, since it didn't come with a Lush gift certificate or anything) on me, with such kind words.

I suppose I need to turn around and pass it on to five other blogs I love. Damn you for snagging Sadie and Tara, but I've shared a stage with them, so phbbbt.

Todd is a D2 customer who shockingly showed me that customers, too, can be amazed at the nonsensical behavior of strip club management. His sardonic wit and clear-eyed commentary make him a jewel in that tiniest of categories, the strip club customer blog.

Avalon almost makes me want to read self-help tomes. While I'm amused at the thought of her trying to whip some of the basket cases I've worked with into SuperStripper material, reading her blog on my phone at work has turned around more than one bad night. She's also a one-woman stereotype-combating machine.

Everything Jo Weldon does is covered in glitter and feathers, metaphorically speaking.

Quixotic Dancer not only picked a fabulous blog name, but has some great musings on men, notably this great post about cunnilingus and male self-delusion.

Davka has been on my radar for a while; I like to read about the places I've been through another perspective.

Enough of that, then. I want my next award to come with a free lapdance, or a sandwich or something.

where I was

Sunday was quiet for a while, quiet enough for me to amuse myself taking snapshots of the bar and then myself.








flickr to be updated when I'm not in an airport

In Alaska. It rained almost all week. My travel partner's disposition has been poor due to factors outside my control. I covered my expenses and made a tidy profit; I am tired and stressed, but I am so glad I came. I would have been sad to miss my annual trip to stripper summer camp.

More awesomeness in stage names, pt II

Tonight: Vanilla Sky (Kat and I joked that Abre los Ojos was a better dancer), and, either the most literal or the most postmodern stage name I've ever heard: Woman.

mmm, tasty

I hope you all caught this: Strip Club Eats: Ten gentlemen’s lounges with good food. Seriously.
—CHOW

hash browns!

"Let's go get some hash browns!" Kat said to me around 2 a.m. last night, sounding for all the world exactly like Leslie Mann in The 40 Year Old Virgin. We'd both been pretty busy all night but it was dying down. I still had work to do with a group of four Twin Cities visitors, out here far from home to fish in the pissing rain, so it took me another half hour to get done. We tipped out our staff, including the poor brand-new DJ who managed to skip me on two rotations after telling me I was up next. This pissed me off because if I think I'm going on stage after the next song, I'm not trying to sell dances, and when it turns out I don't have to go anywhere after all, I'm pissed that I've wasted the time. So he managed to cut into my time by about a half-hour total during the most profitable hours.

But he's really, really inexperienced, so much so that he actually has DJ chatter crib notes in a notebook in the booth. There are so many hoary ones: "Step up to the stage and give some greenery for the scenery! A little green on the lean! This little lady wants something from you and it's six inches long and has a head on it -- that's right, your dollar bills! Tipping is not a city in China, but Peking is, and if you wanna get to Peking ya gotta go through tipping!" and the other DJ had kindly dictated his bon mots for the benefit of New Guy. God, I was irritated, but I really felt for him; they threw him out there with 18 strippers with only a few hours' training, and he was so nervous he stuck to the same patter all night, delivered over dead silence because he couldn't figure out how to keep some background music playing between dancers. It was the Peking/Tipping bit, and the club's PSA about calling a cab instead of driving drunk, delivered four times an hour.

So we get to the greasy spoon around 3 a.m. and it's mercifully free of customers. There's just a table of 22-year-olds, the waitress, and us. Kat's drunk but not crying into the hashbrowns, and the salt and grease is just what I want after a night of hard work.

Then I hear the next table chatting, and they are, of course, talking about the strip club. They clearly have no clue that we work there, and I certainly don't remember seeing them, so they must have been in the bar when we were busy in VIP. Also, we're unstripperfied significantly with the subtraction of 6" heels making us seem smaller and the addition of sweaters making us frumpier.

"It was all right; it was pretty classy for what I thought it would be," said one of the girls. I couldn't believe she threw the c-word in there, but hey, I maybe she was imagining something worse than duct tape on the floor? "I was the only girl in there who wasn't a stripper!" Not surprising. It's pretty female-customer-free up here.

However, Kat misheard. She though this cute little college student said, "I was the only girl in there" period, as if strippers were not girls but another category entirely. Yes, I know. She'd been drinking. "Yeah, those strippers, they're dirty whores!" she said, volume a notch higher than if it was meant for my ears alone.

"Shut up!" I told her. "They aren't saying anything bad. Plus I want to hear the rest of the conversation."

Which didn't disappoint, as she then went into an excellent imitation of the DJ's spiel about cabs and DUIs, etc. I could barely contain myself. I am so going to try to take a picture of that notebook tonight; DJ crib notes = priceless.

Barely, just barely, did we get out of there without engaging them. "I don't want to talk to strangers for free, so shhh," I said at the cash register, where she was still sending comments back in the direction of the (she thought) stripper-haters. "I'm just amused to eavesdrop on the people talking about the bar where we work." Hearing this, the waitress said, "I went there for my birthday!"

Oh, and they totally make the hash browns crispy like they should be, as long as you ask for them that way.

Winner, most random T-shirt, SP20

More awesomeness in stage names

In the past two days I have met "Pastry" and "Cherry Blossom."

My work ethic as a stripper is pretty much entirely determined by whether or not anyone else will get pissed at me if I don't go to work. I have zero accountability to myself, which is part of why, when I'm somewhere without a schedule, I'll blow off work frequently. Don't have to be there? I won't be. But here in Portland, at a small club with only two or three dancers on shift, it's important to show up, or else the other dancers and bar management are inconvenienced. The things that will make me show up are:
1) Being on a schedule somewhere where the schedule is enforced
2) Having a customer who's coming in to see me
3) Having plans with friends that center around me being at work
4) Being out of town and having a travel buddy who's depending on me to keep the same schedule that she is
5) Knowing that there's always money at the club and that missing a shift means I'm certainly missing out

Number five is way too far down on that list.

Anyhow, I landed some shitty shifts (Sunday morning) and a double (Tuesday day at Nicolai, Tuesday night at Mary's) that couldn't be blown off, and then today I'm working the afternoon at Nicolai which I'd dearly like to blow off. It hasn't been stellar money over there. Not as bad as I'm hearing from friends in town ($40 shifts, anyone?), but not up to my comfort level for the insane amount of stage time, either. When I get back I'll check out the weekend nights but now I'm just thinking, "I should call off. But there's only three hours for the booker to find a replacement. She's nice and I don't want to cause her trouble. And there might only be one other dancer scheduled and that would suck for her to get stuck like that."

I'd have no problem calling off it I had a legitimate reason, like an injury, but for some reason I have a stupid work ethic all of a sudden.

A customer gave me a business card on, what, Monday night (I know! Shocking. I'd told him how I file away customer cards), so I dropped him an email letting him know I appreciated his business and to let me know if he'd like my schedule in the future. Normal stuff. Honestly, most of the guys who give me their cards request this. About 25% straight up ask me out when they give it to me, but the majority just want to know when and where I work next.

Not this guy; his email back was, essentially, "I don't normally go to strip clubs, but I would like to get to know you better outside of the work environment, so here's the part where I ask you out." So, you know, he didn't say that when he handed me his card in the club. It made me giggle a little, because this is a classic case of the misinterpretation of business correspondence. The hair salon, the auto shop, they send me nice cards and emails, and my response is, "Ah, they want me to come back, so they're trying to establish a good customer service relationship." I'm sure that guy gets a nice note from his insurance agent, you know? But does it occur to him to write back, "I'm not interested in a policy, but I'd like to get to know you better outside of the office environment"? Probably not.

It's too early in my day to get into all of the thought processes that go into his asking me out rather than just ignoring my email or stopping at "I don't normally go to strip clubs" but I'll get there sometime. Let me emphasize that I don't think badly of this response or this guy, but it does demonstrate how much of a disconnect there is for some people when it comes to thinking of us as the customer service professionals we are. He clearly believes on some level that we are not like his waitress, hairdresser, massage therapist, or whatever other personal service providers he comes in contact with; that our business is on some level less legitimate and that we are potential free entertainment or dates.

Which means we're doing our jobs just a little too well. It's a fine line.

Sunday was my day to do penance; after being out of town for 10 weeks I landed the plum morning shift at Mary's. Mornings can be good there, but I don't think I've ever worked a good Sunday morning (strip club morning = noon to 4pm) there. They are so slow that they have to be mandatory; everyone has to work a Sunday shift once every six weeks. There were probably fewer than twenty customers through the doors, I made $80, a tile on the stage crumbled and had to be patched with duct tape (!), the jukebox is still broken, and it was hot and muggy in the dressing room. And yet, oh, how nice it was to be back at the old familiar club. Really. I miss that place.

The latest issue of $pread is out and I've got a Casa Diablo scene report in it, based on my February blog entry. You should all be subscribing to that fabulous magazine.

Six degrees of stripperation

It really is amazing how many clubs there are in Portland, OR. Even more amazing is that I've only danced at four, total, two if you disregard those at which I've worked two or fewer times. TUSCL's current count tops 50 (if you disregard lingerie modeling studios) and I've only even visited six where I haven't danced. And yet I know dancers who work just about everywhere in town, either because I've worked with them elsewhere or met them out and about or online.
I'll be trying out another one this week, a smaller bar that's always been appealing save for the reputation of its now former booking agent. The dancer bookings have been taken over by a local woman who's also a stripper and comes highly recommended by my friends and work acquaintances. She knows girls I know online, bartenders I've worked with, and other dancers whose opinion she trusted enough to immediately book me sight unseen because they said such flattering things about me.

By the way, I am really happy that there's not just a woman, but an actual dancer, and a quite sane one, doing this work in this town. It's about time. We met out at Doc's Club 82 last night; this is one of the bars in town that's in a strip mall and I completely drove past it on my way to meet her. The bar's been through several name changes over the past couple of years, from Doc's to Club 82 to Atlantis to Doc's Club 82, I think. It's got pool tables and a jukebox and a great sign out front that touts the presence of "Performing Artists." Love it. There were a few pool players and a couple of drinkers, and no visible performing artists. The front of the building was made of one-way mirror windows which had the disorienting effect of letting in daylight and making it seem like there were actual windows passers by could see through.
I've overextended myself this week, packing seven shifts into five days, but I missed Mary's and wanted to give the new place a shot, plus I've just taken about two weeks off and will be having a long weekend come Friday. Also, the jet lag from having been on the East Coast for ten days hasn't subsided. So it's a good thing I have novelty to push me through the week.
A friend I hadn't seen since the second time I worked here, K, met me for dinner later; she too missed Mary's, having left on less than great terms a year ago. We discussed it while eating at Typhoon! on Broadway. "I've worked at so many clubs in Portland." She's the opposite of me, preferring to switch it up on a regular basis. "I'm going to be kind of sad when there isn't anywhere else new to try, so it's like I'm trying to ration them out." She has tried them all, from the big ones to the scariest dives, and is versatile enough for them all, but I think clearly prefers fun, small, stage-centered clubs. She's also been to Guam, which seems to draw a lot of Portland dancers thanks to the ads they place in the back of the local skin biz mag, Exotic.
"I wonder if they'd let me come back to Mary's, though. The money was so good there."
"It can't hurt to ask," I told her. "There's no such thing as fired in stripping, remember? Just say 'I miss it here so much! Is there any way I can start picking up shifts again?'"
So we crossed the street and grabbed some Diet Cokes at the bar, said hi to everyone working, and settled in at the rack while K waited to chat with Vicki. Funnily enough, we heard more Casa Diablo scuttlebutt from one of the dancers on shift (I love that stripping in this town is large enough to encompass a scene and gossip that transcends just stripper talk, much like the bar or restaurant business). It was super slow, being the day after the 4th, and there were barely a half-dozen customers in the bar. Two couples sat in the back not tipping, maybe because of the long walk, but both dancers seemed like they couldn't care less and didn't bother trying to deal with or entice them. After all, they only had one more set to do each before they could leave. I was happy to watch, though, for a few songs, on a lazy Saturday.
But my cash ran out quickly enough, and I know not to break customer rule #1 (bring sufficient cash and never use the ATM or credit cards. Just like in a casino, only bring what you're willing to lose). K remained in the bar and I got a happy text from her soon afterwards: "Totally allowed back!" I missed having her there and am so happy she'll be back. She did after all have one of the best stripper stage concepts I've heard: stripper stand-up comedy. I've got to push for that. So welcome home me, and welcome back K. All of our paths cross through Mary's somehow. It's the Kevin Bacon of Portland strippers.

who gave me the shoes?

No one's stepped up (hah!) to take credit for my cool pair of sexy red heels. Thanks again!

And in honor of the 4th, I give you this terrible joke:

Knock Knock!
Who's there?
9/11!
9/11 who?
You said you'd never forget!

This was in New York ages ago; I scanned it and kept forgetting to post it here. Whenever I see stripper cartoons or other little mentions in my everyday reading I'm always amused and have to clip them, by the way.

There's a stripper story, possibly apocryphal, about a girl stuck in the President's Club at the airport. She struck up a conversation with a traveling businessman, and her occupation as a topless dancer eventually came up. She then sold him 15 minutes of lapdances in the conference room for $400.

So, if anyone's at Newark, I'll be here for several hours and am happy to take my shirt off for what amounts to roughly $80 a song.

oops

On the dressing room counter in the club.

feathers!

This is stating the obvious, mostly, but I'm really into stripping. It would be a hobby if it wasn't my profession. I'm interested in all aspects of it: its place in the sex industry, stripping as saleswomanship, as performance both in its modern form and as the current manifestation of exotic dance, as an entrepreneurial endeavor that can liberate women from capitalist wage slavery and allow them ownership of their time; I read its artistic, political, and economic meanings.

So it should be no wonder that I enjoy taking stripper class. This year I've had the pleasure of pole dancing classes with Summer of PDX Pole Divas and just this past Sunday made it down to the New York School of Burlesque for a fan dancing class with the Professor, no, the Dean of Stripping, Jo Weldon. I've never even thought about attempting a fan dance either at work or at a burlesque show, but when I saw it on her calendar, a big, warm, "I WANT" seized my brain.

Sunday was also a day for the F train to be, a ha ha ha, F'd up, and for a big thunderstorm, so I got to the classroom (the Slipper Room) a full 20 minutes late for class. I didn't want to presume to interrupt but luckily another student showed up, and we knocked on the door, both late for stripper class (imagine!). Luckily we hadn't missed too much and were told to grab a pair of small feather fans (think hand fans, not the giant performance ones) and take a spot in the class.

Jo is a fabulous instructor and I am so amazed that she's singlehandedly deconstructed and teased out the basics of burlesque in such a clear, concise way. I really hope she's working on an actual dance textbook, because if anyone is going to put carefully considered disrobing and teasing into the canon of dance as performance, it's her.

By the end of the class she'd given us at least a dozen basic moves (and that's without floorwork) and choreographed a short dance for us. I loved the feel of the feathers and the way holding a prop automatically made my movements more considered and deliberate, and immediately started fantasizing about doing a fan dance on the huge stage of the Fox Club.


A few weeks ago, the day I met up with Mimi, the guy getting my coffee at Liquid Planet noticed my Texas Burlesque Festival T-shirt and asked me if I was involved in "that burlesque-type thing they're doing at the Wilma Theatre." I of course was not, not being from town, but wanted to know more. "Well, it's supposed to be like burlesque but less racy." Less racy? I thought. Now, I supposed you can have burlesque without nudity, but without being racy? That's like a chocolate chip cookie without chocolate chips. It's not a chocolate chip cookie anymore, it's just a sugar cookie. I googled, but found nothing, so if there is indeed any Missoula burlesque going on, please email me so I can see the show next time I'm there.

Oh, and shortly after that I was in the parking lot of a grocery store in Missoula when I improbably saw a gorgeous, elaborate ostrich feather headdress in the back of someone's PT Cruiser. I should have left a note! I took a picture, though.

Glamour. It's where you find it, sometimes in the back of a Chevy outside of an Albertson's.