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.

When I was in Alaska for a month this summer, some friends of Hobo Stripper opened their home to me and let me a room. They were a married couple and the husband was a kind, burly, missing-a-few-teeth, hardy, hardworking Alaskan. He was a fixture at the bar where I worked and in the town where I stayed. We didn't have too many in-depth conversations, but he was the kind of guy you knew could fix just about anything and would do just about anything in his capability to help you out without being real obvious about it, just because that's how people are up there. Lots of actions, not so many words.

Tara just passed along the news that he died this past week, in unclear circumstances, found by his wife when she returned from working out of town. She lost her previous husband (once when she was giving me a ride she let me know he was in the truck with us. His ashes were, rather, as she figured out what to do with them). Now she's lost another husband and will probably spend a lot of time dealing with his children and hers in unpleasant circumstances. My sympathy and love to you, T; I am so, so sorry to hear about D.