Amateur night, take 3

My last night in Missoula was the Sunday before Labor Day, the last Sunday of the month, and amateur night. I've worked two other amateur nights at this club, one being great and the other being awful for earnings. This one was a record night for me at the club thanks mostly to the first customer who sat at my first stage set of the night and subsequently bought two hours in VIP before 10 p.m. The shocking part about this was his complete lack of fitting the profile of the average VIP-purchasing customer; he was under 30 and from Mexico, and at first I felt a little odd about the whole thing, about being his paid companionship and all, since he seemed sweet and lonely, but then he started propositioning me and getting grabby and my compassion began to be balanced with irritation.

As I've mentioned before, the great thing about amateur night here is the lack of ringers. At just about every single one of these things, the contestants are usually experienced strippers trying to win the cash prize or a job at the club, as some clubs use them as an easy event to get people in the doors combined with condensing all of their hiring into one night of the week. I'm happy to say I haven't had to enter one of these to get hired, although I've known some very experienced dancers who have. I believe the Seattle Deja Vu engages in this practice, with the prize money serving the purpose of buying the mandatory Seattle stripper license.

Not so in Missoula; there's real amateurs. One of them was the mother of one of the dancers at the club. Said dancer didn't work that night, so I didn't get to see her reaction, but I was told this wasn't the first time her mom had competed. There were also some, well ,average local girls, some hot local girls, another older woman who sported the first full bush I've seen at a nude club in quite some time, a truly amateur hottie who'll probably be working at the club, and a ringer, who, if she hasn't done this before, surely studied well. The ringer placed first, the young hottie second, and one of the older women took third. By audience response she should have gotten first place, clearly, as the crowd whooped and hollered for "Gramma!" to win. And yet it didn't seem too mean-spirited.

Back in the dressing room between sets I saw the dancer manager helping a contestant sort her tips. A small pile of quarters was next to the bucket, which seemed odd. First I thought how rude it was that someone threw quarters on the stage. Then I realized that if they made their way into the tip bucket, the contestant had to pick them up rather than ignoring them or tossing them back at the offending "tipper," the two most common responses to those sorts of shenanigans. And finally I realized the manager was unwrapping them from twisted dollar bills, in which they'd been used as ballast to make them reach the stage when tossed from a distance. "You can keep all of these; we're not going to deal with quarters," the house mom said (the amateur night contestants, like the house dancers, give up a percentage of stage tips to tip out club employees. Now I know they won't take a percentage of anything less than $1.00).

Then I received text messages all night from Mr. W, who spent six hours in the cat ER with our cat; blocked them out and continued to work. It was such a strange night. Those two hours in VIP kept me out of the crowd as it was building to its peak, and when I emerged it was into a completely different club, one filled to bursting with a line out the door waiting to get in. I hate the ultra-crowded nights and always have; I find them overwhelming. It makes it harder to pick out my target customers and requires defensive walking through the club. I have to take a deep breath, position myself somewhere with a good view of the crowd, and them map out a route that gets me to accidentally bump into the most likely customers. It worked out well enough, though I'm tired just thinking about it.

After last call, after the lights went up, the club was a disaster area. This is one of the few places I've worked where bringing up the lights actually reveals a pretty nicely furnished, clean club, but after hundreds of recently returned college kids tramp through a bar, it's noticeable. It reminded me of nothing so much as the Pink Pony in Atlanta two years ago the night before the NCAA championship game; a busy night, lots of money, and lots of really drunk girls who weren't strippers.

Once safely in my truck and headed home, I called for a kitty status update, and promptly lost it, then pulled into the Taco Bell parking lot to shut off the engine and cry about my cat, about being away from home and about feeling like a fuckup who'd neglected her little family all summer. All that money I'd made, it should have been kind of a celebratory night, but it wasn't. It was cold and rainy, and I was alone five hundred miles from home.

Big sky, country.

I have been in Montana for most of the summer, as it turns out, and the Wayward household is moving out here for the fall and winter. It's just too nice to leave. I like the club, I like the city, I have found a nice routine here, and we're lucky enough to be very mobile. I've found an apartment and will be hauling some things out here from Portland next month.

Weirdly, this is the first time I've actually relocated because of a better work environment. I have one friend who's moved at least four times to settle for months in a city where she enjoyed working, and I have traveled a lot over the past two years, hitting more clubs in that time period than I had in the previous ten years.

I think this means I might be able to deduct the moving expenses as well, though I'm not sure if that holds true for independent contractors. Also, I'm scared to learn to drive in the snow. Portland doesn't get it, Ohio did, and I didn't even try to learn there, just stayed put.

This is the kind of town that people visit and dream of moving to; it inspires those fantasies of settling down and enjoying the sleepy college town life. Probably just like Austin did in, oh, 1987. Don't look for me fly fishing or anything, but I'll probably attempt to take some more serious skiing lessons this winter.

Audience of bikers? Better play to the crowd

The Hell's Angels were in town last week. Overall, they were pretty uninteresting as customers as none of them were active dance or VIP buyers. 90% of them hung out, drank and socialized with each other in the bar. Of the remaining 10%, 9% were decent stage tippers, and 1% were actively annoying.

That 1% is represented in the above article -- literally. Wearing the same plaid shorts in the photo that he had on Friday night, this dude was the single most annoying customer in the bar all weekend. He was bouncing off the walls, hanging off a the railing that separates the stageside pit seating from the elevated seating area, and at one point actually attempted to walk on to the stage while a dancer was at the front, blissfully unaware of his brief presence. I feel for the band he forcibly sat in with; I mean, they didn't have bouncers or anything.

"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."

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.

Stick a Clark Fork in me

Exactly a year ago I was in Bozeman for Memorial Day weekend and was snowed on. This year I'm in Missoula and it just rained a lot, though today is clearer.

I spent a week in North Dakota earlier this month, same tiny town and tiny bar, so Missoula is quite booming in comparison. I'm sort of in a haze, though, between sinus headaches that are worse than anything I've had before, general burnout, physical exhaustion, what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-life malaise, and a desire to indulge my introvert self with, say, a year in the mountains.

It's so fucking weird to work when my head in in a place like this; to be in a social environment, to talk and be funny and on when it is so so so very fake to the point that I worry all the customers are going to catch on and be sad. I mean, I don't care if the assholes get that kind of vibe, but I have a perverse set of professional ethics that boil down to this: I am, essentially, being paid to pay attention to people. If you're handing me $20 for four minutes or $500 for an hour, you deserve, at the least, decent customer service. By which I mean my attention and willingness to show you a good time within my boundaries and those of the local laws and liquor regulations.

I must be really fucking good though, because I've done really well so far up here despite my shitty mood. It's kind of too bad. I would almost love an excuse to pack it in and head into those mountains.

But it's a nice club, one that makes me happy to be in, and that does help ease the burnout. Plus, I saw something last night I've never seen before -- an amateur night with actual amateurs. It's common knowledge that in most cities, any club's "amateur night" with cash prizes might draw one actual amateur and then a bunch of strippers from other clubs looking to snag the prize money, one of whom usually wins 'cause the contest is fixed. Either that or it's a way to do auditions, so, same thing, plenty of professionals, not amateurs.

This town has real amateurs. Combine that with the holiday weekend, and the place was standing room only. Granted, most of the crowd was young and broke, but hey, I didn't have to put up with them since I spent most of the peak time in VIP. I didn't get to see all of the amateur performances, either, but I caught a little of the first two, a chubby, pasty, goth gal rocking it to Rob Zombie, and a short-haired African-American dancer with a plaid skirt and pink bra (when she came out I was reminded that as cosmopolitan as it is here compared to ND, there's still racism, as I heard a couple of comments in the crowd and the applause was far quieter. Ugh).

It's so cute to watch nonstrippers strip. We were all there at one time, you know? And then we grow up and become professionals and work that shit and go through burnout cycles like clockwork. Ahh, career women.

MimiNY made some noise earlier this year about wanting to come out here; I should find out when she plans to head west and get her up here for a few spins around the stage. The thought of that could keep me going for quite a while.