On Saturday night we went out drinking and dancing. I needed to blow off some steam because I've been stressed at work lately. There's a girl there who's been bugging the shit out of me by being super condescending, like she talks to me like I'm retarded or something. I'm bothered because I don't know what her motivations for doing it are.
Anyway, we went to Bootie at the DNA to see MC Jelly Donut. One drink after we got there I got a text asking if I wanted to go-go dance at club Smut for fifty dollars. It was cool. My friend Trixxie Treat was friends with the promoter and she's the one that organized the dancer's. I was replacing someone who was sick that night. It 's a new monthly club, like electro/jungle/step. The only thing we had to do was go dance on the tiny dance floor to get the rest of the people to go dance. There was a steady crowd, and the music was good. Actually, it was the best music I've been paid to go-go dance to. It was at this bar at 6th and Market, Anu. It was pretty loud. My ears were ringing when I got home. It was pretty fun hanging out with other Lusties, not at Chez B for a change.
So now I'm going to work tonight. I'll be dancing at the Lusty from 7-11pm.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I miss dancing
There was a Black Widows night on the 31st, but I didn't feel up to it for a variety of reasons. I'm kind of regretting it now, though. I've been reading blogs by other strippers lately and for better or for worse, it's gotten me feeling nostalgic for my old glory days.
I've just been working for minimum wage for way too long. It's really really getting to me. I've been an assistant hairstylist for two years and have not yet finished either a cut or color program. I most likely have at least another year to go before I can become a commissioned stylist and stop having to clean up after other people and being subservient to them. And that's if I don't get fired first for hating it.
I guess if I was eighteen it wouldn't be so bad. I would have my whole adult life to learn my trade and build up my clientele and be making six figures by age thirty. But instead I spent my twenties in the strip club, making tons of cash every night and investing none of it save what I invested in my two deadbeat exes. I really thought I got out in time, too: I started beauty school at age 28, and got my cosmetology license right after I turned thirty. Now I'm close to thirty-three and I spend most of my time doing janitorial work. I worry about my future, and the present is getting a bit unbearable after the life I've experienced.
I miss my old life sometimes. I miss all the cash. I miss knowing that even if I only made a hundred dollars, I could always go back in the next night and maybe make three hundred more. I loved sleeping in every day, and getting pedicures and shopping for clothes. I miss being able to take a vacation whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted, as long as I had money for. I miss dancing on stage every night to any music I chose. I miss the performance. I miss making people fall in love with me just by staring into their eyes. I miss getting exercise every night while getting paid for it. I miss having tons of hot friends to go out with and do double dances with and hustle men with and make each other money. Sometimes I miss the nights of getting drunk and going out and having crazy adventures into the wee morning hours, staying out as long as we wanted, with the cash to finance all of it. With enough money, anything is possible.
I get some of this at the Lusty Lady, but it's not the same. I think I'm just missing my twice-monthly fix I always get from Black Widows and Chez Badunkadunk. It's been a couple of months since they lost the Cat Club space, which was as close to perfect as I've seen so far. Chez B has a new venue they will use on the 26th for a special pride weekend show, Julie's Supper Club. I won't be able to go, though because I'm out of town that weekend.
I didn't do Black Widows because I was up early that day and was tired from my salon job, as I always am on Saturdays. Also I'm not so sure about the new venue for BW. It's at Fat City, which I remember to be a rather drafty and rickity club more suited to shows than clubs, especially strip clubs. In other words not necessarily where I want to be wobbling around drunk in six inch stilettos, trying to fend off gropes in a lap dance. Also there wasn't supposed to bemuch of a dressing room, more of a manager's office. This was the first night they used the place, so there were probably some kinks that still need smoothing. I'm going to see what the girls who went have to say about it and maybe if it wasn't too bad I'll go next time. If my friend Natalie (who runs it) isn't mad at me for not showing up, that is.
So I probably won't be doing anything extracurricular until July now. But you will still be able to watch me dance at the Lusty Lady on Mondays and Fridays. I usually do doubles on Fridays, either from 11-7 or 3-11. I'll let everyone know next time I do an outside performance.
I've just been working for minimum wage for way too long. It's really really getting to me. I've been an assistant hairstylist for two years and have not yet finished either a cut or color program. I most likely have at least another year to go before I can become a commissioned stylist and stop having to clean up after other people and being subservient to them. And that's if I don't get fired first for hating it.
I guess if I was eighteen it wouldn't be so bad. I would have my whole adult life to learn my trade and build up my clientele and be making six figures by age thirty. But instead I spent my twenties in the strip club, making tons of cash every night and investing none of it save what I invested in my two deadbeat exes. I really thought I got out in time, too: I started beauty school at age 28, and got my cosmetology license right after I turned thirty. Now I'm close to thirty-three and I spend most of my time doing janitorial work. I worry about my future, and the present is getting a bit unbearable after the life I've experienced.
I miss my old life sometimes. I miss all the cash. I miss knowing that even if I only made a hundred dollars, I could always go back in the next night and maybe make three hundred more. I loved sleeping in every day, and getting pedicures and shopping for clothes. I miss being able to take a vacation whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted, as long as I had money for. I miss dancing on stage every night to any music I chose. I miss the performance. I miss making people fall in love with me just by staring into their eyes. I miss getting exercise every night while getting paid for it. I miss having tons of hot friends to go out with and do double dances with and hustle men with and make each other money. Sometimes I miss the nights of getting drunk and going out and having crazy adventures into the wee morning hours, staying out as long as we wanted, with the cash to finance all of it. With enough money, anything is possible.
I get some of this at the Lusty Lady, but it's not the same. I think I'm just missing my twice-monthly fix I always get from Black Widows and Chez Badunkadunk. It's been a couple of months since they lost the Cat Club space, which was as close to perfect as I've seen so far. Chez B has a new venue they will use on the 26th for a special pride weekend show, Julie's Supper Club. I won't be able to go, though because I'm out of town that weekend.
I didn't do Black Widows because I was up early that day and was tired from my salon job, as I always am on Saturdays. Also I'm not so sure about the new venue for BW. It's at Fat City, which I remember to be a rather drafty and rickity club more suited to shows than clubs, especially strip clubs. In other words not necessarily where I want to be wobbling around drunk in six inch stilettos, trying to fend off gropes in a lap dance. Also there wasn't supposed to bemuch of a dressing room, more of a manager's office. This was the first night they used the place, so there were probably some kinks that still need smoothing. I'm going to see what the girls who went have to say about it and maybe if it wasn't too bad I'll go next time. If my friend Natalie (who runs it) isn't mad at me for not showing up, that is.
So I probably won't be doing anything extracurricular until July now. But you will still be able to watch me dance at the Lusty Lady on Mondays and Fridays. I usually do doubles on Fridays, either from 11-7 or 3-11. I'll let everyone know next time I do an outside performance.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Auto Bio 4
Some of the girls I remember from Little Darlings, Lemon Grove, circa August /September 1999......
When I first got there the only girl who really talked to me was obviously the odd one out, the pathetic loner/loser. None of the other girls really talked to her, either. Her outfits were shabby and mismatched. She had bad skin and little makeup. Her hair was mousy-brown and messy. In retrospect I think she was probably doing "extras" to compete with all the other glossy, sexy and well put-together young girls that worked there. But at the time I was happy to have someone to talk to, someone who could give me some clue to the mysteries of it all. Because everything I thought I knew about stripping, strippers and strip clubs was turning out to be grossly inaccurate and/or inadequate. She taught me how to crawl on the floor of the stage, and gave me some hints on lapdancing. Since I was only there for two weeks, obviously I didn't get to spend too much time "bonding" with her (hell, I don't even remember her name!!), but I'll always remember how she looked and how everyone else ostracized her. In the strip club pecking order I the new girl was lowest, but she was only slightly above me. Had I stayed there any longer being associated with her might have permanently endangered my place in the social order and it was something I tried to avoid every time I became "new girl" in other clubs down the road.
Another girl I worked with there was truly unsettling in her mannerisms and personality. She was a lite skinned black girl with kind of a dog-ish face and large, drooping tits. Her hair was always pulled back tight and she didn't wear much makeup. She had a couple of kids at home. She never smiled and walked around with a stoned, thuggish face all the time. She danced to the gangsterist music she could get away with and when she did her theme set, as we were all required to do, she wore panties and a security guard shirt and danced to thugged out gangster rap about doing time. At first she scared the shit out of me and I tried to avoid her but eventually we got to talking enough so that I gave her a ride home once or twice. When we did I tried to get as much info out of her as I could. I remember asking her how much she tipped the deejay and she responded somewhere along the lines of:
"I don't give him shit. He don't do nothin for me."
I didn't know what to say to that so I asked where else she had worked. She said she had also worked at Jolar, the local peep show that I later found out had a rep for being very seedy; a place for dancers that were too fat, ugly, old or pregnant to work anywhere else. Certainly it was in one of the shittiest areas with high crime rates. The idea of working in a peep show intrigued me ever since I was little and saw the Madonna video. I asked her if she had liked working there. She said no. Why not?
"Cuz I don't like sittin' in a damn box for eight hours!"
Years later, when I moved back to San Diego after five years in San Francisco she was working at the Body Shop with me. She looked a lot better than I remembered. Same vacant expression, but now she half-smiled more often. More like a smirk really. I worked at the Body Shop for two years so I had more time to hang out with her. She was still ghetto as hell, but we got along well enough, most of the time. There was another black girl there she hung out with too. Sometimes if I was getting more dances than them they would make racist comments, i.e.
"Damn, Rocketgirl, maybe I should bleach my skin so I can make some money too", etc.
Anyway, this girl ended up getting fired from the Body Shop by proving just how psycho she was. She had a feud with another friend of mine over territory in the dressing room or some bullshit. It escalated to the point that she brought mice guts to work and put them in my friend's bag. She got the mice guts from her sons, who had pet snakes. That was the last I saw of her. My other friend, the victim, kept working there after I left. She was a veteran and wasn't going anywhere, even though the incident understandably traumatized her.
The one thing that struck me about Little Darlings was how different it was from Nitelife. It was the general difference between all topless and nude clubs. The girls at LD were younger on average; at nude clubs (in CA anyway) girls only have to be eighteen to dance. The customers only have to be eighteen as well, although I didn't notice the crowd being that much younger, in general. That is probably because I usually worked during the day. The girls at LD also had newer and sexier costumes than the girls at Nitelife.
Because Nitelife was an independent, alcohol-serving bar, they were under much greater scrutiny from the police and under more stringent laws and ordinances being in a residential area compared to LD, a no-alcohol club in a different city, in an industrial area. At Nitelife we had to wear full length opaque nude colored tights under regulation "t-bar" thong panties. Anytime we took anything off on stage we had to be six feet away from any of the guys. Lap dances were out in the open and had a six inch rule.
At Little Darlings we had semi-private booths. Instead of 80s style thongs the girls wore barely-there g-strings; literally fabric cut into a tiny triangle attached by string-width fabric. Our legs were bare. You can't find these panties at lingerie stores; you have to go to special stripper-ware stores. I had never seen such outfits before, I hadn't known they existed.
Nitelife had older dancers, seasoned veterans with regulars. They had big hair and played heavy metal on stage. One of the dancers was so old her 21 year old daughter worked there too, as a cocktail waitress.
I remember at Little Darlings seeing young, slender, smooth skinned waifs in gauzy, translucent scanty garments floating around with the aloofness and arrogance of fashion models. It was as if they had stepped right out of the pages of Perfect Ten magazine or something. They danced more gracefully on stage and to techno or R&B music. I was in awe of the spectacle before me, and inspired to achieve the same kind of seemingly effortless sex appeal.
It's a good thing I ended up leaving for San Fran when I did because I was starting to have some problems there. The problem was that my no-good boyfriend (who I would have done anything for) had no job and no place to go while I was working. Most strip clubs, I came to learn, have no-boyfriend policies, in order to prevent big dramatic jealous scenes and fights with customers. They didn't want him hanging out in the parking lot either, and he couldn't really wander around Lemon Grove because it was a racist, redneck town and he's black. He also couldn't drive, and couldn't take public transportation because it stopped running at midnight and I needed him to be there as "protection" when I got off work to walk me twenty feet to my car. Well, this was how I rationalized things at the time anyway. So instead of quitting I asked to be "transferred' to Deja Vu San Francisco, and they had no problem with that. I don't think it would have been a problem to get hired there, but it gave me piece of mind.
Moving to San Francisco, taught me more about stripping, hustling, the sex industry and the nature of men than any other club I'd worked at yet.
In truth, Rocketgirl had not yet begun to fight!!!
To be continued.....
When I first got there the only girl who really talked to me was obviously the odd one out, the pathetic loner/loser. None of the other girls really talked to her, either. Her outfits were shabby and mismatched. She had bad skin and little makeup. Her hair was mousy-brown and messy. In retrospect I think she was probably doing "extras" to compete with all the other glossy, sexy and well put-together young girls that worked there. But at the time I was happy to have someone to talk to, someone who could give me some clue to the mysteries of it all. Because everything I thought I knew about stripping, strippers and strip clubs was turning out to be grossly inaccurate and/or inadequate. She taught me how to crawl on the floor of the stage, and gave me some hints on lapdancing. Since I was only there for two weeks, obviously I didn't get to spend too much time "bonding" with her (hell, I don't even remember her name!!), but I'll always remember how she looked and how everyone else ostracized her. In the strip club pecking order I the new girl was lowest, but she was only slightly above me. Had I stayed there any longer being associated with her might have permanently endangered my place in the social order and it was something I tried to avoid every time I became "new girl" in other clubs down the road.
Another girl I worked with there was truly unsettling in her mannerisms and personality. She was a lite skinned black girl with kind of a dog-ish face and large, drooping tits. Her hair was always pulled back tight and she didn't wear much makeup. She had a couple of kids at home. She never smiled and walked around with a stoned, thuggish face all the time. She danced to the gangsterist music she could get away with and when she did her theme set, as we were all required to do, she wore panties and a security guard shirt and danced to thugged out gangster rap about doing time. At first she scared the shit out of me and I tried to avoid her but eventually we got to talking enough so that I gave her a ride home once or twice. When we did I tried to get as much info out of her as I could. I remember asking her how much she tipped the deejay and she responded somewhere along the lines of:
"I don't give him shit. He don't do nothin for me."
I didn't know what to say to that so I asked where else she had worked. She said she had also worked at Jolar, the local peep show that I later found out had a rep for being very seedy; a place for dancers that were too fat, ugly, old or pregnant to work anywhere else. Certainly it was in one of the shittiest areas with high crime rates. The idea of working in a peep show intrigued me ever since I was little and saw the Madonna video. I asked her if she had liked working there. She said no. Why not?
"Cuz I don't like sittin' in a damn box for eight hours!"
Years later, when I moved back to San Diego after five years in San Francisco she was working at the Body Shop with me. She looked a lot better than I remembered. Same vacant expression, but now she half-smiled more often. More like a smirk really. I worked at the Body Shop for two years so I had more time to hang out with her. She was still ghetto as hell, but we got along well enough, most of the time. There was another black girl there she hung out with too. Sometimes if I was getting more dances than them they would make racist comments, i.e.
"Damn, Rocketgirl, maybe I should bleach my skin so I can make some money too", etc.
Anyway, this girl ended up getting fired from the Body Shop by proving just how psycho she was. She had a feud with another friend of mine over territory in the dressing room or some bullshit. It escalated to the point that she brought mice guts to work and put them in my friend's bag. She got the mice guts from her sons, who had pet snakes. That was the last I saw of her. My other friend, the victim, kept working there after I left. She was a veteran and wasn't going anywhere, even though the incident understandably traumatized her.
The one thing that struck me about Little Darlings was how different it was from Nitelife. It was the general difference between all topless and nude clubs. The girls at LD were younger on average; at nude clubs (in CA anyway) girls only have to be eighteen to dance. The customers only have to be eighteen as well, although I didn't notice the crowd being that much younger, in general. That is probably because I usually worked during the day. The girls at LD also had newer and sexier costumes than the girls at Nitelife.
Because Nitelife was an independent, alcohol-serving bar, they were under much greater scrutiny from the police and under more stringent laws and ordinances being in a residential area compared to LD, a no-alcohol club in a different city, in an industrial area. At Nitelife we had to wear full length opaque nude colored tights under regulation "t-bar" thong panties. Anytime we took anything off on stage we had to be six feet away from any of the guys. Lap dances were out in the open and had a six inch rule.
At Little Darlings we had semi-private booths. Instead of 80s style thongs the girls wore barely-there g-strings; literally fabric cut into a tiny triangle attached by string-width fabric. Our legs were bare. You can't find these panties at lingerie stores; you have to go to special stripper-ware stores. I had never seen such outfits before, I hadn't known they existed.
Nitelife had older dancers, seasoned veterans with regulars. They had big hair and played heavy metal on stage. One of the dancers was so old her 21 year old daughter worked there too, as a cocktail waitress.
I remember at Little Darlings seeing young, slender, smooth skinned waifs in gauzy, translucent scanty garments floating around with the aloofness and arrogance of fashion models. It was as if they had stepped right out of the pages of Perfect Ten magazine or something. They danced more gracefully on stage and to techno or R&B music. I was in awe of the spectacle before me, and inspired to achieve the same kind of seemingly effortless sex appeal.
It's a good thing I ended up leaving for San Fran when I did because I was starting to have some problems there. The problem was that my no-good boyfriend (who I would have done anything for) had no job and no place to go while I was working. Most strip clubs, I came to learn, have no-boyfriend policies, in order to prevent big dramatic jealous scenes and fights with customers. They didn't want him hanging out in the parking lot either, and he couldn't really wander around Lemon Grove because it was a racist, redneck town and he's black. He also couldn't drive, and couldn't take public transportation because it stopped running at midnight and I needed him to be there as "protection" when I got off work to walk me twenty feet to my car. Well, this was how I rationalized things at the time anyway. So instead of quitting I asked to be "transferred' to Deja Vu San Francisco, and they had no problem with that. I don't think it would have been a problem to get hired there, but it gave me piece of mind.
Moving to San Francisco, taught me more about stripping, hustling, the sex industry and the nature of men than any other club I'd worked at yet.
In truth, Rocketgirl had not yet begun to fight!!!
To be continued.....
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