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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.....