Indygrrl, I’d like to say how impressed I am with the way you’re handling this thread. All credit to you for answering all those questions so adroitly and with such diplomacy.
I’ve no particular questions myself, since the stripping biz in the UK is obviously very different from the US, but please permit my (slight hijacking) observations of what I’ve seen over here. I’m a guy, and a musician, and I’ve often worked alongside strippers (metaphorically speaking) in clubs. It’s the differences that interest me; I’ll just run through a few, for the purposes of contrast.
For a start, I’ve only ever seen one stripper that was good enough at her job to turn me on. She did a simulated orgasm type of act on a goatskin rug on the stage, and she did it extremely well. The rest - the many dozens I’ve seen - failed to do anything but make me laugh. They’re that awful.
It’s worth pointing out here that contact with the audience is strictly forbidden here, at least in the types of clubs that hired the bands I was in. Likewise, there were rules about which props were allowed and which were not (I think whips, for example, were verboten), and full nudity was only tolerated for the last seconds of a show - once completely naked, the stripper had to exit the stage. Dancing while naked was completely out of the question. This may have changed, though, in the last 20-odd years.
Strippers would never mingle with the audience, even when fully clothed and off-duty. They entered and left by the stage door where possible, and wouldn’t think of mixing with the clientele.
Tips? Forget it. The girls were paid a fixed cash rate by the club, and that was it. Having said that, it was good money - more than we musicians were on.
Mostly, they’d turn up with some gorilla of a husband/boyfriend, but some came on their own. One regular used to bring along her son, who was about six. He’d watch from the wings as she stripped. Omigawd. She was the same one who once forgot to wipe her face after eating a bar of chocolate, and went on stage with brown smears around her mouth. Omigawd Part II.
Generally, though, they were great fun to work with. One in particular I liked - we used to wind her up by saying she was ugly - in reality, she was very good-looking, and she damned well knew it (hence the irony), but enjoyed the banter. One night, as we were watching from the wings, she started throwing her discarded clothes at us during her strip. When she’d nearly finished, we threw them all back at her - she had to stop her routine, she was laughing so hard. As was the audience.
Oddly, male strippers were the best to work with. They were pretty rare, and only booked for “Ladies’ Nights”, but they were far more professional. Usually, they ignored the rules completely, walking completely naked among the audience, pushing their dicks into women’s ears, all sorts of stuff. And, even more oddly, every single one of them was incredibly nervous before a show - far, far more than the women. One guy, who did a very sexy show (according to Mrs Barrington), including the walking-around-shoving-dicks-in-ears stuff … before he went on, he was on the point of walking out on the gig. We in the band had to calm the guy down and reassure him that he’d be safe. He was genuinely, absolutely terrified. Drunk, women-only audiences do that to guys, but he managed it fine in the end.
An anecdote about a male stripper:
As the finale of his act, when he was totally naked, he got two women out of the audience to participate. One had to tie a ribbon in a bow around his cock, ha-ha. She did that. Then the other had to undo the ribbon, using only her teeth. Ha-ha again. We in the band were watching from the wings, ready to close the curtains at the end of the act (musicians have to do stuff like that sometimes).
So anyway, the second woman couldn’t undo the knot. And she had a bellyful of booze. So what did she do? Wince time: she gave up on the teeth-only thing and grabbed a loop of the knot and pulled it off (the ribbon, that is). Guy screamed, we drew the stage curtains damned fast and went to see if he was okay. Long story short, he wasn’t. He limped to the dressing room, got dressed, and then asked to be taken to the hospital. The biggest blood-blister I’ve ever seen. We never found out how he got on at the H.
General observations and anecdotes about the female strippers’ routine at one particular club:
They had to work two clubs on a Sunday lunchtime - ours and another, loosely affiliated club. Each club demanded two strip sessions, and there was only one girl to do all four. Club A, then club B, then club A again, then club B. 15-minute acts at each. We worked at club B. If everything ran smoothly, there was time for them to do the four-mile journeys between the clubs with time to change clothes, and arrive on time. But things didn’t always run smoothly, and not only did girls often have to travel in their strip costumes, I’ve seen them get into cars naked under their coats, the quicker to get to club A.
Strippers’ gorilla boyfriends would never, ever, talk to the band members. I got the feeling they resented the whole business. And seriously, they were all gorillas - I don’t recall any stripper’s boyfriend being less than a large lump of sullen muscle, or exhibiting any intelligence or friendliness or charm.
The girls never bothered about being seen naked, even during routine costume changes in dressing rooms. As a young, single man, I found this difficult to deal with at first - I just wasn’t prepared for women who would conduct a chatty, friendly, relaxed conversation with five musicians she’d never met before, all the while completely nude. It was as if they’d forgotten modesty.
Overall, I found strippers to be delightful, if usually somewhat clueless, people, and I usually enjoyed working with them. It would have been much more fun, and I would have had even more respect for them, had the situation been more like Indygrrl describes. And if any of the strippers had been as bright as Indygrrl, well, that would have been even more fun. They just weren’t.
End of mini-hijack - I just thought I’d throw my tuppence-worth in here from a different perspective. Sorry if this is irrelevant.
