Great quote about marriage from Stephen King

I was re-reading Pet Sematary recently, and came across this tidbit.  It hits the nail on the head so much I just had to share it.  Marriage can be a surreal experience sometimes, and there are occasional moments when you look at your spouse and think, "Who the hell are you?"  Haha.  Luckily, it's pretty rare for me, but it does happen.  And I know he has the same moments about me.  After all, I do baby talk the cat to a ridiculous degree that even makes me doubt my own sanity at times, lol.  And that's just the tip of the crazy iceberg! 

Open letter to the guy who called me "baby girl" today....

Dear dickbag,

I’m 38-fucking-years of age, and have been a grown woman for a very long time. I am no one’s “baby girl.” Go try running that game on one of the young ones who hasn’t yet learned that she’s got value far beyond what you might recognize in her. Or better yet, drop that bullshit entirely. And while you are at it, stop leering at every woman who strikes your fancy, or the ones that set off the alarm in your lizard brain that tells you when she might be easy prey. No woman worth having will give you her number after you’ve eyeballed and sexually harassed her in the Kroger parking lot.

Women don’t exist in the world to be your eye-candy, to make the landscape prettier, or to be anyone or anything for YOU. It doesn’t matter what you think a woman should be, how you think we should dress and carry ourselves, or what you think we ought to be doin in our spare time. We aren’t in the world to be your soft place to land, your shoulder to cry on, or your fucking shrink…….so do us a favor and keep your comments, opinions, and your overly intimate anecdotes to yourself. Not only have we heard them all before, we don’t care!

Highway robbery, or just another night in the club

I find it amazing when large strip club chains charge insane house fees, dance fees, VIP and Champagne room fees and still expect their dancers to tip everyone under the sun, whether they do anything directly for the girls or not. There's door men, bouncers, champagne hosts, bartenders, djs, house moms............just to name a few. Depending on the club, there are more or less people with their hand out, but no matter where it is there will always be at least a few.

I've mentioned before a chain I worked for where I paid out at least 1/4 of my earnings in fees on any given night. That was before any tip outs to staff. They made so many thousands of dollars off of me in the years I worked there, and damn near every woman who worked there paid out similar amounts. The pure profit they made off of us was astounding. And it was a double slap in the face because not only did they take huge chunks of our money, but WE PAID THE REST OF THE STAFF OUT OF OUR OWN POCKETS TOO! It wasn't enough for them to make money hand over fist, but they wouldn't pay the rest of the staff a decent wage because they knew they could tell them to expect tips from the girls and we'd have no choice but to pay them. And if they didn't feel we were tipping them enough, they had the power to screw us over in little ways.

The dj would screw you over on the rotation or by playing music you hated, the bartender by ignoring you, the dance counter by marking you for more dances than you actually did, the door guy for making you wait forever before walking you out (or not walking you at all), the house mom by being openly hostile.............you get the gist. The only way strip clubs run smoothly is when the dancers tip everyone else well and often. It's one of those things that everyone knows is bullshit, but they do it anyway because that's just how things are done.

My current club (which is a part of a large chain) has a very low house fee, low room fees, and no minimum tip out for service staff. We still tip our dj and bartender, house mom and room hosts, but the club pays them reasonably well, so our tips are actually a tip rather than their entire pay. I hope other clubs will follow suit and stop forcing their entertainers to pay the rest of their staff. It's just another example of one of the twisted things that is the "norm" in the strip club industry. I'm not sure what it would take for other clubs to follow suit, perhaps a large-scale stripper revolt. We're certainly smart, willful, and resentful of paying out so much of our hard-earned cash to people the club ought to be paying. However, as I've mentioned before, organizing and unifying strippers is akin to herding cats. But I'd be behind anyone who started off the revolt.

Just fucking do it.

There are so many times when I'll think about writing more about my life, but it overwhelms me more often than not. It's hard to know where to begin, how much to tell, what the focus should be. And I know the solution is to just start writing and keep writing until I get whatever point I want to make out of my system, but procrastination is my Achilles heel, so much so that I'll sit around feeling guilty about the writing I could have done, should have done, should be DOING. I think just writing things here at this blog that no one reads is as good of a start as any.

The funny thing is I'm the kind of person who goes off on long, inappropriate tangents on Facebook updates and threads........the kind that put people off because I'm "too serious." Well, fuck yes I'm serious about things, and I have a fucking lot to say about almost everything. I'll admit that Facebook is not the appropriate outlet for that stuff, but sometimes the need to speak outweighs any worry about whether or not it might bore or annoy someone.

So yeah, from here on out my goal is to just fucking do it, whether it's earth shattering or mundane is irrelevant right now because it's more important to just put words on the page regularly. I'm going to start with a minimum of one blog post a week and see where it goes

And this counts for one. ;-)

Outdated stereotypes need to die

I've seen this discussed a few times today, and people seem to think it's either offensive, or that people should lighten up and take a joke. I'm interested in whether black women think these stereotypes are fun, or if they find them offensive. I find it aggravating that when I see a black women on television she's inevitably playing some sort of "sassy black lady" character, or acting as a "magical negro" or white girl's bff. And now we have fashion houses profiting with the antiquated "Mammy" stereotype. Will we EVER get past these caricatures? http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/09/dolce_gabbana_sends_racist_mammy_earrings_down_the_catwalk.html

Oh no, pretty mama, what you gonna do in those shoes?

God knows you're lookin' good enough,
But you're so smooth and the world's so rough
You might have somethin' to lose
Oh, no, pretty mama, what you gonna
Do in those shoes?



I'm something of a pack rat. I have a very difficult time getting rid of anything that I think I might want in the future. I've purged every time I've moved, but there are certain boxes that I'll drag from place-to-place until I'm old and grey. One (oh, who am I kidding, there is more than one) of them is full of old dancing gear. I've always known that I'd want to have some of that stuff to look back at for purposes of nostalgia. In fact, I've always known that it is VITAL to my personal history to hang on to the relics of my past.

My birthday is coming up, so that might be why I've been inspired to look through some of my old stuff. I always have a weird sort of confusion/denial when I really think about how long I've been at this. I was 20 when I started (as a summer job that was supposed to last 2 months), and I will be 35 on March 1st. It just doesn't seem possible for that much time to have passed. I'm not one of these people who moans about birthdays and laments my lost youth.........maybe because I still feel young, or maybe because I just don't think of life that way....its hard to say, really, probably a combination of both.

I stayed up all night the other night thinking about life when I first started dancing, some things that I hadn't thought about in years. Thinking about those stories, it almost felt like I was thinking about someone other than myself. Of course I know it was me and I remember it all in amazing detail considering the circumstances, but the tales really do feel like something out of another person's life.

I guess that's how it goes. If I wasn't almost entirely different after 15 years I think it would indicate a severe case of arrested development (which I've been accused of! haha).

I really ought to make a list of the stories I want to tell so that I won't forget things as they come to me. Well, it's my blog, so I guess I'll just do that right here. ;-) These aren't in chronological order really, and this is just a rough idea of what I'd like to write about. Some are whole stories, others just small details that need to be incorporated *clears throat*

*WalMart panties and auditioning at Joker's Wild

*My friends and old JW crew: Tawny, Sunny (and her husband Siefer), Janeane, Tasty (and her husband the baker), Missy, Gary, Me me(sic), Molly, Sheila, Taboo and her sister ______, Jimmy and his parents, John Henry the bouncer, Jenny with the long legs, Michelle(oh how frustrating when you can't remember names......argh)Niki, Rockelle (sic), Buzzy, Shannon,

*Sunny stories--Godzilla the pitbull from hell, pickle juice, pushups and dancing in those thigh high boots

*Janeane stories--having a baby at the carnival, her young Canadian boyfriend Noel and her much older ex-husband who she was still technically married to

*Tawny stories--a bittersweet tale of a very beautiful girl, but a lot of funny shit too, drinking Long Island Iced Tea like a mind-eraser in the bathroom before we turned 21

*Dancing to wildly inappropriate music (which sometimes had to be pointed out, lol)

*Mud wrestling, oil wrestling, and foxy boxing

*Getting involved with the biker element (and naively putting myself in danger in the process)

*The crazy lady who sold "goods"

*Not being able to eat naked at first (not so much a story as a bizarre detail), Rax, the donut shop

*The costumes we wore, the shoes, pre-platform and body spray days,and the jukebox

*Sam taking a wild piss right in the middle of the bar

*My own little private party business (of which there are at least six great stories)

*Having after work privileges at a couple of little bars

*Staying up all night doing blow and playing with highly inappropriate people

*Attempting to hide my secret life

I'm sure I will have an infinite number of ideas to add to this list, but if anyone out there reading this is interested..............pick one and I'll tell it. Otherwise I may or may not get around to it. I have been meaning to blog more regularly, so perhaps this is a good way to get started. I'm very excited to have two people following my blog, and that inspires me for sure.

Herding Cats

Someone recently asked if I thought strippers should unionize and traditionalize (is that a word? dunno, don't care, haha).

I don’t think that strippers should unionize, etc. I do think it would be appropriate for large chains to offer hourly pay and insurance. But I can also see where that would cut into the freedom we have in this job. I could get on board with having as a choice, but I do not support the idea of it on a widespread level. And frankly, getting strippers to unionize would be like herding cats.

Being an independent contractor has it’s pros and cons. When done properly, it gives us the freedom to work when we want, keep our finances to ourselves, and pay (or not pay) our taxes on our own as we see fit. But if a club is going to treat its girls like employees anyway, with schedules and rules and constant bs, they should do the right thing and pay us hourly and offer benefits like any other job would do.

Instead, clubs do what they want anyway, whether they are a corporate chain or a hole in the wall. The arbitrary way they go about things is unlike any other industry I know.

Ideally, my preference is a club where they check your ID to prove you are of legal age and then leave you alone to make your money. This, to me, is the ultimate definition of “independent contractor.” Obviously, there should be basic rules and regulations, but the scheduling, fees, micromanaging, etc. is bullshit because they are calling us independent contractors so they don’t have to put us on a payroll, but want to treat us like employees in every other way. I recently left a club like that. They had us paying out roughly 1/4 of what we’d make in a night. And for their part of things they could barely keep toilet paper in the bathroom. It certainly wasn’t a fair give and take scenario.

Now I work at club where I have a lot more freedom. No house fees, no schedule, just normal tipouts to dj, bar, and house mom, and basic, reasonable rules.

I fully support the freewheelin' way of doing things. I love the idea of packing a bag and getting in the car and driving and driving and driving, and then working wherever I land. If we unionized and everyone had to be employees of their clubs, it would make that lovely fantasy impossible. And I have friends who really do work as travelling strippers and it would be the end of them showing up out of the blue and going to work that night, which would take away the very freedom that I love about stripping. It’s worth putting up with bizarre rules and nuttiness to have that kind of autonomy.

Yes, despite the way stripping has shown up in pop culture in recent years, I still want us to be outside of society, doing it our way. There's nothing quite like walking into a strange bar and being the exotic new girl for a few nights. It takes you out of yourself and puts you on a stage where you can be anyone you'd like, take on a new persona, and be as free as a bird..........