Hello,
Today's photo of the day was taken by my friend Al. In it I am wearing (part of) one of my former feature-dancing outfits I performed in when I used to go on the road. Yep, the time-honored schoolgirl routine. From 1996 to the beginning of 1998 I travelled on the road constantly going from club to club. I had some great experiences and some horrible experiences. The bitter memories are of course the best stories.
Sometimes other women I know in the business tell me that I should take feature-dance bookings now. I don't think I ever will again. It was fun to travel around North America and see new places, but it is even better to stay home. My cats are here and I like to think that I am the center of their lives. That's probably not the case, but I like to think it anyways. Besides, I can dance in LA without dealing with any of the hassles that come up on the road.
I remember this one club in Florida that put the feature entertainers who came there for the week into a guesthouse that was in the back parking lot of the club. These accommodations doubled as your dressing room for your stage shows. So after you put on your costume for your show, and some of mine were pretty elaborate, you had to hike across the parking lot in the whole getup. The parking lot was in full view of a heavily travelled interstate highway. When you went to bed at night you locked the door of the guesthose with a push-button type lock that is the same as you probably have on your bathroom door. All the regular customers at the club, and many potential people passing by on the highway, know that this guesthouse is used every single week by visiting strippers. I travelled alone and did not sleep well at that particular venue.
One week my agent booked me at a club in the French-speaking Canadian city of Quebec City. Someone told me that a bomb had gone off at that particular club recently so I asked my agent about it. He told me not to worry because the former owners were Hell's Angels, but they were gone after the bombing incident and now there was a new owner. "He seems like a really great guy," my agent said. Famous last words.
The new owner of "Club Supersexe" paid me with Canadian currency at the end of my week there even though it was written into my contract that I was supposed to be paid in American dollars which were worth significantly more. All of a sudden he no longer remembered how to speak English. I didn't speak French. We were at an impasse, especially since I was working illegally in a foreign country. I felt completely powerless to do anything, probably because I was. I left the country with much less money than I should have received. Worse than that, I just felt like such a ................punk. I should have done SOMETHING. Don't ask me what, but I should have at least taken some kind of stand. For his part, my punk agent did not answer his phone or my repeated pages all weekend, despite the fact that he received a weekly commission from me to handle exactly this type of occurrence.
One time in Columbus, Ohio the police raided my room with their guns drawn during a mistaken drug bust. In Tennessee I worked at a club that was picketed by bible-thumping demonstrators for the duration of my stay. No tips that week as very few local residents wanted to cross that picket line. A club in Pennsylvania gave me a room for the week at a hotel that also provided shelter for the homeless. Somewhere in Canada I got lost while jogging in the snow. Yeah, I'm an idiot, but I'd never been surrounded with so much unending whiteness- it was a lot scarier than it sounds. Employees of a club in Wisconsin stole all of my tip money out of my bag before I departed.
None of those incidents were really that bad. It was more the continued confrontations with club managers that wore me out. Some of them were fine, but some of them were rude dickheads on power trips. My theory on it? In many strip clubs the dancers make a lot more money than the management so there's a lot of festering resentment on the part of those managers. Strange environment. The best-run clubs are the ones where the owners do selective hiring and compensate the management appropriately.
Female friends of mine in the business point out that I could have avoided a lot of those problems if I had travelled with a "roadie." Maybe, but I don't know anyone I could be around full-time. I know there are a lot of wonderful people in the world, but I'm not one of them. I have not met the person who could be around me 24 hours a day.
All that said, feature dancing remains in my memory in the same way that the "Boob Cruise" does. There was good with the bad, and it was certainly an experience. -- XXOO Tanya