One of the things I like about strippers is that even the well adjusted ones seem pretty messed up. They're just like me, except with better bodies.
Because Stacy had insisted on having this fairy-tale wedding and humiliating her best friends in the form of the canary yellow bridesmaid dresses, we decided to fully deliver on her dream. My suggestion that we go to a karaoke booth was ignored, and instead we ended up on Broadway having labia waved 10 inches from our faces. From what I've seen of drunken hen parties in Dublin (they are everywhere, there), the point of a bachelorette party is to humiliate the bride-to-be. The talk should mainly consist of what a tramp she used to be, and she should be forced to wear a crown of penises for the duration of the evening. Unfortunately, due to the 22 hours I spent traveling in order to attend the nuptials, I had lost my voice soon after arrival and was unable to speak for two days. I had to content myself with using hand gestures to convey what a slut she had been, and had a few pretty solid rounds of charades. I also demanded, in sign, that she wear a pair of glow-in-the-dark penis earrings.
We touched down on Broadway and went into one of the dirty stores there. Anything on Broadway proper isn't really that dirty, because it's aimed at assholes on hen or stag parties like ourselves. Did manage to have a good aul chat with the meth head working at Big Al's though--he told me, among other things, that he advises against using a product called "Anal-Eze" because it reduces sensitivity, and what he likes about anal is that it realy fucking hurts. I tucked away this tidbit of knowledge to chew on later, and we proceeded to our first strip club.
They told us it was going to cost us $15 each to get in. Stacy, previously the demure bride, was enraged by the $15 door fee. She dredged up an employment episode from a decade early that I had nearly forgotten about, and insisted that when she had worked the door at one of the Broadway clubs, they never charged an entrance fee to women. The dude working was like, "Wait, what? You worked over here?" Turns out the manager at her club was the same one as the manager at this club, and Stacy insisted that he come out and give her free entry. She seemed unconcerned by the fact that she had been unceremoniously fired from said club for stealing from the till, and managed to get us all in.
A high percentage of the girls in our group insisted that they couldn't get a lap dance because that would be "cheating" on their boyfriends who were not invited to our little girly soiree. They also said it would be "cheating" to sit too close to the stage or "cheating" to tip the strippers, who are, you know, trying to feed their little crack babies/habits entirely off tips. I wouldn't be one to get a lap dance myself, primarily because the dancers seemed unwilling to spend our seven minutes together discussing my problems with intimacy, which is all I'd really want from an encounter with them. I don't know that being polite to a stripper would technically constitute cheating--this may be why my relationships aren't particularly "successful," but frankly, it seemed like a way for my cheap-ass friends to weasel out of tipping the dancers. So like many other strip club patrons, I ended up blowing a "wad" on the dancers.
One of the clubs went to was the one that used to be known as the goth strip club. It brought back fond memories for me--dancers that would dance to Sisters of Mercy and looked completely uninterested in anything, let alone stripping. But this time, there were no goth strippers to be seen. Apparently that business model wasn't working so they decided to re-brand by having girls with names like Whiskey and Imani dance to "Baller for Lyfe." One of the girls fell in love with my friend Mary (who could blame her) and in the midst of her attempted wooing, told Mary that he real name was Candi. Her stage name was Esther. Oh, the misfortune of a girl born with a stripper name who chooses to strip under an old lady pseudonym.
All in all, was a great evening. Hadn't seen that much vag since college. To top off the stripper weekend, I nearly had the opportunity to see the stripper my ex-boyfriend married while we were dating shake her patootie at a genuine goth strip night. Although her junk was not particularly appealing a decade ago and probably hasn't aged well, I was willing to go for you, dear reader. "This would be great blog material," I thought. As it turns out, the bridesmaids were forced to set up tables all night while the groomsmen were off drinking beer and shirking resonsibility, so we were unable to have the pleasure of going to strip clubs two nights in a row and seeing my sex rival show her middle-aged naughty bits to a crowd of men dressed in all black and wearing eyeliner. Next time, California, next time.
*ps. If anyone knows what that song is on the urban dance radio stations all the time right now that goes "baller for life" please tell me. I need to add it to my "routine."
