Stripping

Picked up an interesting book at a sad book sale (our favorite used-book store is closing; the owners retiring), a quite upbeat book on the profession of stripping.  Strip City, by Lily Burana.  It came out in 2001 but doesn’t seem much outdated. 

It’s well written.  She talks about her own career as a stripper some years before the writing, and interviews three other strippers, and goes back on the road herself, stripping from Texas to Alaska.  Interesting stuff about self-actualization and sexual politics, and the quirks of this peculiar kind of literal self-employment.  No silly moralizing or man-bashing.  In her good-natured attitude she reminds me of the burlesque dancer in Stranger in a Strange Land and a couple of other women so employed in Heinlein’s fictions.

She talks about one stripper, Pillow, who is almost legally blind and has to work the stage from memory.  Strange metaphor on a couple of levels, selling something you can never perceive directly.  Her audience are just man-shaped blobs.  They stuff money in her costume, and when she goes backstage and puts on her glasses she’ll find a twenty among the ones, and not know who the generous one was.

(Pillow speaks Klingon and makes her own costumes – a crafter, bodybuilder and sort of a cracker-barrel philosopher.  I wonder if she ever goes to sf conventions.)

Charming book.

Joe