Friday Night

You wouldn't believe all the girls who show up to work on a Friday night, especially the first Friday of the month. You can't even get any mirror space, so I usually stop at Naomi's place to spiff up and catch a buzz before reporting for duty on those nights. The first few months I don't even recognize a lot of the dancers, but after a while...

Some are the semi-retired. They've stopped dancing regularly because of jealous boyfriends or because they've joined some 12 step or maybe gotten a straight job but show up a couple of times a month to pay off the bright red disconnection notices.

There are floaters -- dancers who stay in reasonably good standing with several clubs and a couple nights a week will bop around amongst them until they find a full house which they will work very seriously and tenaciously until closing. They usually perform some of the loveliest stages, but their song choices are challenging. (Try shaking your ass in somebody's face to Crash Test Dummies' "Mmmm".) Floaters are usually artists or doctoral candidates.

Then you have traveling show girls and spinners. Traveling show girls are careerists and usually very well put together to make up for their lack of style and imagination: professional waxing, buff, fake tan all over, tit job, lots of makeup -- as generic, vanilla slut as you get. They book gigs in various towns and work the smaller clubs in between bookings. They are usually trying to make it big in Vegas or porn and they don't share useful info. (Example of useful info: I just hit that guy up for a dance, but he said no, he prefers brunettes. Go get him, girl!.).

And then there are the spinners. Spinners are usually between the ages of 35 and menopause. They aren't career dancers so much a lifers and I call them spinners because they seem to run through every club in town, working a few months, leaving in a huff or getting fired. When they've burned their way through the circuit, they start again at the first, and so on.

Some spinners used to be show girls who never quite made it. Then they got old and the bookings dried up, so they continue to dance in whichever town they've chosen to land. This type is extremely sour and any other dancer hoping to make money should consider them bubonic. Talk to one for ten minutes and she wil tarnish your mojo with cynical experience and no one will buy a dance from you. (Ironically, the living archetype of this spinner danced under the name Nova. She used to be new, but now she just won't go.)

The other kind of spinner makes me sad. Sad, because this other breed is a Priestess of Seduction and a Daughter of Pain. She will give you amazing, money-making info, distilled through the warped glass of personal prejudice and abuse. This type of Spinner is a hoot and a holler and a mess of psychic scar tissue; a Drama Mama with pizzazz. She will pull you into her personal pathology but her costume tips are lucrative and you will never forget the sparkle of her vulnerable toughness. In my mind, Sweetwater is a prototypical example of the Spinner but Kelly is the archetype.

And she deserves her own entry.