So, I completed my first lapdance.  I walked out of the booth feeling a little dizzy, and a lot sleazy.  I was conflicted.  Is this really what I should be doing in my spare time from dance rehearsals, classes and performances?  Was this money really worth it?  I wasn’t sure yet.  Sure, the guy was nice but I knew that was not to be considered a regular occurrence.  So I sat.  And watched.  A lot.  None of the other women seemed to have a problem with it.  I had to dig through a lengthy rationale inside my head once I was clear of those mirrored booths.

After a while, I figured, what the hell?  I was here now so I should make the best of it and not embarrass my friends.  I went to work.  I was a little more comfortable now that I had my first lapdance under my belt.  Or rather my garter.  Seeing money on my leg proved to be a fabulous motivator.  I was chit-chatting, laughing and enjoying myself.  Kind of.  It wasn’t too bad until I’d remember that I was supposed to be selling my body, not just my personality.  Luckily, I kept meeting guys that would save me the effort of asking if they wanted a dance.  They’d offer.  Awesome!  It saved me from rejection…at least for the time being.

And so I danced.  I was making some decent money off of just being myself.  Something I heard a fair bit of that night and then in hundreds of subsequent nights, “You don’t seem like a stripper.  You’re smart.  What are you doing here?”  In the beginning, there was laughter.  From me.  “Oh well, don’t you think I’m pretty enough to be a stripper, or do you want a stupid ugly girl?”  I know.  Clever.  On the outside anyway.  On the inside, I was asking myself the same f*&^ing thing!  But then, it’s pretty smart to be an attractive woman who knows how to use her physical attributes to her advantage, right?  Sure.  I was smart.  In the end, I could rationalize anything.

The interesting part was that I started to believe it.  And, honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that.  I mean, in the exotic world, there are extremely intelligent women who do great things with their money: they raise families, pay for college (yes, some of them are actually in school), pay off debt, buy real estate, invest in a business, etc.  There is something to be said for an industry where you can walk in broke and walk out with a thousand bucks to do with as you please.  So what if you have to get naked, bump n grind a stranger or let one of them fondle your boobs to get it?  It’s worth it to some.  And I soon joined that some…

I finished my weekend with a fair bit of money considering I was only there a couple of nights.  On the drive home, I couldn’t stop grinning and blabbing away about the money, the guys and how simple it all seemed to be.  I rationalized all the way home.  My friend laughed and told me she was happy that I came along and shared my enthusiasm.  When I returned to dance rehearsal Monday morning, I have to say I felt weird, almost giddy.  I had a secret and I wanted to tell people but I knew better.  That went without saying.  I couldn’t imagine telling all of these conservative, semi-conservative ballerinas what I had been up to that weekend.  I’ll admit while I was stretching a few times, I made my first attempts at booty-shaking.  I’m not sure what it looked like from their perspective, but it couldn’t have been good.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it!  I was a member of some special club that none of them would understand.  And that was cool.

Now, remember when I told you I was a lesbian?  Good.  I still was but I was taking a hiatus after a tumultuous end to a relationship.  I was dating a guy.  It was very innocent at first.  Actually, it was innocent at the end, too.  It just wasn’t for me.  I was gay and there wasn’t much I could do about it.  But, he was a nice guy and we had fun together, remaining friends even after he called me out as a lesbo.  I told him what I had been up to.  Partly because he wondered where all this cash came from all of a sudden, but also because I was bursting at the seams to tell someone.  He wasn’t mad, just concerned.  Especially after I saw an expensive top in the mall that I really wanted and proceeded to calculate how many dances I had to do minus the tipout in order to afford it.  My first venture into stripper calculus.  His words: “See, that’s where it starts.  You’re going to price everything out by the dance.”  Boy, he wasn’t too far off.

The world of stripping infiltrated my daily life so much so that I was over anxious to get to the weekend.  More weekends, more sexy, more money.  I couldn’t wait.  Unfortunately, there were so many things that I absolutely should have waited on, or better yet, avoided altogether.