Tonight, her body brings home the bacon
Roxane Marquez
Anyone who’s ever been to Los Angeles International Airport has
probably seen LIVE LIVE NUDE NUDES. It’s a tough one to miss. A
tacky, late ’60s-inspired orange, gold and brown pattern adorns the
letters of the word "NUDES" on the main marquee that leaps out
toward anyone zooming westbound on Century Boulevard. The marquee
is literally this strip joint’s claim to fame.
I learned this last Saturday night when my friend Demetrius and
I ditched Stratton’s looking for something new and different to do.
Knowing Demetrius, he could check out the women ’til the cows came
home, but my glass of Guinness was getting near empty and the beer
left a thick feeling on my tongue. So when we tried to think of
something different to do and came up with patronizing a strip
joint, I thought, to hell with it. The two of us were out the
door.
Twenty minutes later we pulled into the parking lot. It was
packed. As we exited the car and walked toward the door, two
security guards frowned at me in odd amazement.
"Well, what did you expect?" I thought to myself. Not
surprisingly, I received the same look from the man to whom we gave
our admission money (Demetrius paid the $10 cover charge), from the
bouncers and even the (clothed) waitresses. The all-male clientele
reacted a little differently, showing a mixture of embarrassment
and curiosity. But to the strippers, I was just another
customer.
We sat down and ordered two $5 orange juices (once again,
Demetrius paid). The place was everything I expected it to be. Worn
red and orange carpets. Rednecks in one corner, recent immigrants
in another. College-aged kids scattered all around. Some
haggard-looking businessmen sitting on either side of me. A few men
donned in quebradita cowboy attire. They could’ve been anyone, from
the guy who cleans toilets at the local Winchell’s to the guy who
approves or rejects my bank loan.
And it was the same with the strippers  they were all
ethnicities and varying ages. But though the songs changed, their
routines varied little. Skimpy clothing came off first and
eventually, full nudity  and always, when the acts ended, the
collection of the dollar bills men left on the edge of the stage to
get a closer look.
After we’d been there a while, a stripper who’d been on stage
just five minutes before came up to our table. "Table dance?" she
asked us with a smile.
My mouth dropped. "Wha- … No, no that will be quite all right,
thank you," I answered nervously, before Demetrius could
respond.
She began to walk away. "Wait," I called to her. "Could I ask
you a few things?"
"Sure," she replied.
I’d read about strippers in various women’s magazines Â
about the recent general trend of women, many of whom are
college-educated, are turning to stripping to make a living
because, simply put, the money is excellent. So I figured, what
better way to find out about this than straight from the
source.
"It says on the marquee out there ‘Female Strippers Wanted’," I
said. "Is that still the case? And if so, what’s the pay?" I
inquired.
"Oh yes, we’re always hiring," she answered. She went on and
talked about auditions and hours and how the women who worked there
technically made minimum wage, but the tips they earned brought
their nightly salaries in the hundreds.
"Seriously?" I asked.
She replied that yes, it was true. She was originally from the
East Coast, she said, and had put herself through college by
stripping for a living. She now had a degree in management, but she
wanted to be an actress, so she moved to Los Angeles. Stripping was
easy money compared to what few jobs were available, and she’d done
it before, so why not do it again? After all, you can’t make a
living without bringing home the bucks.
Soon after talking with her, Demetrius and I decided to leave.
All the way home, I found myself staring at billboards and bus stop
posters adorned with women in revealing clothes. I thought about
the scantily clad women in the beer commercials I’d seen just hours
before at Stratton’s, just a few days ago on the television in my
room, just a week ago on my parents’ big-screen TV at home.
And I thought, "What’s the difference?"
The concept of woman using her body as her profession is not a
new one. Now that I was able to put the stripper’s words in context
with what was going on around me, the concept of stripping for a
living didn’t seem shocking to me at all. Now, I felt like there
was little difference between a woman in a bikini advertising beer
or beepers and a completely nude woman dancing in a
strip-joint.
After all, when you have to make a living, you go where the
money is. The unrelenting message society conveys is to go for the
bigger bucks, not to strive to make the world a better place. And
the reality is that stripping can bring in the bucks.
And so though I found the woman’s words somewhat enlightening
that night, I also found them disheartening and disturbing. My God,
I thought. They can say that 1992 was the "Year of the Woman," they
can point out how women have made advances in a myriad of fields
… but the bottom line is that when all is said and done, a
woman’s body still guarantees a steady cash flow.
But no matter how simple and lucrative the stripper described
her profession as being, I couldn’t erase from my mind the memory
of seeing a young woman stretching her nude, vulnerable-looking
body across the front of the stage for a single dollar bill.
Viewpoint Assistant Editor Marquez is a fourth-year student
double-majoring in history and English/American studies.