Monday, 6/9/97 Tonight, her nude body will be bringing home the
bacon
Roxane Marquez April 6, 1995 Anyone who’s ever been to Los
Angeles 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 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 out 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, 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 change, their routines varied
little. Skimpy clothing came off first and eventually, full nudity
– and always, when the acts ended, the collection of 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 onstage just five minutes
before came to our table. "Table dance?" she asks 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 – the recent 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
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 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 be 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 escape 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.