Stripper chronicles: One night in the life of

More from my daughter the stripper:

Q: ‘One night in the life of a stripper.’ What happens when you first go to work?

A: You pay your house fee then you go downstairs and dump your bags.

Q: What is downstairs? Is it a changing room?

A: Changing room, yeah, and all the lockers and stuff. So you take your bags down there. You put on your make-up. You put on spray tan, if you do that. Do your hair, if you do that.

Q: Do you do them?

A: No.

Q: You do nothing? You just have your hair the way it is?

A: I do my make-up.

Q: Nothing to your hair?

A: No, it just sits. I think I’ve got pretty good hair though, which helps. I can just leave it down and it’s all right. Put on your clothes, put on your shoes, or don’t put them on and carry them upstairs because it’s like, three flights and they’re on a slope so that you always feel like you are going to fall off them.

Q: Angled, how?

A: To the front.

Q: That’s really dangerous. Especially with high heels on.

A: Well, people don’t fall down them. You’re a lot more careful when you’re in stripper shoes than you are any other time. Then you might have a coffee. There’s a coffee machine downstairs.

Q: When you go upstairs, do you go because you’ve got a podium straight away, or do you just go and hang out on the floor?

A: Whichever one you want. Some girls take a long time to get ready. I sometimes take 15 minutes to get ready and other times take an hour and a half if I don’t feel like going up. So you can go up, start work, just walk out onto the floor, see who’s there, go and talk to someone, or you can go up when it’s time for your podium. That can be how you start.

Q: Do you often go out onto the floor and start chatting to each other?

A: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It can be a bit of a mothers’ club.

Q: ‘On the floor’ is basically the big room where everyone hangs out?

A: Yes.

Q: So the clients come in and through the main foyer, and straight into that room?

A: They go upstairs to that room.

Q: And is there a stage there?

A: Yes, there are two. There’s the main stage and then there’s a little podium. The main stage is where you do the podiums and where the shows are done every however often they’re done and the smaller podium is for when it’s a busy night and you just have more girls on stage.

Q: So on a less busy night the small podium’s not in use?

A: Yes.

Q: And is it every hour and a half that somebody goes on the podium?

A: No. Every 20 minutes it changes.

Q: So what about you? Through the night how many times do you go on it?

A: Three, four times. Maybe two times.

Q: So there are girls on the podium all the time. They just swap over every 20 minutes.

A: Yes.

Q: Twenty minutes at a time! That’s a long time.

A: It’s all right though. You just do whatever.

Q: So once you’ve been on the podium, is it often that someone has seen you on there and wants you to do a dance?

A: Yes.

Q: Is that the most common way of getting a dance?

A: Different girls work differently. That’s common for me. If that doesn’t happen I’m like, ‘Woo, hang on. There’s something wrong here.’ Other girls, no. They walk around and talk to customers. It depends on the girl.

Q: And if somebody wants a dance, do you go off to another room?

A: Yes. There are two rooms with couches and then two rooms without doors that have seats in them.

Q: So there might be another couple in the same room?

A: Yes.

Q: And sometimes you talk about getting more money if you take them downstairs.

A: Yes. That’s the ‘dungeon’.

Q: Is that on the same level as where you get changed?

A: Yes. You walk through the foyer/dungeon area to get to the change rooms. And the dungeon’s got like a schoolroom, and a shower room, a jail cell, a mirror room and an Arabian room. So you can take someone down there and it’s a lot more private. You can dance for them down there. And there’s a bar as well.

Q: It’s sounds more relaxed down there. So is that why you make more money, because you tend to spend a lot more time there?

A: It costs a bit more to go down there because we give a little bit of what they pay to the club to use those rooms. They are, theoretically, fantasy rooms so we might put on costumes for the client. That doesn’t happen very often, but we can do it because they are paying for that sort of stuff. It’s just better down there. Customers always say, ‘What’s different?’ and I’m like, ‘There’s no difference. You’re going to get the same dance but it’s better.’ I don’t know, it’s like more personal. And somehow that changes it a little bit even if it doesn’t literally change anything.

Q: When you do shows, is it one a night?

A: It used to be one a night. Now it’s one a week.

Q: How many shows are there?

A: There’s one at 9 o’clock and a little one at 10.20. Then there’s one at midnight. And on Friday and Saturday there’s a little one at 1.30 and another big one at 3 o’clock.

Q: So they have enough girls who are willing to do that many shows?

A: Well almost all the girls used to do one a night. They are finding it harder to get showgirls to do them, though. I think because they do so many less now and the house fees went up and the show fees didn’t go up accordingly, so we’re like, ‘Why am I doing this for not the right amount of money?’ And it’s not as much fun. It was occasionally quite fun doing a big show, but then you’d have mini-shows which are easy and fun to intersperse. But now you don’t get them and it’s just like well fuck. I don’t know, they used to make it really worth it to do them and now they don’t really.

Q: So if it were worth it, would you want to do them again?

A: I still do them sometimes. I did a mini.

Q: Yes, I remember, you told me.

A: It’s the culture around shows that has changed. So it used to be, ‘Oh you’re doing shows for us. That’s great. We love you. That’s excellent.’ Now it’s like, ‘Do a show.’ That’s it. So it’s the culture around it that’s different.