Sunday Stripper Migration

But first: one of my stories is on the Quirky Nomads Podcast today. I’m still on the crappy laptop, so I haven’t been able to hear it yet.

Sunday is stripper migration day in the mid-west. Out here, you get “booked” for a week, which is Monday through Saturday. In exchange for all this planning ahead, which is unnatural for strippers and most people, the clubs actually pay us! To compensate for paying us (usually $50-75/shift), the clubs take some of our dance money (usually $5-8/dance). To make up for taking our money some of them offer a bonus if you reach a certain number of dances or set a dance record in their club. Where I am this week the dance record is three hundred and something dances in a week. That’s $4500 in dance money, and fifty dances a day. I don’t think I’ll be setting a new record, but if I did it would sure help out with my IRS bill.

Anyways. Saturday night found me and Hat-Ma messing around after work until 3AM, and then hanging out at a truckstop diner for a couple more hours. Of course, once you have steroid packed steak and eggs at 5 in the morning, you don’t want to go right to sleep. So I went back to Hat-Ma’s hotel room to catch up with all the internetting I hadn’t done the whole week. I was going to write this weeks blog entries, catch up on my emails and blog reading, and be really productive. But my brain was silly and sleepy and I got nothing done, except for raiding the continental breakfast in the hotel (yay, orange juice!).

Around 8AM Hat-Ma and I remembered that she had to check out at 11AM. For a minute the glass was half empty and she was going to just get another day in the hotel, but then I remembered that the glass was half full and it was a chance to right our backwards sleeping schedules! I threw the ball for Bro in a field for a few minutes and then went to sleep in the hotel parking lot.

Hat-Ma called at eleven. “Hey, are you awake?”

“Huh.”

“Oh no. Are you going to get up? Maybe I should just get another day.”

“Uh uh.”

“You don’t sound awake. They haven’t started bugging me yet, but I swear they come after the strippers first. I can hear them yelling at Platinum and Chocolate.”

“Uh.”

“Well. I’m going to start packing. I’ll call you when it’s time to go.”

“Uh.”

I rolled out of bed and waited for the cold to wake me up. Twenty above doesn’t have quite the affect that twenty below does, though. Bro ran in his crate for breakfast and I shut the door on him so he wouldn’t get any ideas about morning snuggles. Half an hour later I remembered: Hat-Ma. Hotel. Morning. I called her, but she didn’t answer. Maybe it was a sign that I could go back to bed? No. I stumbled into the hotel and up to her room, where she had suitcases and duffel bags piled in the hallway. It may have been the quickest Hat-Ma packing ever.

I sat in front of the laptop and stared at it. Internet. I hit refresh on everything. Emails. Comments. Conversations. Morning. What the heck? Oh, yeah, Bro.

I went back outside and threw the ball for Bro for a minute, and then put him in his crate as Hat-Ma started hauling her bags out to the van. We stacked them in front of Bro and on the bed and anyplace they would fit. It was crazy. I took a picture, which I will share with you guys once I get my real laptop back.

Ironically, driving wakes me up.

Now I’m in that drunken little Christian town where everything is closed on Sunday “due to the lord.” The nettles guy is here. I talked to him on the phone on my way here, and he told me that he’s been spreading the word about nettles. He’s found that what I told him is true – if you love them when you pick them they won’t sting you – and he’s been explaining to farmers that if they will love them and promise to use them when they are weeding them out of their fields they won’t get stung. I had to laugh, cause this guy thought I was crazy when he first met me and saw me drinking nettles. Then he asked if I was parking at WalMart, cause he’ll come wake me up and take me to breakfast sometime. Riiight. I’m definitely scouting out new parking places here instead of repeating last years parking spots.

The funny thing about coming back to these little towns is that I have little built in lives. Friends, hang outs, trees that I visit, and wifi spots. In this town I have an ardent dyke admirer. She is sweet when sober, but manipulative and annoying after a night of drinking in the club. It doesn’t help that I hid from the cops in her bed one night. 😈