Which crusty old stripper archetype am I?

I’ve noticed lately that some people think of me as an old time veteran stripper, and I have been dancing for, well, longer than I’d like to admit. It got me thinking tho… you know those “What ____ are you?” quizzes that are all over the internet? Well, what old stripper archetype am I? (Old stripper, not old person, I’m actually young).

There’s the old time burlesque queens. Definitely not me, but maybe when I get older.

When I first started dancing at a “real” club (cause the first couple I worked at didn’t count) there were a couple old school dancers (if you’re a stripper, you know the one’s I mean). They sat me down and were like, “wipe that crap off your face and let us fix it and gawd you need to cut four inches off your hair and you absolutely are not wearing that budwieser dress in this club!” They wouldn’t let me go on stage until I could do a good stage show (I think I gave myself a gazillion black eyes and bloody noses learning to do those old burlesquey kicks, which I can’t even do anymore.. but no one else does them anymore either so it doesn’t matter!) and they decided that Marilyn Monroe was my sex symbol archetype and they made me watch a bunch of her movies and emulate her (it’s really been just the last few years that I’ve finally left Marilyn behind.) They made me hold my glass in a certain way and walk and sit and talk in certain ways. They told me not to *ever* have sex with anyone until they’d courted me for seven months. Yes, they said “courted”!!! It was quite the education for me.

Those are the kind of women that I think people are talking about when they refer to old time veteran strippers. I definitely don’t qualify there either.

But is there another archetype? Indeed, there is…

I had just started working at this little biker bar in West Virginia. I’d always worked in “classy” clubs (as if class has anything to do with it) before that, where we were all perfect ladies or at least maintained the illusion. So you can imagine my shock and horror when I looked up and saw that the girl on stage had her nipple in some guys mouth! I grabbed the dancer next to me, who I had danced with in “classier” places and who was very wise, and also a girl scout troop leader.

“OMYGODDESS LOOK what she’s DOING!” I whispered to her.

She looked up at the stage, then back at me, totally unimpressed. “Yeah,” she shrugged eloquently, her dangly rhinestone earings brushing her shoulders, “shit happens.” She was so beautiful and bored and jaded, and I was so horrified, I’ll remember it forever.

Shit happens? Not in clubs *I* worked at. Obviously this girl was bringing us all down. And where was the posse of old school girls who would be kicking her ass in a classier club? But this woman was older and wiser than me so I followed her lead in ignoring it. Later I asked her to expound on her shit happens theory. She said (something like) “well, if you or I were her we would be doing the same thing, so there’s no need to judge. That’s just her thing, it doesn’t change who she is. Obviously it’s not your thing, so don’t do it.” At the time, that totally blew my mind.

Today, I guess of all the old time veteran strippers I know, I’m most like her.

Which makes me uncomfortably close to being a jaded biker bar stripper, which is actually a rather comfortable place to be.