Wading in the Velvet Sea

Friday night rolls around. I haven’t heard from him yet, and I don’t have his number. Meanwhile, I am on Instant Messenger with my friend Jeanna. Jeanna and I have one of the stranger relationships in the history of human interaction from the outside looking in, but it makes a bizarre sense to us. But that’s another story. I’m telling her about how I was supposed to go to a strip club, but probably wasn’t, and all this got here really interested in going to one. Since she’s leaving in a few weeks for Nashville, we figured we could qualify the outing as a ‘going away party’.

So we make plans to meet at 8:30, so I get showered, eat dinner, etc, and in the middle of my frozen pizza get a call from Jeanna. Turns out she has a friend from MIT who wants to come with her boyfriend.

‘Oh, how’d y’all meet?’ I ask.

‘Oh, met her through a personal ad last summer.’

OK, so now we’ve got Jeanna and what turns out to be an open-relationship couple. OK. While on the phone with Jeanna, the roomie’s BF calls. He wants to go after all. This should be the most bizarre 5-some since O Town.

So we decide to go to ‘The Foxy Lady’. This was chosen largely for the 25 minute commute, as opposed to the hour plus ride that ends you up in ScaryVille, Rhode Island. None of us had been to this club, but as the tallest member of our group I was called upon to lead the expedition into the club. There’s a few millennia of social stratification based in our genes for ya.

The first ten minutes are always completely disorientating for me, at least, in the few and far between experiences I have had in strip clubs. There’s just something fundamentally OFF about the whole experience…hard to put my finger on it…oh yes, it’s because real life usually doesn’t have naked women parading around. That’s it.

This place, as far as these places go, was actually gorgeous and extremely classy (as opposed to the one in NYC this past summer, which looked like if you converted your Mom’s basement into a strip club). The place was structured around one gigantic stage, where a girl would dance for 2-3 songs at a time, and two smaller stages that looked exactly like small trampolines. Oddly enough, no poles. Anywhere. This shattered my fundamental notions of a strip club. After crying for a bit softly, i recovered.

The best thing about this place was that you didn’t need a watch. Because every hour, on the hour, all the girls would parade through the stage, and I mean EVERY girl, to ‘Girls Girls Girls’ by Motley Crue, which wasn’t too subtle a song selection. Musta been 30 women at once just descending on the place like iit was the beaches at Normandy. On the hour, $30 got you a lady for two songs and a sweatshirt. A sweatshirt. Can I take a minute here to go ‘BWA’? A T shirt I could see. You’re low on laundry, need a shirt to wear under something else, OK. I dunno about you, but do you really wanna run to the local supermarket wearing a ‘Foxy Lady’ sweatshirt? Not thinking so. I however seem to be in the minority, because on the :05 of every hour, under the main stage, you’d see a good 12-15 guys getting their sweatshirt dances.

So, time for our quote of the night!

The boyfriend and I are at the mainstage, just, you know, talking about physics, and Jeanna comes over. She and her online dating something-whatever-the-hell-that-was-girl have already gotten a dance from a girl who I kid you not was the spitting image of Jeanna. (‘That was my narcissism fetish,’ she explained to me after the dance.) Between that and the Jack Daniels she was drinking straight, she was in a good mood.

Jeanna comes walking over to me and kneels down. ‘How ya doing, sweets?’ I ask.

‘Oh, other than being half-drunk and wanting everything in this room with a vagina, I’m great!’

And walks away.

The boyfriend turns to me and says, ‘Well, that just made my night worthwhile.’

Good times.

The place we perched out at on the stage was about 3 seats down from this one guy, who obviously was a regular. Must have had 3 dozen tulips with him, and several boxes of unknown content. We really wanted to know what was in the boxes, but just couldn’t bear to ask him, because he looked like the type of person that, once you’ve made eye contact with, will NOT stop talking to you all night long. Without fail, every girl who came by said some variation on ‘Hey, long time no see!’

The boyfriend turns to me at one point and goes, ‘Well, I have another life goal.’

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘To never ever end up like that guy.’

Fair enough, I thought.