Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Cannot Find My Draft!



This blog won't be posted in my usual style. This is the first time using my iPad to post. Having quite a day: I can't find my draft, I stressed through Dodgers traffic to make it to a dance class just to find out it was canceled and I still haven't purchased a keyboard for my new iPad yet. I wanted to continue my story about leaving the Pink Poodle because of how the dance styles had changed so drastically.


 The next club I went to was called The Brass Rail in Sunnyvale, Ca. This is where Steve Jobs started. Not the Brass Rail, but the city of Sunnyvale.  The Brass Rail was topless...sort of.  This was a club with a full bar and a reputable smorgasbord style lunch. The dancers were also cocktail servers. We were paid a minimum wage and kept all of our tips. The object was to be in the top five each night for selling cocktails. There was some sort of light penalty for being a lazy server, but I can't recall what that was.


 (About my shit day? I also forgot my reading glasses:-( I am blindly writing this post!!)


 Back to the subject .Yes, topless sort of. Once you were hired, you were taken to a small room in back of the DJ booth. You shot on video doing a topless dance. No floor work. No pole. Just standing there, bouncing boobies and smiling. They would play this while you danced on stage in a bikini. Hence, they advertised having topless dancers. They are still open and to me knowledge, still practice this form of "topless dancing".


 They did have poles. They were no more than 6ft.   The stage was a long, narrow sort of catwalk. You stepped on to the stage from the back. About five feet in front of you were two poles on the very edge of the stage, one on each side. There was a horizontal pole on top that connected the top brass poles. Every so often a dancer might do a tiny spin on one of the side poles. But mostly it was all about the pull ups on the horizontal bar. There was a crazy dancer called The Animal, an older, thin, mean, Harley riding, drunken bitch. She would swing on the horizontal bar and in mid swing let go in mid air and land with a thump in a hard Chinese split. No knee pads, no boots. Crazy bitch!


 I also got the worst reception from the dancers there. More so than any new club in which I was the new girl.  I remember being shown to the main dressing room. It was crowded. Every time I put my bag somewhere, I was told to move my "shit" somewhere else. Especially by The Animal. I was already nervous. I started to cry silently and tried to sneak out of the club. The big black DJ caught me and asked me to go into the small video room. He convinced me to stay and said I could use this smaller private dressing room. I started undressing when an attractive, light toned black dancer called Summer came in and politely said that this room was reserved for her and her three dancing sisters: Spring, Winter and Fall.  (Yes, for reals).  I was so getting tired of this. I told the DJ I had been kicked out again. He knew what was going on, so he introduced me to Roxy and said she would be my guardian angel.


Roxy was a short, muscular dancer, with short blond, curly hair and a New York Bronx style accent.  She was someone you wouldn't want to fight with.  She was very supportive of me and hung out with me off and on through out the night.  Nobody really messed with me when they found out we were buddies.


Dancing styles there were bouncy and cute.  Sort of like early Madonna music videos.  Customers were not allowed to touch.  There were no lap dances.  There was floor work.  Mostly just leaning back and spreading or walking like a spider and spreading. Nobody had heard of booty popping at that time.  The big move was to bend over with your booty to the audience and move it from side to side.  Tall, thin, white dancers with boobs seemed to be the money makers there.  Back then, I had shaved both sides of my head and had wild curly hair on top.  Sort of like a combo of early Prince and Madonna combined.  There was another dancer there with shorter hair than mine!  We both did fairly well.  Another funny thing about this place is that a lot of the girls wore pantyhose!!  Yes, pantyhose.  My short haired girl wore full covered body suits over pantyhose and still made more $$ than me  some nights.  Summer, the diva that kicked me out of her dressing room, wore pantyhose.  She was actually a good dancer.  Even back then, I felt like pantyhose was cheating!  I also thought it looked dorky.  This would never fly now!  Guys are so dorky.  In my entire career I have never wore pantyhose to cover flaws!


(I was able to fix the format of my post after all:-)