Outside the office, the club begins to fill up; 15 to 20 people are now strewn throughout the room and the dancers are more prevalent among them than before.
One dancer, Sydney, sits alone on one of the couches lining the right wall. "I really don't feel like working right now," she says, sounding almost defeated. "There are just those nights that I come in and am disgusted. It's that conflicting thing that's always going on in my head. And it's not the girls, it's the guys." She contends that although she likes all the girls she works with, it's the idea of the men coming in, paying for the illusion of sex that turns her off of dancing.
Sydney, like Tori, is dancing to put herself through school. She's had seemingly every job in town, including owning and operating her own coffee shop. A self-described "full-fledged feminist" who can read ancient Greek, she concedes that this is the only job that could pay for school, so she does it five nights a week to get by. "I guess the main drawback is that I haven't had a date since I've started here because the idea of what I do turns many people off," she says. "But if boys are stupid enough to throw their money at me, more power to 'em." She sighs, gets up and approaches a man who has just sat down at a table. They talk.
"The part that bugs me the most is that when other girls find out what I do, they look down at me." Tori sits back down at the table. She crosses her legs and lets her eyes wander across the club, always looking through the setting instead of at it as if something's missing or out of place. "Really, those girls are probably the real sluts." Her stance on the decision to be a dancer has grown stronger since she started. After more than three years dancing, she's molded a very realistic view on the business and what she does.
Her eye is so clear when it comes to this, it's almost hard not to believe her when she says she enjoys what she does. "If you're smart about it coming in and avoid the negatives that can go along with the stripper lifestyle, there's
The part that bugs me the most is that when other girls find out what I do, they look down at me.
nothing wrong with it," she says. "I have other goals in my mind and other things I want to do with my life. You kind of have to plan ahead. A lot of girls don't think about the fact that you can't be a dancer forever."
A man in his early 30s walks in alone. He sits down at a table farther from the stage and orders a Coors
Light. He is, apparently, on his way home from work and just stopped in for a few minutes to relax. Tori eyes him aloofly, and then looks up across the room at nothing in particular. She strokes the bracelet on her wrist for a minute or two before standing up. "Well, I guess I better go make some money," she says derisively, yet with no trace of self-deprecation. She walks over to his table, carrying herself with an saunter that makes it all too clear this is one walk she's made more than just a few times in her life.
She sits down and they begin talking. She faces forward for the most part, talking, with minimal eye contact, to this man she's never met before in her life. No matter. They sit and talk anyway creating the illusion that they are, in fact, old friends.
Every now and then when the conversation lulls, she'll look up and around the room as she's become accustomed to doing. Her wide eyes search, but can never seem to really locate whatever it is she's trying to find.
— Kevin Kampwirth can be reached at kkampwirth@kansan.com.