THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
WEDNESDAY, MAY 10, 2006
Tori waits at AllStars Thursday night before going to change for her next dance set. She has spent the last five years as an exotic dancer, using money she earned to pay for courses at the University. She will graduate this May.
Dancer
Instead, they see a girl who dances topples, flirts with customers, performs lap dances for cash and enjoys mixed drinks (velvet hammers are one favorite). She casually smokes Camel Lights and earns $200 to $800 a night stripping for a mostly male audience of bikers, college students and blue-collar workers until two in the morning on some nights.
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Tori looks through her clothes to change for her next dance set Thursday night at AllStars. The National Merit Scholar often studies between sets.
This 24-year-old blessed with enviable brains, beauty and body will tell you she enjoys this job and what it has done for her.
"I had very poor self-esteem in high school, and it has gotten much better since I started
dancing," she said.
Still, she insisted that her real name not be used for this story, saying that professors at the University — where she will receive a degree in human biology this spring — might
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has worked with Tori the last five years. A big brother figure, he said he watches out for Tori's welfare.
have a "narrow-minded" view of what she does for a living.
A life once filled with church, school and family is now filled with stripping, college and drinking with friends.
"There's always somebody in a group that gets completely dicked over. I was that person."
Eleven hundred miles away in her suburban Salt Lake City home, Tori's mother, Janet, bursts into tears over the phone.
Regardless of her family's wishes or what others think, Tori declares she has been on her own for the last six and a half years and is doing just fine. She knows her family will never approve of her lifestyle, but in a way, they may have contributed to getting her where she is.
People like "Big" Will Reed, the burly bouncer-turned-general manager of AllStars who
But Tori won't hear it. She likes her job. She likes the money. She likes the atmosphere and the people she works with.
The oldest of four children, Tori and her family moved to
Her younger sister tells her in a text message, "You're better than this."
"I don't understand any of this," she said about her daughter's lifestyle.
Tori Dancer
Lenexa from Utah when she was two.
She remembers watching cartoons and having occasional spats with her younger sister growing up.
An intelligent kid, she always did well
"Tori is a very smart girl. I gave her all the brains I had," Janet said with a laugh.
in school
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dominated Tori's childhood, occupying at least 15 to 20 hours per week. Three hours of church, youth meetings and seminary five days per week from 5:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. were just some of her Mormon church activities.
Early on, Tori did what was asked of her, at home, church or school.
At age 15, Tori began to question the Mormon doctrine, including its strict rules on dating (Mormons aren't allowed to date until 16, and then they
must do so in groups) and its ban on caffeine. She remembers pleading with her parents to attend events like the Kansas City "Renaissance Festival."
"I never got it." she said about the book of Mormon. "I tried, I really did. I just never got the vibe that I should go with it."
Her mother disagrees. "I don't think she was ready for the information," she said.
Janet insisted other teenagers in the Church and their harsh treatment of Tori fueled her daughter's discontent. One teenage boy sent e-mails to others calling Tori a "whore" and a "slut," and warned them to stay away from her, Janet recalled.
"There's always somebody in a group that gets completely dicked over," Tori said. "I was that person."
Janet contended that if Tori had been treated better, things might have been different. "I wished I would have done something sooner."
The family moved to Utah during Tori's junior year of high school. Mounting tension between Tori and her parents intensified when she dated a non-Mormon and hung out with friends her mother called "druggies."
Tori admitted her friends dabbed with alcohol and drugs and that she even tried both a few times. However, she's adamant that her experimentation was brief and never affected her at school.
HER parents reacted swiftly and firmly to Tori's behavior, sending her to a drug rehabilitation center. She was isolated and had no contact with friends for five months.
Tori checked herself out of rehab when she reached legal age at 18. She stayed with her parents in Utah for only a few days before her boyfriend and best friend picked her up and drove her back to Kansas.
Tori did not speak with her parents for nearly a year after she left Utah, but she now understands why her parents sent her to rehab.
"I was the oldest and they were concerned for my welfare. I still feel bad about them sending me to rehab, because it was so expensive. But it was not necessary," she said.
Even Janet wonders now if sending Tori to rehab was an overreaction. "I don't know," she said. "I still feel badly to this day about it."
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Back in Kansas, Tori enrolled at the University. With her freshman year winding down, she was living in Overland Park and commuting daily and had just left her job at a department store in Oak Park Mall.
Having worked 40 hours a week at the old job to cover her bills, she knew she needed to find a better-paying job fast, because she was getting no financial support from her parents.
In high school she had joked about being a stripper. Suddenly the ioke turned serious.
She sought the advice of her then-boyfriend. "He was supportive, and not in the creepy 'I want-to-date-a-stripper sense,'" she recalled.
She visited Bada Bing in North Lawrence, now called AllStars. The search was over.
Five years later, Tori and her mother still have never discussed Tori's job outside of school. "She doesn't ask, so I don't tell," Tori said.
But Janet knows, and she can't understand why her daughter chose to dance at a strip club.
"It breaks my heart, but it's her life and she has to own her behavior," Janet said.
Tori said stripping was a job, not a lifestyle, although her social life away from AllStars usually involved bars and alcohol.
She said her main reason for stripping 20 to 40 hours a week was simple — the money. Average nights brought in $200 to $300. Good nights can bring in as much as $800.
Lap dances, a staple of any strip club, fetch $20. But Tori has her limits, going as far as to call herself "prude."
"I won't dance for creepy guys. If I get a bad vibe, I won't dance." she said.
Tori said some men think they can do whatever they want to a stripper.
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