As far as I know, my favorite dancer Lily is going on a long vacation starting this weekend. At least that’s what she told me the last time I saw her, which was toward the end of March. I guess she’s my “former” favorite dancer now. When financial circumstances and other serious distractions prevented me from going to the club, I thought perhaps she would drop me an email to see why I hadn’t shown up; I’d given her my email address at her pointed request. I didn’t get her address, however, assuming that if she ever wrote me, I would then be able to write her back. But when I never got any email from her saying hello or asking why I hadn’t come by, I decided that I didn’t feel like making any special effort to see her before she went away.

Maybe I’ll see her at some point when she returns from her trip, but the attitude I’m mentally adopting is that I had a good time hanging out with her for a few months and our little acquaintanceship has pretty much played itself out.

I say that’s the attitude I’m “mentally” adopting. It’s called “acting as if.” Acting as if I accept the fact that we had some fun together, and that I understand how these things just dissipate over time. But the way I actually feel is sort of sad and angry. “Sort of,” because I’m only sad and angry about it when she infrequently comes to mind, or when something reminds me of her--like a review in the paper yesterday of a restaurant I had hoped to take her to. Otherwise, I give her little thought. I have other more important things to think about, but it would have been nice to still be tight with her as we were in December, at least as a kind of oasis from all the tension I’m living with right now, like worrying about my kid sister’s recent cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Yes, one of the functions of a stripper is that she can be an oasis of fun in the deserts a customer must cross in his outside life.

I’m sorry if I’m putting metaphors in a literary Cuisinart here, but I didn’t sleep well last night.

Anyway, there are a lot of fish in the Ecdysiastic Sea...but I’m starting to feel tired throwing out the line. And maybe too old to expect anything but a few minutes of mindless fun with these peelers.

I bought a disposable digital video camera at the drugstore the other day--can you believe they have such a thing? And actually, it’s not very good--the battery seems to run down quickly. Anyway, I took some footage of myself saying something wry and self-deprecating. Shit, I look like a seedy old guy, at least in closeup.

I’m not that old. But maybe I am seedy...

I hope you’re laughing a little as you read this. I’m actually chuckling a bit myself as I type it.

I’m starting to feel that it will be less hurtful to me if I keep my interactions with these dancers to a minimum. Less conversation, just keep it physical. After all, they’re using me just to get money, so why shouldn’t I use them just for erotic pleasure? I’m starting to think they feel more comfortable being treated as objects anyway, rather than as people.

Maybe I also want to be treated just as an object, since I seem to go back for the same kind of treatment. While they’re sex objects, I’m a financial object--a human ATM.

Lily knew I was hurting for money, but the last time I saw her, she really milked me for every last cent she could get. It was hard to resist her when sitting next to her, so I took the only other course of action--avoided seeing her altogether.

Because of the kind of face I have, which can appear trusting and ingenuous, I think dancers who don’t know me look upon me as naive and easily manipulated. That’s why I think I take pleasure sometimes in turning down the cocky, arrogant ones for a dance--you know, the ex-high school hotties who think they still rule the patch. Sometimes they look amazed that I don’t say “Yes, ma’am!”

Like an ATM that doesn’t give them their stack of twenties.

Yes, I am probably one of the most cynical customers in the clubs. I’ve spent thirty-six years going to strip joints of various sizes and configurations--the first place I ever went to was actually a burlesque theater, one of the last remnants of a now-vanished era. And now I look upon the dancers with a very jaded eye, and expect very little from them as people...on the other hand, if a gal gets to me in the ways in which I am vulnerable, if she seems to just be a regular person who happens to take her clothes off for a living but shows me other facets to her persona--my cynicism turns to hope and faith as I once again embark on my quest to find the gold hidden in the heart of a stripper.

Instead of Jason and the Golden Fleece, think of it as Sir Cranky and the Golden Heart.

Cynical, yet romantic.

Understanding, yet angry.

Philosophical, yet sad.

Yep, that’s Sir Cranky.

And I feel I’m almost at the end of my rope with this crap...

Yet it’s funny, how I can be one type of person at eight in the evening last night, smugly content to stay home and read a noir crime novel, proud of my ability to resist going out and dropping a hundred bucks in a club--but then at two a.m., when I couldn’t sleep, kicking myself for not going out earlier to have a few thrills, to watch a girl dancing onstage in front of me, to make her laugh with a silly joke, to feel her body undulating on my lap...and to insert twenties in her garter for all these minor but necessary pleasures.

Oldest story in the world.

Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

So much for the theory of evolution. Somewhere along the line, it stopped.

Oh, just keep going, Cranky, dig a deeper hole for yourself.

If men were evolved, they wouldn’t need women? Is that what you’re saying?

No. If SIR CRANKY were more evolved, he just wouldn’t give a shit, could take it or leave it, like Lee Marvin in the old movies, cool as a sharkskin suit...

Instead of soft like Jello that the ladies can plunge their hands into and squeeze whenever they feel like it!

It's really beautiful outside today, and it will be a crime if I don't go out for a walk. It was nice out yesterday too, and I should have gone for a stroll, but other than picking up my laundry from the wash-and-fold, I stayed in. Still, in all fairness to myself, I had completed a big load of work in four and a half days with crackerjack efficiency, and I was pretty tired. I'm now basically two weeks ahead of my deadlines, so I'll be able to visit my kid sister Jenny in Chicago without worrying about work. She recently started cancer treatments, and I want to see her and lend a hand however I can. I'll be in the Midwest for ten days starting next weekend.

I plan to continue blogging while I'm gone, however, and I hope to on a daily basis.

I felt like seeing more neo-burlesque last night, and there was a show on the Lower East Side but I felt too tired to get on the subway and go all the way downtown for it. Instead I slipped my Something Weird DVD of Hollywood Burlesque in the recorder and watched the show in its entirety for the first time. It's about sixty-seven minutes long, and is basically the filming of a complete San Diego burlesque revue from 1948. It's enjoyable both as entertainment and as an historical record. It's shot from different perspectives so you get to see the show both from back in the orchestra and closer up near the runways.

The dancing and choreography is a little muddled sometimes, and the singing of the tenors may not exactly be top drawer as they accompany the chorus girls, but the dancers are all lively and pretty and the music is catchy. The comic bits are a mixed bag--the baggy pants jokers in this DVD are not as strong as others I've seen, as in Something Weird's Best of Burlesque DVD which had top guys like Little Jack Little and Beetlepuss Lewis, but there's still something enjoyable about the gags even when they fall flat. There's one absurd sketch that has three dancers (dressed) imitating bees with honey in their mouths (it's actually water), which they then spit on the goofy male comic. And there's a funny skit involved two guys dividing up forty dollars.

The featured peelers in Hollywood Burlesque are quite good. There's brunette Marie, and Amazonian Bobbi Roberts, and sultry dirty blonde Jenne, and platinum blonde headliner Hillary Dawn--but my favorite was Joy Damon, with her mane of auburn hair and a killer body that she could really move. She obviously seemed to enjoy dancing around the stage, at least judging by her sexy and flirtatious smile and athletic energy. The power of a smile is so great to me that I find it hard to believe that if this Joy Damon is alive, she isn't still in her mid-twenties and jumping around, rather than her eighties and probably moving quite a bit slower. A great smile makes people seem immortal to me...

Anyway, there was also a man-and-woman dance team which did a couple of numbers. What made one of the couple's numbers unique was how the woman stripped off bits of her costume and handed them to the man onstage, who then danced behind the curtain to put them aside. Usually the person who "catches" the stripper's clothes is offstage.

Another thing that was unique about Hollywood Burlesque was how after the dancers stripped down to their pasties, their concluding move was to go behind the curtain, remove the pasties, and then pop out for a few seconds to reveal their bare breasts to the audience. In most of the vintage burlesque movies I've seen, the dancers usually wear some of form of pasty on their nipples throughout.

There's another movie on the same DVD called Peek-A-Boo which has an early appearance by my fave Patti Waggin, only billed as Patti, but I believe I already discussed Peek-A-Boo in a previous entry. Anyway, if you're interested in learning more about this disc, I've included a link to the Something Weird Video website so you can see the boxcover and read more about what's on the DVD. I don't work for Something Weird; I just like to make it easy for you to share my enthusiasm if you're so inclined! It looks as if the video is currently out of stock, but I'm sure they'll get it back in.

HollywoodBurlesque

Yesterday evening I went to a show called the Starshine Burlesque, given in the backroom of a bar in the bohemian East Village. It was inexpensive, unpretentious fun. I felt in the mood to see women taking off their clothes off in an entertainment context, but I didn’t want to spend a hundred bucks for beers and lapdances at my usual haunts; so I decided to check out the Starshine. It just cost me five for a beer, five for the admission, and a couple bucks thrown in a hat passed for tips.

I don’t really consider the neo-burlesque shows that I’ve seen over the last three or four years to be stripping in the usual sense of girls disrobing to earn a living by turning guys on. Although the neo-burlycue babes do shed their costumes and dance around in pasties and g-strings, what they do is often more like vaudeville or performance art on themes and motifs borrowed from pinups and old-time striptease. The dancers in the show last night each did a single song, interpreting the lyrics by taking off their appropriately chosen costumes or outfits. Each number, which lasted about five minutes, was done with a theatrical or comical emphasis rather than for the sake of being overtly seductive, but it was still nice to see gals onstage lifting up their skirts and revealing the tops of their stockings...

As the hundreds of entries to this blog make clear, I enjoy watching women take off their clothes as an entertainment spectacle. The one thing that neo-burlesque has that stripclubs (at least in Manhattan) do not is that the neo-naughties can strip out of whatever they want. In stripclubs they usually wear gowns or short dresses, and remove them post-haste with little tease; but in last night’s Starshine show, Scarlet Sinclair peeled out of a 50s-style flower print shirtwaist dress; Honi Harlow shed a Raggedy Ann outfit; Peekaboo Pointe doffed a 1960s ladies’ suit, slinky slip and stockings; Creamy Stevens danced out of a red-and-white patterned dress (and she wore the best shoes of the evening, very high black ankle-strap platforms ala Bettie Page); and Little Brooklyn emerged from a metallic-colored outfit that recalled the disco excesses of the 80s. Stevens and Brooklyn co-produce the show.

Even though the program did not emphasize the prurient, it was still sexy, especially when the dancers reached around to open their bras--displaying their backs to the audience, undoing the bra hooks, pulling down the cups, and then turning around to reveal breasts with pasties. My fascination with this particular disrobing gesture might be a legacy of growing up in the 60s, when that move was usually the high point of sophisticated love or sex scenes in films.

Many of the women in neo-burlesque, like the performers in the show I saw last night, often have very attractive faces which are enhanced by dramatic makeup; but their bodies are those of average women, rather than showbiz types. Sometimes their hips are broad, and their breasts are of normal proportions. They are a realistic contrast to the idealized creatures we are accustomed to seeing in today's overly plastic entertainment.

Sometimes their bodies recall the figures of many burlesque dancers in the 30s through the 50s, whose shapes also ran the gamut of types. The old-time striptease world always allowed for variety in female forms, a variety that neo-burlesque emulates.

Anyway, all these analytical thoughts weren’t going through my head during the actual show, which was light-hearted and brisk. It lasted around an hour, which was about right, and also included a guy named Ukelele Louie in crazy clown makeup doing a very funny song imagining his own funeral as a bizarrely festive affair with an unusual buffet...consisting of his own body. Thankfully, his song's emphasis was on comedy, not cannibalism. Emcee Carmen Mofongo, who bills herself as "the spirit of Carmen Miranda in a Nuyorican from the Bronx" did the emcee chores with humorous aplomb and even used a riding crop to spank a few audience volunteers onstage. There was also a cute drinking contest wherein two female volunteers, kneeling in front of the statuesque team of Creamy Stevens and Little Brooklyn, raced to finish bottles of beer held between the dancers’ legs. The moment when Stevens and Brooklyn squeezed those bottles between their creamy thighs was indeed a shining one...

Yes, I left the Starshine Burlesque in a good mood, and since they have different acts every week, I’ll be sure to check them out again sometime. If you want more information, I’ve included a link below to their website.

StarshineBurlesque

I ended my previous post, "Quick stop in the breast dimension," by saying that I wasn't going out to another stripclub last night, and would instead read a book. Since the book is a noir novel with a 50s setting, and one of the characters is a beatnik drug dealer, I picked up on some ancient argot and ended my post with the observation that staying home to read a book was "dullsville."

Our fellow Blogstreamer BigChris left me an insightful comment that it's "Adultsville," not dullsville, and I have to admit I agree. More and more, I get tired of this existential chase for thrills and prefer the company of my books, DVDs, and music. But by referring to one of my favorite activities, reading, as "dullsville," I was also expressing my honest fear of turning into a sedentary old fogey. I was also being a little cute. There's that part of Sir Cranky that loves the night life and doesn't ever want it to end for him...

In the last year or so, a freelance project I've been associated with has, for the sake of efficiency, compelled me to get up much earlier on a regular basis, and I don't stay out as late as I used to. But the other evening, around midnight, I had to run out to the drugstore for something, and as I walked the somewhat empty streets I realized I hardly ever go out now after ten-thirty or eleven, and that I miss that special feeling of being on the later night streets, when there's an edgy energy and voluptuous expectation in the air...

I've hoofed it home from clubs at two in morning and on one or two occasions walked by a couple fornicating under the marquee of a Broadway theater. Hooker and john, or randy lovebirds, I couldn't tell...

The publicity will have you believe that Times Square is totally Disney-fied, but you can see this isn't true when you walk along Eighth Avenue, one block west of Broadway. There is a lot of lowlife still around...although I wouldn't be surprised if the rare hooker you still see on the stroll is actually an undercover cop waiting to bust you if you chat her up for prices.

There are porn shops on almost every block on Eighth Avenue going up from 39th Street to 48th Street, and some have started having live girl shows again too (as opposed to just video booths).

But the fact is, going to stripclubs has become an expensive proposition. It's hard to have a fun night there without spending around a hundred dollars.

Hey, this is a city where a studio apartment can rent for $2100.

People wonder why the adult video and Internet erotica business has exploded. Well, the simple fact of economics is that watching a video can be five times cheaper (in New York City, the average price is around twenty bucks for a new movie) than a night in a tittie bar.

Although I've certainly seen my share of X-rated videos, I still prefer live entertainment...maybe because it helps me feel as if I'm in the adult video of my own life. Sir Cranky's Naughty Side, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ad infinitum.

Ad infinitum? I wish. That's asking for immortality, son.

Still, as BigChris also noted in his comment to my post from yesterday, after repeated exposure, the "wax museum" atmosphere of the stripclubs can get to the jaded middle-aged consumer of striptease. That is a good analogy.

Speaking of which, I wonder if Madame Tussaud's on 42nd Street has a statue of Gypsy Rose Lee? I've never been there.

Switching gears here, I had a weird dream last night. I dreamt I took Jessica Alba to dinner, but all I can remember from it is trying to hail her a cab afterward on a rainy 45th Street! Is that screwed up, or what?? Her father was lurking somewhere in the dream too; according to what I've read, she won't do nude scenes in her movies for fear of earning his disapproval. Anyway, the street was bright with the lights of the theater marquees, and rain was splashing on the street, and I couldn't hail a cab for anything. I was yelling and yelling to get one, and I just couldn't. Finally I woke up, quite relieved that it wasn't real. I was awakened by my own yelling in the dream! Crazy. Maybe somebody was yelling outside my window for a cab in reality, and I integrated it into my dream. I had a headache when I woke up, just like I did after a miserable dinner I had with a stripper about a year and a half ago, so maybe my dinner with Jessica wasn't so hot after all, and I was trying to blank it all out.

Actually, yesterday or the day before in the New York Post, there was an article about what men and women of different ages prefer in partners--and the opening page of the article, which I meant to clip but forgot to--featured Jessica as the favorite of men in their twenties, and my other personal favorite Doris Day as the top girl of men over SIXTY-FIVE!! Sheesh, guys under sixty-five like Doris too! The article said that younger men preferred looks over personality (as exemplified by Miss Alba) and older men preferred personality over looks (as exemplified by Miss Day).

I wish I'd clipped the page because it was startling to see the spectrum of my own erotic fascinations on it. I'm not in my twenties, but I'm not in my sixties either--and I love both Jessica and Doris.

And fie on the Post!! To say that Doris Day is an example of the kind of woman who rates higher in the "personality" department is ridiculous! The pic of Doris the Post used was very sexy, especially in the breastworks department (she was wearing a tight top). And it looked like she was wearing some tight capri pants and flats in the 50s style. Yum!

Doris Day's singing voice is 75% sex appeal, and 25% whatever else appeal! At her peak, the woman was a stone fox!! And THERE'S slang that dates me!!!

Dream date for Sir Cranky: Jessica Alba circa 2006 plus Doris Day circa 1956, with me at a steakhouse prior to prolonged nightcap and sensual encounter in a penthouse suite!

You know, when I write about stuff like this, tapping out the sentences on my keyboard with a kind of goofy intensity, I can see it all so clearly in my mind that it almost seems real...

And maybe in the dimension of dreams, it is.

Maybe I should spend more time asleep? I seem to have a better social life there.

6:35 p.m.
After finishing a good bit of work this afternoon, I finally propelled myself out of the apartment to have a beer at one of the stripclubs. It was early enough that I didn’t have to pay admission or coat-check fee, and I was happy about that; but I wasn’t happy that the cocktail waitress shortchanged me by a dollar. Ya see, I gave her a twenty for a ten dollar beer (Manhattan prices!), and told her to give me eight back. She only gave me seven--two singles and a five, and then she sat there chatting with me for a minute or two afterward. I wonder if she knew that I had realized immediately that she’d taken three instead of two for her tip, and was waiting to see if I was going to say something. I could have, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to embarrass her if she had deliberately tried to shortchange me; and if it was a honest mistake, I didn’t want to embarrass her unfairly. It wasn’t the dollar; I can bear the hundred-cent loss; it was just that I felt bad that even though this waitress has known and served me for at least three years, and I have always tipped her generously (20%), there was the possibility she would do this to me. Well, from now on, I might have to count my change in front of her.

The friendly champagne host stopped by to say hello even though I never go back to the champagne room--perhaps hope breeds eternal in the guy’s heart?--and he told me that there were lots of beautiful girls dancing; however, I didn’t see anybody that really piqued my enthusiasm.

A few dancers came up and asked if I wanted a lapdance, but I didn’t feel like it. I still am very money-conscious, as I need to be because of the credit debt I incurred paying off my self-employment taxes, and I was only interested in spending dough on someone who really struck my fancy. Nobody did, so I left when I finished my beer.

When I got out of the club, I saw five gals on the street in less than a minute who were more attractive to me than any of the girls dancing inside on the stage. Were they really better looking, or was it because they were wearing clothes, and I couldn’t sit in judgment of their imperfections? Or was it because the gals on the street were 1) not out to hustle my tight-fisted heart, and 2) had an aura of mystery since I didn’t know anything about them, period, much less what was under their clothes?

Of course, the gals on the street were also ignoring me.

Oh well, I could go to another club later, the one where my current favorite dancer Lily works, and if she’s there I’d probably enjoy a little time with her. Or maybe Misty, another nice gal, is working there this evening. I’ll see how I feel after I have something to eat...
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9:45 p.m.--
Well, it’s three hours later and I’m back from my chicken teriyaki and shrimp tempura dinner. I just wasn’t in the mood for another stripclub today, after the less-than-inspiring experience earlier. I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but--I’m just going to read for awhile and call it a night. But isn't that's dullsville, dad?