Rarely do I get something to write about in the mainstream media that hooks up with my personal concerns about exotic dancers, but I was able to get more than five hundred hits over the last three days to this blog by analyzing my feelings about the stripper-scripter Diablo Cody and her Oscar win, and by commenting on other people's blogs to get my nom de blog and my URL out there.

This may seem mercenary but I want as many people as possible to read my blog...and if you read the posts I've written like "Strippers Can Write?!!" and "Diablo Cody: the stripper as Godzilla," you'll see that the whole thing struck a real chord with me that goes back long before I even heard of this person. She has merely become an icon for feelings swirling around in my brain and heart as an admirer of what I like to think of as "commercial women"...ladies who use their sexual appeal to entertain. I guess "commercial women" would include a lot of mainstream actresses and singers too, not just strippers. For example, I saw a picture of the singer Rihanna this morning in the paper dressed in dominatrix gear during a recent show. She looked kind of hot (although not as sexy as her cover photo on the recent Cosmopolitan). But there was one sloppy detail that took off the edge of her allure for me--why didn't she have stockings for those garters, instead of just wearing thigh high boots? I don't get the appeal of dangling garters. But perhaps I'm a purist...

Yes, "commercial women"...I never heard that term before, or don't recall hearing it, although somebody else may have used it before...or did I just coin it? In the nineteenth century women who used their looks to make a living were known as "professional beauties"...I guess "commercial women" is kind of the same idea.

So Diablo is going to write another memoir following up her Candy Girl tome about her days as a stripper...this new one is going to be about going to Hollywood...well, good for her...she's gotta work her turf.

That's what it's all about, right? We're just trying to survive...

I think folks are cutting back on tissue during this recession, or whatever economic crisis we're going through...as I went about my business in town, I saw two people blow their noses without the aid of Kleenex in the last twenty-four hours, and one of those humans, an otherwise respectable looking woman, stood a mere three feet away from me at the bus depot as I froze my ass off waiting to ride out to my freelance gig in New Jersey...thanks, lady, you just missed my shoe.

What a glamorous life...so how can you begrudge me a little envy of Diablo Cody?

Meanwhile, I had never heard of the website Egotastic until the other day, when they displayed those fairly undraped photos of Cody online...the site is a goldmine of cyberflesh! I liked those bikini pix of Christina Milian...my eyeballs romped over her rhythmic curves.

Now if only computer technology could provide us with the sense of touch and smell as well as sight, then I wouldn't pine for my strippers anymore at all...alas, I think that's a scientific challenge that even Bill Gates couldn't conquer.

Writing that last post made think more about my erstwhile favorite stripper Lily again, whom I saw from late fall 2005 until spring 2006. I used to tip her while she was onstage by slipping singles into the ankle straps of her heels. She had extremely pretty size 6 feet. She had a gorgeous butt too. She was Japanese and in her late twenties. She knew I had a sexually submissive streak and she played into it, it was kind of a game between us. She told me her fantasy was to lead a guy around on a leash and maybe I would be the guy she would try it with. Promises, promises. Didn't happen except in the metaphorical sense...but sometimes the metaphorical can suffice. Or not.

She spoke pretty good English and was studying it at school as well. I'm a fan of some Japanese writers and I gave her an English translation of Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales. Unfortunately I had only read about two of the stories before I gave her a copy of the book. I didn't realize how fully wild it actually was. She took time off from the stripclub during Christmas 2005 and said she would read the book over her break. I read the book in its entirety myself during her absence, as it was a way to feel connected to her while she was gone. I didn't realize that the most famous story in the book, "The Tattooer," about the girl getting a tattoo of a spider on her back and becoming a femme fatale to her tattooer, was actually the MILDEST of the yarns. Junichiro Tanizaki, one of Japan's more revered writers, often depicted submissive, masochistic characters and obsessive love, and some of the tales got pretty damn bizarre. When I finally saw Lily again and asked her what she thought of the book, she said with a not-so-vague look of distaste that it was "weird." At least it seemed that she'd read it, though, or at least some of it...her distaste looked authentic. But I wonder if she thereby thought I was as weird as some of the Tanizakian characters...which I am not, although I admit to a definite quirkiness.

Lily used to tell me how much she enjoyed wearing a kimono sometimes. I never saw her in one, but just the mental image of it provided my mind with such a vivid contrast to her usual stripper wear (teeny, teeny g-strings) that it sometimes seemed as if I HAD seen her in traditional dress. I can imagine her in a kimono as I write these words, walking along in the white socks and high wooden sandals...for some reason, I can't remember the name of those shoes now, although I know it...

Oh well...my acquaintance with Lily was almost two years ago now. Hard to believe...

I looked in the mirror last night and saw a fifty-six year old man who is aging more rapidly because he is not spending time lately in the company of young women. It's like being between a rock and a hard place; I don't want to spend the money, and yet the money spent seems to have kept a spring in my step that has been missing lately. Well, it's a moot point, since dough is tight lately and I'm just spending my leisure time reading or watching movies.

I wish I could find a stripclub with all Japanese strippers, who come onstage in kimono. They invite men from the audience to come up and help them disrobe...

What a show that would be!

This is a follow-up to a previous entry, posted on 2/5/08:

StrippersWhoWrite?!!

Anyway, in the current absence of strippers in my life, due to my tighter financial situation, I find myself caught up in the saga of Diablo Cody, the stripper-turned-blogger-turned-memoirist-turned-Oscar-winning screenwriter. Man, that’s a lot of bases to cover before you’re even thirty.

Now, I haven’t read her blog, or her stripper memoir, or seen her movie Juno. All I know is that a STRIPPER has won the OSCAR for screenwriting...

I guess I feel that once a stripper, always a stripper...

Diablo seems to loom like a “stripper Godzilla” over the noirish urban landscape in my mind, crushing all my edifices and defenses. Sometimes I feel that the terrain of my emotions must look like the gloomy Tokyo skyline in the original 1954 Godzilla film...

The current dearth of peelers in my life leaves me feeling frustrated and lonely. Now, Miss Cody is probably a good writer; I wouldn’t know. But the fact that she was a stripper seems to have brought closer to the surface the not-so-buried hostility I feel towards dancers, which has always co-existed with the awe and worship I feel towards them. I won’t say the “love” I feel; I’ve never really felt “love” for strippers...although a couple of dancers over the years came close to stirring feelings like that in me. No, generally what I feel is a form of masochistic awe at them, and a desire to adore and pay homage to their beauty...to surrender to it like a drug.

Because Miss Cody has worked as a stripper and seems to have parlayed the contemporary rebellious cachet of that profession as a useful segue into subsequent endeavors, her Oscar feels to me not as an award for her cinematic excellence, but somehow as yet one more example of how strippers get over on their susceptible fans BECAUSE THEY ARE SEXY NAKED LADIES—even when they have clothes on!

Striding Godzilla-like through my player-hating, disappointed, bitter fifty-six year old thoughts, her triumph has awakened me to what happens to stripper devotees when they can no longer financially afford to forget the ambivalence of their hobby by submerging themselves in an endlessly distracting torrent of continual lapdances and fantasies fulfilled...

In the absence of ecdysiasts, with an ever-more constricted financial situation, I am left with ruminations of 1) how much money I spent on strippers over the years, and how little real sustenance I got for that investment; 2) how much money I could have socked away if I didn’t spent money on them; and 3) and how readily I acquiesced to their skillful blandishments, like an accessory to my own monetary and emotional ravishment...

Yes, this is what I come up with after analyzing why Diablo Cody, a person I don’t know and have no reason to care about, has taken up so much of my mental attention in the last three or four days which lead up to the Oscar ceremony and followed it...

All right, I’ve said my piece. Although I know it’s ridiculous and subjective, Cody’s Oscar win feels like one more occasion for a stripper to pull a fast one on me, Sir Cranky, PERSONALLY...which is either a sign of incipient madness, or just the usual crankiness of a sexually frustrated middle-aged bachelor.

But it also makes me reflect on the power of words, and how strippers wield them. I think of the words of the dancer Lily, of whom I was fond and to whom I was as generous as I could be from the fall of 2005 until the spring of 2006 when my economic circumstances finally began to tighten...

Early in our acquaintance, Lily said one sentence which subsequently helped to earn her a couple of thousand dollars from me over the next three months. I remember exactly where she was standing when she said them, on the smaller of the two stages in the club. I was standing near that stage, drinking my beer, and we were chatting, and she was complaining to me about another customer who had asked her out on a date, without ever having even gotten a lapdance. She said thirteen simple words to me: “Before I go out with somebody, I have to get to know them!” And although I knew and warned myself repeatedly that she could just be giving me a line—it turned out that she was—I was willing to suspend my disbelief in my intuition and prove to her that I was willing to “get to know her” so that maybe, just maybe, she would become friends with me in the great outside world that lies beyond the strip club. It never happened. So yes...just those thirteen words, simple, haiku-like in their precision and power to exert influence, kept me coming back. And back. Until I knew it served no purpose, and stayed away.

Can strippers write? They sure can.

Just thinking some more about Katherine Heigl at the Oscars...combined with her beauty, her self-effacing nervousness on stage was so appealing; she really has a knockout punch when it comes to femme appeal--she's gorgeous and funny...my God, a woman like that leaves me helpless...I've met and dallied with a couple of those in my day...fun...but misty memories now...

Which reminds me of Misty, a stripper I knew before I met Lily...by Jove, it's hard to believe I was friends with Lily way back in late 2005-early 2006...(see my archives)...but Misty had that same combo of physical allure and sense of humor...haven't seen her in a long time...wonder how she's doing...

Actually, Misty came to mind when I watched the Oscars and saw John Travolta present an award. Misty once told me that her mom was about my age (mid-fifties) and a fan of Travolta's back in her youth, but now her mom thinks that Travolta looks "swollen"...it was a funny description, and I can't help but think of it every time I see the dude...