My First Strip-Club Audition

When I walked into the Century Lounge strip club, one of the guys who worked there told me I was beautiful and that I was going to make a lot of money. That was exactly what I wanted to hear.

This was the club Stripper Pimp, my Hollywood talent manager, wanted me to try first. The lead singer of his girl group was, in his words, "the queen" of this club. She came up to say hi as I waited for my audition. At work, she looked friendly, open, smiling. Outside work, she was cold, unapproachable, unsmiling. But I was genuinely appreciative of her show of support.

This was only the third strip club I'd ever been to.

The first, the Jet Strip, had been oddly comforting. The girls basically looked like different-ethnicity versions of me: they were pretty, their boobs were real and their dance moves didn't look too daunting. Stripper Pimp didn't like the Jet Strip. He grumbled when he found out I'd been there on my own.

I'd just visited the second club, Ron's Barbary Coast, the day before. It was a ghetto nightmare. The same black girls who threatened to kick my ass in elementary school were all grown up. And not only did they look like they could still kick my ass, but they looked like they could do it while sliding upside-down from the unsanitary pole.

The Silicone Lounge – oops, I mean the Century Lounge – was equally intimidating. Most of the girls were white. Most were blond. They had huge, fake boobs. And they could dance. I mean really dance. As in, their moms and dads had obviously paid for ballet, jazz and tap. They floated around the poles, looking gorgeous and takeable.

I wasn't white. I wasn't blond. My barely-B-cups were real. And one more thing: I couldn't dance.

I'd never mastered the cabbage patch, the running man, the tootsie roll or any of the popular black dances from my two-and-a-half decades on planet earth. As far as formal training, I'd had one year of Dance I, only because the Detroit Public Schools required a year of physical education to graduate from high school.

So when it was my time to take the small stage, I simply did the best I could.

I came on in a sheer, short-short, sparkly black dress that Stripper Pimp had bought me, along with six-inch, shiny, patent-leather stilettos. At some point in the song, I lifted the dress over my head and onto the floor. No bra. Maybe no panties. I don't remember for sure.

One of the 10 guys perched by the small stage was a little Mexican man. As he looked at my naked breasts, his eyes glazed over and he murmured something appreciative in Spanish. At least I had one fan.

I left the stage riding a huge adrenaline rush, the same high I got whenever I performed. I was almost cocky: All that angst and crying over this?! That wasn't sh*t.

I made my way to the back, where the club managers were watching my audition. Stripper Pimp had told me that if they liked me, they would hire me on the spot and put me on the schedule. Instead, they told me the schedule was full and that I should call back in two weeks.

Well damn. Was it really possible to fail a strip-club audition?

(Stripper/Casting Couch Diaries Part 9 of 17: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17)
(Stripper/Casting Couch Lessons Learned 1-2: 1 2)

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