Stripper Heels

Digging in the junk trunk today reveals a pair of size 8 red stripper heels.  No, Darling Husband didn’t wear them I did.  I don’t think anyone in life sets out to be a stripper.  I’m reasonably sure that when I was 10 I didn’t say to myself, ‘you know, I want to take off my clothes for a living when I’m in my early 20s.‘  But I’ll get to that.

From the first date with Darling Husband, I was one completely smitten kitten.  From the moment we started making out against the hall closet door in full view of the neighbors had they come round and looked in the side light windows, I was gone.  I was completely overtaken by his presence, I allowed him to possess me.  Have I mentioned that it wasn’t a terribly healthy relationship at first and for....well, a while? 

We’d been dating for about a year, and all in all I was dealing pretty well with the situation.  I saw him several times a week, we spoke every day on the phone and even had regular sleepovers.  I think I even had a toothbrush in his bathroom.  Maybe.  I was working days in a hotel restaurant and nights as a cocktail waitress.  Oh, to have the energy I had when I was in my 20s again....anyway, one afternoon I was getting ready to go to my night time job and a radio ad started playing for one of the local bar’s ‘Bare as You Dare’ contests.  

*Ladies, let me just stop here for a moment and offer a word to the wise.   Don’t ever say things to your men just to see if you can get a reaction out of them because it doesn’t generally turn out well.  They are not wired the same way we are.  Public Service Annoucement over.*

So, just to see how he would feel about me taking off my clothes for strangers I casually said something to the effect of ‘you know, I was thinking about doing that contest’.  His response, and I will never forget these words, “That’s great.  Just be sure to not go on a night when all the Pretty Girls are there”.  WHAT??  I’m pretty sure that I didn’t hear you properly.  He didn’t think I was a pretty girl?  He kept me around all this time because I was a good lay but I wasn’t pretty enough?  Really?  I was crushed.  

When I confronted him about it, immediately, he tried to explain, but I really wasn’t hearing it.  His explanation was that sure I was pretty but that the stripper girls usually did these contests on their nights off so the competition would be unfair.  When he said Pretty Girls, I capitalize because he was classifying a group as a proper noun.  As in, the girls who get paid to be pretty.  That is all they do and all they are.  Of course, you know all that was lost on me.  From that moment on I had something to prove, dammit. 

I’d say less than a month later I was stripping.  I needed for him to know that I was a Pretty Girl.  Or at least capable of being one.  How it is possible that being a stripper could simultaneously boost my self-esteem and drag it down is a mystery to this day.  But that was the effect that it had.  On the one hand, I had men giving me money to take off my clothes, which bolstered my damaged body image, however I was naive enough to think that I could make them see past the boobs and the curves and realize how SMART I was too.  What the hell was I thinking?  So in that respect it wore my self-esteem down.  

But the wearing down of my mental self-esteem had the unlovely side effect of bitterness.  I didn’t like coming to work, the smell of beer breath made me want to vomit, and essentially I started loathing the men that I was making money from. In defense of men, it wasn’t their fault.  Not really.  You put men together in a dimly lit room with alcohol and nearly naked women...they can’t help but revert to the reptile brain.    

To cope I drank, a lot.  I was a stripper for about 2 1/2 years total and there is a large chunk of that time that is missing from my memory, lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol.  There was usually more drinking and drugs involved when Tony and I were ‘broken up‘ (as if that ever lasted more than a couple of days - a week tops).  I finally realized that working in that environment had an overall negative impact of who I was as a person.  I was jaded and cynical and bitter.  Apparently I wasn't a Pretty Girl after all.  I was much, much more.  I knew that I had more to offer just no idea what at that point.    


You will likely hear more regarding some of my ridiculous and horrifying behaviors as some point in the future because I'm sure that I'll find more items from 'My Strippper Days'  in this silly old trunk of mine that have stories attached to them. Don’t know why I’ve hung onto these old shoes so long.  I think I’ll send them to GoodWill.  There may be a Pretty Girl in need of a pair just like this.