Strip Club Week, Day 3: Stripper for One

I'm running out of related
images for these posts.

How have you enjoyed Strip Club Week on The Anthony Show so far? Wow, that's great. Have you thrown up yet?

Meanwhile, I'd mentioned that although I've been to strip clubs, it's only been while in the company of others. I've never gone to a strip club alone. Hell, I don't think I've ever walked into a normal bar by myself, and I even have trouble going to the supermarket without a chaperone: I tend to wander the aisles, spend way too much time reading labels, fill up my cart with impulse items, freak out moments before I reach the checkout line, and abandon the cart and slink off empty-handed.

Now, if you recall, my first club experience was in Niagara Falls at a place called Mints. That locale required people to sit at tables or on stools right in front of the runway. There was a bar, but it was mainly for the waitress to fulfill their orders. If you got your drink at the bar, the waitresses wouldn't get tips, and the waitresses would get mad.

But other clubs had accessible bars. These bars are very handy if your party just wants to check things out without making the commitment to sit at a table. Some strip clubs don't have this option, while the smaller ones have only this option: in other words, the main "stage," if you can call it that, is surrounded by the bar, and there are private-dance areas in the back.

Strip Club Week, Day 2: The Stripper Force-Field

The Mints I dealt with were
curiously nude.

When we last chatted, I was in the middle of my first strip club experience. Let's return to that den of sin!

Mints was the kind of place where a hostess seats your party at a table. I later learned that other clubs let you kind of roam around or hang out at the bar, but at Mints they kept the men on a tight leash. The other things that made the ladies of Mints different from those at other clubs I later experienced in the States:

• They took off everything, and I mean everything
• They worked with a force field

One of my friends called over one of the girls, who was dressed in her not-yet-naked attire. When she showed up, he whispered in her ear and pointed at me. She nodded and gave me one of those "come with me" gestures. I had no choice but to go with her — when a woman in a bikini gives you an order, unless that woman is Joy Behar, you follow that order.

Strip Club Week, Day 1: Welcome to Strip Club Week

Whoops! Wrong stripper.
But that IS a very sexy car!

Even though I've already told my best strip club story, I want to back up a moment and share my overall musings regarding what is referred to by a number of euphemisms, including "adult entertainment," "gentlemen clubs," or, as we'd say when we'd drive across the border into Canada, "the ballet."

I don't know whether I'll have enough posts about strip clubs to fill a week, but "Strip Club Week" on a blog sounds almost as cool as "Shark Week" or "Exotic Hamburger Week."

Or, maybe it doesn't, and it actually sounds misogynist, pathetic, and soulless. But anyway, here's the first post.

Before I'd ever set foot in such a place, my only impression of what a strip club would be like was formed from movies that included scenes in strip clubs, which usually starred Eddie Murphy before he started wearing fat suits or co-starring with children or talking animals, such as Beverly Hills Cop. These movies were mass-market films that presented strip clubs — if I can accurately summon the memories from my mid- to late teens — as tantalizing dens of masculinity where men whooped and hollered and waved rolled-up dollar bills in the air, and the women were not tragically deformed by plastic surgery or drugs.

The women also wore a lot of makeup, never completely disrobed (a rare topless shot was as risqué as it got), and, if I remember correctly, occasionally wore outfits made of feathers. I should note that these movies were made in the 1980s (which could explain the feathers and why the men all seemed to be wearing plaid dress shirts), and they weren't the kind of movies that showed anything seedy, like if Jodie Foster's character grew up and starred in a Taxi Driver sequel where instead of hooking (or maybe in addition to hooking) she worked at Larry Flynt's Hustler Club.

(The movie would end with Travis Bickle showing up with a flamethrower to fry Larry Flynt in his wheelchair, and I know you'd pay to see that.)

Anyway, onto my first (and, alas, not last) strip-club experience...

The Time I Was Forcibly Removed From a Strip Club

It's never like this.

Sometimes my blog-post titles oversell the posts themselves. I did get forcibly removed from a strip club, but I was part of an entire group that was forcibly removed from a strip club, and I was guilty only by association. But it's not easy to explain those distinctions to the kinds of people who bounce at strip clubs.

I'm eventually going to run a post on my overall thoughts on strip clubs, but I'll put that on hold for now and instead discuss the evening I was forcibly removed from a strip club.

This episode was part of a larger undertaking, a bachelor party that began at Yankee Stadium on a perfect day for baseball, especially when it ends with a walk-off homer by Scott Brosius. After the game we hopped in a limo — riding in a limo is cool, but leaving a Yankee game in a limo is even cooler — that took us to dinner at El Cantinero in the NYU part of town.

ARE WE AT THE STRIP CLUB YET
Dinner was some buffet-style Mexican that was very good. Better than dessert was learning that the open bar wasn't just for beer, but for everything at the bar. It was the first and only time that I ever said to a bartender, "Twenty-five lemon-drop shots, please!" without fleeing the bar before I got the bill.

Things seemed to be moving smoothly until...