Some people get off on video, some on print, and some like to get their wands waxed by the chamois of a naked female butt.
Lap Dancing
I walked into the lap dance place with a hard-on. It was called the Tango Palace, but it wasn’t palatial, and I never saw anyone do a tango on the floor — unless you count the trouser tango. It was up a flight of stairs at 49th and Broadway, Times Square, and in the early 1960s, when I visited it, it served as my introduction to the joys of female flesh.
The Tango Palace was what was called a dime-a-dance hall, but even back then inflation had set in — they sold their dance tickets for a dollar a pop, with a ten-dance minimum. Rubbing my teenage erection against a hostess, I invariably got off by the second or third dance. I was left with a stain on my shorts and a handful of dance tickets. The Tango Palace didn’t give refunds.
The place is no more, a victim long ago to real estate developers’ greed. If it still stood today, I would probably have to buy 30, 40, or 50 ten-dance ticket books to achieve the plateau of pleasure I gained so effortlessly back then….
Flash forward a quarter century. A small, loft-like theater in Lower Manhattan. A windowless space, lit dimly with colored lights, so the final effect is an eternal ruby-red dusk. In this shadowy atmosphere, a cadre of women patrols the aisles between the theater’s seats. The women are dressed (or, rather, half-dressed) in push-up bras, leather thongs, black lace bustiers — the kind of clothes that earn their charm by looking like they are about to be stripped off.
Which is lucky, because off they come, spilling out an alarmingly varied assortment of breasts, nipples, pussies, and winking butt holes. Large, perfectly formed tits the size of mixing bowls. Drooping breasts like pairs of swollen, sagging mud flaps. Small, martini-olive nerpage. The pussies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, too-delicate, trimmed muffs shaved into fanciful butterflies, or sprawling, rain-forest Wookie bushes.
It’s a sexual smorgasbord. Sampling the fare are the other denizens of the space, an army of silent, slack-jawed, fever-faced men. Some of them are in suits, sexual refugees from Wall Street — a few blocks away. Others come from their blue-collar jobs — truck drivers, janitors, and carpenters.
The nearly nude women pass in a parade among them, a constant flux that gives the room a hypnotic, ebb-and-flow feel. The sense of female nakedness in a room full of clothed males lends the women an aching vulnerability. They thrust out their chests, they vogue, they coo their invitations: “Want some company? Want some company?” This is a code. What the woman is really asking is this: Do you, a red-blooded male, want her, a scantily clad female, to plop down on your lap and squirm there like some epileptic rabbit, shucking off what few threads she has left on her overheated body, allowing you to feast upon it, kneading her boobs, sucking her nipples, feeling the liquid-oven warmth of her sex cram up against your groin until it rubs you both into a boiling frenzy?
Most of the men say yes. The ones who can speak, anyway. Some of the others manage only to claw mutely at their wallets long enough to extract the price of admission to this low-rent heaven: five dollars, half a sawbuck for a three-minute song. She takes your money and takes her seat. Welcome to the wonderful world of lap dancing, 1990s-style.
Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven, the fun couple that brought Basic Instinct to a salivating public, have announced plans to collaborate again on a film titled Showgirls. This one is Flashdance meets Viva Las Vegas: the story of a young, inexperienced dancer determined to find her destiny as a Las Vegas show girl.
But when she shows up in the town that Bugsy built, the doors to the big time are closed to her. The only work she can find is as a lowly lap dancer in a nickel sleaze palace, as far away from the glamour of Strip striptease as our poor latter-day Esther Blodgett can get. “We found out that there is indeed lap dancing in Las Vegas,” Eszterhas was quoted as saying — a man confident in the power of research. Yes, Virginia, there is lap dancing …. Stop the presses! We are shocked — shocked! — that such a thing goes on. In fact, the whole hags-to-bitches plot line of Showgirls sounds just about what Hollywood would make of the recent resurgence of striptease, topless dancing, ecdysiast entertainment — call it what you will. Turn the world of stripping into a pyramid and chronicle our heroine’s climb to the top, to the very pinnacle of success: the Las Vegas show girl!
That’s what you get when sexual dweebs like Eszterhas and company, outsiders all, try to make sense of commercial sex in America. Let me clue you in, Joe — some of us view the stale dry hump of those feather-boa show girls as the very nadir of adult entertainment, while the sleazy electricity of the lap dance suits us just fine.
‘“In almost all topless clubs,” says one longtime stripper, “you do most of your work offstage.”’
Different strokes for different folks. Ever since the so-called Sexual Revolution hit the barricades in the late sixties, the whole movement of commercial sex has been toward satisfying specific urges of specific clienteles — carving the demographic pie into even more particular slices. Some people get off on video, some on print, and some like to get their wands waxed by the chamois of a naked female butt.
“What we do is not prostitution,” says Dominique D’Anthony, the owner and proud operator of the Harmony Burlesk Theater, the Lower Manhattan lap-dancing mecca. “We have very strict rules. No genital contact. Basically, the man can’t unzip. He has to keep his equipment inside his pants.”
D’Anthony is a forceful presence, a cute, stocky blonde of around 40, the grande dame of lap dancing in New York City, its chief apologist, proponent, and historian, as well as a one-woman answer to anyone with the temerity to claim that all females in adult entertainment are exploited. Hang around with her long enough, and you get the idea that this woman has never been exploited in her life. No one would dare.
And when Dominique D’Anthony holds forth on lap dancing, she knows whereof she speaks. “I was the marathon Mardi Gras girl,” she says, speaking of the “Mardi Gras” lap-dancing specials her late lover, Bob Anthony, used to hold back in the late seventies in his Times Square theater, the Melody Burlesk. Dominique, who first met Bob when she applied for a job at his club, worked “12 hours a day, seven days a week” dancing on the laps of the raincoat brigade.
Twelve hours a day perched upon Popeye’s pecker? Seven days a week? They shoot lap dancers, don’t they?
But it was all by design. “I’m a businessperson trying to obtain capital,” Dominique told Bob, who originated lap dancing when he operated the Melody, a second-floor flesh emporium at 48th and Broadway. So Bob simply got out of the way and let the lady do her work — making her his partner in 1983. After Bob died, in 1986, Dominique took up the standard. She carried the ideal of lap dancing for the masses through a succession of venues, until she wound up owning the building that the Harmony Burlesk Theater calls home.
For the gonadal archaeologists like me who remember it, the Melody Burlesk of the late seventies and early eighties was a golden place — like Plato’s Retreat, say, back when it was still in the Ansonia Hotel. The Melody represented a one-time-only confluence of dancers, customers, and lack of law-enforcement presence that made for what amounted to a decade-long commercial orgy. It was Bob Anthony who labeled his weekend nonstop lap-dancing festivals “Mardi Gras,” to dress them up for the paying public. It was the first time anywhere that a male customer could actually “lunch out” on a living, breathing female, and the charge back then was the easily affordable buck-a-minute standard.
Before that there was always burlesque. The underbelly of vaudeville for more than 50 years, the showcasing of the female form passed through a slow series of changes toward the final meltdown of Mardi Gras. Burlesque was born in the Roaring Twenties, and by the end of the next decade, every town in the country with more than 10,000 people had a burlesque theater. Usually, the dancers kept the tease in striptease by only stripping down to pasties and a G-string. In New York, burlesque theaters were places like the Olympic, on 14th Street, which was a cavernous sucker pit catering to the laboring masses of the Lower East Side.
The high-water mark for classic burlesque was reached by the famous Minsky’s, on 42nd Street. A sort of low-rent “Ziegfeld’s Follies” (charging a buck, as opposed to Ziegfeld’s six-dollar levy) but still playing primarily to a mixed (i.e., couples) crowd, Minsky’s was busted by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in 1940 — part of his effort to pump up public morals as a campaign issue.
At the same time burlesque was withering on the vaudeville vine, another form of quasi-erotic entertainment was emerging from the shadows. The “rub joint” of the turn of the century evolved into the dime-a-dance parlors of the forties and fifties. Places like the Tango Palace were answering a desperate need. To put it in terms that Adam Smith would understand, there was a horde of hungry male consumers out there willing to pay top rate for a little feel of female flesh. This market put a constant, inexorable pressure on the authorities.
Little by little the rules began to loosen. Year by year the “taxi dancers” — so called because you hired them by the clock, like hacks — became a little more reckless, a little more permissive. One year the “no touch” zone ran from their necks to their knees. The next year well-heeled customers were feeding them a steady stream of singles. In exchange, they would allow the customers’ hands to roam over their bodies like so many free-range chickens.
So lap dancing is what happened when burlesque collided with dime-a-dance-when a G-string was run over by a taxi. The Mardi Gras was actually the death spasm of burlesque, a last attempt to lure customers away from the massage parlors, peep shows, and X-rated movies that were popping up all over the place in the late sixties and seventies.
Mardi Gras succeeded only too well. The “burlesque” portion of the Melody Burlesk was in constant danger of being buried under the onslaught of grope-happy customers. “Lobsters,” the girls called them — the touchie-feelie fetishists who came in week after week, sometimes every day. In the nineties, courtesy of the push toward safe sex, voyeurism became the fetish of choice. When burlesque segued into the topless-bar boom of today, lap dancing came along for the ride — that is, whenever it was allowed. There is a whole spectrum of topless clubs, just like there was the spectrum of Ziegfeld’s and Minsky’s and the Olympic in earlier times.
At the high end of the topless-bar spectrum, it’s strictly look-don’t-touch. The first concession to the demands of the horny is such personal services as “table dancing.” Then the dancer may allow a quick feel while a customer slips her a tip. Always, the constant pressure is toward more and more physical contact between customer and dancer until finally, in some clubs, the dancer is bouncing and wiggling on the customer’s lap.
“Since the Sexual Revolution, the whole movement of commercial sex has been toward satisfying specific clienteles.”
“In almost all the topless clubs out there, you do most of your work offstage,” says “Cassandra,” a longtime stripper who has worked in a wide variety of venues all over the country. “What you allow is up to you. It’s all rationalization. What you can get away with balanced with what you can live with afterward. The first time I did lap dancing, I went home and soaked in a hot tub for four hours.” (“What they do,” amplifies Dominique D’Anthony, “is what the premises allow. Some girls will try to push the limits and go beyond …. Some do and get away with it, but risk the loss of their job if they get caught …. The customer always wants more, for sure.”)
Again, it’s a simple dynamic that Adam Smith would understand. The dancers want tips; the customers want action. Witnessing the lap-dancing scene at the Harmony Burlesk today, you can understand the attraction. The French — leave it to the French — even have a fancy name for it: “frottage,” meaning the rubbing of two bodies together. The fire that results is lit in the loins of those involved.
“It’s the perfect thing for the man who’s interested in safe sex,” says Dominique, attempting to explain the lure of lap dancing in the nineties. “It’s great for a husband, because it’s titillating without actually being ‘cheating.’ He can come here and play, and then go home to his wife to have sex.”
A slightly more jaded portrait of the practice emerges when you talk to the Harmony dancers themselves. “Maxie” is a 27-year-old, pretty-faced hardbody with baby-doll tits and not an inch of spare flesh on her body. “It’s good exercise,” she says, and I envision a whole line of lap-dancing exercise videos. Feel the burn. Maxie has worked all kinds of adult-entertainment jobs — peep shows, topless clubs, stripper — grams — and she likes lap dancing over them all.
“Here you’re your own boss,” agrees “Dixie,” another Harmony lap dancer. “A lot of girls here work only a couple of days a week to flesh out their budgets.”
For a Harmony lap dancer, a great night is worth $600, an average one $200 — depending, of course, on the laps. Some of the younger, prettier, bigger-titted girls have a line of customers waiting for them. They can leapfrog from lap to lap and make $500 in a few hours. For others, like Dixie — a little older than the others — money comes a little harder. The second-tier girls work the edges of the crowd, tireless in their pursuit of the Holy Fiver. Basically, the dancers at the Harmony work for tips only.
“You are self-employed in the truest sense of the word,” Dixie says, just before she drifts off to employ herself.
A beautiful 19 year old, “Finesse,” tugged at my sleeve, wanting to tell her story. Her upturned, perfectly formed breasts, nipples proudly hard, stared at me throughout the interview, like a couple of hands folded in prayer. It was lucky I had a tape recorder, because I didn’t hear a word she said.
“I come up here from Tampa once a month for a week,” she told me. “I take home two or three grand, and down there you can live pretty well on that for a month.” I asked her if there were occupational hazards to lap dancing — chapped thighs or something like that. Does she get hot when she squirms on the lap of some john? “I’m a lesbian,” she confessed, though her nipples were still pointing in my direction. “There are a lot of gay dancers here. It makes it easier, in a way. You don’t get worked up every time you’re with a guy. You can keep your distance. They always want you to get hot, always want you to have an orgasm,” she continued, tossing her mane of curly brown hair and laughing. “So you fake it. Once in a while, though…” Finesse lets a smirk play across her face. “Let’s just say I don’t fake it every time. My lover hates what I do. But I’m the one who pays the rent.”
Google “Lap Dance” and then immerse yourself in the 135,000,000 results. That would be one way to research. You can even find a Wiki should you wish to master the art yourself. Honestly, though, all you really have to do in order to understand the lap dance would be head to a local strip club that offers them with a couple of $50 bills reserved for that experience. You will understand the subject perfectly after a single try. … Of course we only know that from listening to others. Naturally no one in this rarified editors’ room has ever had a lap dance (that anyone can prove). Naturally not. … Changing the subject quickly, we did want close with a most official whine from the art department that the first pass at a header image got rejected by the boss. Obviously that was a tragic mistake. Probably the boss needs a lap dance.
