Flying Without Wings

There was never a time when I did not love dancing. Feeling my feet bouncing off a hardwood floor excited my passions like nothing else I ever did or learned to do.

The stage floor was my home. My comfort zone. My protection. My salvation. The place where I shone the brightest.

Beginning with ballet at five years old, carefully mimicking the girls down the road who took real ballet lessons, I built my repertoire of unique blends of ballet, modern jazz, and my own inventions.

The first year of college opened up the freedom to take any dance courses I chose and I chose them all, reveling in the pain of stretching and bending myself into the measured movements of ballet, the unlikely gyrations of modern jazz and the body twisting yoga moves my dance instructor blended into our routines.

Saturdays at college were spent in the dance studio with the music and the mirror and the barre. I spent hours combining the positions and movements I had learned. The only classes from college I recall were my dance classes. The others were a blur of aggravation until the next ballet class. School was weighing me down. It was keeping me from my love. I soon left it behind.

Finding myself on stage at a club in a big city I was paralyzed with fear and couldn't manage even the simplest steps. Discouraged with my debut, I was leaving the club when an older gentleman stopped me with an offer I could not get out of my mind throughout the next week of dull geometry, English Literature, Psychology 101, and more of the same.

Don was an agent for dancers in the city and he thought there was potential in my failure of a debut. No. He was not a pimp. No. He was not a lech. He was a real dance agent.

He called me on the dorm floor phone later that week and gave me my first dance booking. It took exactly three months for me to toss my graduation cap into the wind and put on a G-String permanently.

I was awkward at first, realizing how different it was from dancing alone in a studio to dancing in front of an audience. Other strippers took me under their tassels and helped me along the way with costumes, makeup, shoes, and other accouterments, which made up the entirety of the Exotic Dance world in the 1970s. Back then there were no lap dances, no poles. You had to be able to dance and you had to have real shows with costumes, themed music, and a shred of self-respect to make the big bucks.

That time in the stripper world was the transition from real burlesque entertainers and go-g0 girls dancing in cages to elegant women in shining gowns, spiked heels, and towering wigs, who could woo an audience by removing an elbow-length silk glove. That was my time. That was my style. I held on as long as I could in that quickly changing world, traveling all over the United States and Canada, enjoying every minute until my body finally said, "Enough already".

One thing I had that most other strippers did not have was my ability to dance. I could twirl across the floor in my cape, made of seven yards of voluminous chiffon, and light up a stage with a tornado of swirling fabric, playing peek-a-boo with the audience and my semi-nude frame.

My signature kicks were copied but never duplicated- at least not on the strip club stages. I could do mind-bending contortions and splits for my floor routine, and my chair routine was smooth and sultry. Silk stockings were still in style and there was something of a little boy in the men in the audience that was fascinated by them. I could remove my stockings by hooking a toe from the opposing foot into the top of my stocking and sliding it off slowly on my fully extended leg. With toes pointed, ballet style.

I never performed vulgar nudity. I never did the old bump and grind. Except for my comedy routine. I learned early on the way to keep from looking overtly sexual was to keep my arms and legs in ballet form- no matter what the center of my body was doing.

During my thirteen-year career in the strip industry, I accumulated dozens of shows and costumes. I loved, especially music less traveled and blues that dripped like honey from the speakers. I was part of the music. The music became part of me while I was dancing. Nothing. Nothing set me free as dancing did. It was truly flying without wings.