Chapter Twenty-one: This is My Body Moving Electric
an excerpt from Strip by Catlyn Ladd
The rhythm a pulse, driving me on. Lights on my skin, flickering sweat. My thoughts stop. There is only music.
Here on the stage I embody sexuality. Power lives in my veins, in the lines muscles make under my skin. I feel like anarchy, like broken taboos, like liminal space. I feel like god.
Dance is an act of creation. In the beginning, the Greek goddess Euronome danced the world into being. The great Hindu sagas are still told in dance all over India. Dance is often related to the female, a manifestation of her creative power. Sexuality is a metaphor for the act of creation and thus dance, sexuality, and the ability to bring forth life became overdetermined representations of woman.
Dance is magic. It is a powerful visualization technique. It weaves spells both for the dancer and for the viewer. Dance unites the performer and the audience and is thus a symbol of sexual congress, the most intimate physical unification of bodies.
Around the stage is a wall of pressing bodies. Men, and a few women, laugh and cheer and throw money. Bills coat the stage. One of my regulars shoulders through the crowd and holds out a folded rectangle of money. I step to the edge of the stage and pull out the strap of my T-bar, meeting his eyes, which crinkle in appreciation. “You’re beautiful,” he says. I throw back my head and laugh. He slips a hundred dollars into the outstretched band of elastic.
I lie down on my back and stretch out. Hands appear in the air above me and dollars rain down. In ten minutes I make a thousand dollars.
It is my birthday celebration. For six weeks leading up to the day when I celebrate turning twenty-three, I pass out business-sized cards that I have had made. On one side is a photo of my breasts with my fingers, sheathed in spiked rings that are hinged with my knuckles, crossed over them. On the other side is the date of my party and the information that the holder of the card will get into the club free on the night in question. All of the club’s regulars are in attendance plus a healthy smattering of men who have used my card to gain free admission to the local gentlemen’s club.
Right now they are all here for me. The other stages are closed, so for the duration of two songs, it is all only about me. The clothes I remove are custom made specially for the occasion. There’s a chocolate cake lit by candles for me to blow out at the end of the set. The piles of money are swept from the stage into a garbage bag.
It is the last time I appear naked on stage. At twenty-three I retire from stripping in order to utilize my master’s degree and enter teaching, the vocation that will become my permanent profession.
In the coming years I will achieve tenure, a doctorate, and a critical feminist lens partially shaped by my years as a stripper. I will write this book, documenting my experiences. Twenty years later I still sometimes dream of the stage. I hear a certain song and it all comes rushing back: the smell of the club, the thrill of the taboo. My body begins to move, electric.
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