Oh, and the way I knew it was time to quit was one night I was standing in the dressing room and some song I hadn't heard for a while came on...I said "I haven't heard this since it was still on the radio when I first started dancing." The girls standing next to me replied, "I was in kindergarten when this first came out."
LOL
That really did happen, but it's not really why I retired. I left at 31 (physically at my peak I think) because I was in my last year of law school and I didn't want the transition to "real life" to be quite as jarring as it would have been if I waited until school was over too.
There was another reason too... the industry had changed. I liked to dance on stage and hated, I mean HATED doing any sort of champagne room/hustle sort of thing. I had my regulars that would come in and tip me for hanging out with them at the bar or because they liked the shows I did on stage. I liked the social aspect of my job, both the dancers and the customers.
I never planned to retire from work altogether when I was done dancing...it was just the job I had until I moved on to do something else. That attitude started getting harder and harder to maintain as you were expected to do and show more in the clubs.
When I started dancing in 1989 (and yes, I realize some of you were not born yet) the rules were different. Most of the northeastern/midwestern clubs were only topless, most had absolutely NO contact, and the champagne room concept really hadn't been invented yet. I got paid to be pretty on stage, and I made very, very good money doing just that. But as the industry evolved and became more mainstream (and especially after the invention of internet porn) guys wanted more and more and wanted to pay less and less to get it. And girls were willing to give it. It became less about the fantasy of sex then about the sex itself, and I didn't like that part. It's not that I have any issue with sex work, (hell, I'm considering doing some camming on the side right now for kicks and extra dough) it's just that it was a separate world than stripping was for me and I didn't want it to change. In that regard I guess that most of the girls from my early years were more like burlesque performers than modern day strippers. That's not to say dancers didn't escort and such back then, of course they did, it just wasn't as prevalent as it is now.
My short point in that LONG story was just that you'll know when you're ready. LOL.
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