A ‘She’ll Love You Forever’ Gift: Stripper Class
Valentine’s Day was fast approaching, and I couldn’t think of what to get for a special someone in my life. But lucky me, I opened The Times and saw a story about a Hancock Park actress who teaches a women’s self-help course that sounded interesting.
The class was about how to locate your inner strength while stripping on a dance pole, either for personal enrichment or for the man in your life.
“Beautiful!” the instructor shouts as women pretend they’re stripping for their husbands. “He’s dying. He’s loving it.”
My first thought was that, as a gift, it beats a box of chocolates.
But I couldn’t be sure how the lovely and talented Alison would react if I enrolled her in the class as a Valentine’s Day gift. It isn’t easy for a man to know what’s up these days in the women’s movement.
Take the recent stories about newswoman Greta Van Susteren. She always struck me as smart, independent and un-Hollywood--the rare TV personality who didn’t look like a chirping bobble-head.
But then I saw someone resembling her on the cover of People magazine, sporting the “new look” that is “the talk of TV.”
To my surprise, it was a virtually unrecognizable Greta, who spoke of her face lift as if it were an act of courage and national leadership.
“I’ve made it safe for other people to have plastic surgery,” she said through a smile that might not have been an option.
Feminism is dead, I thought. It’s got to be safe to send your wife to stripper school.
As The Times’ story reported in a tone generally reserved for medical breakthroughs, women are on a waiting list to pay $50 for the privilege of stripping to their skivvies and slithering up and down a pole at the home of actress Sheila Kelley, who was on “L.A. Law.”
Kelley, much like Greta Van Susteren, finds herself in a national leadership role.
Having produced a stripper movie called “Dancing at the Blue Iguana,” she is now a self-styled social scientist on a mission to teach ordinary women the liberating, empowering effects of lap dancing and pole dancing.
“I know how powerful I feel when I do it,” purred Kelley, who believes the dance pole belongs in the bedroom, not the go-go club.
She said she paid real strippers to teach her their moves so she could then heal sexually repressed housewives. “I know how sexy I feel. I know how beautiful I look to me and to my husband, and that’s all that matters.”
Speaking of the husband, he’s actor Richard Schiff, who plays the White House flack on “The West Wing.”
Given the Oval Office connection, I thought perhaps President Clinton was going to pop up as a motivational speaker in the pole-dancing class. No such luck, but Schiff volunteered that his friends are envious when he tells them his wife likes to strip for him.
Jesus, he tells his friends? My wife gets upset if I tell someone she squeezes the toothpaste tube from the top. But for some couples, I guess discretion has gone the way of feminism.
Schiff said he’ll be changing his toddler’s diapers and hear hooting and hollering from his wife’s class. It’s certainly none of my business, but I might start to wonder. Here you are, elbow deep in poop, while housewives frolic in stiletto heels and teddies in the back room, scissor-kicking around the maypole while your wife yells, “Beautiful!”
I was vaguely aware that people lived in a world I knew nothing about, but I never would have guessed it was in button-down Hancock Park.
“You’ve got to read this story,” I told my wife.
“What story?”
“The one about this actress who teaches pole dancing at her house, and her husband is some guy on ‘The West Wing’ who goes around telling friends his wife likes to strip for him. What do you think about that?”
“We gotta get out of this town,” she said.
“Where would you even get a pole like that?” I wondered.
She didn’t answer. She was muttering uncivil thoughts about women who do dumb things for idiot men and then try to pass it off as liberation.
And so, playing it safe for Valentine’s Day, I bought my wife a nice card and some books about Tuscany, and I took her to dinner at a romantic Italian cafe.
When the time was right, I asked if she would have liked it if I’d bought her a dancer’s pole instead.
“Yes,” she said, surprising me. Must be the Chianti, I thought.
“What would you have done on it?” I asked.
“I would have used it to swing around and kick you in the head.”
Lovely and talented, and too smart for me.
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Steve Lopez writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes. com.
