Betty Jo Tompkins is a college girl (well, part-time anyway) and more than a
little adventuresome.  So, on a lark, and to earn some spending money, she
tries out for a job at the local strip-club.  This could be fun.

Or,

Betty Jo Tompkins is a single mom who never quite managed to finish high
school.  In quiet desperation she auditions as a topless dancer.  Somebody has
to put food on the table.

Or,

Betty Jo Tompkins is a disturbed young lady.  She left home at 17 to escape an
abusive step-father and moved in with Bubba Joe, an equally abusive unemployed
drummer who occasionally gets a shift at the car wash between stints in the
county lock-up.  On the advice of her girlfriend, Betty Jo goes to work at the
corner nudie bar.  "After all", she says, "I guess I've done worse."

Or,

Betty Jo Tompkins is a cashier at K-Mart.  She's been married a year and a half
and it's not as easy as everybody said it would be.  Besides she's bored out of
her skull.  Wouldn't life be a little better if…?  So, quitting the cash
register, she goes to work at a strip club.  It seems like the right thing to
do at the moment.

Or,

Betty Jo Tompkins is a crack-whore.  She doesn't want to remember much of her
past.  Fuck, yesterday was bad enough.  She gets a line on the jack-shack in a
bad part of town.  It's a piece of shit for a job, of course, but she's sucked
dick before for a living and it gets her of the streets.  "Let's me get
something off of those assholes, for a change!"  If she can just make enough to
get high before the shift, she'll be OK.

Or…..,

Well, you get the idea.  Betty Jo could have come from almost anywhere.  

Betty Jo Tompkins has learned a lot in her first two weeks on the job.  She
reports in wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair pulled back in a
ponytail and carrying a large, cloth purse.  But she has learned to leave
everything on the first hook along the dressing room wall.  She leaves her
past, she leaves her dreams, she leaves her conscience, she leaves her
insecurities and her fractured self-image, and most of all she leaves Betty Jo
Tompkins on that hook.  She puts her warpaint on and her first trashy, skimpy
costume and emerges through the door as Suzie.

Suzie's a slut.  She knows how to make men give her money and lots of it.  She
knows who she has to flatter and who she has to grope.  She follows the rules
mostly, but can get as nasty as she needs to.  She can tell the college kids
with no money to spend from the old balding guys with wads of cash in their
pants.  She knows the weirdo from the guy who drives the Mercedes.  She can get
money from them all.  If she thought about it, Suzie wouldn't be proud of what
she had to do to get the money.  But she doesn't think about.  Betty Jo would
think about it.  She would be sick at the disgusting little sex tricks, at the
lies she had to tell and the slow, mutual destruction of the stripper/customer
mindless buzz.  But Betty Jo is not here, she's still on that hook in the
dressing room.  Safe.  After nine and a half hours of flashing her pussy at the
fools along the stage and pulling the dicks of the pathetic old perverts in the
VIP room, Suzie has finally made enough.  She walks into the dressing room for
the last time and….disappears.

Betty Jo Tompkins walks quickly through the bar, not wanting to make eye
contact with the disgusting creeps that Suzie had devastated just ten minutes
earlier.  Betty Jo paused just long enough to pay her tip-out and she was gone.

Gone just in time to make her evening class and then stop on the way home to
buy that cute skirt she saw in the window yesterday.

Or, gone to pick up some milk and bread and make dinner for her son.

Or, gone to Pop's Annex to get in a little after hours partying before Bubba
Joe comes home.

Or, gone home for a hot bath to wash all the club slime away.

Or, gone to find a connection.  If she got lucky, she wouldn't have to suck him
off too, just to get enough junk to last until tomorrow.

And so, Dear Readers, what does this all mean.  It means that dancers come in
all shapes sizes and dispositions.  They have hopes and dreams and aspirations,
just like everybody else. It means that they need to be treated with the same
respect inside the club as outside.  It means that some are regular people and
some are absolute poison.  It also means that I don't give a fuck.  I have no
desire whatever to get to know Betty Jo Tompkins or any of her dreams or
problems.  Many posters talk about the joy of talking to dancers and getting to
know the "real" person underneath: trying to get through the Suzie persona to
get to Betty Jo.  But this is crazy.  Any stripper who hopes to survive must
invent a Suzie to protect the real Betty Jo.  For us, as customers, to try to
penetrate the only real defense mechanism she has is unfair and just plain
wrong.  If we really want to meet Betty Jo, go to the college library or the
supermarket or the after hour's bar or wherever else she hangs out and compete
on equal terms.  But don't go to a stripclub and try to destroy a 19 year-old
girl by getting inside her zone of comfort and inside any armor she has left.

Nearly every crash and burn story you hear on this newsgroup originates with
some pathetic loser trying to get a "real" relationship going with a dancer. 
This almost always ends up either in expensive frustration or emotional
disaster, usually both.  The only sensible path is crystal clear to me.  I
already have as many "real" relationships as I can handle.  I don't want a
thing to do with Betty Jo.  I don't want to know her name, who her favorite
group is, what her hobbies are, or the state of her love-life.  I don't want to
know a thing about her private life, I don't want to talk to her at all.

Suzie, on the other hand, woo-woo, when does her shift start?

Blue