Listen!

I started dancing back in 1989 at The Naked Eye in the remnants of the Boston Combat Zone. The club was still run by burlesque rules: no black shoes on the front stage, and girls made money for the club by doing "the champagne hustle."

The champagne hustle was, in essence the solicitation of our company in exchange for exorbitantly overpriced cocktails. A "single" was nine dollars, of which we got four in commission, a "double" was eighteen, (we got eight) and a "triple" was twenty seven of which we got twelve. The holy grail was when a customer bought you a bottle a champagne. Moet was one hundred dollars, (we got twenty) Mumms was one hundred and fifty, (we got forty) and DP was three hundred, (we got sixty).


I had become a dancer after getting accepted to Boston College. I expected to make tuition by dancing, not soliciting drinks. Soliciting drinks meant listening to these men who, for three hundred dollars, had all sorts of expectations I was not prepared nor obligated to live up to. Hence the term the champagne hustle. It should be noted that I never made it to B.C. I got hustled too.


I eventually figured out that as long as I listened to these men and let them be the ones who were onstage, figuratively, performing as it were for me via conversation, they were more inclined to spend their money. I still however felt the burden of their expectations and was really squirmy about the whole procedure.


Lady Jane was a feature performer. She had been a dancer for years and had the whole thing down pat. She gave me a few pointers that were meant to make listening to my customers a bit more palatable.


"Just listen to the last few words of each sentence so you know whether to answer 'yes' or 'no' to whatever they're talking about. Then you can zone out the rest of the time and it doesn't get to feeling so heavy."


I tried that, but it felt inauthentic to me. My customers felt it too. Although I did get more bottles of champagne, the type of men who bought them for me were no where near as interesting to talk to as they had been previously. It was all very disheartening.


Six years later, as I was about to begin my Saturn Return, I began Jungian dream analysis and enrolled at the Swedish Massage Institute at the same time. After some negative experiences as a dancer, it became imperative that I find a new career and find a way to change my opinion of human contact. Massage school was exactly what I needed. I learned to release somatized emotions, face my absolute darkest fears, and got over the fear I had accumulated of being touched. I also learned a new technique that was meant to be used when dealing with survivors of physical trauma, called Reflective Listening.



Reflective Listening is the repetition of what the client says to you in such a way as to keep the focus on the client and make the session entirely about them. The idea is that you do not involve yourself in their experience of emotional release of their somatized memory at all. I have to admit, I wasn't very good at this at first, but I got better at it with time and rumination. I thought back to those lonely men in the Boston Combat Zone and I realized how badly they needed to be heard. It's easy to see the women as the only victims in the world of strip tease, but the men who seek comfort from a dancer are socially dysfunctional in their own way as well. We seek out one another: women may work on their daddy issues while the men work through some Oedipal issues of their own. Reflective listening taught me that the path to God is found through the constant work we must all do to improve the quality of our relationships. Once again, I don't know how good I actually am at this, but I think it's the goal we're all supposed to shoot for.



A few years after graduation, my husband at the time and I were attending his first premier party. (DJ is an actor/comedian) We walked in and I was introduced to the director of the show (VH1's Sledgehammer) as well as various other important people connected with VH1 and Viacom. I immediately knew what to do. I went into champagne hustle mode, but with a twist. I had learned to be a better listener this time. I wasn't out for commissions on drinks. I was out to pimp my man.

On the drive home, DJ commented, "I think I did pretty good. I might have gotten a commercial out of that party." ( No party full of actors is ever just a party. It's always work.)


"Really," I replied, "I got you three."


I explained with astonishment that I had had an epiphany: that all those years as a dancer may not have been in vain after all. When combined with the skills I had learned in massage school, I had developed what looked to be a highly useful skill. Shockingly, DJ did not respond positively. He was jealous! I couldn't understand why! I was trying to explain that this was a business skill. Yes, he was an artist but he had to be two different people if he was to be a success; and artist on camera and on stage and a businessman at social events. There is a reason we are not together anymore. DJ loved being with an intelligent woman so long as I was working in his service and not upstaging him. I wasn't trying to upstage him. I was trying to teach him a useful skill. If you can't hack an equal, I don't know what to tell you buddy.

He also always subjected me to the double standard and passed judgement on me for having been a dancer. Funny how a man's porn stash doesn't make him less of a man but any skills a woman learns as a stripper are instantly discounted.

What really burned me here was the fact that DJ was not allowing me the opportunity to give back all the lessons on improvisation that he imparted to me. Back in West Palm Beach, when we were all still theater majors at Palm Beach Community College, DJ and Michael and Ron and Dean and all the other members of the Comedy Squad, would tell each other stories at parties. Rolling Rock bottles would litter the floor as I lay with my head in DJ's lap listening to the guys, listening and absorbing. They had learned how to weave tales of sad and lonely childhoods into side stitching mirth filled madness. Alchemy is telling tales of woe and spinning them into gold. Mike and DJ had a knack for that. As members of the Squad and then Lost Footage and the Swarm, I often referred to them as the Lennon & McCartney of improv comedy. I had learned so much from listening to them as well as adapting the imperative skill of listening that improv entails into my observation and writing skills. Why couldn't he, just for a moment, be the student and not the teacher?

Going half time, KSU is probably going to take me another four years. After that, I see plenty of book signing parties and publishing house events in my future. I hope for DJ's sake he learned something from my epiphany. But if not, I have every intention of putting it to good use in the future.