Maybe I’ve been watching too much of The Walking Dead, but, when I was cutting through the parking lot behind Deja Vu with my dog yesterday, and ran into this car of theirs, my mind went immediately to zombies. As I’ve never seen it rolling around town, I imagine they only use it in case of stripper emergencies. Still, though, I can’t imagine it’s good for business.
As for the title of this post, it’s a reference to the strip club’s much-dispised slogan… “1000’s of Beautiful Girls and 3 Ugly Ones“.
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The Picture of Whorian Gray.
#terrorboner
Will you please just go inside this place and get it out of your system?
It reminds me of the “Faces of Meth” campaign.
I am actually surprised that internet porn hasn’t put them out of business.
Why are you surprised?
Butterface
I am surprised that people are still willing to go to Deja Vu when they can look at naked women all day for free and while drinking beer on the internet. I guess I have to admit that I have never actually been in Deja Vu so I suppose there could be some artistry going on in there which works better live than on the internet. Still, it just seems like looking at pictures or videos of naked ladies pole dancing would be an adequate substitute especially for people who might be ashamed to be seen gracing the doors of Deja Vu. Haw! Maybe I should go over there to check out what’s going on inside that place. Maybe they are running the best artsy fartsy hipster burlesque show in the world and I have’t heard about it.
Actually… I kind of wonder if they would ever be open to such a thing. I am not in a place where I am willing to do this myself though but wouldn’t something like The Fat Bottom Cabaret or other forms of feminist erotica work better in a city like Ypsi? Well I don’t know. I would be way more likely to go see something like that than a regular strip show. I head that the ladies there don’t even get naked anyways. So no beer and no vagina? I can’t see how the place is still in business.
Generally speaking, people go to strip clubs because they can interact with living, breathing females. Though I don’t frequent strip clubs and have only been a handful of times (I find them boring and expensive), conversation is a big part of the experience (part of the reason I don’t like them). For a lot of men, this is really quite difficult in real life (or simply unpleasant in my case).
Internet (or paper) pornography cannot replicate this.
I’ve known a few women who worked at Deja Vu, all for their own good reasons. The stories they told made it sound like any other business with lots of regulars. I worked at diners for years. My goal was to convert the standard 50cent tip into a dollar. I did that by talking to lonely people (and happy and angry and hung over and tired) but I did that mostly by listening. These women work for dollars too. Some came in to the work damaged; others did not. Nothing about that equation was changed by their Deja Vu experience. Quite a few were gay and simply didn’t give a shit about the male gaze. It was work. I remember one story about a kind but shy yellow cab driver who regularly taxied the women to and from work. One stripper found out it was his birthday, so they invited him in a gave him a free lap dance. The way I would give a regular or a delivery driver a free slice of cheesecake. Deja Vu is a business operating in the marketplace (with bad base-appeal ads) like any other; it is also a real place like any other populated with regular humans doing what humans do. And I think that’s why it’s still in business. The dance of power and desire is not unique to Deja Vu or strippers. They’re just a wee bit more pragmatic about it. For what it’s worth, two pretty great artists with a strong feminist bent also worked at Deja Vu, the screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno) and performance artist Erin Markey, who actually has a piece about Deja Vu out their on the inter webs somewhere. I agree with Peter Larson that Mark needs to get in there and maybe even get to know the people there. It would make a great story. Right after the hair braiding shops…
I have interviewed someone who worked at Deja Vu. It was a few years back, on my old puppet-hosted talk show, Dreamland Tonight. It was interesting stuff. I think there’s a recording somewhere. We talked a lot about the business end of it, as I recall.