Last year was New Years 2020 and I remember celebrating it as a dancer, in a busy strip club, as I have done for the past 20 years. The COVID pandemic has yet to be announced here in the U.S. and all is well as we celebrated into the night ironically with the iconic roaring 20’s theme.
It was a great theme to represent what we expected 2020 to be, a year of great changes. You see, 1920 was the year of economic boom, where jazz music blossomed, Art Deco peaked, and women started wearing makeup, hiked up their dress, danced, drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and had gone against social and sexual norms and nearing the end of the Spanish Flu pandemic.
We all look and dressed the part of flappers with short bobbed hairdo adorn with embellished headbands, our dress vintage with slinky fringes, carefully thought out and selected fabric of luxurious satin, sexy silk, and faux fur boas, accessorized with pearl necklaces, and my favorite accessory satin elbow high gloves. I loved them so much that I planned to incorporate the gloves into my 2020 ensemble. I felt a playful and sultry seductiveness as I see eyes locked and hypnotized by the movement of my gloves, the only thing left on me during my performance.
As a dancer, our fashion has to always be evolving. I had planned to adopt some inspiration from the roaring 20’s fashion. Little did I know that 2020 had different plans for me, for us all.
Every New Year’s Eve, the club would select a fun theme to ring in the New Year. Only on this day, glitter is OK. Glitter is not OK 364 days in a strip club. Most men do not like the sight of glitter, as well don’t their wives. I can recall one New Year’s Eve party when we made glitter the theme! There was so much confetti and glitter thrown everywhere! I did not think it was possible to even clean it all up. It’s great to see that when you head back to work the next night, there would be no remnants of the blurry drunken evening you just had. Kudos to the cleaning company.
One thing I learned from working in a strip club, is that it doesn’t matter what happened last night, it’s a new night to write a new blurry story.
How about a disco 1970’s theme? A real-life replay of Saturday Night Fever. Disco lights bouncing off silhouettes of girls with g strings, afros and blown out hair. A club overloaded with peppy dancers in the celebratory mood ready to entertain for your dollars. On this night, it’s common to see it “rain” in multiple areas of the floor and stage. Raining dead presidents is surely in the forecast this evening.
On this night, the club will open later than usual because it will close later than usual with after-hour parties often held. The owners will surely be there to be the host of the party and celebrate with all of us through the countdown.
For having worked in this industry for so long, my New Year’s Eve has become predictable. I would normally be occupied by my top customer from the year. He will be my top VIP, for he has been my most loyal paying customer to me as well as to the club. I will be expected to be next to him when the clock strikes midnight, where he’s sure to have secured that first kiss. After so many years, I learned to have exquite timing and find myself in the ladies room just as clock strikes midnight. This way I avoided the “accidental” slip of a tongue in the kiss, or a sneak grab from my geriatric customer. This way, I can enter the New Year’s more gracefully. I did this for several years and I was never missed, because there are plenty of girls around ready to take my spot. As long as I’m not gone for too long, we will drink and laugh as he slips me crispy $100 bills enticing me not to leave again. We will celebrate into the evening as we have done with all the other major holidays in the past year.
Entertainers do not get New Year’s Eve off. It’s the busiest night of the year, we work. We will celebrate and be punctual just like any other night, besides this night the dancer earnings will start in the black, on this night you can keep all your money, no house fee. It is high energy on this night. It will get crazier and wilder than any other night in the year. All stages will be open, with a faster stage rotation to fairly run through all the talents this evening.
If an owner owns multiple clubs, this will be the night to consolidate into one club, where the staff and dancers celebrate all under one roof as a cohesive company party.
The dressing room will be extra crammed tonight with additional girls from other clubs that the owner owns. I know it may feel awkward to enter into someone else’s domain, but this is the rare occasion when the clubs merged. Club girls can act like rival gangs from West Side Story. The house girls alone are already crammed like sardines in a small dressing room, let alone now having to accompany another set of girls from another club. It gets tight in there, girl’s belongings stacked on top of each other, with no seating available, all trying to get a piece of the mirror behind other girls trying to do the same. This was all before the new popular term “social distancing.” In fact, social distancing would be impossible in that dressing room. I can imagine this new word would have the girls squabbling over space even more so, like wolves and their territory.
There was none of this, New Years’ Eve 2021. Clubs are still shut down due to the pandemic and a vaccine is still in its developmental stages. The COVID surges continued to keep the clubs and bars shut down as word of a new strain has emerged. New York City in 2021 was historically empty as we did our countdown from our couches, toast our champagne flute thru ZOOM, and kissed the ones that are truly close to us.
Happy New Year!