Oh my... too many times to count. Plus, I was an emergency cocktail waitress very briefly at one and my UNDERAGE roommate worked at tthis horrible/wonderful/hil arious/actually shockingly impressive strip club that's in a double wide in the parking lot of an uber-skeezy motel in my hometown (granted, she was like a month shy of 18 and I had JUST turned 21 at the time, so you have to cut us some slack, lol). It was HILARIOUS and awful and wonderful and I went pretty much every night she worked, because being so young and whatnot, she was a bit freaked & wanted the moral support. Often patrons would pay for my drinks (like, I wouldn't spend a penny on alcohol) and then when I went to tip a dancer, some guy would pass me a couple bucks or one of the strippers would do something like grab my head and motorboat me, lol. so, often, I'd end up making tips too, even though, at that time, I didn't work there (this is the same club that I briefly worked as a backup/emergency cocktail waitress for, lol). I mean, they all knew me since I was there ALL the friggin' time; I was nice & a good tipper to a certain extent (I tipped a little bit more than what I'd consider "polite" for the amnt of time I was there); I gave them rides on occasion; etc; and I think they felt bad that I was stuck in there forever getting hit on by all these skeezy guys and whatnot (though most of the time I played touch screen wheel of fortune - I'm probably STILL the reigning champ - hahaha), so they tried to throw me a bone, so to speak. Anyway, I've been to a million strip clubs, a million and one of my friends have worked as strippers and/or escorts and one of my friend's wives is even a madame and not a damn one of these women fits any stereotype of these professions in the slightest and are all amazingly talented and highly intelligent women - I think that work just holds an allure for some of us or we see it as easy money or those of us who aren't as repressed don't find anything morally wrong with stripping and the like. It just messes with one's self-esteem at times or the woman's self-esteem may (but definitely not always by any means, as is the stereotype) already be messed up, and then stripping just messes with it more. I guess it all depends on your reasons for doing it, your confidence going in, and how much you're able to compartmentalize, etc. Anyway, I'm babbling here instead of iin a blog post or something, like I should be... luckily, I have a milliion and one more stories and have barely scratched the surface of my experiences involving stripping/escorting/st rip clubs as a patron/virtual worlds & the sex industry & so on & so forth. I don't know how in the world to turn this into a poem, but I'm sure I can write some fascinating stuff, regardless. less