This one time, at band camp...

VH1 has, for quite a while, been imploding with these shows based on popular culture where pundits riff on the various historical trends of past decades. Right now they're doing the 70s, their worst offering so far because most of the talking heads weren't out of their Kimbies when the events occurred, so it's yer basic cynical putdown fest on the psychedelic primary-colored polyester blast that was the 70s. Paulie "the weasel" Shore was tapped for his punditry and he weighed in on the Chippendales dancers, male strippers, that held forth in the 70s. This jarred loose a memory that I'm surprised didn't surface for the "My Expeditions to the Planet of Third-tier Strippers" post. Once, my little Midwestern hometown hosted male strippers at a local pub. This is that story.

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If it's been a while since you've been laid, you get this skank about you. Anyone who's looking hard enough can detect it. Well, back in 80something, it was waaaaay past time for me to get back into the rumba. Lo and behold, I spied a poster for some male strippers coming to town. At the time, I didn't even really register it, but later, during a long boring space of horny hours at work, my subconscious had set up an avalanche of logic which tripped when I saw a beefcake calendar posted by one of the girls at work, which were big at the time.

I thought:
1. At the male stripper event, many local women will attend, drink a lot, and watch hunks gyrate.
2. There will be maybe 8 guy strippers, tops, but there will something like a hundred women at this event, and prolly a good percentage of the strippers would rather go home with each other anyway.
3. After a few stiff drinks, and I don't even need to make the pun, there won't be a dry seat in the house - with practically no one to come to their aid (again, apologies).
4. The math for success was so obvious that even your basic hoof-stamping counting horse would whinny, "well duh" if you were to point this out.

So, I pointed this out to my guy buddies. They said, "You'd have to be a fag to go watch a bunch of guys take off their clothes." I walked through the avalanche of logic again, stressing that the last thing we'd be doing is watching the guy strippers. "Everyone would think I was a fag if they saw me there."

So I went alone, dammit.

To this day I have yet to insert myself again into such a froth of worked up women as I encountered that night. The place practically had a funk in the air. (I didn't even have to pay a cover charge because I was a guy! Such innocent times!) I had been sooo right.

Got a beer and started scoping out the terrain. Whilst connoitering, no less than three women literally rubbed themselves against me - it was crowded, but personal space could have been maintained had that been desired - and one actually looked me right in the eye and said, "Exsqueeze me" as she pushed by. (She looked exactly like Rizzo from Grease, not my type, so I kept a wary eye on her and used her as my point to be farthest from during the remainder of he evening.) Thus, onward.

I had a second beer and began choosing my conquest in earnest. About that time, the rental on the first beer came due, and I worked over to the men's room to discover that it had been converted into the performer's dressing room. The bar was originally built as a pool hall, and had closed and reopened as yet another newly-themed watering hole almost yearly, but no one had added rooms for a band or what have you. They didn't expect guys that evening (was I the only one with vision? - yes, only a couple other guys were there, and I don't think they were interested in the girls), so it became evident that I would have to go elsewhere to relieve myself.

It was an especially bitterly cold night that night. On the weather channel, you can often see the big cold, blue finger on the temp charts that rests on the upper Midwest states from November to March. That night most of the country was getting the finger. About the third time I had to venture out to the tundra of the parking lot (one trip per beer I surmised), I was seriously pissed and hatched a plan for vengeance. I was by the unused steel back exit doors behind the stage, and decided to leave a creative excretory ice sculpture upon them. I was nearly complete with a rather decent butterfly when the door flew open for the first time I had experienced since the place was built and, WHAM! cracked me smack-dab in the middle of the forehead by someone taking garbage to the dumpster. The cartoons are correct; you see stars when you get hit really hard in the head.

It didn't knock me out entirely, but I did black out and must've staggered around in the snow back there for a good minute or so, judging from the tracks afterwards. In my compromised state, I had abandoned all other tasks other than remaining upright, and so had let myself go, so to speak. Alas, I had finished the ice sculpture on my jeans.

"Dismay" does not even begin to cover the glacier of emotions I felt at having such an opportunity snatched from my grasp. I thought and brainstormed and schemed, but there was no way around the fact that I could not go back into the bar covered in frozen urine. And to make it worse, the event was going to end before I could get home, change, and get back! What a wedgie fate had delivered unto me. Bitterly, I drove home. I think I even grumbled out loud to myself the whole way, if memory serves.

However, the next day, it seemed so sit-com silly and ironic that I kinda chalked it up to God removing me from something I didn't even want to know about and accepted it as mysterious deliverance. I also must admit that I never have liked waking up with a stranger, the couple times that it's occurred (especially this one time when I had totally gapped her name because I had been so wasted when I learned it initially; I'm sure that brain cell had died that very evening, so I never had a chance).

And that's all I have to say about that.