Ice Cream and Stripper Poles
Pole, Burlesque, Salt & Straw
I gravitate toward writing about strippers and sex workers, toward people who embrace their sexuality, who revel in it. We can psychoanalyze why this is at a later time, or maybe the answers are in the self-reflections I made here.
Because of this proclivity for the profane, I found myself at Tractor Tavern in Ballard for a spring-themed pole/burlesque/erotic dance variety show in April. I was writing about it for the Seattle Metropolitan Magazine (I learned through this process that the people at the Seattle Met do not like it when you refer to them as “The Met.” A mistake I vow to never make again.)
I grabbed a drink. I chatted with the people I knew from my time acquainting myself with pole dance. I interviewed a few performers backstage. Then, I settled into a seat on a bench along the venue’s northern wall. The majority of the audience sat in front of me, facing the stage in rows of chairs. I had to pivot my body toward the stage for a full view of everything. Spotlights lit up a stripper pole with a big, red rose flowering at the top. On the curtain at the back hung a bull skull. This was, after all, a country bar.
Sat next to me on the bench was a man in a glittery red cardigan, a red and black kilt, a red baseball cap, and tan combat boots.
He was folding dollar bills into footballs, like kids did in grade school to pass time in class, lining up the point of the bill on a desk and flicking it through a field goal made of someone else’s fingers.
“You know about these?” He asked, mid-fold, to the young men in the audience in front of him. They shook their heads.
Feeling outgoing with my journalism cap on, I interrupted. “Like this?” I asked, and stuck up my thumbs and forefingers in the shape of a field goal.
“Yes! Exactly,” he said, and flicked the dollar bill at me.
This was Nicholas Easterday, a massage therapist and fire artist. I didn’t quite understand what a fire artist was, but he told me about how he lit things on fire for his art and that seemed like enough of an explanation.
Nick was here to see his girlfriend, Artemis Fox (her stage name), who he met several years ago at Burning Man. Nick is a 10-year veteran of the festival and often doles out massages there. This makes him very popular. He met Artemis in an eight-person shower. A classic tale of love at first group shower.
She strutted on stage in knee high green tights, long green gloves peppered with black thorns, and a peplum dress made of different pieces of red fabric. “La Vie en Rose” piped through the speakers. Longingly, Artemis looked up at the rose at the top of the pole as she danced, ripping away petal after petal on her dress. Love me, love me not.
“Do you want to come throw bills at her with me?” Nick asked. Nah, I was good here.
Nick strode up to the stage, at the stage left corner, rested his elbows on a speaker, and flicked dollar bill footballs at his girlfriend. She ripped away her dress to reveal a skimpy sparkly number, then leaped on the pole, climbed to the top and gloriously sniffed the rose. Soon, she wore just nipple pasties.
Artemis started burlesque and pole around three years ago. By day, she’s a pediatrician. She grew up with crippling social anxiety, she said. She started these arts as a way to break out of her shell. Her next venture? Stand-up comedy. Which one will leave her feeling more exposed? Stripping or comedy?
When it was all over and she left the stage, Nick ran to the backstage curtain, a Salt & Straw cup in his hand.
“Did you bring her ice cream?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re both crazy about Salt & Straw,” he replied. “It’s mostly melted now.”
Still, she liked sweet things, so Nick brought her sweet things.
Charmed, I sat back and watched the rest of the show. One dancer spent her days as a death doula; another had “Valar Morghulis,” the phrase from Game of Thrones tattooed on the back of her thighs which, if you aren’t in the know, means “all men must die”; a different dancer specialized in roller pole—a mix of rollerskating and pole dance; one dancer, who specialized in twerking, earned her living as a paralegal and kept her wire-rimmed glasses on the whole time despite her vigorous booty shaking; a woman who trained as a ballerina her whole life mixed pole dance and ballet, stripping and swinging around the pole, en pointe the whole time.
I hoped all of these performers had someone to bring them ice cream. But, I knew for some, like the roller-pole dancer, this part of their life remained separate from the life they lived offstage. For them, the dollars rained down on them by a loving audience was validation enough for now.