Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America

"A colorful, often funny and always thought-provoking examination .. . Burana does a masterful job ... with the kind of easy, intelligent style that makes other writers envious." —
Rocky Mountain News

"Lily Burana gets my vote for producing the best sex worker autobiography to date! Strip City is insightful, super honest, and beautifully written." —
Annie Sprinkle

"She's a talented storyteller." —
Seattle Weekly

"In Strip City Burana has written the selective parts of her personal history in an authoritative voice. She has also recorded her yearlong cross-country trek in language that's rollickingly joyful, evocative and incisive. Elegant and eloquent, Burana's prose has a gentling, not to mention, distancing, effect on the edge that she still insists upon walking." —
San Francisco Chronicle Magazine

"Burana is a great writer; her self-deprecating, casual style is not only engaging, it's seductive. Burana doesn't glorify her work, but her honesty certainly glorifies her." —
The Nation

"First rate." —
Publishers Weekly

"Strip City is to strippers what On the Road was to the Beat Generation. This is a significant literary work for an entire sisterhood of women, bringing them out of the shadows and into the light. Lily Burana has done something amazing." —
Alysabeth Clements, Private Dancer magazine, feministstripper.com

"An engaging writer." —
San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Funny, ardently Americana, and intelligent. Witty and irreverent … fascinating." —
Austin Chronicle

"Burana writes well … she's got a sense of humor and can capture a face in a sentence." —
Palm Beach Post

ONE

It takes me several tries to get the bunny head thing just right.

As with much in life, it's a matter of positioning. You have to make sure you place the decal in the exact same spot every time, or you'll muck up the whole enterprise. I learned this the hard way. Careless application brought me, in succession, a three-eared bunny, then a bunny with too many eyes, then a blobby bunny with a club-ear and no distinct presence. Today, at the start of my tenth tanning session, I made sure the sticker was stuck just so, and when I'm done, I'll finally have what I am after: a small white patch in my tan, just below and to the left of my navel, in the shape of the Playboy bunny.

The girls who use the bunny heads are something of an amusement here at the busiest salon in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The plastic dish of decals sits next to the towels on a shelf by the cash register, in full view of every beautician and customer in the place. When a girl reaches into the dish, the women who run the shop look up from whatever make-over or pedicure they're doing and give one another a knowing glance. Oh, these ladies know that their job is to groom, not to judge—if you want your hair dyed a shade of copper-penny red that hasn't been seen since the days of "I Love Lucy" or your nails air-brushed blue and orange to show team spirit when you go down to Denver for a Broncos game, they'll oblige without comment. But something about a girl with the bunny tan sets the beauticians spinning. She's a little tacky, a little wild. The kind of girl who drives up to the salon in her Camaro fifteen minutes before closing, grabs a decal from the dish, and strides into the tanning booth for her ten-minute fake bake. Afterward, she's off to the Outlaw Saloon for a night of drinking, flirting, and, if the air is right, fighting.

That's not really who I am, but for my purposes, it's an image I can live with.

I have been making twice-weekly trips to the tanning salon for several weeks now. I started out pale as milk but I'm making significant progress toward my goal of a sensuous golden brown. Never mind that up close, my skin is starting to look knobby and taut—a little like the texture of a regulation football. The color is fantastic. From a distance, I'm the picture of health. I've never tanned in my life—I was a Goth as a teenager and didn't leave the house much during daylight in my early twenties, so all this dark, rich pigment is a novelty. I think it's great.

My dermatologist begs to differ.

I spent the morning getting yelled at in the skin clinic. I stopped by to see the doctor about a strange and sudden rash on my chin, and in an offhand moment I asked her, oh, by the way, if she would, please tell me about the effects of using a tanning bed.

It was an innocent question, and I simply was not prepared for the response. I gripped the edge of the counter in the examining room as the dermatologist dressed me down with vitriolic force strong as the heat from a blast furnace. "Oh, tell me you're not tanning," she moaned, closing her eyes and pressing her fingertips into her temples in frustration.

"Just a little," I lied, my eyes averted to the diagnostic posters on the exam room walls. Sebaceous Glands 101. Skin Occlusions At-A-Glance. Melanoma Made Easy.

"You seemed like such a smart person when you walked in here," she shrilled, "but after hearing what you've just said, I have to treat you totally differently!" She went on to tell me that by doing only ten tanning sessions a year—a year, she repeated for emphasis—I increase my risk of developing skin cancer seven times over.

The doctor spoke with the certain fury of a true believer, and she assured me that she had science to back her up. She called for her assistant to bring in a packet of information about indoor tanning. Slipping the thick sheaf of papers into a plastic sleeve, she said to me, "Do yourself a favor and stop right now. If you bought a package of tanning sessions that you haven't used up yet, give it to someone you hate."

With goggles to protect my eyes and a towel draped over my face, I lie in the tanning bed bathed in the eerie blue-purple glow. The industrial hum is oddly soothing, as if I'm a baby in a man-made womb listening to the muffled rhythms of the world outside. This snug, warm, thrumming space is all the universe I need. The white noise, the doctor told me, is part of what keeps tanning enthusiasts coming back, despite the known dangers. "Some people get addicted," she says. "Try meditation as a substitute."

In the packet she gave me is an article on the ills of tanning that says, "A tan is your skin's response to ultraviolet-induced injury; it's trying to tell you something. Just imagine if your skin could scream instead of tanning." I remember Fran Lebowitz writing about being on the phone with a Hollywood type, and describing him as "audibly tan." I am quite sure this is not what she meant. It would give a sensible person pause, this screaming-skin analogy. And if that wouldn't, the facts would: A tanning bed zaps the user with a day's worth of concentrated sun in ten minutes. Frequent use can cause premature aging, irreversible skin damage, and sun poisoning. One bad sunburn can equal years of accumulated exposure to natural sunlight.

But as far as risks go, tanning seemed pretty minimal compared to what I needed it for.

When a man gets engaged, his friends might throw him a bachelor party. They'll herd off to a club to see strippers, or order them in, and raise a glass to the groom—that poor sucker, that lucky bastard. The bachelor party is a raucous, ritual demarcation between the chaos of single life and the mature orderliness of pairing off. One final night with the antiwife before wedding your wife-to-be, it's a time-honored way of saying, "Goodbye to all that."

But what does a former stripper do when she's about to get married?

On my bed at home, I've carefully laid out everything I'll need for my trip: costumes, jewelry, makeup, hairpieces, brushes, combs, and curling irons—all the things that make a girl girly. Like a good tan, these tools of the trade are critical, because for a dedicated exotic dancer, form is just as important as content—if not more so.

It's a wonder that I made any money at all when stripping was my sole means of support. I was a bit of a slob. I'd wear the same costumes for a year. Instead of buying new outfits each month like many of the girls, I'd take their hand-me-downs. I had roots here, chewed fingernails there; I ate cookies for breakfast and, in general, was not much of a pro. But this time I am finessing every detail. With the knowledge that this upcoming trip is the last of the last, I'm building my ideal stripper persona from the ground up. Or rather, from the outside in. Starting with the wardrobe. Thus far, ready to be packed, I've got:

• Long spandex halter-top gowns and matching thongs in fluorescent pink, red, and leopard-print
  
• Black strapless evening gown with gold beading
  
• Black minidress with silver reflective squares on the front
  
• Baby doll minidress made of insect-print fabric
  
• Silver metallic thigh-high boots
  
• White patent thigh-high boots
  
• Gold iridescent platform sandals with long ankle straps that wrap around five times
  
• Clear Lucite platform mules
  
• Ankle-strap stiletto heels in white, gold, silver, and black
  
• Day-Glo orange-and-black zebra stripe bikini
  
• Pink velvet bikini sprinkled with rhinestones
  
• Hot pink bikini with white polka dots, trimmed with white bows
  
• Garters to tuck tips in
  

…

I have been engaged for six months, and I'm being called by some inner voice to go on my own bachelorette odyssey. I quit working as a stripper almost five years ago. When I stopped, I charged right into a new life as a writer, and never took a long look back. I left a lot of loose ends dangling and I didn't have the time or the emotional energy to take any kind of personal inventory. That period of my life is well in the past, and most would say I'm better off for it. But the past has a tricky way of not staying put. The idea of stripping my way around the country, an old fantasy of mine, has resurfaced. I've met several women who have done it, and I envied their adventures, their courage to hare off to a strange town with little more than a bagful of costumes and their own curiosity. Now, the thought of taking such a trip myself comes to me all the time—when I'm brushing my teeth, when I'm working at the computer, when I'm lying on the living-room rug watching TV with Randy, my intended. With a mate and a journalism career and a house to consider, I can't just pick up and leave for an open-ended venture, but I want to get out there somehow. I look at Randy sometimes and wonder, does my desire to do this mask a fear of settling down? If I married him tomorrow and hadn't gone out on the road, would I feel resentful?

But when examined closely, my yearning to take this trip is less about sweeping the path to the altar clear than it is about needing to settle this for myself. For my own sanity. Those inner voices can be pretty persistent, after all. Sometimes they seduce: "Wouldn't you love to see the clubs in Dallas?" Other times they nag: "You think you have your whole life to take a trip like this? Train's leaving the station, honey. Better get on it!" It's strange: When I quit, I wanted out so badly and now the pull is just as strong to go back in—a surprise to many. Myself, most of all. On the desire's surface is the basic hunger for adventure—the same impulse that sends people scaling Mount Everest or off on the Iditarod, despite the protestation of family and friends, and regardless—or perhaps because—of the danger and the length of the odds.

I miss the bright lights, the showmanship, the gamble. Beneath that lies a feeling of incompleteness: For all the time I spent as a stripper—six years, on and off—I still feel there's so much I didn't see, and even more that I don't know. At the very core of the urge, nesting deep like a secret seed beneath the thrill-seeking, the stage hots, and the curiosity, is the startling realization that I sleepwalked my way through stripping the first time. And while I've had ample exposure to what everyone else feels about stripping, what eludes me still, after so much time, is how I really feel about it. I don't want to enter the next stage of my life leaving six years of my past unresolved and incomplete. Like veterans compelled to revisit a battle scene or refugees who years later sojourn to the homeland, I need to go back in order to move on. That's why the desire for this is so pressing, I realize. It's nothing I can reason away. You don't always choose your journeys in life. Sometimes they choose you.

I can't play the carefree California hardbody type to save my life, and I'll never pass for a supermodel or a pouty-but-pure teen queen, so I don't draw much inspiration from the sex symbols of today. Finding a role model for my stripper self requires a look back in time, to the 1950s, when a vamp could be a vamp, and there wasn't nothing like a dame. When sex symbols had some hips, some thighs, and some mystique.

The obvious icon of the era is Marilyn Monroe, but she's never appealed to me that much. She seemed too vulnerable, too much a victim of circumstance. And too straight-up Hollywood. The girl for me is the campy Marilyn knock-off, Miss Mamie Van Doren. She is a classic vamp whose most notable achievement is making an impressive number of forgettable films. On the poster for her film
Born Reckless,
Mamie stands staring into the distance, hands on her hips, wearing a cowboy hat, form-fitting blouse, criminally close-cut britches, and riding boots. The blurb reads: "She's every big-time rodeo prize rolled into one … pair of tight pants!" She also appeared in such projects as
The Girl in Black Stockings, High School Confidential, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women,
and my favorite,
Sex Kittens Go to College.
Make no mistake, Mamie wasn't known as a woman of great intellect or grace. Or talent. As Paula Yates writes in her book,
Blondes: A History from Their Earliest Roots
: "With an important line like 'Over yonder,' Mamie could make a seven-minute scene just licking her lips and pointing in the wrong direction." But Mamie seems self-possessed and fun. Fast but fabulous, Mamie is a total rocker. So I'll take a pinch of Mamie, and mix it together with a lot of burlesque legend, Lili St. Cyr.

Lili St. Cyr, born Willis Marie Van Shaack in Minneapolis, gained notoriety as a stripper in the 1950s for her glamorous and inventive stage routines. She immortalized the bubble bath show and raised the stakes on burlesque gimmickry when she developed "The Flying G," an act that ended with her g-string, which was attached to invisible fishing line, zipping out over the audience just as the lights went out. But more than her trademark shows, Lili was known for her uncommon sophistication. While other women in the business invented giddy, packaged personae—Ann "Bang Bang" Arbor, "The Million Dollar Figure"; Pepper Powell, "The Titian-Haired Tantalizer"; or Bubbles Darlene, "America's Most Exciting Body"—she was simply Lili St. Cyr, a bombshell who adopted the name of a French military academy. If Mamie brought a little rock-n-roll freedom to uptight Hollywood, Lili suffused the sleazy world of striptease with some elegance.

The best stage name is already taken. "Daisy Anarchy" is the moniker of a well-known bottle-blonde virago in San Francisco. So I have to come up with something else. Back in the early burlesque days, the second-tier, nonheadlining performers were called soubrettes. They'd adopt stage names with kitsch value—Ada Onion from Bermuda, Carrie de Booze from Canada, Lisa Carr from Detroit, that sort of thing. The modern equivalents are called house girls and they use straightforward first names: Keisha, Julie, Brittany, Devon. But that's no fun. Even though I'm just a house girl, I want a full name, something I've never used before, to go with my new, custom-built stripper identity. But there are so many choices I don't know where to start.