Ava Adore

Expiry Dates

So, for those of you who’re baby strippers, here’s something I didn’t know when I started working: Regulars come with an expiration date on the package. I’m not talking about dying; I mean there will eventually come a day, sooner or later, that your regular stops coming in (at all or for you, makes no matter really).

Now it seems like common sense to me, but then again ‘regulars’ in general remain something of a mystery to me even today. But back then, I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what a regular really was, how you got one, how you kept one—how you kept more than one. Then I started treating shifts like marketing networking seminars and got better at it (ha!).

So my question to all veteran strippers, active and otherwise: How do you keep your regulars coming back over time—extending the expiry date? Or is that impossible?

I sit here staring at my list of contacts and it seems the ending of each defunct regular was more or less logical: a few went broke, a few moved, one had a baby, one was the best friend of the father of a new dancer and wouldn’t come back (that one was good while he’d lasted), and a few turned out to be dicks I didn’t want to see again anyway.

But what I want to know is how you prolong the inevitable: the “good” regular who comes in steady and then decides he’d rather take you to dinner. He’s decided he’s ‘earned his stripes’ and that this really is a dating game after all and if you don’t want to go out with him, he doesn’t want to spend any more on you. This happens eventually.* How do you put it off?

I don’t lead people on. If I keep you as a regular it means I actually can stomach you as a person and don’t mind spending copious amounts of time on your lap, hearing you talk; hell, I even care about the words you say. I can’t keep up the bullshit facade if I can’t stand you. It’s just not in me. I’m a bad businesswoman, I guess. But this also, clearly, cuts down on my long-term regulars. What’s a girl to do?

*I have met only 4 (lovely) exceptions. That’s to-date; maybe they’ll ‘outlive’ me or maybe their expiry date just hasn’t hit yet. We’ll see.