by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/09/14 13:52 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/09/14/8770668856267197219.aspx
Feel free to ignore all or part of this blog post which is entirely off topic by any reasonable standard....
It all started with Valerie, the physical therapist in training who was working as a dancer when I lived in Columbus (previously mentioned in Stripping is an interesting job (aka On the meaning of meaningless, aka All Mn characters are non-spacing, but some are more non-spacing than others)) if you are curious....
I have had many people ask me over the years to fill in more of the story here, thus explaining the raison d'être of this very blog post....
The reason why my friends and I happened to be there is that one of us was getting over a recent breakup and had been inspired by the episode of Friends where Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry) was inspired to go to a strip club for the very same reason.
The club had discoverable rules like customers could touch dancers but the vice versa was not true, and that customers were encouraged to buy the dancers drinks 🍸 that were *very* watered down and mostly split between the dancer and the club while at the same time to drink lots themselves within reason.
I was kinda amused by the whole charade that was being played out and when Val asked me what was so funny and I explained why, she was herself amused by my insight into what was going on, asking me more questions about myself and so forth.
I learned that she was going to school to be a physical therapist and when I explained that I was doing transcription for some neurologists and neurosurgeons who often ordered physical therapy she loved the double entendres like "work hardening" and "using gait belts on each other" that made us laugh while everyone else thought that we were crazy...
I still have a few gait belts from that wild time, you know? ;-) We ended up breaking the rules and going out for several months outside of the club, while occasionally having as much fun as we dared *inside* the club without getting me kicked out or her fired. I even learned how she could dance for someone else while "aiming" it at me, some times to tease me and other times to frustrate me and make going home with each other later even more exciting. Sometimes I would have another lady dance for me and play the same game with Val too, with the other dancer our unindicted co-conspirator in this game we were playing with each other.
I learned a lot about not having to feel jealous and how to use those who were around us to express our own feelings for each other and enjoying ourselves the whole time.
When we finally *did* move on, it was on really good terms (now that I think about it better terms than usual!), with the following rule: as soon as one of us could dance with someone else and not have it be about each other, we would move on.
And eventually we did so, although I did attend her graduation months later and we had one last wild night to fuel our imaginations of this unorthodox relationship we shared.... ;-)
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