If you give a dancer a drink

The bloom is off the Atlantis rose for me. Maybe my initial visits were positive outliers and my recent ones were randomly mediocre, or maybe there’s been some decline at the club. This visit, like my previous one, was disappointing both in terms of the number and the attractiveness of the dancers. Unlike my previous visit, which was in the early afternoon, this one was on a Friday night, around 10pm, which you would think would be a pretty prime time. And I’ll admit there were, as always, a few really good looking girls, but there were plenty of customers in the club, and the hotties were pretty continuously being snagged by seeming regulars to go to the private rooms.

I found myself getting approached by somewhat less attractive dancers and waving them off, sometimes multiple times. It was also the first time I found fault with the layout of the club. Most of the other times I’ve gone, the T-shaped stage has been occupied by two dancers at a time, but this time there was only one dancer at a time, and some of them set up in one corner or another for multiple songs; if it wasn’t my corner, from where I was sitting I would have had to crane my neck to get a look. I don’t feel like craning my neck at a strip club.

Finally, after about an hour at the club, I was approached by an attractive dancer. She was friendly, but very young and not in a ‘wise despite her years’ type way. Like many Atlantis dancers, she was a student at a Philly area university. She ran track (has anyone else noticed a prevalence of sprinters among black dancers?) and we had a fun convo about the Penn Relays. She was finishing a drink and asked me to buy her another, which I did. Halfway through the second one, she was getting noticeably tipsy and admitted that she had rarely been drunk before. When I was younger, I might have thought that would result in a fun time, but I’m old enough to know that a sober, “working” stripper who is in control of herself will actually result in a more fun experience that a 19yo trying to handle liquor for the first time. Nevertheless, I succumbed to her request for a private dance after she gave me a passable preview at the bar. I regretted it almost immediately. In the private room, she stumbled taking off her shoes, and fumbled around trying to get her top off (I had to help her). She gave a dance that was an 8 for “heart” but a 3 for “execution” from the start, but it went from bad to worse was when she began to pass gas, multiple times, with her crotch a foot from my face. She kind of apologized, and I laughed it off, but I honestly couldn’t wait for the dance to end after that. I’m sure this must be an occupational hazard for dancers, but others must be better at controlling or hiding it because I can’t recall ever being on the receiving end of it before. Anyway, it was a true mood killer and most decidedly not the private dance experience I’d grown accustomed to at Atlantis. Oh well, I guess you win some and get winded by some.