Graduation night at the pole-dancing studio. They do this every December, when the course of instruction hits its end. The students show what they learned and they do so for two and a half hours. Soloists and dance teams, one after the other. It’s a gala evening, a high-spirited event. The students aren’t preparing for work as strippers; the training’s for themselves and now they celebrate. Some are dancers, as in modern dancers, some are actresses, others simply want a discipline and like this one.
See a difficult thing done well, especially by one person after another, and you feel like the world’s a better place. See people who all look the way you wish people could look and you get a bit dizzy, even hot behind the eyes. The students are women, their ages in the 20s and 30s, their height far from uniform. But they’re all toned, their bodies elegant. Run your eyes along and you see nothing that isn’t muscle, but no particular muscle catches your eye. The muscles ripple along and form a surface and this surface doesn’t rest. Meanwhile the girl’s moving up the pole; knee close to an ear, she lets her arm glide outward and she’s 10 feet above the floor and with her nose pointed to the ceiling.
The students wear costumes that seem to be trying to hide on them; during each act the costume seems to wind up smaller than it started. I remember bikinis, and possibly shifts and bikini bottoms, with various accessories suited to different themes. In between acts agile figures with disinfectant run cloths up and down the poles. One of the agile figures wears an orange bikini and has a profile like an angel; it’s such a privilege to look at her, and the display is par for the course here. What I mean is that we’re supposed to look. It’s a land where beautiful women have their bodies out for view, no asterisk about how they’re really just going for a swim or a cardio. The women are here to pole dance, we in the audience (men and women) are here to look at them do so, and the dancers make sure their bodies are on maximum display. This kind of situation is usually set up by men who want other men’s spending money. But here the women set it up, the studio owner and her teachers and students.
At show’s end the students line up to take their bows. Seeing the line-up briefly switches the default for reality. Standard-issue humanity has become streamlined and poised, not clunky and knobby. It’s like when the Legion of Superheroes gathers and everyone’s a superhero, there’s a landscape of them and that’s how people are. The studio gala, second floor of a small building downtown, and there’s a stage full of people looking this way, and they’re women who want you to look. Finally, at last, reality has redesigned itself to be comfortable.
My trainer told me about it. He’s known the studio owner since they were kids, when he came prancing up to her and said she had to come to his friends’ party; she had on a purple dress and back then he thought that was style. All these years later he’s got his practice and she has her studio. He was the show’s second MC and helped with the pole wiping. Adrien, my trainer, is very good at what he does, and it was nice to see that his friend’s a good teacher. Also a good producer, since the evening proceeded splendidly. Cunning decorations stretched between us and the ceiling, strings of silver stars and purple squiggles and demure little gold disks, and their placement shaped the room. and proceeded with aplomb. At one point a stout, charismatic blonde woman of middle age advanced into the audience, microphone in hand; she was singing a patter song that featured some very nice rhymes. At another point a bodybuilding cop showed up; he wanted to enforce noise ordinances but lost track of his shirt and pants. The owner did a bit with Adrien where the cop thought she was feeling him up but really it was Adrien—a comic shock for the burly heterosexual.
Thirty-five people on stage at the end: the cop, the singer, the MCs and pole wipers, and the many teachers and students. The audience was also 35 or 40 people. Plush loveseats, not folding chairs; the loveseats had been pushed together and made rows, three and a half stubby and shallow crescents that took up all the room’s space except for the stage and a small gap behind us. The loveseats held you; the cushioning was deep but firm, the arm rests massive. People were all near each other but not breathing on each other, and the air never got close. The heat must’ve been turned down and everything left to the bodies.
Adrien tells me that after the show the cop described his exercise regimen; unfortunately the cop also said he wasn’t gay. Another misfortune is that the woman in the orange bikini has a boyfriend, though my regret’s academic, of course—I’m old. The end of your life nears and you stumble upon what you never had, this petite land of sanity located inside a stumpy building near the warehouses. Sad but beautiful. Or I should say I’m sad, they’re beautiful.