My First Stripper

Did you know that you can hire a stripper online?  No, really. 

 

I went to a bachelorette party a few weeks back and there was a stripper.  In this girl’s living room.  And by girl, I mean, 35-year-old mom.  IN HER LIVING ROOM.  I was woefully unprepared for a stripper, but that didn’t stop me from asking Tony, Tony’s mom, Leland, and other people who are close to me (and by asking, I mean shrieking incredulously): “How do you hire a stripper?!  Are there references for such a thing?!  What’s he going to do?!  Are we just going to sit around and watch him take off his clothes?!”

 

But here’s how it is.  There’s this thing called the internet, and you can basically run a business on it (I know, right!  Who does that?) and that business can be providing strippers to the greater Seattle Metropolitan area.  And you can post photos so that people can choose whom to hire.  Like these.  We saw Giovanni, if you’re brave enough to click through.  And then a potential client can book a whole damn bachelorette party right online and even specify what sort of costume the stripper will wear, OHMYGOD.  Possibilities = endless.

 

The bride is a marathon nut.  So the stripper rang the doorbell in running clothes, claiming he got lost while training for a marathon.  OF COURSE HE DID.

 

So, here is the list of stuff I learned about strippers, particularly those who make house calls:

 

It is not so much a show as it is a series of lap dances.  Lap dances for everyone!  The bride got a bit freaked out after ten minutes or so of the stripper dancing all over her, taking dollar bills out of her shirt with his teeth (his teeth!), so he moved on to the rest of us.  In case you’re wondering, we all had several “turns” at getting a lap dance, and I got my ass smacked pretty darn hard a few times.

 

It’s totally okay to squeal.  Or, at least, Giovanni didn’t mind.  He was really cool about our level of drunken girlishness.  I like to imagine that he is just a normal UW student trying to make ends meet by stripping on the weekends.  Besides, don’t you think it would have been a million times weirder if we were all serious or, God forbid, turned on and into it?  Eeeewwww!

 

You have to provide your own music.  This is a lot of trust on the part of the stripper, if you ask me.  On the one hand, it’s our party, so we should listen to what we like.  And, for whoever got to make the “stripper mix” on her ipod, well, that’s a source of fun for years to come.  But what if our taste in music was horrible?  Like, “crank up the Sade and work it!”  I don’t think so.

 

So now I have been there, done that.  If you ask me to your bachelorette party and you have a stripper, I will not even bat an eye.  I might down several glasses of champagne the night of to prepare myself, but I will not be outwardly phased.

 

Come to think of it, the rest of the night had one first and one surely-not-last as well: I rode a mechanical bull for the first time (and fell off), and for not the first and probably not the last time I danced on a bar.  You know what?  I’m a hell of a good time.

Finding the Sun

If I controlled the world, I’d make all my friends live where I choose to live.  Sadly, I’m not in charge.  Unless you are Charles and Jamie and Buster.  Then I am most definitely in charge.

 

Consequently, if I want to see friends, they either have to visit me or I have to visit them.  It goes without saying that before I had children, it was a lot easier to go see friends in far-flung locales.  Now, however, I have to cart carseats and snacks and diapers and toys and books and many changes of clothing where ever we go.

 

On Thursday, we said goodbye to Tony, goodbye to Buster, and goodbye to snow and hopped a plane to Phoenix to visit Liz.  My mom came, too, keeping the adult-to-child ratio at 1-1 for the travel period and bumping us up to 3-to-2 while in Phoenix (this was ideal).  The weather was perfect.  The company was excellent.  And the plane rides were encouraging – I’m now feeling more confident that we can make a much longer flight to France later this spring.

 

While in Phoenix, we did a lot of playing.  That’s certainly something else that has changed since having kids: when I travel with them, the trip becomes necessarily for them.  Meaning, I write off most of the things that I want to do, or would do if I were there alone.  No adventurous dining.  No wine bars.  No adult museums.  No long car trips. 

 

Instead, we spent most of our time at the Train Park and at the Phoenix Children’s Museum (which was HUGE).  I probably don’t need to tell you how much fun that was for Charles.  See for yourself the level of mirth: