Strip Clubs

I just heard an antecdote about a strip club that made me pause and reflect.

Seems an HR director at a regional branch of a larger corporation was recently fired for taking a work team out to a strip club.

I don't get strip clubs.

I don't get HR directors either, but that's a whole different subject.

Don't get me wrong-- about the strip clubs-- I like nudity. It just strikes me that there are alot better ways to enjoy people getting naked.

I mean, lots. Back in the day, I got lured into going to a series of strip clubs, and the whole time I remember thinking, I think I might enjoy seeing these ladies naked, in a different setting, but this is just stupid.

Of the probably 14 women I saw naked (or semi-naked, which seemed to depend on relative age), only one of them could really dance, and few of them seemed to be enjoying what they were doing at all. In fact, the guys watching seemed to enjoy the ones who were not enjoying what they were doing, which was weird. The whole thing was just . . . well, depressing.

Here's the best thing that happened to me the night I went out to a bunch of strip clubs.

It was a week night, a Thursday, I think. Towards the end of the night, at the last place we went, they had shots of Canadian Club for a buck and a half. I was bored with the strippers, one of whom had sat down to talk politics with the guys I was with (and proceeded to con them into paying her "cab fare"), so I got up to go to the bar for a second Canadian Club (I had been drinking beer previously, and had managed to keep a fairly even keel). The bartender poured me two shots, saying the second one was on the house (this was at, like, one thirty in the morning), so I stayed to chat with him. He asked me what I did for a living, and I said nothing yet (I was a college student), but I wanted to be a writer.

A guy who had just come up to the bar to get his next whisky said "Don't bother. There isn't any money in it."

His words hit me in the forehead like a shotput. I drunkenly asked "What do you mean?"

"You ever see that movie Terms of Endearment?" He asked. I nodded. He said "I wrote that." And he turned and walked away, without another word.

By this time my friends were out of money and asking if I had any left. I had thirty bucks, but I lied and said not enough for another round. So we left.

A bit later, on the mercifully short ride home, I managed to drag the name out of my murky memory: Larry McMurtry. I just got shot down by Larry Freakin' McMurtry. What the hell he was doing at a strip club in Charlotte on a Thursaday night was anybody's guess.

I got no use for strip clubs. Anyone ever asks, my vote is include me out.

(A quick PS After the Yours Truly: On looking up Doc Nagel's blog I was zipped tot he Wikipedia entry on the concept of the Invisible hand, the intro to which reads thusly:

"The invisible hand is a metaphor coined by the economist Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations and other writings, Smith claims that, in capitalism, an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called “the invisible hand”. In detail, a free competitive market ensures that those goods and services perceived as most beneficial, efficient, or of highest quality will naturally be those that are most profitable. Thus, self-interest striving for profit has the side-effect of benefiting everyone by increasing standards. The mechanism for this, Smith saw as being the free price system.[1]. The Invisible hand would have been true if we could have actually seen it."

Ah, Wikipedia. You just know, you just gotta know, that that last line was inserted by some cranky academian, screwing with Wikipedia because he belongs to the freakin wiki, strictly because he/she could.)