Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America

It was so fascinating to read about Lily's journey around the country, the insider bits about how different strip clubs are run, her motivations for becoming a stripper in the first place, and how the experience affected her. It's a lot more philosophical than I thought it would be; Lily really delves deeply inter her own feelings about what she is doing and whether it is damaging to her psyche. She also includes interviews with a couple of older women who were or still are in the business, which adds some historical perspective to her writing. She treats her subject with thought and humanity, instead of salaciousness, which is refreshing. Really a fantastic read!

On the voyage of self-discovery and fulfillment, some people take a year off after grad school and join the Peace Corps. Others go live in an ashram, meditating and harmonizing with the inner god. Some climb mountains, some sail around the oceans in dinghies, some bike across America.

Not Lily Burana. She got naked.

And you can read all about it in her memoir-up-to-this-point, Strip City. It’s subtitled A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America, and that should tell you everything you need to know about this 328-page goodbye letter to sequins, pasties and cash-stuffed G-strings. At times it’s brazenly funny, at times it’s brusquely polemical, but rarely is it shocking. There’s a certain prudishness clotting the atmosphere show more of Burana’s tale of strip joints and peepshows. If you can imagine a furiously blushing Walt Disney sitting at the tip rail and waving twenties in the general direction of a well-clothed vagina, then you’ll have some idea of the kind of PG-13 restraint found in Burana’s narrative.

Here’s the setup: Burana had worked as a stripper, off and on, for six years. She quit to pursue a career as a journalist. Then, after being out of the strip business for five years, she fell in love with a cowboy she met in a Wyoming bar. They got engaged and that’s when Burana had a crisis of the soul: she wanted to have one last fling with getting nekkid in public.
Like veterans compelled to revisit a battle scene or refugees who years later sojourn to the homeland, I need to go back in order to move on. That why the desire for this is so pressing, I realize. It’s nothing I can reason away. You don’t always choose your journeys in life. Sometimes they choose you.

It appears that Ms. Burana had a copy of I Ching propped open on the desk while writing this.

Polemics and All I Really Needed to Know I Learned at the Dancing Beaver aside, Burana takes us on a journey across America’s strip clubs (about 2,500 by rough estimates from The Exotic Dancer Bulletin)—from Dallas to Anchorage—as she works a couple nights here, a couple hours there. Along the way, she journeys back through her life (perhaps because “it chooses herâ€??).

And so we see how she began, at 18, working at Peepland on New York’s 42nd Street:
I know the threshold I have crossed, that I have entered a dangerous and possibly damaging world. This is not cosmetic defiance like being a hardcore kid; a very serious taboo has been broken, and there is no turning back. This is scary, but in a small, sleazy way, it’s exciting, too. I never would have through that I’d do something like this, but now that I have, I am full of my own daring. I feel more in control of my life than I have in months.
That same feeling of “gee-I-can’t-believe-I’m-doing-thisâ€? continues through the rest of the book. When she’s not describing the Life with wide-eyed wonder, she takes time out to ponder the real question at the heart of the matter: why do men go to strip clubs?
I’m mystified—I squint at them contemptuously and try to puzzle it out. Sometimes, if the tips aren’t coming fast enough, I corner them: “What are you doing here?â€? “Is that a wedding ring? Why aren’t you home with your wife?â€?
Still later, she sermonizes from the Church of the Sacred Strobe-Light:
Stripping takes out of me things that I didn’t even realize I had. The near-nudity isn’t the problem, or the physical vulnerability, or working well outside the margins of acceptable female behavior. It’s the damn neediness: Angry men scowling at me like they can buy me for a dollar, lonely men professing love after a ten-minute chat with the specter of femininity that wafts before them, and confused and desperate men convinced that if only they could get a girl to do what they ask, however outlandish, things will be better somehow. These men don’t just hunger for a glimpse of skin, because they could stay home and look at Miss August were that the case. They want some kind of connection, to tap the life in a live, nude girl. And no amount of professional distance on my part can keep that leeching feeling at bay. I’ve nothing left but exhausted tears, choked out silently, running in fat rills to my chin. I drive along crying and mopping my face with wadded-up Burger King napkins.

An acquaintance of mine, a regular patron of strip clubs, says he has to take his trips in small doses, that after only an hour he starts to get nudity overload. You won’t necessarily get nudity overload in these pages, though you might overdose on sentiment and self-pity.

So don’t come to Strip City looking to get your jollies by reading about bare boobs and lap dances that go too far. By the same token, don’t come in search of a nitty-gritty expose of the flesh industry. But if you want to read about the ache of leaving something behind (turning a chapter in your life, so to speak) and you don’t mind spending a couple hundred pages doing so, then by all means crack open the book.

Don’t get me wrong—Burana is a very competent writer (sentences like “the sax player goes crazy, splatting, honking and wailing as Tempest peels off layer after layerâ€? roll trippingly through the brain) and she writes with sincerity. It’s just that I learned nothing new about the strip industry that I didn’t already know from seeing countless scenes in movies where lowlifes meet in smoky bars to discuss matters of great criminal importance. In the blurry background, there’s usually a couple of girls with vacant eyes swiveling their hips or kneading their breasts or doing pole gymnastics—but they’re always there to serve as mute mannequins, window dressing to boost the movie’s rating toward an R.

Burana at least allows the mannequins to speak, but—save for a few characters—we still don’t get a sense of the Inner Stripper. Not that I was expecting Bergman, mind you; but I was hoping for something more than Disney. show less

Strip City was a book that I came upon without knowing what to expect of it. Knowing only a limited number of people within the adult entertainment industry, the stereotypical view of those who populate it wasn't one that I necessarily held in mind. While this book did little to "open my eyes" to what the industry is, it did entertain me considerably.

I found her forays into the history of the striptease interesting, and particularly enjoyed the anecdotes of Times Square that Scarlett provided. Also interesting were the comparison of the clubs found in Texas, Montana, and Las Vegas. I think that this book did more to paint broad pictures of human nature than it did to detail a trip across America. Also, her trip across America wasn't so show more much a trip as it was a series of jaunts. Oh, well.

All in all, this book was light entertaining reading that held my interest the whole time. I enjoyed Lily's writing style and blutness more than anything else. show less

Lily Burana is a poster child for what the sex industry is meant to do for a liberated woman -- she enjoys her job, rarely feels degraded and easily earns the money to pay for college with savings leftover to support an uncertain freelance writing career. But as Burana reflects on her life as a stripper during a one-year tour of stripping across the United States, she finds that even she cannot escape the feeling of stigma attached to her profession. This is a thought-provoking book whose ideas have stuck with me for quite a few years.

I could not wait to get started on this book. While entertaining, I felt that it was misrepresented. The subtitle (A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America) led me to believe that this would be about a year of travel and stripping. What the different clubs were like, what the different people were like, etc. What you get it a tiny bit of this, but more introspection regarding why she got into stripping in the first place, how the industry has changed, whether she really wants to quit or not, what the first clubs she worked at were like... Not quite what I was sold on. Entertaining, but mis-sold and that annoys me.

Retired stripper Burana decides to take one last tour of America for investigative journalism and writes about the industry from a personal and political perspective. This was a good introduction to a profession I knew next to nothing about, but seemed to honestly deal with the conflicts of money, feminism, and the objectification and monetization of sexuality. Fascinating.

An interesting look at the underbelly of the sex industry from an insider's perspective. Reading this book was both educational, as I learned about the industry, and depressing, as I saw the author's struggle to get out of the business. Not necessarily a story about redemption, this is illustrative of the kinds of unexpected emotional and material temptations that lie in the way of the unwary in this business.