Free Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles by Lynn Waddell Page A

earn? Either way, having been hustled by a
    stripper for the first time in my life, I feel a little exploited.
    She moves on to the O’Doul’s couple. “Would you like a dance?” she
    asks and takes the woman’s chunky hand. The two women disappear
    into the shadows of lap dance alley. Skinny Mr. O’Doul’s stays behind
    and sneaks glances.
    Are the female customers a sign of widespread sexual liberation or
    simply an indication that Tampa attracts more female libertines? After
    talking with the couple who earlier poked bills into the cowgirl’s cleav-
    ap
    age, I suspect the latter.
    Mar
    Jack and Sandy, who prefer pseudonyms, are part of a threesome
    t
    who share a condominium at Paradise Lakes, a Pasco County nudist
    Fo
    community. Sandy’s a nurse; Jack’s a retired cop from Michigan. Mar-
    gni
    tha, his wife, also retired, couldn’t come with them tonight. Clarifying
    K e
    their living arrangements, Sandy says that she and Martha have sepa-
    ht
    rate bedrooms and Jack goes back and forth. “I’m bisexual,” she adds.
    7
    “Though not so much anymore since I got with Jack.”
    4
    Jack rolls his eyes.
    They aren’t scoping for a fourth companion, although they haven’t
    ruled out getting a lap dance. “We were just bored and had nothing else
    to do,” Sandy says, proving that even polyandry can get stale. “We’ve
    never been here before so we decided to come down and check it out.”
    “I heard about it when I lived up in Michigan. But it’s just one of
    those famous things that when you live near it you rarely get around
    to checking out,” Jack says as if the strip club is a national landmark.
    Of course, he has also been distracted, what with sharing the beds of
    two women at a nudist resort that just hosted the Miss G-String Inter-
    national contest.
    Little surprises Mary when it comes to customers’ sexual prefer-
    ences. Back when a mother, in her forties, and her daughter danced
    at the Mons, a couple of men regularly bought lap dances with both at
    once, inferring incestuous fantasies. “There are some sick puppies that
    come in here sometimes,” Mary says.
    Wearing jeans, an oversized T-shirt, and little makeup, Mary looks
    more like a friendly Home Depot garden employee than a strip-club
    manager. She has bangs and a loose ponytail that’s dark with a few
    strands of gray. She’s worked for Joe for twenty years. She’s been a
    waitress, a door girl, and now a manager, but never a dancer. “Some-
    proof
    times I think I should have been because I would have made more
    money,” she jokes. In seriousness, she adds. “I couldn’t do it. I don’t
    judge the girls who do, but it’s not me. I’m more private about that
    stuff, and I couldn’t stand people touching me.”
    The stage is briefly empty, and Mary calls out over the microphone
    for a dancer to take the stage. She sighs in exasperation. “We tell
    them over and over that they will get more dances if people see them
    onstage.”
    Mary likens her job to being mom to five hundred teenage girls.
    “They have so much drama in their lives. A lot of the girls come here
    open and fresh, and some go from that frame of mind to being sucked
    ad
    into this fucked-up drama with the other girls,” she says.
    ir
    Although the club is nonalcoholic, dancers can stash drinks in the
    olF
    dressing-room refrigerator. If one gets drunk, Mary makes them sit in
    eg
    their car until they are sober enough to drive home or come back to the
    nir
    stage.
    F
    Naturally, the club has a no-drug policy, but invariably some dancers
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    develop a habit. “Joe has put girls through rehab,” Mary says. “He will
    help those who are willing to help themselves. Ones that don’t, he lets
    them go.”
    She says before the Great Recession, Joe kept a therapist on retainer
    for dancers and offered health insurance to full-time employees. “Joe’s
    an exceptional boss,” Mary says. “He’s only here a few hours a day, but
    he’s always here. He lives