“Mind you, that’s only my opinion, of course,” said Andrea, who’s been dancing at a club called Private Eye, in Aberdeen, for the last two years and knows the score. She knew, for instance, that it was unwise for Mark Bosnich, the new Manchester United goalie, to have his stag party at a lap-dancing club the night before his wedding. Andrea does lots of stag nights but never the night before the nuptials That’s much too risky. The groom could be put on a slow train to John o’Groats in a drunken stupor and go missing for a week.
Here’s another thing. If you’re muttering irritably that an article about lap dancing without a picture of a lap dancer makes as much sense as a ploughman’s lunch without a pickled onion, hear this.
You don’t have to look stunning to be a lap dancer – stunning in the conventional sense, that is.One of the girls Andrea dances with is a size 16, but the boys love her It’s her attitude; she’s fun. That’s what counts, says Andrea, who’s 19 and intermittently blonde, and wants to go back to college when she’s made enough money and seen the world Neither should take long. She can earn up to pounds 500 on a good night, which is the same as the girls earn at Stringfellows in London. No wonder they can’t get the staff any more at John Lewis, as a harassed assistant in haberdashery told me when I was looking for shoe polish.
They’re all auditioning to be lap dancers.Incidentally, they don’t call them lap dancers at Stringfellows. They call them table-side dancers, and “they’re very, very tasteful”, said Roger, Stringfellows’ operations director. “It’s not like America where the girls really do get into extraordinary contortions in their customers’ laps and are happy to accept tips in unusual places. We take great care to observe all the proprieties,” said Roger piously, sounding more like a churchwarden than a man who auditions up to 20 girls a night wearing only a pair of high heels, a G-string and an easily removable frock.
The girls, I mean, not Roger.London apparently has funny laws about dancing girls. In the West End they’re not allowed to strip off completely, and they have to wear G-strings and literally keep their customers at arm’s length; whereas in the City, a mile away, they can take the lot off.”All our girls wear garters above the knee for customers to tuck their tips into neatly,” said Roger, who clearly runs a tight ship. He was signally unimpressed, by the way, with my description of Andrea’s size 16 colleague who had the boys begging for more. “Aberdeen is full of big, tough oil men who probably go in for big women. Of course, I can’t impose my personal preferences on the girls I employ. I have to account for all tastes – small Asian, big Swedish, redheads, brunettes and some very slender girls, too. It’s the Kate Moss look.”As for being able to dance, that’s almost irrelevant.
