It’s tough in the stripper business. On any given day, a stripper might wake up to find that there’s a new law that says she has to wear more clothes, or stay a certain distance away from the customers, or who knows what. There’s always a preacher or a pinhead politician hassling the hardworking strippers. Right now, strippers in Alabama are shooting spray-on latex onto their girlparts so they can comply with an Alabama law that requires any skin that would be covered by a modest bikini to have an opaque covering. After a federal judge threatened to throw out Alabama’s anti-nudity law—an act that would’ve allowed Alabama strippers to dance full-out naked—movers and shakers in the state government decided that latex bikinis were better than nothing. “The choice we were faced with was some covering or no covering,” said Chief Deputy Attorney General Keith Miller. “We decided it was better to have these coverings than nothing at all.” Meanwhile, down at Sammy’s, a strip club in Birmingham, attentive folk say that anybody can see right through the latex, and the dancers look to be topless. Apparently, these women’s state-mandated coverings aren’t exactly opaque. All this puts me to wondering: why should any government official anywhere spend any time thinking about strippers’ pink parts and protuberances, and how much covering those parts need? Are the strippers causing any real harm? Has any stripper nipple—even a big and sturdy one that could support, say, a stack of eight to 10 CDs—ever hurt anybody? I bet not. From everything I know, nipples are shy and gentle things, much more likely to be hurt than to dish out any hurt. Back in my rock ’n’ roll days, I played many a gig at Al’s Cabaret in Birmingham. It was an after-hours club, and at about 2 a.m., it filled up with strippers who’d just gotten off work. Those strippers wore pasties, with tassels. The girls could get their tassels going clockwise, counterclockwise, or both ways at the same time. I don’t know about anybody else, but the late-night tassel-spinning at Al’s always put me in a good mood. It’s none of my business what Alabama strippers do, but they might want to consider the old-school tasseled pasties rather than the new spray-on bikini tops. Seems to me the cleanup—or, more likely, the pick-off—would be a lot easier with the pasties. I know some of you are wondering: what do the strippers do about covering up the “modest bikini” area on their bottoms? Well, according to published reports, they spray their butt cheeks with latex, and then put on thongs. Apparently, getting the latex tangled up in body hair isn’t an issue, because today’s hip-and-happening stripper doesn’t have any body hair below her neck. Fred Patterson, who works on the Birmingham vice squad, told the Associated Press: “You can get (latex) that matches your skin color. The only thing I hear from the girls is that it can be kind of irritating.” Well, there is an alternative. Alabama strippers could start a new fashion trend by using spray-on hair. An internet-savvy stripper could go to onlyhairloss.com/glh and buy a can of Good Looking Hair for just $13.95. If Good Looking Hair doesn’t make a good spray-on bikini, a resourceful dancer could use it as a truck-bed liner. Better yet, they could just get themselves some real enough latex bikinis, which unlike the spray-on sex suits ought to be good for more than one show. A quick Googling of “latex bikini” turns up many opportunities to buy—or just look at—a whole lot of latex bikinis. There’s even a photo gallery of supermodel Gisele Bundchen in a latex bikini. It’s easy to make fun of Alabama’s strict anti-nudity law, their anti-erection law and their anti-sex-toy “dildon’t” law, even though we have virtually identical laws here in Tennessee. Truth is, any police officer in either state could go to a strip club, spend a few miserable hours checking for exposed nipples and turgid manparts and fill up a bus with offending dancers and patrons. Not that it would do any good. I say if a woman wants to dance naked on a pole in front of people, that’s fine with me. If a man wants to go watch naked dancers on poles, that’s fine too. As long as they don’t drive home drunk and hit someone. I haven’t been to any strip clubs myself. Not because I’d be offended or corrupted by it, but because I think strip clubs would smell funny. I’m a man who can smell ants from a distance. Put me in a room filled with hot and sweaty girlparts, pheromones, cigarette funk, liquor smells and such like, and I just wouldn’t be able to enjoy the dancing. Besides, I can see all manner of naked dancing on cable TV anytime. Finally, I have to admit that I’ve been wondering: after the show, do the Alabama dancers peel the latex off themselves, or do they peel it off each other? Either way, I think the peeling would be way more fun to watch than the dancing. If they start doing live latex peeling in Alabama, somebody let me know. I might be willing to go as far as Huntsville.
