HARDBACK
LANE CONFESSES TYPICAL STORY ... AND A FEW ODDITIES
BY DOUG FRENCH

A fool and his money are soon parted,” the old saying goes. And there’s no business like the strip club business to make that happen. But if you think all it takes is the standard bump-n-grind to earn the big money, you’ve led too sheltered a life. 

Thankfully, ex-stripper Lacey Lane is here to fill us in on the curious needs of certain VIP-room customers in her book Confessions of a Stripper: Tales from the VIP Room.

Ms. Lane evidently made all the money she needed in just seven years of shaking her moneymaker and has, according to her bio, retired from the biz to split time between Scottsdale and L.A. It is hard to imagine that she has completely retired, however, given that, based on her account, she seems to have spent most of her money on clothes and spa treatments. 

If the reader is interested in the lurid details of sex acts performed clandestinely in the darkness of strip club VIP rooms, this book will be a disappointment. Although the author writes that sex happens — especially in Sin City — she would never agree to compromise her morals and do that for money. 

Lane’s high and mighty moralizing is one of the weak points of the book along with her continuous use of corny analogies like, “…and enough raw fish to make the Pacific Ocean take out Missing Persons ads on milk cartons.” She uses almost half of the book to tell her story about having low self-esteem despite being “extremely attractive,” and having a “killer body.” Of course, this was dear old dad’s fault because he divorced Lane’s mother when the author was only 2 years old. She has abandonment issues. 

Predictably, a cruel stepfather arrives on the scene. But soon Lane escapes to college, and during her sophomore year checks out a local strip club with some of her guy friends. She finds the club empowering, but doesn’t think she could take off her clothes for money. So, she decides to apply for a job totting drinks. Unfortunately, the club didn’t need cocktail jocks, and the rest is history: She enters a profession where she can make money — $1,900 for her first four days on the job — while at the same time working on her self-esteem issues.

Lane also has plenty of tips for both aspiring dancers (have a good attitude and work to get customers into the VIP room) and strip-club patrons (tip bartenders heavily because they have the scoop on everything, dress neatly and bring lots of money) that she dispenses before finally getting to the stories advertised in the book’s title.

The back half of the book is a series of short chapters chronicling the stories of unusual customers with unusual needs. Lane worked in a number of clubs coast-to-coast, so her experience has run the gamut. A few of the common fetishes like foot, baby and crush are represented, along with stories involving snakes, iguanas, bugs and rodents.

Her customers included: a woman looking for a wife candidate for her son; a British secret agent; a guy with multiple personalities; a professional gambler who blew up balloons with 20- and 50-dollar bills inserted so as to watch in delight as dancers stomped on them to get the money; a guy looking for his reincarnated ex-fiancé who had committed suicide; and a dentist who paid to floss dancers’ teeth and then used the same floss to clean his own. 

The most interesting tales involved guys who Ms. Lane described as quiet and nerdy. One guy was willing to pay the author and other dancers — not to dance — but play Scrabble, chess and card games such as Go Fish, War and Concentration with him. He even insisted the girls leave their clothes on. 

One “cute balding little man” insisted on making a rubber cast of the author’s feet, a process that took 40 minutes and cost the “foot man” $350. And then there was the customer who looked like a “GQ model” and paid the girls while he measured each part of their bodies that could be measured, logging the results in a reporter’s notebook. 

A few of the events from the book took place in Las Vegas, but the real wacky stuff occurred in Los Angeles strip clubs. Like the California Legislature, “Los Angeles has, by far, the most resident nuts, kooks, weirdos, and freaks,” according to Lane. 

Strippers need money as much as politicians, and at least they provide a service people want to pay for. LW