Ok. I don't think I've really said I'm a 'pole dancer'. It just takes a lot more explaining - plus it sounds like I get paid for it!
Because 'pole dancer' is synonymous for most people with stripper, which I'm not (not that there's a thing wrong with that if it floats your boat and pays your bills ladies). And no matter how hard you try to explain that we wear very little on the pole in the first place because the friction of skin contact helps us not to fall on our heads and that there is no grinding on the thing like your butt crack is itchy, and for gods sakes I don't even own a pair of perspex platform heels...well, it never seems to convince people that you're not practicing at home with a chair and a feather boa.
Here's the truth, pole (some say 'pole fitness' to differentiate from the girls who collect dollar bills in their panties) is one of the hardest things, physically, I've ever done. And I'm no soft city girl. I had a couple of years of intensive kung fu under my belt before I fell off a pole for the first time. You'll know a beginner from her bruises - mostly on the inner arms and thighs - huge big blue-green mothers, where the muscles aren't strong enough to hold onto the pole and the skin gets dragged and burned. You'll know too from her blistered, sticky hands, if she's been practicing enough. Coated with a mixture of resin and alcohol to make some of the more dange-
rous inversions a little less risky, this stuff takes days of scrubbing to get off. If you catch her after class, she's dizzy from the spins and red-faced from hanging upside down, and her arms ache from dragging herself up to the ceiling dozens of times in an hour.
Before I started, I never thought anything so demanding could look so easy.
So why do it? Because it's bloody addictive. And, if you have the right teacher (thank you Thuy!) it's incredibly fun. There's nothing like it (even if you're like me and spinning makes you rather nauseous): the turns, the climbing, the inversions, the suspensions... and even though it takes a while, the unbeatable sense of accomplishment when you manage something you've been trying to do right for months - that's worth every drop of sweat.
And then there are the girls who take this seriously - and I'm not talking here about seven nights a week at a gentlemen's club. I mean international championships (any kind of stripping and you're barred), world tours with Cirque du Soleil and private lessons for $100 an hour. Every girl's pole idol is the Australian Felix Cane, world number one and the most impressive pole dancer you have ever seen (not to mention deliciously cute). This girl has done moves others couldn't even get into, and 'death drops' no one else would dare.
After leaving BA and my regular lessons I had to make do with the pole that held up the washing line out our back garden in Galway, plus some gardening gloves to avoid frostbite (the addicted will do anything to get their fix. Children's playgrounds, street signs, subway bars...) Now that I'm up here in the great white north, I'm saving for my own pole, and may even give lessons eventually.
And then someday....someday there'll be a 'coyote ugly' type establishment, where the girls dance on poles attached to the bar for the sheer good clean fun of it, and the pay will be great (paid by the owner, by cheque rather than in crumpled dollar bills) and we'll have our own pole academy, and touring show, and enter the olympics, and....
Till then, I'm a teacher, a traveler and a lowly writer.
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