B.C.'s strip clubs are down to the bare bones

Not a lot is going on in strip clubs in B.C. these days.

Wasn't a lot going on in the Fox pub when Keona Lee took to the stage in her white high heels and not much else.

It was late Thursday afternoon. A few guys shooting pool, a few more watching the Canucks. Only a couple of front-row regulars radared in on the dancers.

Not a lot going on in strip clubs in general these days. When they pulled the brass pole from Nanaimo's Globe Hotel recently, it left Vancouver Island with just four bars featuring exotic dancers - and one of the two remaining in Victoria has an uncertain future.

"It's getting harder and harder to find work," says Lee, who has been dancing for the best part of a decade. In the good times, she was pulling down $1,500, up to $2,000 a week. Now it's anywhere from $400 to $900.

On the Island, dancers like Lee are limited to the Fox Showroom Pub in Saanich's Red Lion Hotel, JJ's in Campbell River, the Argyle in Port Alberni and Monty's in Victoria's Plaza Hotel, though the latter building is up for possible redevelopment.

Long gone from Victoria are the likes of the Ice house, the Brass Rail, the Sherwood on Gorge, Oly's on Broad and the Kings Hotel on Yates ("Home of the A Class Dancers") - all now vanished or properly clothed.

The decline isn't just local. B.C.'s once-booming strip club scene has faded dramatically.

Randy Knowlan, who owns Stripper Entertainment, has been booking dancers into clubs since 1986. Where there were once a dozen strip joints within walking distance of his downtown Vancouver office, there might now be a dozen in the entire Lower Mainland. Knowlan's roster of performers has shrunk to 400 from a high of 4,000 (though that high reflected, in part, the number of Canadian dancers he used to send around the world before the dissolution of the Soviet bloc flooded the global market with cheap competition).

Why the drop? Blame (or credit) Internet porn, drinking-driving laws, the economy, the mainstreaming of sexuality. "Stripping is not as risqué as it used to be," says Knowlan. "You've got Oprah on television doing pole work." In downtown Vancouver, the bars were simply pushed out by property values, office towers rising in their place.

In Victoria, business has been blunted by the same changes - the smoking ban, tougher drinking-driving penalties - that sent working man's pubs like the Ingraham and Tally-Ho the way of the ashtray and the red terry-cloth table cover.

Hotels make their booze money on cold beer and wine stores now.

A young crowd might keep the Fox hopping on weekend nights, but gone are the tradesmen who used to pack the place on a Friday afternoon. "Guys used to come in here and have two or three beers after work," says bartender Dan Salmon. "Now they have one and go home."

That means lower profits for strip clubs, which need to cover the cost of the dancers, DJs and extra security. During busy times (such as when student loan cheques come in) the Fox's entertainment bill might push $10,000 a week, more if they're showing pay-per-view sports, says entertainment manager Loran Werrun. Then there's the cost of running the shuttle with which they ferry customers home at the end of the night; bars worry a lot about liability these days.

No such concerns back in the wild times that came after full-nudity clubs were made legal in B.C. in 1972. Strip bars flew and fell in concert with B.C.'s resource industries in the 1980s and '90s. "All the cities that used to have a pulp mill had one or two strip clubs," Knowlan says. No coincidence that the most successful peeler bar in the province today is in Fort St. John, home of B.C.'s petroleum patch.

Werrun sounds almost wistful about the old days, with their glitzy Vegas approach. "The mentality of the dancers is different now," he says. "They're as attractive as they used to be, but they don't go all out, put on a show."

He doesn't mention the legendary Mitzi Dupree, whose ping-pong ball shooting (don't ask) exhibitions brought her fame, fortune and an obscenity trial acquittal in Kamloops in the early 1980s.

He does remember Jane Jones, who appeared on stage with a Siberian tiger.

"There's definitely no tiger, no snake charmers any more."

Knowlan says that's because every time the strippers came up with something the audiences liked, the liquor authorities banned it. No Mitzi-like use of props, no touching the patrons, no touching other dancers.

Not that the rules were always observed back in the big-hair era, not if the dancers were men catering to female audiences. In the DJ booth at the Fox, tattoos climbing up his arms, is former male stripper Jimi Dean (" 'A rebel without his clothes,' that was my shtick") who remembers wading into crowds of women who would just go nuts. Dean was netting $4,000 a month - big money in the 1980s.

"I got a good 10 years of solid, solid work out of it," he says, "You used to be able to go to the Okanagan and make a fortune."

No more. "Stripping started to die down for the guys in the 1990s." Now male dancers need day jobs to survive.

He says all this without noticing the female dancer performing on stage. "I've been doing this for 20 years. Am I desensitized? Christ, yes. I don't even notice the shows any more."

Can't say that of everyone in the Fox.

By the time Lee was into the fourth and final song - Marilyn Manson's dark cover of the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams - of her 18-minute show, she was down to the high heels and bikini bottoms, which soon came off. The pool tables were silent. A spirited hockey fight on the TV went unwatched.

Thirty seconds after the dance was over, Lee was back in the DJ booth, wrapped in her robe, any trace of eroticism left on the stage.

Is it still fun getting up there? She shook her head. No. Too much work for too little money. Unbidden, she emphasized that strippers are not escorts. ("We're there to fulfil a fantasy on stage, and that's it. That's as far as it goes.") Even when they find a booking, the money dancers make is eroded by travel expenses.

Lee, who won the Miss Nude Vancouver Island title at Nanaimo's nowclosed Globe in 2004, has had enough of sitting in a hotel room between shows, reading books or playing Skip-Bo with the other dancers.

She graduated from a post-secondary school this year, plans to open a small business, one that will let her stay home with her family.

"I'm on my way out," she says. "I've been on my way out for the past year."

Following in the path of the places she used to dance.

[Source : vancouversun.com]