“Nothing dies of too much love.” Paul Simon, Seven Psalms
Either it happened or it didn’t. Either way, I have no complaints. I made Facebook contact with a porn star I’d been following for a decade, a woman forty years younger than me, her gang bangs and DPs, her lesbian sex, flimsy porn plotlines before getting to the raunch, the videos all over Pornhub, Vixen, Brazzers, Peekvids, Hamster and all the others.
But for a moment it felt personal, once we got past the Hey Babys, the conversational wariness, the transactional vibe: an actual exchange of confidences. When I asked about her tattoo, Chinese characters snaking up her spine, she seemed to laugh and explained – When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. 生活带来您时柠檬做柠檬水
Or was this a publicity assistant, an AI spambot, after all? Didn’t she have better things to do than banter with a stranger online? Sure, it was in her interest to keep the fans attracted to her, maybe get them to subscribe to a sexy chat service, maybe buy some doodad, some merch.
But she or her assistant or the AI program or whoever responded to my comments made no insinuations, while the dialogue lasted, no attempt to score a buck. The admiration felt mutual, the human interest. Unless it wasn’t, but does it really matter?
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.
Even as prepubescent kids we recognized the erotic possibilities of Annette Funicello, a Mouseketeer with budding breasts, a full six years older than me, pure girl. We hung on her roles in the Spin and Marty serials, Anita Cabrillo in the Zorro series, adolescent fancies exploding inside us.
But it was in her early twenties, already at the mercy of our hormones, in her series of Beach Party films, alongside Frankie Avalon, that she really featured in our prurient fantasies. Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Annette as Dee Dee in Beach Blanket Bingo sent our visions and desires into overdrive.
Only 45 when she began having balance issues, dizziness, while promoting her Frankie Avalon reunion movie, Back to the Beach, already a mom three times over, she kept quiet for five more years before the public disclosure of her multiple sclerosis.
I’d read Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” – glut thy sorrow on a morning rose – and I knew beauty was fleeting, but the reality of my teenage heartthrob falling apart made the evanescence of time a fact you could touch, smell.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.
After taking all our clothes off (so emblematic of what we’re up to), Stacey (the Ethical Stripper) and I – DOCTOR Sarah Vernon, aka, Gypsy Charms (Ph.D. in Sociology, Glasgow University) – open ourselves to a conversation, whatever the audience wants to talk about. We guide punters through the bump’n’grindy world of tits, tease and ten-pound notes.
Our venue’s the Illicit Thrill, Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s shadiest nightspot. We’re comedians, as well as strippers, you see, but we satisfy your curiosity in oh so many ways. Do we ever date customers, you ask? How do we prevent ingrown hairs, razor rashes? Shaven versus unshaven pubes? Can a stripper also be a feminist?
Of course, my stage-name – Gypsy “Fur Coat Nae Knickers” Charms – a not-so-subtle nod to Gypsy Rose Lee; when I saw Gypsy at the Edinburgh Playhouse, my brother one of the troupe, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up!
My work’s brought me to support IUSW (International Union of Sex Workers), campaigning to improve safety and working conditions for the women working in clubs.
I run the Academy of Burlesque and Cabaret here, Forest Road, Edinburgh, encouraged Mitzi von Wolfgang to start her own in Milan. As well as dance classes, we sponsor what Brits (and Scots) call hen parties. Loads of fun! Come on – you can ask us anything!
A Modern Modest Model
“I didn’t think it was immoral,” she told the interviewer years later, “but I didn’t want to cause problems. It might have embarrassed my future husband, and it would have upset my family.”
Playboy had threatened to sue Betty Brosmer for breach of contract when she refused to pose nude. “I wore sort of a half-bra,” she remembered, “a low demi-bra, nothing showing.” Playboy eventually dropped the case, the photos sold to Escapade.
A popular pin-up model, Betty first appeared in a Sears & Roebuck catalog at thirteen, would go on to appear on the covers of all the pulps and men’s magazines, working with top photographers like Alberto Vargas, posing for Christian Dior, fashion modeling, winning beauty contests left and right, including the title Miss Television, appeared on TV with Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason. “When I was fifteen, I was made up to look like I was about twenty-five,” Betty mused. “In 1956, Modern Man called me ‘Hollywood’s Most Chased Chaste Pinup Girl.’” You can see her pin-ups on the barrack walls in The Dirty Dozen, and in Pumping Iron.
“After I married Joe in 1961, changed my name to Betty Weider, I stopped doing pin-ups, but I got into fitness, my husband’s field, appeared on the covers of Muscle Builder and Vigor, wrote a column for Muscle and Fitness.”
Married for over fifty years, until Joe’s death, they donated a million bucks to the University of Texas for their Physical Culture and Sports Center. “I never needed to flash flesh to excite the imaginations of young men; my form was there for all to see and savor. But I never posed nude. Not even once.”
Strippers Unite!
“Stripper Safety Over Bosses’ Profits!” my placard declared, on the picket line with my colleagues, Lilith and Velvetta, outside the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in LA’s North Hollywood neighborhood.
We need protection from wage theft; we need a guaranteed minimum, overtime protections, and of course, Social Security. If Starbucks and Apple can do it, so can strippers! But the last straw? When management turned a blind eye on customers who fondled and abused us. They actually fired three dancers, barred another fifteen from entering the club just for raising these concerns. So we started organizing at Star Garden.
We’re not the first. The Lusty Lady Club made that history in 1997, San Francisco, the first strip club to unionize. When management cut dancers’ wages in 2003, they all struck, and won, then bought the club from management, ran it as a worker-owned business for ten years, until they had to close in 2013, broke.
The Actors’ Equity Association, 51,000 members, including Walt Disney World and Broadway talent, is going to be representing us here in LA.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.
