Clubs

I wonder how well some club would do if there weren’t and stages or dancers. What if they were just a bar? Some would make it, most wouldn’t I imagine. A lot of clubs have no particular reason for existing, without the dancers they are just really loud, expensive bars. Others seem like your regular local neighborhood club, with a stage added. I’m not sure some clubs know what kind of customer they want to attract. Different clubs have very different feels.

When I moved back up from Texas the first club I went to was Stars Cabaret. They had a billboard on highway 217 at the time. I think the tag line on the ad was “A little bit of Vegas here in Portland” or something like that. Stars turned out to be too much like Vegas for me. Every time I walked into the place I felt like they were trying to stuff a shopvac in my wallet. It’s the only place where I constantly had merchandise hawked at me. After hanging around there I ended with collection of garter belts, t-shirts, and other swag of no real value. Some of the stuff was pure crap.

One time they were giving away plastic “football” mugs. These injection molding was so bad you would have cut yourself if you tried to drink out of it. Everybody was abandoning them at the table when they left. It’s a safe bet the mugs arrived in a boxes and left in a dumpster. This was also my first exposure to how Star’s treats their girls. The merchandising scheme was the girls would all be herded up to the stages with the crap swag item of the day. The DJ would pitch if you bought a dance from a girl you’d get to keep the useless, poorly made product of a Malaysian sweat shop. Until I got to know a couple girls I didn’t know that Star’s actually made the girls buy the swag from the club. If the dancer didn’t sell item she had to take it home, whether she liked it or not. One dancer I got to know would walk to my table and pretend to try and sell it to me trinket, then sit down. She’d just send the t-shirts to her brother. It was just the cost of working at Star’s for her. It’s been a while since I’ve been to there, I’m not sure if they still do that.

Star’s is unabashedly a strip club. The flip side of the sales pressure is the fact it’s very efficiently run from a customer perspective. I very rarely had to wait for anything when ordering. The dancers were remarkably punctual for dancers when it came to getting to the stage. When a girl got on the main stage she always had a gown on. It was a business that was there to serve you, for a price. This wasn’t what I look for in a club. I’m much more looking for a place to relax. Star’s is meant to be a strip club from the ground up. At Star’s I felt like if I wasn’t spending money I needed to leave.

Location is probably one of major factors as to clubs success. Several clubs I’ve gone to I’ve only known about because I saw them while I was driving somewhere else. This is changing with the internet. I was looking up different strip club reviews on line when I ran into the Dolphin. Most of the review sites are zagat style with different one star, two star, three star, etc, etc ratings of things. About the only useful information I can ever pull of those is the basic type of club and its address. Curiously, it was one of these sites that had link to the best strip club site I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately it no longer exists. If I remember right it was written by a person who went by the nom de plume of Ook. Instead if the usual “zagat” stuff, it consisted of his first person adventures visiting clubs. He and his trusty steed kumquat would motor off to different clubs. It was the most best, most original stuff I’ve ever seen. It was there I read about the “cetacean on a stick” club.

The Dolphin had a much more relaxed atmosphere. I didn’t feel like I had to throwing dollars on the rack to be there. It’s peculiar, both are places of business but have very different atmospheres. A lot of this has to do with the DJ. The DJ at Stars was constantly mentioning drink specials, pimping the special event where all the entertainers would be one stage at once, the dry to sell you a trinket you do need or want. I’m still finding those damn garter belts when I clean out drawers. The DJ at the Dolphin seemed more interested in actually putting on a show. The atmosphere also carries over to the dancers. The girls were a lot more willing to sit and talk.

At the end of the scale from Star’s is the Nicolai St Clubhouse. This is a local neighborhood bar that just happens to have dancers. You can just picture the guy setting up the club “Yea, I want the pool tables over there, the lottery machines over there, the naked women over there”. The cool thing about this bar is if you want to hang out for an hour or two with out being bothered, there’s no better place.