I now have an itinerant roommate for the moment. She is a former dancer that has fallen on difficult times. See the previous blog for more details. This is the second time I have had a dancer stay with me for an extended period of time while she got her life back together. This is also the last time. (Famous last words?)
I noticed the same characteristic in both girls. They are terrible money managers. It isn’t accurate or fair to infer that all dancers are this way, but there are aspects of the job that reinforce bad spending habits.
This first and most profound thing I noticed they operate on the idea there is always another payday tomorrow. All they have to go to work to get more money. They tend to treat the club as their personal ATM machine. Unfortunately to get money they have to work for six hours, get naked and deal with a bunch of drunken customers and the wallet is recharged.
This behavior became apparent in the way they shopped. Not the amount of time they spent shopping (which could be considerable) but they almost always spent every cent they had. They both prided themselves on being “good shoppers”, they would work very hard to get the most for their money, but they always spent every last cent they had on them. If they walked into a store with $60, the walked out with $59.99 worth of merchandise, whether they needed it or not. There was never a thought of saving a penny. If they needed more money, they just picked up another shift.
There many problems with money management scheme. The obvious is that there is no reason to save money. It assumes that she’ll be able to get a shift tomorrow (this is usually not a problem, but sometimes it can be), and that she’ll have a good night. The biggest hazard is it also assumes that nothing will ever happen that can’t be fixed with one or two night’s income. Life isn’t that fair, everybody is going to be hit with big unexpected expenses. This is where I see dancers usually have the biggest meltdowns. They have to make a bill, and they are having a terrible night.
This is when standards start to fall. Girls will do things they normally wouldn’t allow. They let hands go where to places that are usually off limits. They become more aggressive with customers and other dancers. It’s nothing specific to dancers. It just seems like they are in this situation more than most folks I know.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’ve had to hawk stuff to make my tuition. I’ve watched folks at work lie to make a sale, to get that commission, to pay the mortgage. The difference is that this seems to be a constant problem with some dancers. Except for short term goals (cars, boob jobs, deposit on a place to live) they do not have any sort of plan to save money.
The flip side of this mentality is that when they have a really good night or weekend they will take time off and coast. The will live off the earnings until they run out and only go back to work when they have to. I know one dancer who will tell me with a completely straight face that she has “never had a vacation” that she has always worked since she was twelve years old and this will be her first time in years. That she deserves to take time off. I hear this at least two or three times a year. She takes more time off in a year than I have in the past decade. She just uses this argument as rationalization to take a vacation. If she can work out a way to have a bunch of time off, that is great. More power to her. But don’t tell me that you’ve never had a vacation.
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