I saw the nominations for the Strippies and being an engineer I had to take a look at some statistics. There are 17 categories, 4 nominations for category for a total of 68 total possible nominations. The strip club Devil's Point had 16 nominations. The is 24% of the nominations or roughly 1 out of every four nominees were from Devil's Point. Siren Wolf was nominated for nine of the ten categories that a female dancer could get. Of the 68 nominations only two came from clubs west of the Willamette river.
I've already seen a little grousing on twitter about the nominations. To be completely candid, if you don't like the way the nominations turned out then vote more. The numbers might seem a little skewed but this is a result of the voting method. You could vote daily for your favorite dancer in this contest. This means that voting everyday becomes really important. It's more important to have people voting constantly than just getting a bunch of votes short term. If the voting is open for thirty days then one person voting every day (30 total votes) can out weigh 29 people voting for one day.
This ultimately turns this into a voting campaign for the contestants. In my opinion this is the only way you can really run a contest like this. I don't think you can really do this with an objective judging process. This would be difficult to do for a lot of the categories. Seriously, what defines "Best floor work"? To establish a set of criteria, select judges then try and get everybody scheduled to see the performers would be an enormous task.
The clubs and entertainers that did well probably made a very active effort to promote themselves. The clubs I hang out at made no attempt to promote their people and the result shows it. The Dolphin and Star's Cabaret clubs represent some of the largest clubs in Portland. Athena Aura (Not Athena Aurora, her name is wrong on the pdxstrippies web site) was the only one from those clubs. All the promotion was done by her and not club as far as I know.
I think the Strippies have done a excellent job with the contest. I wish I could attend this year. I'll have to wish Athena well from cyberspace this year.
I got to go see the inaugural Strippies awards and I have to admit I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I got meet a few folks in real life I’ve only read about on the internet; Notes_of_Art and Katstories to name a couple. I noted in an earlier post that this was the deal of the year. It was.
One of things that surprised me was how well it ran. Putting together a show of any kind is enormously difficult. I frequently set up and run trade shows for the company I work for. I guestimated once that for every five minutes of show there is at least eight hours of setup and planning. For a two hour show there are a ton of hours going into it. It’s really easy for things to get misplaced or screwed up.
I couldn’t decide if this was an award show with strippers or a stripper show with awards. There was kind of an odd quality to the pacing of the show. The performers there were amazing. This is the first time I’ve scene Ty Fyre perform and she is absolutely amazing. The performances in the show are testament to the fact that stripping can be an art form. It is much more than somebody just taking off their clothes. To engage and entertain a large crowd is incredibly difficult. Yet the finalist for stripper of the year: Natalia, Cricket, and Berlin managed to pull off that task. Kat really had some really funny and original material in her routine. If you think public speaking is difficult, try to be a comedian. Dieing is easy, comedy is hard.
I was surprised by how nasty some of the crowd was. I heard one of the go go dancers referred to as a TuanTuan (I can only assume her was talking about the dancer with the white furry leggings). And that was the nicest comment I heard. The others I won’t repeat.
One thing that always drives me nuts about running a show are the people who just show up and complain about little problems. There may have been 15,000 different things that had to happen for the show. 14,999 get done perfectly. Yet nobody notices that, but they will always point out the one that doesn’t. Most shows are utter chaos behind the scenes. That being said, I’ll point out some of the short comings. But I did notice the 14,999 details that did go right.
My biggest complaint about the show was the venue. Unless you were in the front row or standing on the furniture you couldn’t see anything. I was standing on the benches for part of the show. For the other part I was standing on the venue floor. The most I could see on the floor was just people’s heads on stage. I got annoyed when the go go dancers were on stage. All I could see was the tops of their heads bouncing around. Not terribly interesting. If they could have gotten the stage about three feet higher it would have been much better. Many of the performances were really hard to see. This is easy for me to say, I didn’t have to locate a venue.
The vendors that were setup in the hallway were cool, though I don’t think a middle aged electrical engineer was the target customer. The raffle was a test of patience. Listening to people read off numbers of missing tickets is about as exciting as being at the DMV. Maybe they should just show the gifts to promote the local vendors and contact the winners by e-mail.
The judges need to be more impartial. When the winner for best bouncer was announced the judge went into a rather long speech about what a great bouncer the winner was. I’m sure it’s true. But it kind of implies that the others aren’t (since they didn’t win). I voted for Steve from D2, he was the bouncer that guided by semi-coherent butt out of the club when I fainted. He politely ignored me when I said I was fine and needed to drive home when I wasn’t fine and shouldn’t drive home. That’s my personal bias but I’m not a judge.
More importantly, when the judges make statements like that people begin wondering how fair the voting is. One of the reasons for the Strippies was a response to some of the questionable practices of other contests. It doesn’t matter how fair and rigorous the voting practices are if people begin to think the process is rigged. I think the voting at the Strippies were 100% above board. The judges need to maintain that integrity. Decorum matters.
Watching drunk people you know can be really funny. Watching drunk people you don’t know can be really annoying, fast. I can die a happy man if I never hear “YOOOOUUUUNNN-YYYOOOOONNNNNN Jacks” again. They should cut off the MC’s from the bar a little earlier in the evening.
I think there is actually a lot of potential for the Strippies to reach a larger audience. If I could make one recommendation to the producers of the Strippies, it would be to immediately hold a meeting, review what went wrong and what they want to achieve next time. They don’t have to come up with solutions or plans just get things down while they are still fresh in your head. Just get them recorded. A year from now things will appear a lot different. The show post mortem meeting was probably one of the most effective ways I’ve seen to improve a show. Also they should invite outside people to the meeting as well. You view the world through the prism of your personal experiences. Getting a view from outside of your experience can be really valuable.
Another thing would be to turn on the auto reply on the e-mail voting account. It would be nice to know that the vote you sent was received. I’m looking forward to next year’s event. I’ll start creating my new e-mail accounts now. Remember, vote early, vote often.
I normally avoid strip club events like the plague but this is one event I will attend. This has to be a strip club patron's deal of a century. For only $10 ($13 at the door) you can see all the top dancers in one place. This would cost a fortune in tips if you went to each club to see each girl at her home club. For more details check the PDX Strippies Facebook page.
The event will be at the Mt Tabor Theater (not a club) which means reasonably priced drinks and no peculiarities in the judging. You pick the winners with your vote. So be sure and vote by e-mail (PDXSTRIPPIEAWARDS@YAHOO.COM) or go the the Facebook page.
