Playing Friday

[Sound of a horn and passing train is heard in the background]

SAM FORBES: A train hurtles down the tracks beside the club, so close the benches in the locker room shake.

I tie a black ribbon into a bow around my ankle and the back of my 7 ½ inch, Pleaser platform heels.

[Low, pulsing bass, reminiscent of club music, plays]

The Meisner Technique, developed by Sanford Meisner, is an approach to acting that focuses on an actor’s environment and the other actors in the scene more than internal thoughts and feelings.

Meisner said, “acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

Friday, my stage name, is written on a yellow sticky note and taped to the wood laminate locker door.

I tuck a black leather clutch holding my phone and my money under my arm before I push open the swinging locker room doors and strut onto the club floor.

My insecurities fall away for the sake of the performance.

[Pulsing, uptempo electronic club music and crowd noises play in the background]

The air hits me like I’ve run into a wall I didn’t notice, warm and heavy with the smell of people, a crowd dancing and drinking. It’s a busy Friday night, my night, as the hosts and fellow dancers remind me.

“Excuse me,” I repeat, squeezing through the crowd of people waiting to get to the ATMs or the bathrooms that are directly outside of the locker room, pointing my hands like a shark fin as I weave through the cracks. I find a clear path and settle into my rhythm; my heels strike the blue confetti carpet in time to the music; the muscles of my core tighten and swivel as I flow down the aisle past parties of 4-10 people with bottles of Belvedere, carafes of cranberry juice, orange juice, bottles of Veuve Clicquot, Hennessy, champagne buckets full of ice with silver ice scoops on top that are too small to hold more than four cubes at a time.

Sapphire is written in flashing lights amongst a false night sky that blankets the top half of the back wall.

I imagine myself, my energy, filling every corner of this large space, an old gym with 50 ft tall ceilings. “The Largest Strip Club in the World!” Sapphire proclaims in all the ads.

[Low, pulsing bass, reminiscent of club music, plays]

A lap is one circle of the club where I evaluate my options: who do I want to perform for?

I walk through the Martini 1 bar, named for the 20ft illuminated martini glass mounted behind it, and Peter’s bar, the back bar, also only open when it’s busier, named for the club owner, then around the side hallways to see if someone is lingering there, away from a table or party.

Who is angry? Who is bored? Who is eager? Who is watching me? Who do I want to talk to? Who am I interested in? The most important question: where is the spark?

[Daft Punk-like electronic music swells]

Directors cast based on the spark, lining up potential lead actors during call backs, to face each other, stare at each other, for longer than is comfortable. They are looking for chemistry. I am looking for chemistry. I want someone who wants to be in a scene with me, who wants to act, to play with me. I want the spark.

[Soft, inquisitive music plays in the background]

I’ve spotted him sitting at a candlelit table in a low-backed, blue upholstered chair on wheels, easily rolled from one table to another, easily toppled by a vigorous lap dance. He looks at me, longer than he meant to, before looking away. He shifts his weight in his chair, crosses his legs, tries to focus on the conversation with his friend, but he glances back at me quickly, one more look.

I turn from the aisle and walk between the tables until I reach him. I smile warmly, lean over, my hand on the back of his chair.

He blushes a little, eyes wide. I sit on his thigh, my legs crossed and touching the floor between his legs, my arm around his shoulders, my black leather purse tucked into the back of the seat, where no one walking past can grab it.

The most basic Meisner exercises consist of two people sitting across from each other having an interaction based on what is in front of them, this moment.

Of course, there is a script; everyone is working from some kind of script, even in real life. But, before the script, underneath the script, what is the truth in this moment?

I look at the person in front of me, I really look at them. I feel their emotions, the tension in their body, how they look around the room. I look for the details.

As I first practiced in acting class in college, I say what I see.

Maybe he repeats what I say, noticing my blue eyes, or he notices something else about me.

[Laughing]

I smile and squish my curls.

I look at his jacket and touch the silk pocket square, folded neatly in his pocket.

[Inquisitive music plays for an extended break. The sound of two people laughing is heard in the background]

We both laugh a little nervously, but here we are, grounding ourselves in this moment.

When he consents to me sitting down and responds to my observations with observations, he has begun to play this scene with me, actor and audience.

We are going to continue to talk: questions, stories, like most conversations, but now our interaction is grounded in our bodies, and where we really are.

For someone to play a scene with me, they must also behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances. They don’t have to, of course. Anyone can revoke consent at any time by refusing to answer, by changing their energy to something that is closed off, by telling me to have a good night, or that they’re not interested.

“Yes” means nothing without the freedom to say “no”.

[Upbeat dance music, like that found in Dance Dance Revolution, plays in the background]

After years of dancing, I sense how close I am to the end of the song. Right before it changes, I ask.

Are you ready?

[Electronic music fades into dream-like music]

Dance begins with breath, from deep within my diaphragm, breathe in, breathe out. When any motion is filled with air, it becomes a dance.

[The sound of someone taking deep breaths in and out]

In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

Next, connection, between the music and me and him. He is my audience of one, one inch from my face.

I touch him.

I am liquid. I am light.

I shine through him and lift him out of the darkness. I see him. Maybe he sees me. For a song, we understand each other.

[Music fades out]

The most common question a stripper is asked is, “what’s your real job?”, or “What else do you do?”

“I’m an artist,” is how I answer that question in the club. It is the most honest answer for who I am and what I do that covers dancing, theater, photography, writing, illustration.

I pull my phone out of my leather clutch, load my Instagram page, and show guests the drawing I did last week, my film photography, my violin playing.

The first people to buy my art were guests I met at Sapphire who contacted me later asking for an illustration.

It wasn’t until my show at the Lost City Museum in Overton, NV, that I got the question, “what else do you do?”, by an artist in the show with me.

I tell her I’d studied drama with an emphasis on acting and directing. But that, in my ten years living in Vegas, I’d been stripping, mostly at Sapphire.

Then she asks the second most common question I am asked at the strip club, “what made you choose to be a stripper?”

[Pensive, laser-like electronic music is heard in the background]

So, I tell her that I read somewhere that Americans spend more money in strip clubs than any form of live theater combined. After I finished my degree, I wanted more practice time in front of a live audience. I wanted to have more of a foundation of real people and lives from which to inform my acting. I spent four years listening to professors and classmates debate whether or not theater was dead and I wondered: how can theater be dead, if strip clubs, a form of theater, are booming? It made me think about what forms of theater aren’t recognized by the theater establishment.

[Music becomes rhythmic and hip hop-ish]

In every acting class, every audition, actors are encouraged to make different choices. It doesn’t matter what the choice is, only that it’s not the same choice everyone else makes. I saw strip clubs as a new Vaudeville, a place to work an act, over and over, with as many people as I wanted, a place where I also had the freedom to create the kind of character and performance I imagined, something that was constantly evolving, changing, based on my experiences.

I was worried someone would ask the same questions at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery in Las Vegas when I showed my stereoscopic street photography. I was prepared to say, “I’m a stripper,” but no one did.

For months before the show, I took early morning and late-night walks around my favorite part of the city, from the Arts District over to East Fremont, with a View-Master or Stereo Realist Camera loaded with Ektachrome or Velvia film.

I am looking for sparks there too, the spark of a story, a moment, that most people don’t notice.

[Resonating of Tibetan singing bowls and chimes is heard in the background]

Human eyes are stereoscopic. Each views a slightly different angle of reality. The brain combines the left and right image into a single three-dimensional perception.

When two photographs are taken by a camera with lenses the same distance apart as human eyes, they appear three-dimensional, when viewed together.

That’s the thing about stereoscopic photography: like a lap dance, it too must be appreciated on a personal level—only one person at a time can look into a View-Master. It’s inside of our own minds that the image becomes three-dimensional.

[Upbeat dance music, like that found in Dance Dance Revolution, plays in the background]

After years of dancing, I sense how close I am to the end of the song.

Playing Friday, I learn and grow as an artist even more than I hope for, but it is time to apply my experiences to a different set of imaginary circumstances.

[Sound of a crowd joins music]

But how do I express a complete picture of myself?

This has always been my conflict as a dancer: I am hyper-exposed, naked, seen by thousands of people every year, but when I leave the club, in many ways, I don’t exist.

It’s inside of the audience’s mind that Sam the artist and Friday the stripper merge into a single three-dimensional image.

With each lap dance, conversation, connection, people have an opportunity to see my dimensions—exploring the intersections of art and sexuality, and each person chooses whether to see the truth in these imaginary circumstances.

[Chimes are heard over electronic music until fade-out]