spandex & lucite shoes: part 2, Sheena

Here’s to the women in the high-heeled shoes,
They’ll smoke your grass, and they’ll drink your booze.
They may not have cherries, but that’s no sin.
They still have the box their cherries came in.

Along the likes of “here’s to swimmin’ with bowlegged wimmin,” this toast has what we in the studies of rhetoric call an implied audience. And the audience implied here is either the high-heeled, grass-smoking, booze-drinking, popped-cherry strippers themselves or the people who love them.

Here’s another striptastic Monday episode of My Life as an Ecdysiast. Enjoy.

Cheers,
CG

Sheena was not a punk rocker. Sheena was a stripper. And while the two are not incompatible—one of my best friends of whom I’ll speak in later installments was both a punk and a stripper, as well as an anarchist and a single mom—Sheena was as glossy, as feral, and as unbelievable as her name.

Sheena was an unapologetic brunette in a sea of bottle blondes. A lithe 5’7”, Sheena had the sinuous, dangerous beauty of a jungle cat crossed with a cobra. She was from south Florida, she was the viciously tan color of a marshmallow on the verge of combusting into blue flames, and her real name was, I kid you not, Sheena.

Sheena the stripper.

“What else was I going to be with a name like Sheena?” She said. “A librarian?”

She had a point.

Moreover, she had a perfect body. I have seen many beautiful women in my life. Hell, I’ve even been one. But Sheena had the body that in any light, from any angle, in any position, doing any activity, was drop-dead fucking gorgeous. I once saw her at the end of a long night dancing, slumpy-sprawled on a bathroom counter, eye make-up in raccoon rings, smoking what must have been her 38th cigarette of the day and she was gorgeous. This woman probably looked gorgeous when she woke up, gorgeous when she dragged her ragged ass to the bathroom and gargled, gorgeous when she farted, gorgeous when she puked. I can’t even begin to think about what she looked like when she fucked, or I’d have to stop typing.

You get the picture. The woman was hot. And while she was one of the multitudes of improbably beautiful women I worked with at Thee DollHouse, Sheena was more than just gorgeous.

She was to strip culture what anthropologists suggest Lucy is to humankind. Here's a statement verging on hyperbole, but I'm going to make it anyway: With Sheena began what we have accepted as the normal standard of female hotness today. Her dance moves are replicated in music videos. Her sense of style permeates cheesy fashion. Her body glitter—which she used to concoct herself because in the early 90’s no one made it yet—now stocks the shelves of tweener stores. Her make-up is unknowingly aped by Paris Hilton, as are her antics. Girls go to the gym, flock to plastic surgeons, stick their fingers down their throats to have Sheena’s body.

Barbie may be our patron saint. Pam Anderson may be our guru. But Sheena, she is our Lucy.

Female beauty is a terrifying and intimidating thing, and not solely for men. As a woman who had always considered herself pretty enough, I found it unsettling to be working with—or serving, really—these mythological creatures. They had legs that reached up up up like the trunks of beeches, as if their asses wanted to ascend toward heaven, but their shoes kept them earthbound. From the back, the more beautiful ones had visible when they stood, just stood, a little puffy poochy sliver of g-string, a little tantalizing bag of invisible goodies. Their backs curved inward, their hips curved outward, their stomachs lay flat as an architect’s table.

I’ve already written about their breasts. They smelled like apricots.

Many had beautiful faces, but not all. Sometimes, need I tell you, the hand was a bit heavy with the eyeliner, the lipliner, the blush. Sometimes, the skin betrayed what their hairnailsmakeupdressattitude did not. Sometimes, they looked—to the close if not the casual observer—as if their lives had been hard enough that this work was not exactly a conscious choice.

Nonetheless, it was hard to be in a room stocked to the rafters with beautiful chicks of every color, shape, ethnicity, and persuasion, if not size.

Size was pretty much a given. Except in shirts, no one was wearing double digits here. No one, except for maybe a fitness competitor or two, topped 135. Flight attendants in the 1960’s had it easy compared to the physical requirements for these chicks. And it wasn’t easy to be that desirable.

We women are raised in an oddly dyadic fashion. Look at any women’s magazine, and you get two messages: be me and do me. Articles and ads tell us that we are not ok as we are: we are flawed. We smell; we have cellulite; we wrinkle; we are not fresh; we have unmanageable hair; we have hair in bad places; we eat too much; we sag; we are too big, too small, too round, too flat, too…whatever. At the same time, the pictures tell us what is desirable. This model with open lips and wind-blown hair, we are taught to want her. This one recumbent on a chaise, skirt open to reveal her inner thigh, we want her too.

This culture raises us to believe with every fiber in our unconscious beings both to hate other women for being beautiful, which we—simply by virtue of being on the wrong side of the glossy page—are not, and simultaneously to desire those beautiful women. We are not who we want; who we want is not who we are.

So imagine, then, 75 gorgeous chicks, all raised in this culture and all competing for the same pool of dollars. Ugly? Oh, yeah…

And one woman, Sheena, reigned supreme. Queen Sheena.

And the bitch could dance. Imagine a snake swaying back and forth before she strikes in a rhythmic tortuous series of curves; that’s how Sheena danced. Sheena had this move, this signature move, where she cantilevered herself in her shoes so that her back leaned improbably backwards, as if she was doing the limbo, but at the same time, she undulated from her hips, making her body wave like a flag. Now imagine a perfect, tan, hard-bodied brunette with a shakey-shake ass doing it. In your face.

Any customer Sheena wanted, Sheena got. Any girl Sheena wanted fired, was, or at least moved to another club. Sheena made thousands of dollars. Every night. One story about her was that she went into a BMW dealership and pointed to a car and said, “I want that orange one.” And paid cash.

Everyone wanted to be Sheena. Everyone wanted to do her.

And she could not give a flying fuck.

Because what was so really special about Sheena was not her name, or her prodigious beauty, or her signature dance. What was so intensely special about Sheena was that she got it. She got the game.

When other girls fretted, she strutted. When other girls pouted, she shouted. She knew full fucking well who had the power in this stripgame and it was not the jackass with the expense account. Nor was it the drooly, scaley, unctious management. She knew that when she stood on stage and removed her clothes piece by piece that she was an object of desire, and she used it.

She was Sheena. Hear her roar.

All the way to the bank.

I heard she retired back to Florida. She bought a house, she opened a business, she married a man. She had kids. She, in short, fell from the empyrean and landed in the suburban. I heard too that she was happy.

So, yeah, Sheena. Wherever you are, thanks for the stripperstyle, because I took it for my own. Thanks for the dance, because I stole it. (And now I’m teaching other women to do it too.) Thanks for telling me the name of your plastic surgeon, because I went to him.

And thanks for the who-gives-a-fuck attitude, because I borrowed it, though I’m giving it up now.

And finally, thanks for knowing your own power, because when I feel uprooted in this world of women and men, unsure of myself, my worth, my body, my self, I think of you dancing on that stage, swaying to your own inner music, and I remember that power is not only knowing the game, but also choosing to play it the way that you want.

Comments

[James]

Those models in magazine don't really exist. I know this because I used to make a living doctoring photos of them. I could do just about anything.

[Alohalani]

James doctored some of them perhaps, I saw quite a few of them at 6 a.m. and they were frickin' gorgeous.

It's all about "getting it" and playing the game by your rules. Otherwise, you become a victim.

[elvis hitler]

I saw a video of Sheena. She was stripping (fully nude and showing everything) in front of Sloppy Joe's in Key West. A large crowd had gathered to watch the show... I have to admit, she was just as you described. Absoulutely Amazing! One the most perfect looking girls I've ever seen. Glad to hear she's moved on from stripping (can't do that forever) and is having a good life.