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Striptease U. | page 1, 2
Porn star Annamalle, for example, commands top fees as a club entertainer precisely because she, in just a few short years, succeeded in appearing in more than 300 adult films. It's a simple matter of supply and demand -- dudes who have spent six months fast-forwarding to Annamalle's good parts will pay top dollar for the luxury of seeing their favorite sex industry professional in the flesh. Visibility can be especially important, Hayek said, for "novelty acts" -- women whose appeal stems primarily from the staggering size of their breasts. Still, Hayek admits, adult films are not absolutely necessary to a feature entertainer's career. Hayek's wife, Ann Marie, for example, parlayed one Playboy spread into a five-year stint leading a traveling burlesque review called Dream Girl Centerfolds and another few years as a solo dancer. She then formed Pure Talent, now one of the most respected agencies in the business. Hayek started her business in a small apartment just three years ago, and today the Hayeks own their own home, new cars and a freestanding 2,000-square-foot office building. If all that career development talk doesn't sound very sexy, well, there's plenty of sex in the rest of the school's curriculum … including a lot of talk about the opposite sex. The stripping portion of the training is led by a big-name feature entertainer, Jade Simone St. Clair, who travels 42 weeks a year with a two-man stage crew and a trailer brimming with $50,000 in costumes and another $50,000 in fog machines, pyrotechnics and a state-of-the-art stage lighting rig. "I'm like my own little Kiss concert," St. Clair says. St. Clair, like Jim Hayek, employs her own idiosyncratic vocabulary, sprinkling her conversation with words like "sweetie" and "baby doll." She developed this persona out of professional necessity. It is a way of turning reality into fantasy, which she says is at the very heart of the service she provides. "We tell the girls, when they walk in the front door of the club at 7, the fantasy begins. And at 2 o'clock, it's over," St. Clair says. "Because in between the walls of that club, it's fantasy time. The guys who come in to finish a business deal, or because they had a fight with their girlfriends, or because they just want to see a pretty girl dance, they want a break from their everyday life." To help ensure that the guys' bubbles are never burst, St. Clair says, her curriculum's most important lessons is for the dancers "to keep a good attitude." This includes looking deeply into men's eyes and conducting themselves in a "classy" manner. As Jim Hayek puts it, "Walking across the club with a cigarette in your mouth, a cocktail in your hand and chewing gum in your mouth is not alluding to the fantasy that the customer came in with." And when the dancers sit with a man in hopes that he will pay for a lap dance, St. Clair encourages them to be good listeners. "Don't talk a lot, or be negative. Don't talk about bad boyfriends or say, 'I don't have enough money to pay my rent.' Make it funny, make it a party atmosphere." Onstage technique in the new millennium, St. Clair says, is a lot more about performance and tease than it was in the '80s and early '90s. "It used to be they would be sexy for one or two songs and they got down and did table dances. Now, it's more of a tease again, back more to the burlesque days." As a result, St. Clair teaches them the full history of burlesque, starting with Gypsy Rose Lee and moving forward. Last, but not least, comes the inevitable question: cosmetic surgery -- yes or no? St. Clair, who has had breast implant surgery, admits that "as a 'feature,' it's almost a necessity to have bigger type cleavage." She goes on, a hint of apology in her voice. "Due to the fact that over the last couple of years every 'feature' has had it [breast surgery], it is almost as if the gentlemen expect to see it." St. Clair began her stage career in the musical theater, attending a performance high school in her home state of Texas and going on to study dance in New York with such notable instructors as Gregory Hines and the Martha Graham Dance Troupe. She gradually made her way into stripping after entering a nude beauty pageant on a dare and winning. As earnestly as St. Clair and the Hayeks work to legitimize their profession, both stress that for many of the entertainers, moving into a more mainstream form of entertainment is often the ultimate goal. "One of our girls was used in an ad in Cosmo in December, and that's what we are looking to do more of," Jim Hayek says. "A lot of our girls are very beautiful." St. Clair herself says her "goal for the year 2000" is to move out of working "gentlemen's clubs" and into mainstream television acting work. She says she would like to either become a host on the E! channel or a VJ on MTV. "I love to talk to people," she says. But for now, as the primary instructor at the Pure Talent School of Dance, St. Clair finds a great deal of satisfaction in teaching "bright-eyed" young women how to overcome their natural inhibitions. "I have this little girl in here who is bashful as can be, and I want to make her into a feature," St. Clair says. "She came to class saying she wanted to learn how to be an extrovert. And today, she had to strip in front of all of us. I was so proud of her. I'm starting to feel like a mother."
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