The naked part was easy.

This is a story I wrote for my paper that was scooped before publication by the big hairy daily in town. Since it never saw the light of day, here's an unfinished version: 

STRIPPERELLA, Feb. 18, 2008

Let’s play a word association game. I say a word. You say what immediately comes to mind.

I say pole. You say north.

I say dance. You (maybe) say shake.

I say pole dance. You say stripper. (It’s OK. It doesn’t mean you snap ones under garter belts on the weekends.)

Unless you’re a firefighter and your association with poles is of the lifesaving variety, most people hear pole dance and think stripper.

You’re not alone in this conjecture. Even Nicole Phillips, the instructor of Cherry Blossom Pole and Exotic Dance Fitness gets inundated with stripper jokes whenever she talks about her new teaching gig. 

Curious. I decided to take her class.

Beam me up hottie.

Before reporting for pole duty, I Google it first.

Pole dancing, according to the Wikipedia entry, requires muscular endurance, coordination and sensuality. Several hits later I discover that pole dancing is also the next big thing since Richard Simmons sweated to the oldies.

It was exactly one year ago that The New York Times ran a story on how pole-dancing parties were dethroning Tupperware parties in the Jersey suburbs. I dubiously eye my salad in a Tupperware container. Smirking, I think if this thing catches on like Tupperware, I’ll be buying my Aunt Shirley stilettos for Christmas.

I run to the office bathroom, change out of my work attire and into something more aerodynamic, something more pole-worthy.

Phillips’ class is held every Friday night in Rosemary Court, a colorful klatch of cottages off Central Avenue in Sarasota’s Rosemary District. Before I go any further suffice it say this is not where I expected to pole dance.

Rosemary Court is adorable with its babbling Zen garden in the middle of a semi-circle of clapboard cracker shacks dedicated to wellness. Yoga. Pilates. Meditation. Aikido. Outside the semi-circle of holistic empowerment, Central Avenue still tries to catch up. Since we’re talking sexuality here, lets just say that when Sarasota bloomed into adulthood the Rosemary District hit puberty.

As I walk past the Zen garden and through the door marked “Pole and Exotic Dance Fitness” I imagine the voice of the Rosemary District cracking as it says, “Wait for me guys. I’m on my way.”

 The Clark Kent factor. 

Phillips is tiny, lithe, like a portable pole dancer. Like someone you might hire to baby-sit your kids. I had expected someone more, I don’t know, burlesque?

She works at a Sarasota engineering firm where she spends most of her days seated quietly behind a desk. She says when she started pole dancing two years ago she felt like she was leading a double life. Typist by day. Pole girl by night. 

“It’s like my superhero personality,” she says, giggling. “Only I know I can do this super cool thing. At night it’s kind of like I come out of the phone booth.”

From second grade on Phillips, 26, was a competitive cheerleader, but she tired of most fitness routines and dabbled in yoga, Pilates and the gym. But all of these, she says were such a chore.

How the pole entered her life is as non-sexy a story as choosing a college major. She researched it on the Internet, purchased a pole for her house and practiced for six months before contacting Vertical Dance, a school out of England often credited with pioneering pole fitness.

Like any fitness instructor, Phillips wanted legitimate certification so she completed a six-month program over the Internet, turning in written exams and session plans, student teaching pole fitness classes and performing routines via web cam.

“It was something that was important to me. I’m not just some girl doing that pole thing,” says Phillips.

In November she started offering pole lessons to the public. Surprisingly she wasn’t the only lass in town looking to spin. One Sarasota woman celebrated her 59th birthday with a pole party.

“I hope I celebrate my 59th birthday with a pole party,” Phillips says.

 

Idle hands make farting noises.

The pole is slippery from my sweat. And thanks to the wall of mirrors that spans the front of the room I can't escape the fact that I move more like a mechanical bull.

The amateur class consists of five women 40-ish in age, all of whom ask me to not identify them. Pole dancing has a bad reputation they say, which baffles me because a.) all of them are way better than me at this and b.) pole dancing is supposed to be empowering not humiliating.

One woman, we’ll call her Dallas (her idea, not mine) signed up for Phillips’ six-week session in January. Beaming and sweating Dallas confesses she lost 14 pounds in Phillips’ class.

“I’m a powerful woman,” says Dallas. “So this is an opportunity for me to get in touch with that other softer side.”

Turns out Dallas is a motivational speaker in town. She travels up and down the Gulf Coast pitching her inspirational two-cents to salesmen in Sarasota's male-dominated boat industry. 

“You don’t dress like a girl. You don’t talk like a girl,” says Dallas of her day job. “You kind of have to address the guys on their own wavelength.”

I praise her for stepping outside her comfort zone and then foolishly attempt a cross-legged fireman spin mid-conversation.

As I spin, I hug the pole like I’m a toddler clinging to my mother’s legs. Be sexy, I repeat. Slither. Wither. Be Demi. Be Elizabeth Berkley. Be Madonna! TLC’s Red Light Special comes on and I shake it off. I attempt one more serpentine motion with the pole between my legs and a death grip above my head, and as my clammy palms make their way down the steel beam a farting noise triggers immediate rubbernecking and at least one eye-roll from a woman in the class.

 Kyle, my coworker and cameraman, smirks and snaps a picture for the story.

Goddammit. It was my hands, I want to shout. My hands! But I don’t because that would be Turrets of me, so I step aside to make room for Dallas since she and I are sharing a pole.

“Ah,” she says grimacing. “It’s you whose been making the pole so sweaty.”

Great. I’m certifiable slime. I run to the bathroom to wash my dirty hands while Phillips, at the front of the class, demonstrates a Cirque Du Soleil bridge move. 

When I return, I sit the next move out and hide behind my Bic pen, scribbling notes in a reporter’s pad. In the margins I write things like: sux hairy monkey balls, strippers need raises, go to Cheetah Lounge tonight and bring fifties.

Epilogue.

Three days later my arms were still sore. I felt like I bench-pressed my coworkers. No, I felt like I bench-pressed my coworkers whilst they polished bowling balls dressed in chain mail. And to think I clumsily swung around a strippers pole in front my coworker Kyle, who photographed the whole sorry display for the paper — spandex, fart noises and all — only to have the story scooped Monday morning by a schlubby male Herald Tribune reporter.

Oh the humanity.