Cheap thrills.

Meet my new wheels. She's a real Bianchi. 

Light as a feather and the color of a robin's egg, my Bianchi came from Goodwill. She's got pizza-cutter tires and handlebars shaped like my pug's tail.

When I wedged her into the front seat of my Honda Civic, she contorted into a kind of fetal position, which made me think perhaps Bianchi was scared or sad, having just been pulled abruptly from the bike pile at a tidy Goodwill store on 4th Street in St. Petersburg.

She's a 23-year-old Italian with a stubborn saddle, caged pedals, soft tires and a nervous tick. I think her rear break might be chaffing against the rim, but with the proper tools and gentle touch she'll be prime for riding long distances. 

I hadn't intended to get a 1986 Italian racing bike. My sister Heelya and best friend Ro are visiting next week and I wanted a third bicycle so we could pedal the Pinellas Trail together. I've been eyeing a tricked-out mountain bike for a month now and was fixing to shell out $500 for a better (and I mean way better) bike than the one I pedal now, but today's little lesson in negotiation and good will has prompted me to forgo a new model in favor of a more seasoned cougar.

I pulled into Goodwill today with two $20 bills in my wallet, feeling good about myself, my friends and the world. I'm on a new cash-only budget thanks to $3,000 in fraudulent charges at a Panama stereo store. My debit card number was stolen last week (perhaps in cyberspace) and when the bank told me I'd have have to wait a week for my new card, I decided now was as good a time as any to pay homage to my parents by paying for everything in cash. 

Peering into the back stockroom at G.W., I asked one of the employees if there were any decent bikes for sale. One guy perked up and said, "Sure. We got a Tour de France bike out front."

I figured he was pulling my chain, (bike pun!) but as I followed him out front to the parking lot where the robin egg blue Bianchi was parked, the vintage bike stuck out like Christie Brinkley ...                                                                                      

... in a sea of Tonya Hardings.

"It suits you," the guy said.

"I'll take it," I replied, not knowing how much it would cost, but assuming not much.

So I wheeled it into the store and up to the counter, where an employee with a name tag that said JAYME asked, "You buying that bike?"

"Yup," I said.

"Do you know how much it costs?" He asked incredulously. 

"Um. No. How much does it cost?"

"Fifty bucks," he said.

Before I could even get a word out, the man in line behind me said, "No way is that bike worth fifty bucks. Man, you're rippin' the girl off. Give it to her for 25."

A woman standing in line behind the man chimed in:

"Fifty dollars! She's gonna have to put new tires on that bike!"

"It's an expensive racing bike," the Goodwill clerk snapped. 

"It was an expensive bike," scoffed the man behind me. "Man, that thing is old! Being that she's a girl, she's gonna have to pay someone to fix those tires."

Slightly embarrassed by the attention I had drawn, but thrilled by its sitcom appeal, I quietly said to the clerk, "It's OK. I came here thinking I'd get a deal. No biggie."

Upon further inspection of the name tag, I noticed that JAYME was the store manager and as I turned to push the Bianchi back to the bike pile, Jayme sighed and said, "Alright. $35 and that's as low as I'll go."

Forking over my money, I nodded at the male chauvinist behind me, grateful for his cojones. Although I don't usually take kindly to being treated like a damsel, in this case I curtsied, grabbed my bicycle and headed home. 

--

This isn't my first love affair with a 1980s bicycle. I was once infatuated with a clunker 10-speed named Ross. For more on that torrid romance click here.

Independence, 1950

This one's for my Nana.

We were sitting around the kitchen table Christmas night – my mom, my sisters, Nana and me. And for whatever reason PK got on the subject of homesickness.

She remarked that she has good days and bad days. That some days, no matter how many romantic comedies she watches, or how much chocolate ice cream she eats, she cannot shed the veil of homesickness that shrouds her every move.

Because I'm hard-headed and fail miserably at making my sisters feel better when given the opportunity to do so, I didn't tell PK that when I was 22 and living alone in Sarasota, I Googled the distance between North Collins, N.Y. and the Gulf Coast of Florida. And that every time I cried out of homesickness, I'd remind myself that 1,269 miles is pretty good chunk of space.

Putting my pangs of sadness to good use, I wrote a math equation.

For every one mile I was separated from my family I would devote one day to giving Sarasota a fair shake. Rounding up slightly, I divided 1,269 miles by 365 days, giving myself 3.5 years to make a go at in Sarasota. If after 3.5 years I was still sad as hell, missing home, or craving a new adventure, I'd throw in my beach towel, pack up my things and leave.

But of course I didn't tell my sister any of this as we were sitting around the kitchen table. Because the happy ending to this story is, after 3.5 years I met Joe.

Instead it was my Nana who piped up.

"I was terribly homesick when I was living in Arkansas," she said.

Dumbfounded, we asked, "WHAT? Arkansas? WHEN?"

My Nana – who raised her family next door to her sisters' houses, across the street from her brothers' houses, and literally within footsteps of the house she grew up in – lived in Arkansas. Arkansas? I don't think even my mother knew Nana lived in Arkansas.

Captivated, my sisters and I urged her to continue with the story, the likes of which goes something like this:

Nana's father owned grape fields stretching the length of Brant-North Collins Road. Nana and her six brothers and sisters grew up in these fields. And if they were doing poorly in school their father, my great-grandfather, would pull them out of class and stick them on the farm.

My Nana, the middle child, was whip smart, with a wicked sense of humor, and strong arms from playing softball and picking grapes. When Nana was 18 her father sent her to Sturkie, Ark. for the summer, where he owned a strawberry canning factory with his brother, Louie.

"Dottie," he told his daughter. "I'm too tied up in local affairs to travel south. I need someone to keep an eye on the Arkansas factory."

My great-grandfather had gotten wind of some shady dealings in Arkansas, and Nana, being whip smart, was as good an ambassador as any, so he sent her.

It was 1950, and Nana, together with a girl named Vicky and a guy named Vinnie, crossed the Arkansas/Missouri line in a dusty Cadillac with the windows rolled down.

Nana, wearing a sundress and feeling ridiculously independent, remembers pulling over for breakfast at a diner with fly strip-yellow lighting. She remembers Vinnie, who was older, perverted, and a friend of her fathers, muttering under his breath that if the waitresses' tits weren't rubber, he'd eat them. She remembers she and Vicky slapping Vinnie's hands away when he went to pinch the waitress' ass, and she remembers thinking: my father sent me to Arkansas with this creep?

She was dating my Papa at the time, so of course she missed him and wrote him letters every day. When she heard that he was dating someone else – another girl named Dorothy – she brushed it off, because, as she says, "the other Dorothy wasn't a threat."

One time, Vinnie handed Nana a letter. He asked her to drive it to a post office in St. Louis, Mo. Any post office, so long as it was in St. Louis. Nana says she figured the guy was fooling around with some lass in Arkansas, but that his wife back home thought he was in St. Louis. Whatever the situation, she didn't care. It was nice to take a break from strawberry canning and get behind the wheel of a Cadillac.

When Nana got back to Brant, she scolded Papa for "philandering around," (with another Dorothy no less.) Two years later she and Papa got married. They had five children, including my mother, the second-to-the-youngest, who was born in 1960.

Nana says she found the other Dorothy's sweater pin in Papa's possession, and that Papa tried to pawn it off as a gift for her. But she knew better.

She held onto it for few years. It was after all, a name pin, and Dorothy was her name too. Whenever she'd see The Other Dorothy around town, she'd think, Ha! I've got your pin at home. But eventually she lost it, threw it out, or whatever happens to things like that.

As she talked about Arkansas ("It was awful. I couldn't wait to come home.") her eyes sparkled. Sure she was homesick, but I could tell, the memory of her independence thrilled her.

For the helluvit, I Googled the distance between Sturkie, Ark. and Brant, N.Y. It's 946 miles. Or by my coping calculations, two and half years.
--

PS. Happy Birthday Nana, four days late.

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.