Amateur Night

Karma is not your typical housewife

Story by Tori Norskog

By 10 p.m., the strippers were no longer stripping. A long-legged brunette with crimpy hair leaned against the pole on stage; hands behind her back, she wiggled an eight-inch platform stiletto around on her right foot, scanning the packed club for potential tippers. Earlier that night, a crowd of only a dozen people had netted her a decent amount of tips. But as Sunday progressed, there was no one sitting at the counter around the stage, also called sniffers’ row, to pay her for her work.

Men were no longer building little houses of folded dollar bills to entice her to come along, lick her hands, wipe the saliva on her chest and then lean over to pick up the bills with her sticky breasts. Every once in a while she would leave the pole, walk back to the ballet bar and turn her back to the crowd, gazing at herself in the wall of mirrors.

Laurie Watkins, who was in charge of the club that night, likened the dancers to quirky cats. “Sometimes they want to be petted and sometimes they don’t,” she said.

Professional strippers aren’t employed or paid by the club where they dance. They are independent contractors licensed by the state. They work for tips, and they know that on the last Sunday of each month, customers save their money for amateur strippers. It’s on those nights that the Fox Club Cabaret in Missoula puts on a competition for non-professional dancers to parade on stage, hoping to win cash prizes. That makes the professionals work less hard. Often, they don’t even bother to strip.

Not that anyone would have noticed at this point in the evening. People anxiously shifted in their seats, checking their cell phones for the time as it inched closer to 10:30 p.m. Every time a new person exited the back dressing room, customers would look that way to guess whether or not it was one of the amateurs who would be taking their clothes off for them.

Finally, the lights dimmed and the disco ball went on, making the room feel as if it were in motion. One of the DJs, Nick Farrington, came on stage to explain the rules. No one in the audience could touch the dancers, photograph the dancers or taunt the dancers, though tipping was certainly allowed.

“Just don’t be a douche bag,” Farrington said. “It’s a pretty easy rule.”

As he left the stage, eyes locked on the red curtain from which the first dancer would emerge. Men grinned while their female companions sat rigidly next to them, downing drinks to loosen up.

Watkins reasoned that strip clubs are the most unlikely place for men to cheat, since they cannot touch the dancers.

“It’s harmless,” she said. “They work up an appetite and then go home with you. If anything, you should want your man in a strip club. The girls don’t care about your man, all they want is his money.”

***

A Puddle of Mud song started blaring and Karma walked onto the stage. With her head tilted down and a black fedora covering her eyes, she marched her witch-like ankle boots over to the pole. Wearing only a pair of black boy-short undies and a gray T-shirt with a black beaded cross on the front and the back all torn up as if a lion had slashed it, she wrapped her leg around the pole and started off her performance with a quick twirl.

She then tossed her hat aside, tousling her hair when she took it off, and the crowd started cheering. Most spectators recognized her. She has performed at every Fox Club amateur night for the past two and a half years.

Karma, 21, has performed at every Fox Club amateur night for the past two and a half years. (Photo by Justin Franz)

Karma first conceived of the idea to take her clothes off on stage when she was a freshman at the University of Montana, studying nursing. She says she was looking for a job when a professor showed a documentary on stripping in her English class. She thought to herself, “I could do that,” and began taking notes on the dance moves rather than on the film.

Tonight, lying down on stage, legs spread, she jiggled her butt and thrust her hips up and down until her boy-shorts started creeping off, exposing a black g-string. She inched the shorts the rest of the way off and slingshot them across the stage. The crowd roared.

Sitting at one corner of the stage were three girls who could not have looked happier. Noticing their hysterical laughter, Karma crawled over to them, rose to her knees, and peeled off her shirt, exposing voluptuous breasts and causing the girls scream like yetis. The group, all waitresses from Hooters, comes to see Karma every month.

After the girls had stacked up enough dollar bills to get her down to her birthday suit, Karma straddled the rail in front of them, and then dropped to the floor making a thud when her butt hit the stage.

“She’s bad ass. That’s a pretty awesome girl. I respect that girl so much for doing that,” said Lucas Berry, a man in the audience.

Karma, 21, is different from the other dancers, especially the professionals: She is overweight because of a thyroid condition. Her condition causes her to gain weight because it slows down the digestion process.

“Basically, it slows my entire endocrine system down and attacks and lowers my metabolism really bad,” she said. “It even slowed my hair growth down. My doctor said it slowed my aging down.”

At 5 feet 5 inches, Karma weighed 130 pounds when she first started competing at amateur night. Then her condition flared up last year, causing her to gain a significant amount of weight. She is now a size 14 in an industry of skinny women that go to extreme measures to control their weight. But that has not deterred her from performing nor lessened her appeal.

People like Karma because she is entertaining, original and positive, Watkins said. “Any woman, no matter the size, if you have a positive attitude, people see through the cosmeticness.”

Karma maintains that stripping has empowered her.

“I feel a whole lot better about myself than I used to,” she said.

To have guys other than her husband think she is cute has boosted her self-confidence.

“My husband noticed I look so much happier,” she said.

The 21-year-old tends to make more money than the other amateurs, about $100 a night. And yet, there are always the few occasional jerks that yell out things like, “Oh great, another fat chick.” She said sometimes she watches the other dancers and wishes she were their size, or at least the size she used to be. The comments can get her down and have given her self-confidence issues, but she won’t let them break her, she says.

Because of her experience, the other amateurs often look to her for guidance before their first performance. They are supposed to pick numbers out of a hat to indicate the order in which they will perform. If one of the new girls picks No. 1, it’s simply assumed that Karma with take her place.

“I always tell them as soon as you get on stage and hear them cheering, ‘Hey cutie,’ you will completely forget and have fun. I fell on my ass the first time I danced and just took it as ‘cutsie me,’” Karma said.

To be a good performer, she says, you need to smile, because that creates an aura of having a good time. She recommends making eye contact with whomever you’re dancing for, to make him or her think he or she is the only one. She says there is no need to be nervous, that it is all about attitude. Yet she remembers how nervous she was before her first performance. Before that night, the only person who had seen her naked was her husband, she said.

Each amateur is given two opportunities to dance, and Karma uses her second performance to project her personality. She is known for bringing props on stage, such as a belt, horse crop or whip. She started this exploit last year when she brought a cop costume to strip out of but forgot her handcuffs. So she decided to improvise and use her belt as a prop.

“A guy put a five down in front of me and told me to smack myself and I noticed the more I did it, the more money I got,” Karma said. “The best one I ever did was when I brought the horse crop and a Griz football player was there and his friends said he had a spanking fetish and kept dishing out the dollar bills for me to keep going.”

***

Karma believes that people tend to represent their fantasy sexual selves when they are on stage. She said that both she and her husband are rather passive with each other sexually, but on stage, he says she is domineering.

“When I first went shopping for costumes, I picked out a frilly thing and my husband said, ‘Not you.’ So, he grabbed a black latex thing and he said, ‘Definitely you. You looked like you wanted to punch someone, which really turns guys on.’”

Karma’s husband is OK with her stripping, she said, as long as she protects herself and comes home to him afterwards. He has only seen her perform once: last December, the night she won.

She had only made $19 during her first round that night. Feeling defeated, she called her husband to come down and cheer her up. Then she did so well during her second round that the crowd cheered for her to do an encore dance. Karma is the only dancer in the history of Fox Club’s amateur night to have ever had an encore performance.

“I probably won ‘cause he was there,” she said.

That night she walked away with $300.

“I was not skinny when I got my first place,” she said. “It was funny that the overweight girl got it over the skinny bitches.”

Karma and Alex have been married since she was 16 and he was 18. She’s heard plenty about how they supposedly set themselves up for failure by getting hitched that young. Take one of her high school teachers, who predicted that their union wouldn’t last longer than six months when she first learned of it, according to Karma. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the couple had already been married for a year and a half at that time.

The couple met in drama class when Karma was a freshman in high school.

“I got into class and I was having a bad day,” she said. She could sense that he was watching her, and when he winked, she told him to get lost.

But they were paired for many of the romantic scenes in class because their chemistry was perfect. They now consider their teacher their matchmaker.

A few years later, Karma said, she got all hopped up on sugar and wrote Alex a letter asking if he thought they would ever get married. Within days, he showed up with a ring, got down on one knee, and asked her to marry him.

“We were at eye level for once,” Karma said. Alex towers over her at 6 foot 4.

He isn’t easy to live with, she said, but they care about and adore each other. After five years of marriage she says they couldn’t be happier.

“Nothing’s perfect, but we love each other and put up with each other’s shit,” she said.

***

People have a hard time guessing Karma’s age. Outside the Fox Club, she does not wear makeup. She pulls her dark brown hair up in a ponytail and wears jeans and a T-shirt, usually with some type of a cartoon character or a line from a movie on it.

She works at Direct TV, where, coincidentally, she mostly takes calls from people trying to order porn. She likes to go to movies, play with her three cats and spend time with her husband. 

When she talks about her family, she scrunches up her shoulders and talks in a baby voice. She said her parents are not exactly happy with her stripping, but that they have chosen to leave it alone as long as she is happy and safe.

After telling her mother that she had been stripping, Karma discovered that her grandmother used to strip as well. She remembers her grandmother calling her up and saying teasingly, “Hi, you busy, busy girl.”

Asked to describe herself, Karma says: “I’m just your typical housewife.”