A Chance to Unleash Your Inner Pole Dancer
In a backyard studio on a quiet street in Hancock Park, six women gather in a dimly lighted room on a Saturday night. Wearing sweats and T-shirts, they start the evening with a rigorous routine of yoga and ballet stretches. Fully warmed up, they change into skimpy shirts over lingerie, strap-on stiletto heels, then crank up some thumping hip-hop music. One after the other, they perform erotic dances for one another, swaying their hips, strutting and spinning around a strippers’ pole bolted floor to ceiling rafter. The routines all end with the dancer stripping down to lacy bra and panties.
As each dancer shows off her wares, everyone else cheers her on, as the leader shouts out, “Beautiful! Beautiful!” “Slow down,” and “He’s loving it. He’s dying.”
Welcome to Stripping for the Everyday Woman, a high-tone class on disrobing billed as a remedy for sexual repression. Neither a showcase for audiences, nor a professional training ground for X-rated clubs, this class, designed and led by actress Sheila Kelley, is meant to be a self-help experience, a safe place to learn to enjoy playing the stripper’s role--whether for the sake of a relationship or just to unleash a pent-up self.
Kelley, best known for playing Arnie Becker’s sultry, no-nonsense assistant Gwen Taylor on “L.A. Law,” might seem an unlikely evangelist for stripping and lap-dancing. A trim and attractive 37-year-old, her lank brown hair flows to her shoulders, and she can often be found wearing no makeup and jeans. Her look could easily be described as Hollywood-style mom-next-door. Indeed, she and her husband, actor Richard Schiff, have two children, ages 7 and 11/2.
There’s a gentleness about Kelley that’s as soft as the purr in her voice. She displays a friendly, unaffected manner and is apt to tap the knee of the person she’s talking to in wide-eyed agreement. Even when performing elaborate tricks on the pole--spinning like an upside-down iceskater--she adds touches of ballet that make her act seem almost wholesome.
But Kelley is driven by a mission. Encouraged by friends who were fascinated when she installed the pole, she wants to drag striptease away from the exclusive domain of sleazy clubs and into master bedrooms, which is where she feels it belongs. She sees stripping as a liberating act for women, a way to enhance one’s physical and sexual potentials.
“Getting up there and owning the space and allowing your body to move the way it wants to move naturally, being overtly sexual without apology, gives these women and myself an enormous sense of satisfaction. See the smile on my face?” she asks, wearing a beatific grin. “When I’m teaching, this is me. I just get this energy. This wall of sexual, sensual, beautiful energy comes at me. It’s a high.”
Her students’ hoots and howls during class support her claim. So does the popularity of her program, which she started in May and has grown through word of mouth. Thirty women now take her 90-minute classes weekly, each paying $50 a pop. Twenty-five others are on a waiting list, and Kelley is looking for rented space to accommodate her burgeoning business.
“I did not say I wanted to become a stripping teacher. This all just happened,” she says. “I know how powerful I feel when I do it. I know how sexy I feel. I know how beautiful I look to me and to my husband, and that’s all that matters.”
Her students are friends, actresses and mothers--sometimes they’re all three--who come to the class, they say, to tap into their repressed sexuality. They’re white, upper-middle-class women ranging in age from 24 to 57. Kelley refuses anyone who says she aspires to become an X-rated dancer. Talking about her students, Kelley is very protective--and not only because of the social taboo against stripping. Her students are shy, she says, so even in class she keeps the lights low and forbids anyone from inviting guests. One student, who asked to remain anonymous, spoke of the classes as a way to give married women a renewed sense of sex appeal.
“Women my age, housewives and mothers, aren’t prepared to say, ‘Look at me, aren’t I gorgeous?’ It’s embarrassing,” said the actress and mother, who is in her 50s. “The class is incredibly embarrassing and brings out all of your insecurities. And yet, you’re dying to do it.”
Kelley first became fascinated with stripping while studying for film roles. The youngest of nine, she was raised in an Irish-Catholic family in Pittsburgh. When, at age 24, she walked into a strip club to prepare for the 1989 movie “Breaking In,” she was stunned. The dark world of these sleazy clubs--and the women who worked in them--fascinated her so much that she began writing a script about them. It evolved over years into the film “Dancing at the Blue Iguana,” which Kelley produced and Daryl Hannah starred in. That unglamorous portrait of strippers’ lives was directed by “Il Postino’s” Michael Radford and released by Lions Gate Films last year to mixed reviews.
During the long process of making the film, however, Kelley paid strippers to teach her their dance moves. And she also started stripping for her husband, Schiff, who plays Toby Ziegler, the taciturn White House communications director on NBC’s “The West Wing.” That was her turning point.
“It struck me how unbelievably empowering it was for me to dance for my husband alone,” she says. “Simultaneously, you become your most open, your most vulnerable and your most powerful.”
Schiff says men are bug-eyed with envy when they find out his lithe, pretty wife, a former ballerina, likes to strip for him. He says he has also discerned a difference in female friends who have taken her classes.
“It has changed their marriages, and it’s changed the way they walk through life. There’s a centered kind of sensuality in them that might have been fighting to get through before,” he says. “Then there’s just the fun they have. They’re always howling and screaming back here. I’m playing with the kids, and then I hear this hooting and hollering, and I think, ‘Man, I want to be back there. What am I doing changing diapers?’”
Neighbors in the old-money, million-dollar homes of Hancock Park also appear to be unflustered by the enterprise.
“Several neighbors said they know she has a pole in the house and that she practices. But I’ve only heard positive things about it,” says neighbor Christopher Larsen. “It’s not like she has working girls going in and out. They’re really pretty quiet.”
Kelley’s classes and her neighbors’ acceptance may indicate that another sexual taboo is being peeled away. Hollywood has been nudging strippers into the mainstream with major releases like “Showgirls” and “Striptease.” Bada Bing, the topless club in HBO’s “The Sopranos,” brought stripping to critically acclaimed television. The Internet’s profitable relationship with pornography has contributed a general frankness to America’s dialogue about sex. Just recently, TV sex goddess Pamela Anderson, who has a stripper pole in her bedroom, said she may give up acting to strip onstage during her boyfriend Kid Rock’s rock concerts.
Historical factors might be at work, too. Crunch gyms considered adding “cardio striptease” to its roster of aerobics classes months before testing it in Los Angeles last September. The experiment was so successful that classes are filled to capacity and are being offered at Crunch clubs in New York and Miami as well.
“With Sept. 11, people learned the lesson that you have to take hold of life and have some fun,” says Crunch publicity director Dayna Crawford. “There’s one woman in the L.A. class named Thelma. She’s 70 years old and refuses to miss a class.”
Even so, Kelley says her classes are not an easy experience for many who attend. Some have burst into tears because they’re so afraid to perform in groups. They clearly are petrified of vamping.
“I’ve never been able to act sexy in a movie. I was playing romantic parts and everything, but that was an area where I just felt foolish, totally foolish,” one student says. “Sheila’s very supportive and wonderful. She eggs you on and keeps saying, ‘Oh, powerful move, powerful move,’ and screaming out how beautiful everyone is. And she means it.”
Several students aren’t married, and some of the married ones say they have never performed for their husbands, despite months of classes. They take the classes for themselves. Each dance ends with a fake lap dance on another student, yet there seems to be an absence of sexual tension among the women. When Kelley is asked if students get aroused, she just says, “Ewwww.”
For Kelley, the experience is about power, a word she uses 18 times in some form during a two-hour conversation. There’s also a sense of mischief: “I probably got pregnant after a lap dance,” she says with an impish grin. “There’s a way to spice up your marriage.”