A year ago, when I live in a bus, my right hip started to hurt if I laid on it for too long. I did some research and decided it was probably arthritis, probably related to my childhood of repeated hip trauma. I mentioned it to my then girlfriend and she rolled her eyes and said “That’s stupid, why would you think that? It’s not like you’ve ever had any traumatic injury to your hips.” It was one of those moments where I would have dumped her and never spoken to her again, except that we were living in a bus together in the middle of South Dakota and she didn’t have any money. It was okay as long as I slept on the other side though, so I just ignored it.
Then, night before last, at work it started hurting. A lot. I would go do a couple lapdances and then I would be like, “shit, my hip hurts, I can’t do this anymore I’m leaving.” But then after a few minutes it would subside and someone else would want a lapdance and I’d do it all over again.
The next day I found a chiropractor (recommended by another stripper, of course). He said my sacroiliac joint was out of whack and probably had been for a while, then he folded me up like a pretzel and popped me and things went where they were supposed to be. My lower back flexibility, which had gone mysteriously missing a while ago, suddenly returned. I felt great. I went to work and stepped into eight inch heels and suddenly it hurt. A very lot. But this is the week, the peak of season, the few days where I make most of my money for the year, so I couldn’t leave. The club was packed, but no one was spending money. After four hours no one had made much money, and my friends and I were offered some money to go hang out at the cool hangout in town. I jumped at the chance to take off my heels.
We went to the local bar and told jokes. I got propositioned by another dancer, one that always slobbers on me, in the bathroom:
Me: Oh hey, your here. The club was too slow for you, too, huh?
Her: Would you like to sleep with me? I haven’t been with a girl in so goddamn long. Please?
Me: Um, not tonight? Maybe tommorow?
Her: I’m so horny.
Me: Uh, I can’t just ditch my friends. Sorry…
I must be putting out some kind of vibe or something cause lately every drunken bisexual stripper in the state is after me. Which is so wierd for me.
Back at the table our guy slipped our money into my friends pocket, all discrete during conversation.
“Sorry, I’m the jaded bitch of us,” I told him a few minutes later when I pulled the wad out of her pocket and thumbed through it. There were a few hundreds, some fifties, lots of twenties. If we were getting shorted it wasn’t by too much, and I didn’t want to blatantly count the money in the middle of the bar.
He wanted to hear the juicy gossip about each of us from the other one. I told him my friend has a kink for hotel sex, and even hangs out on hotel rating sites looking for the perfect jaccuzzi/bed combo. Which is, of course, an exaggeration. She told him about how I stomped on this guy’s penis in spike heels in Pennsylvania for money and then took pictures of it and used the pictures later to sell the shoes on the internet. At least, I gathered that was what she said, I never asked. Then he leaned in and told us about his stock market sins and how we should invest our money in real estate.
When my friend excused herself to the bathroom I followed and we counted the money. It was short, and I was pissed. But then I realized that I was basically getting paid $250 to eat a cheeseburger, and how can you really be pissed about that?
Today my hip hurt even more. I went back to the chiropractor and mentioned how much it hurt when I put on my work shoes. “Oh, do you wear heels at work? That’s not good,” he said.
“Yeah, eight inch ones.”
“That’s. Really. Bad.”
“Well, I mean, they have a three inch platform so it’s really just a five inch rise.”
He said no more shoes. So I went and got some ballet-slipper looking socks (’cause the store here doesn’t have any of the pretty ballet slipper looking shoes in my size) and I’ll just wear shoes when I go on stage. On stage I don’t have to stand up, I can just crawl around all sexy and do floorwork, so it won’t really matter.
You might look into Feldenkrais method for back problems from dancing. A lot of ballet dancers have used it to keep their bone balance.
OK, you’ve finally inspired me. I’m going to perfect the Yoga Sequence for Hootchy Girls Who Walk Around for Eight Hours in Six Inch Stiletto Heels that I’ve been using to ward off back pain and SI joint issues for lo these many years. I will post it back at my place in a few days.
My Grandma swears by Feldenkrais, also.
Oooh, Grace you know about this stuff? The chiropractor swears that I must have been in a car accident or something (he teeters between thinking I’m lying to him and thinking I’m just nuts and don’t remember LOL). But I really think it has to do with wearing heels, and that floorwork move where I arch my back with my legs in the air and my butt on the floor and move back and forth. Also leaning back ass grinding.
I’m off to google Feldenkrais…
I was always taught that high heels put the whole posture out of alignment and cause back problems. I think that comes from taichi. Something to do with the way the pelvis tilts when you have your feet flat on the floor, and how it was to tilt differently once you are on heels (or on tiptoe). Taichi, chikung etc teach that the back should be relatively flat rather than having a big curve at the waist level like we seem to have in the west. To straighten the back the pelvis and sacrum has to tuck more under the body. What that feels like to me is that my energy is more contained and aligned in the lower part of my body (which is also why martial arts practitioners are so stable when in that position).
Can you dance in bare feet?