The Grange Hall

by Chriselda Pacheco

So the story goes that a Tejana girl from little old San Antonio, Texas showed up in San Francisco, in a U-Haul, no job, no place to live but held within her a heart of gold (bronze, silver and platinum), alongside a fierceness that would cut right through beef jerkey in the dark without looking from miles away.  Did I say beef jerkey? Well, I am from Texas.  Sorry, I digress.  Moving on …

… people ask me why I started stripping, (or exotic dancing as some politically correct strippers may say).Well, it’s rather boring and practical really.  After all, why would anyone really want to put up with overpaid, arrogant, suit-wearing, corporate lawyers and their bad breath?  Well, for their American Express cards, of course.  You see?  It’s all quite practical.  Plus, maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about unpaid full time internships that inspire one to get creative with how they will survive in an expensive city, without mommy and daddy’s help, that is.  After all, I deserved the same opportunities as the next trust fund baby, right?  Am I right?

Ironically enough, this internship was at a magazine named after a woman who had some big balls of her own: Mother Jones, where they were looking for interns who were self-proclaimed “hell-raisers”. Yeah!  During the day I was a scarf wearing, fact checking, recycling, socially conscious, New York Times reading, liberal media, hell-raising fiend.  By night, I was Nathalia, a seductress wearing black-laced bottoms, clear 6 inch stilettos who danced amidst a brass pole on a red lit stage.  I would undulate half naked over your father or your husband -  for instance -  for 20 bucks a song.  And boy did that add up!

But before you hate and judge me, hold onto your moral high horse because the truth is … I too judged these women before any of you could.  More than that, I judged myself.  Now, this is where it gets interesting.  You see, as a journalist I always prided myself on being really good at spotting the next big story.  For some reason my life seemed to be a series of finding myself in the eye of the hurricane – surrounded by chaos enough to smell the nuance of it but never touched by its wrath.

Everywhere I looked, I was reporting on anti-union, conservatives.  Bus strikes.  Labor rights.  Gay rights.  I marched in anti-war parades and smoked pot as my consciousness grew around a fire with some mushroom eating hippies.  I was on fire with my “searching for the truth”.  Yet, the entire time I was missing the story that was forming all around me – in the closest of all proximities.  That story was my own oxymoronic life.

What I was learning about the world, men, sex, money, power, women and low and behold – myself, was enough to fill a memoir of strange juxtapositions.  I too was in the trenches with the same people I reported about.  Hell, growing up in a dangerous gang ridden neighborhood, and as the first in my family to get a high school diploma and college degree, it was no wonder I identified with most of my “colleagues”.  This is why I found such unexpected comfort in an over-crowded dirty locker room with loud, dysfunctional, tattooed, rough but beautiful women.  The truth is, I felt safer there in that place of drunken debauchery than I ever did working a 9-5 desk job surrounded by beige walls and Hewlett Packards.

At least it was honest.  Even the men who called us “liars” knew they were being lied to.  No pretense … just the raw and naked truth about people and their real intentions.  You see to most people, being nude in public is their greatest fear. But to a few, being naked in public is a way to hide.

And that is the way of the stripper.  The beautiful and complicated way to hide is to show no fear.  What else can you take from me if you’ve already seen me naked?

“You can’t take my dignity”, says Alexa, a dancer in Austin Texas. “But, I’ll make you believe that you did.”

Chriselda Pacheco…

Lived in Brazil (twice), speaks Portuguese, worked in print journalism, Radio production “KPFA Radio“, radio editing, writing, and video production. She has also taught multi-media to young folks in an Inuit tribe in Kotzebue, been a concert tour photographer, an “at risk youth” mentor, an Amnesty International activist, and a community activist working with battered women.  She is also the sole proprietor of “Quantum Shutter“, a photography business she plans on developing into a multi-media platform extending beyond photography.