Flirting for Fun and Profit
If you read the stripper websites and message boards, you’ll find a lot of discussion among dancers about how to sell a lap dance. Dancers study the popular books on selling, from Clement Stone to Zig Ziglar. They take classes in how to close. They trade opening lines.
But I’ve seen a master at work at one of my favorite Vegas strip clubs and she didn’t use any of those techniques.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting at the bar of a popular Vegas topless club. It was a busy night and the club was packed when a group of five guys in coats and loosened ties—all in their mid- to late-20s—entered the club as a group and were quickly escorted to a VIP booth by one of the hosts. A waitress was right there waiting to take their drink orders and as soon as she left the table, an older dancer “just happened to be walking by” when one of the guys asked her to take a seat.
She was stacked—obviously surgically enhanced—and she was also in good shape with long legs and a great ass. She was the dancer in the club your eyes went to. She was wearing a pink bikini and lingerie ensemble with her breasts spilling over the top.
I’d seen her up close earlier and I knew she was sixty if she was a day, but she was a knockout who’d obviously taken care of herself. She might have been a showgirl in Jubilee, back in the 1970s.
She didn’t sit down immediately, but stopped and chatted with the guys for a few minutes. And when the waitress arrived with a bottle of Absolut and setups, one of the guys poured her a drink and handed it to her—at which point she took a seat in the space they’d made for her.
Over the next hour, I watched her flirting with every guy at the table, laughing at their jokes, sitting on each guy’s lap for a few minutes, nuzzling into their necks and playing with their hair. (Yes, playing with their hair–a technique Zig Ziglar neglects. Some younger dancers seem to be waiting for a marriage proposal before they’ll flirt like this.) Every 10 or 15 minutes I saw her lead one of those guys away from the booth to the club VIP. Then she’d return to the table to flirt with the next one.
Meanwhile, many younger, more beautiful dancers were wandering through the club, trying to interest guys in dances, and occasionally succeeding, but not one could match her for total sales in the time I sat there. And when I left, she was just starting on a group of guys at another table.
