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Sexy, sassy and strutting their stuff
Marin women enjoy burlesque, stripping, pole dancing
By Vicki Larson, IJ reporter

On a Friday night in San Anselmo, 18 women are invoking the goddess. Before them isn’t a New Age crystal or a statue of some Hindu goddess. No, before them is a pair of black satin, 7-inch-high platform heels, and the women, sitting on colorful mirrored and tapestry pillows in a semicircle, are listening to Diane Greenberg talk about women’s divine sensuality and the gift of sharing it with others. Of celebrating one’s beauty. Of the sacredness of stripping.

Soon, there will be nudity — Greenberg’s and theirs — and the women, curiosity aside, are nervous.
In Sausalito, a half-dozen women are gathered in a small room of Stage Dor Dance Studio with little more than two floor-to-ceiling poles, a boombox and walls of mirrors. “Oh, beautiful!” they gasp in unison as Deborah Hodson — in a tight black lace top and slinky black tights — executes a particularly sensual body wave, an undulation that sends her hips, then her chest, trusting forward, her lips in a partial pout.

An hour later, Shara Switala holds court in the larger dance room at Stage Dor.
“OK, walk,” says Switala in a half demand, half purr.

And so a half-dozen 40- to 60-something women — gathered on a rainy Tuesday night for a weekly burlesque class — walk, eyeing themselves in the mirrors before them. But it’s not just any walk; it’s a pointy-toed, hip-swaying, look-at-me, leg-stretching sassy strut. A lady of the evening walk. And they are clearly loving it.

A funny thing has happened with female confidence-building and bonding. It’s taken a decidedly erotic turn.

But it’s not just a soccer-mom, baby-boomer version of “Girls Gone Wild.” Instuctors say they noticed a marked increase in interest in the sensuality-fueled classes they’ve been offering in Marin dance studios and gyms in the past year. It’s women’s liberation, but not our mother’s liberation.
“Women are just two seconds away from awakening. We turn each other on,” says Greenberg, a Novato resident and former professional dancer who teaches “The Sacred Art of the Striptease.” “Women have an appetite. We just don’t have permission.”

That is changing, not only in Marin but across the country. Suddenly, striptease, pole-dancing and burlesque classes and revues are popping up everywhere — from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York — and in some seemingly unlikely places. Even the chic French department store Galeries Lafayette has been offering free striptease lessons for women plopping down their francs for dainty lingerie.

The classes are about being female, and they’re striking a chord in women who are tapping into their naughty sides — aided by feather boas, elbow-length black satin gloves and 5-inch platform heels — to throw out old notions of how proper women behave and what their bodies are “supposed” to look like. Many say it’s a variety of female bonding as important and as fun as a bachelorette party or girls’ night out.

“People are trying to find different ways of venturing out and exploring themselves. It’s becoming OK to be a sensual being,” says Toni Dee, who’s been teaching women, including teens, how to strip at the Bay Club Marin and at Gold’s Gym.

“For me, it’s a place of female comraderie. It’s a place where you root for each other,” says Jennifer Solow, a Mill Valley author who has taken strip and pole-dancing classes for years. “Where else in the world can you go and say to another woman, ‘You look so sexy doing that’?”

Greenberg, who has taught stripping strip for 10 years, says she has seen a big jump in interest locally in the past two years. “We’re all shy, we’re all self-conscious and we all doubt our self-worth and self-beauty,” she says. “At some level, we bought into our culture’s ‘you’re the wrong —’ and you fill in the blank.”

Sensuality is innate, Greenberg says; her class just helps put women in touch with it.

“At the end of the class they feel more about what they always already were,” she says.

The women in Greenberg’s class came for different reasons. A few talked about image issues. One was facing surgery and wanted to celebrate her body before it is cut up. One expressed a desire to try her moves out on a new lover. Not all got naked, but all fawned over and celebrated those — from the buxom to the lithe — who got up to dance, be it a minute or five.

“It’s fabulous when women own their natural beauty and are willing to be coached with a little bit of attitude or get a few tips by observing others,” Greenberg says. “This is one opportunity to get a woman’s attention. Every woman loves a good costume party and play dress-up.”
At Switala’s burlesque class, there’s lots of dress-up. The comraderie is evident and the banter is risqué.

“I love this song. It’s so corny,” Switala says as a classic bump-and-grind disc spins in the boombox.

“Did you say horny?” teases Leslie Klor of San Rafael, a lively 60-something.

Clearly, Switala’s students love the theatrics of the class as much as she.

“I love the exotic dance but also love the playfulness of burlesque, the posing and the walk,” says Switala, who has been dancing and performing vaudeville since the late 1970s. “It is a way of putting yourself out there without being overtly over the top.”

The Fairfax resident has been teaching the weekly hourlong Tuesday night burlesque class at Stage Dor for nearly a year. Many come to the class because they have a desire to perform, but they all walk away with a lot more than that — a bit of stage presence and a sexy new way to walk.

For Betsie Diamond of Kentfield, Switala’s burlesque class is pure freedom of expression. Diamond, who is in her 50s, loves the flirtaciousness of burlesque. “Everyone seems so uptight these days, with the war and the economy and the election. It’s more like an escape.”

But, she admits, “I’m a tease anyway.”

There’s lots of bumping and grinding at the Strip Teeze exotic dance class Dee has been teaching since September at the Bay Club Marin and since October at Gold’s Gym, both in Corte Madera. It’s been a big hit at both locations; at Bay Club Marin, Dee had to move the class to the basketball court to fit everyone in.

“A lot of women want to learn how to move and feel free with their bodies,” says Dee, who stripped professionally for 20 years.

But nobody gets naked in her classes. First, they’re in gyms, so that wouldn’t quite work, she says with a laugh. But mostly it’s because the emphasis is on movement. “It’s about balancing the body, more than sexual,” she says. “I teach them how to move and feel sexy with their clothes on.”
That doesn’t mean she doesn’t use the usual props — boas, high heels, gloves and belts.

It’s a great workout as well, says Dee, a former professional bodybuilder and judge for the International Federation of Bodybuilders. “Your muscles are sore the next day. They’re using muscles they’ve never used before. The whole movement is based in deep-core workout. It’s not just wiggling your butt around.”

But that butt-wiggling is pretty helpful too, she’s discovered.

“A lot of women don’t even know how to walk sexy,” Dee says. “There’s a whole art to the strut.”
Dee says the confidence that comes from knowing how to move her body helps in many areas. “I feel better in my business, I feel more empowered as a woman and I feel better with my partner.”
It isn’t about sex.

“It’s about empowering you as a woman, not about going out and getting laid,” Dee says.
Anything that helps a woman feel good in her skin is a good thing, says Lonnie Green, who is an intimacy counselor in Marin and the Tahoe area. “I think a lot do (feel good), but not in front of a judgmental audience,” be it parents, lovers, friends, other women, strangers. Strip classes can give women “full permission to let go. ... It could be extremely liberating.”

Green, who lives in Mill Valley, has known Greenberg for many years and has hired her to do one-on-one strip work with some of her clients. “A woman who’s really in touch with the pleasure of her body” can bring that energy into her relationship and revitalize it, Green says.

“Women are so uptight” because of media images, she says, that they can’t even tap into their own inner beauty “even if they have a luscious body, or, like me, too thin a body.
“There’s nothing more beautiful than a woman who’s happy,” Green says.

Joan Heartfield of Maui, who is a psychologist and leads an annual “Divine Feminine Mystery School” in Marin, agrees. Greenberg taught a striptease class at Heartfield’s seminar last year and it was such a hit that she’ll teach one again for her in Tiburon this June. Thankfully, Heartfield says, women are finally being allowed to express their natural, exotic energy. “The more confident women are with their bodies, the more fun they can have. The more confidence, ease and joy.”

That wasn’t why Delores Kilgariff was drawn to Dee’s class at Gold’s Gym. “I always felt comfortable with my body,” says Kilgariff, a 56-year-old Mill Valley resident who stays active with tennis, running and lifting weights. But, she says, “This makes me feel even more so.

“Everybody just feels so sexy,” says Kilgariff, who has taken the class several times. “I have a different attitude toward everything. You can just let yourself go. It’s so nice.”

And to do that in the company of other woman is especially powerful, says Claudia Six, a San Rafael sexologist who has taken strip classes not only to aid in her work but for “my own eroticism and for fun.

“You see other women and they all have an innate eroticism and it looks different — large dykes, petite blondes and your average housewife. It validates everyone’s eroticism. It’s fun and it puts you more in touch with your body,” she says. “It’s permission that it’s OK to move this way.”

Virginia Simpson-Magruder knows how to move. She’s been dancing for some 15 years. But when she was cast in a dance show last year as a pole dancer, the Novato resident realized she had to get educated fast. She took some classes through S Factor, the cardio workouts inspired by striptease and pole dancing created four years ago by actress Sheila Kelley (classes are offered a few times a year at Red Dot’s San Francisco location). “I just got hooked on it,” says Simpson-Magruder, who now teaches drop-in pole dancing classes with Lane Driscoll on Tuesdays at Stage Dor.

She agrees that it’s not about sex, although slithering and shimmying up and down the pole definitely is sexy. But the pole’s just a prop.

“I’m not into all the erotic stuff. I’m into the playfulness of it. Women are pulled to pole dancing but the image that’s connected to it is the eroticism of the strip clubs, which is not a pretty thing.”
Just like in stripping or bawdy burlesque, she says, “you have to let go of your inhibitions or work through them,” Simpson-Magruder says.

Adds Driscoll, “It’s really transformational.”

Solow, 41, who loves pole-dancing so much that she bought a portable one for her home, calls them “monkey bars for women” — once women can get past the image of it being “slutty and for bimbos.”
Solow’s 5-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son are into it, too. “I’m sure it sounds very weird to someone who has preconceived notions of pole-dancing,” she says, “but my kids make up moves like ‘The Froggy’ ... It’s like skiing. There’s tricks to learn and to invent. It sounds provocative and naughty but it’s fun. You get addicted.”

Hodson, a 48-year-old Mill Valley resident with a variety of dance experience, was drawn to the pole-dancing class out of curiousity. “It took more nerve than I expected,” she says. But by the end of her first class, she saw herself in a new way. “This pushes the envelope a bit, dancing for others and being appreciated. To have that female audience is good, too. It makes you feel sexy.”
And feeling sexy, the instructors say, is different than being sexualized.

Six, the San Rafael sexologist, says these types of erotic classes help women of all ages set boundaries and feel safe in their sexuality. She says many women think that “if they show a little of it, someone might get interested and they won’t know how to handle what they started.” The classes give women an understanding of their own eroticism so it’s not “something that they hand over to a guy. They can move the energy for themselves.”

Dee, who has has girls as young as 16 in her class, says the young gals come into the class giggling, but they leave learning a powerful lesson. “I’m not trying to advocate sex to anyone, but they’re aware.” Feeling confident in your body and about yourself helps the teens have control, learn when to say no and when to say yes because “it’s my decision,” she says.

For Debby Graham of Tiburon, Dee’s strip class has been powerful.

“It’s like opening your inner goddess,” says Graham, 43. “When I say ‘opening your inner goddess,’ I mean I now walk around with confidence in everything I do. It’s strange. It’s amazing. I have a different outlook with men. It’s this little secret that I know.”

Vicki Larson can be reached at vlarson@marinij.com. If you bump, grind or strip Diane Greenberg will be teaching The Scared Art of the Striptease for women April 14, 7 to 10 p.m. in Novato, $45. Call 898-7510. She’ll teach a women-only class May 6 at World Dance Fitness, at 40 Greenfield Ave., San Anselmo from 7 to 10 p.m. $40 in advance, $45 at the door. Call 457-8787.

Greenberg also offers private classes. Call 898-7510 or e-mail Diane.
Toni Dee teaches exotic dance classes at the Bay Club Marin, 220 Corte Madera Town Center, Fridays from 7:15 to 8:30 p.m. Four-session classes are $80 for members, $120 for guests. Drop-in classes are $25 members, $35 guests. Call 945-3000 for the next session.

Dee teaches exotic dance classes once a month at Gold’s Gym, 10 Fifer Ave., Corte Madera. Free for members. Call 927-4653. Dee also offers private classes. Call 454-8944, www.tonideefiteness.com.

Shara Switala’s Theatrical Burlesque class is offered Tuesdays, 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Stage Dor Dance Studio, 10 Liberty Ship Way No. 340, Sausalito. $15 a class. Call 339-1390, www.stagedor.com.

Virginia Simpson-Magruder and Lane Driscoll offer drop-in pole-dancing classes from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m at Stage Dor Dance Studio, 10 Liberty Ship Way No. 340, Sausalito. Beginners classes are the first, third and fifth Tuesdays of the month, intermediate classes are the second and fourth Tuesdays. $15 a class. Call 339-1390; www.stagedor.com.

Simpson-Magruder will also bring a portable pole to your home for a private party. Call 827-2827; http://virginia.apolelotoffun.com.

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