Everything that’s great about your favorite blogger/dancer (her writer’s “voice” [seriously]) get’s stripped away (pun intended) when someone else does the writing. Diablo Cody, Minneapolis’ favorite stripper/blogger/media critic is written up in this week’s CityPages and it’s really kind of a dissapointment. A disclaimer: I read her site for the writing, not the neccid pictures, of which there are few (psst… update the pics, Diablo).

A couple complaints: First, the title: “Pussy Galore”? That’s all the geniuses could come up with for a title? Second, like a lot of english majors, I get more interested in the po-mo “stripper is the watcher/critic, the audience is the author/text” switch, rather than the standard “Stripper isn’t dumb” storyline (does that make me a literary voyeur?). More of her observations on her audience, less of her observations on wedding cakes. Third, every stripper (or welder, or line cook, or customer service rep) has their own story and their own dreams their working toward, so why another story about someone in the sex biz? (1). Lastly, everything you have to explain is ruined when in the explanation. If CityPages thinks Diablo Cody is interesting, they should have sent her to the bridal fair without the mouth-breathing Real Journalist and let her write the damn story. The essence of the profile was “here’s a stripper who writes” so why not just let her tell us what she saw, in her own voice, at the bridal show? Show (or publish), don’t tell.

Small World Story #1: My father in law used to be sort-of business partners with a guy who ran a dance club in what is now the Choice.

Small World Story #2: Back in the dot-com glory days, I used to work directly across the street from Choice and up 4 stories. My office looked down, but not too judgementally, at the front door where I could see the folks duck in and the bouncers keep the bums out. I could also see the roof of the 1 story club. On hot summer days, the “workers” would go to the roof and cool down in a pool, sending all of us sweaty web-geeks into a bit of a tizzy. Combine that with our “full fridge” policy and we’d lose a lot of productivity when the mercury went over 80 degrees. No wonder we couldn’t turn a profit.

_{(1) Obviously, sex sells, even when the story is ostensibly not about the sex. It’s just edgy enough to feel a little dirty without actually being too dirty. What’s revealing is that the author “Rod” Smith makes no mention of going to see her at work. Writing about the intellectual in the sex business is still writing about the sex business, no matter how detached you try to make your observations, so he might as well have gone right up to the front row and put his dollars down with the rest of ’em. Boy, I would have loved to hear him pitch his editor about doing this story, though.}