MainLine Theatre - 3997 Saint-Laurent, Montréal QC 514-849-3378

For Sasha Van Bon Bon, there is an odd sense of nostalgia about the ’90s. The Mirror’s veteran sex columnist, who’s been doling out sage advice on all things carnal to readers for over 15 years, worked as a stripper for much of that decade.

“I miss being a kid in a strip club,” she says now, from her Toronto home. “There was a power in someone getting excited by just looking at me. Strip clubs were strange places. There was a lot going on there, a lot of confession from men about their desires, and a lot of mystery.”

Over the past few years, Sasha has developed her memories and reflections on the peeler trade of that period and concocted a stage-show memoir, Neon Nightz. The burlesque autobiography opened in Toronto in September to rave reviews. She’s now revamping it and bringing it home to Montreal as part of the Edgy Women festival.

“It will be incredible to perform it in Montreal,” says Sasha. “This is where all of the action happened, the things I re-enact in the show.”

Sasha says that during that period, there were “tons of strip clubs, everywhere,” something that she feels Quebec’s Catholic history has a great deal to do with. “In the Catholic Church, you go to a confessional. In a strip club, things were often very similar to a confessional. Men would come into dark places and tell you their desires, their intimate feelings. What fascinated me were the very spaces we create to indulge in these paradoxes.”

Strip clubs, as Sasha recalls, were “sometimes sexy, often boring, sometimes funny” places. “There was this one man who was an incredible masochist. But he couldn’t really deal openly with his obsessions around having pain involved. He took a Polaroid of himself with a hot curling iron up his ass. He’d show it to us and then talk about it. At one of the clubs I was stripping at, there was a strip-club buffet. I told him to take several carrot sticks into the bathroom and shove them up his ass. I don’t know if this was a healthy thing to do, but he would do it when I told him to.”
Original mounting

Sasha originally mounted the show with the Scandelles, the Toronto-based burlesque troupe she’s a co-founder of. The September production was done as a two-person show, with Sasha delivering monologues as Kitty Neptune performed the stripteases. That production was particularly tough for Sasha.

“Oddly, it wasn’t the issue of bringing so much personal material to the stage but the fact that when we ran it in September, I was going through several major changes in my life. It made the creative process, and being onstage in front of audiences every night, very difficult. This is one reason I’m so happy to be able to mount it again. I’m in a much better place and rewrites and rehearsals have been really invigorating. I feel back in my body and mind again and that’s been such a gift.”

Sasha confirms that the ’90s was a very, very different time. What led her to stripping was “kind of harebrained,” she says now. “I was working in afterhours booze cans, which was very stressful because they often got busted. Some of my friends were strippers. Some of them worked at Else’s on Decarie, which was the most hilarious dump you’d ever seen. Throughout the ’80s, I was totally against sex work, as we all were back then. I thought I’d start by dancing in a lesbian bar, as I thought they’d be easier. Wrong! Lesson number one: women don’t pay for sex!”
No accounting for taste

Sasha says she also learned that people’s taste in strippers is usually very standard and pedestrian. “I had thought some might have some exotic or unique interests, but most people have very prosaic tastes. Most men want blonde, tanned, skinny, with implants. When I first started stripping, it was mainly in clubs outside the city, as I didn’t want to run into any of my teachers.” (Sasha was completing an undergraduate degree in creative writing at Concordia.)

Sasha soon got over whatever sexphobic second-wave feminist ideas that had been drummed into her. But she was always reminded of students who were trying to learn about the milieu, thanks to Concordia’s women’s studies program. Students would arrive at the strip clubs to learn about taking it all off, but basically came off as tourists to Sasha and other strippers. “I used to call them the Simone de Beavers. They were stripping to round out their women’s studies degrees. They were often into very individualistic feminist ideals. They thought their tit was the same as their elbow. You’re not in here as a political action. You’re here to work!”

While nostalgia can often paint things with a rosy glow, Sasha does not utopianize this world. “I do not see this in a purely positive light. I was young at the time, and there were a lot of expectations around what I was doing. Some people who were pretty fucked up about sex were showing up to explore it. I don’t know if it was the perfect place to do it.”

There were moments of hilarity that were very specific to Quebec. Feature dancers would be booked at strip clubs, who would show up like guest strippers to liven up the talent roster. “In burlesque, there would be hobo clowns. These were like hobo strippers. There were these two strippers who were wearing sports bras and they would traipse around to a country version of the Macarena. They had huge implants that they’d bobble on people’s heads. Me and the other strippers would just look at them and ask, ‘What in God’s name is going on?’”
Lapping it up

The biggest change Sasha experienced in stripping during that time was a seismic one. During the ’90s, some strippers began to agree to lap dances, which involved intricate negotiations with clients about what kind of touching might be allowed. “This was very bad for a lot of strippers. It was frightening—suddenly touching was allowed, and this opened a floodgate. One woman might not mind a rim job in a booth, but you might not want that. It turns us into prostitutes—not that there’s anything wrong with that, but our job description changed overnight. Suddenly we were bickering with clients over our body parts.”

Sasha notes that this huge shift also changed the feeling of the social space of the clubs. “It used to be that a group would gather around the stripper. I remember people having business meetings under my ass. But with the advent of lap dancing and private booths, people would disappear into them and the group dynamic was broken up.”

Aside from learning how to strip, Sasha says she learned French in strip clubs. “There’s nothing more beautiful and hilarious than stripper Québécois. I’m so glad I learned French in a strip club! In this latest incarnation of the show, I’ve really enjoyed translating some of the dialogue into French. I love Québécois so being able to add dashes of it into the script has been a lot of fun. Many of the conversations in this show originally took place in Québécois—even when it was spoken in English, it came from French and had a French-Canadian quality to it.”

As might be expected, Sasha explains that putting your life out on stage like this is an emotionally charged act. “I love when strippers see the show and relate to it so personally but I’m also really glad when civilians are touched by how emotionally complex a space like this can be. I loved when people from Montreal were in the Toronto audience and really got the cultural references. I would actually stop mid-monologue and have little chats with them.

“With this version, I want to tell people how much I love this city and miss it. I got to know Montreal from a very privileged perspective—that of a stripper. Sex workers and queers—those are my people. I’m really eager to share that with the audience.”