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Author takes new spotlight, with clothes on

By Al Sotack, Washington Square News

Residents of New York City have a luxury unimaginable in most other cities: the proximity of celebrity. We find ourselves in line behind rock gods at the corner deli. Writers bump into us at bars. Notice the quiet wallflower at the club. What was the name of her movie again?

Part of the thrill is that we are acutely aware of the gap between the air-brushed gloss and the flawed portraiture of reality. It reminds us that celebrity is amplified life, altered and distorted, while at the root there are veins and capillaries, hair and flesh. We are hungry to take off layers, to see as much real skin as possible.

"Before my readings I get very, very nervous," Elisabeth Eaves tells me over coffee in the East Village. "And I thought, 'Well, I guess I get nervous before large groups of people when I have all my clothes on.' With clothes off, there's a blinding effect. With a naked woman in the room, no one can think about anything else."

Elisabeth was early for the interview, already sitting by a sunny window when I arrived. Coming into the cafe, I walked right past her. The slight, pretty woman by the window did not even register with me as the author of "Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power," the recently published memoir and investigation into the world of stripping. Between the jacket photo and the time spent in the book describing her physique, I was taken aback that I did not immediately recognize her.

This is a woman whose life seems to be characterized by dramatic jumps. In 1996, at 25, Elisabeth stripped in Seattle's relatively famous peep show, The Lusty Lady. A year later she was off to graduate school at Columbia University, and soon began working as a journalist for the Reuters wire service in Jerusalem and London. Book reviewers have latched on to this shift as almost dichotomous, but to me that jump was not as striking as the move she made next, from the low-profile world of wire-service reporting to that of the hardcover.

"Its kind of strange reading reviews of yourself," Elisabeth tells me. "I skim them. I'm not comfortable spending much time with them. Maybe I have to be in this phase longer."

Since publication, no stalkers or weirdos have recognized her on the street, but she has been the subject of attention. This is the shift from observer to subject, from writer to object of the public eye. All forms of exhibition come with a haunting epilogue: the fear of being witnessed later, with clothes on. Near the beginning of "Bare," Elisabeth writes about the haunting terror of Lusty Lady clients who might have recognized her on the street.

Once, while having drinks with friends, I heard a ruckus erupt at the other end of the bar. Bar fights and obnoxious drunks are not rare in the city, but this one was memorable because some jerk was yelling at an acquaintance of mine, a sweet, truly gorgeous girl I did not know particularly well. "I remember," he yelled. "Remember? Remember when you used to strip?"

The look on this silent girl's face was heartbreaking, as if her beauty had dropped like a coat to the floor. We kicked the jerk out on his ass.

"A big part of this is being annoyed by the rules," Elisabeth says. "I know guys who are interviewing for banks and their boss will take them to a strip club and it's considered normal. A guy my age and stage, it's a normal thing. I was on the other side of that equation and I couldn't talk about it at all."

Elisabeth claims to have gone into stripping for a variety of reasons, citing both her early exhibitionist tendencies and a notion that strippers were somehow freer than she was. But after she gave up the year-long personal mission, Elisabeth found she still had not come to any conclusions. And moving on with her life, she discovered that the stigma still burdened her.

"I wouldn't tell anybody," she says. "It caused so many misunderstandings and titillation. I was annoyed by stereotypes of strippers ... yet it bothered me that men I knew used prostitutes and went to strip shows. And I thought, 'I'm kind of a hypocrite because I worked as a stripper.' These are things that motivated me to go back [to stripping] and write the book."

In her book, Elisabeth is at the forefront. She is the vehicle for the information, her inquiry into stripping filtered through her personality. She writes about her childhood, her motivations for stripping, her boyfriends.

While Elisabeth has a long way to go before she qualifies as a celebrity, any person putting themselves in any kind of public spotlight is open to attacks. The jerk in the bar who yelled at the pretty girl was trying to strip away what he saw as a facade, exposing what he knew would be stigmatized. In our society, a woman's sexuality is especially vulnerable to these attacks, these attempts to assert power. Strippers deal with the violence inherent in our power structure every time they walk on stage.

The dropping of clothes is a self-assertion as much as it is an economic necessity, and Elisabeth dropped a layer once again with "Bare." She challenged a stigma by revealing her career as a stripper. While she is aware of the dangers, the trap of a career in stripping, what she calls the "psychological hooks" -- constant sexual attention and instant cash -- this book seems to have legitimized her old job in the eyes of many detractors. But with the book tour and the readings, I have to ask if there are any parallels between taking your clothes off in front of strangers and reading to them.

"Its definitely seen as legitimizing it," Elisabeth says. "Standing in front of a group of people, yeah, there are parallels. There's something about, I don't know, like a good teacher or something. They know how to hold people in their thrall. It's a somewhat similar skill. When you're dancing, if you're good at it, you're watching the audience, knowing what to do next."

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