Dancers afraid 4-foot rule will put them out of a job

Eight-hour days, five days a week, and the flexibility to stay home if one of her children is sick.

It's better than selling insurance over the phone, or working as an assistant in a nursing home. In those jobs, she worked 12-hour shifts, sometimes six days a week.

But dancing in Seattle's strip clubs, Jessica is an independent contractor. She chooses her hours. She can take a day off whenever she wants.

"I have the freedom to do that without getting in trouble," said Jessica, a 25-year-old single mother.

Next month, Seattle voters will decide whether to repeal strict new rules that could kill a dancer's business. An ordinance approved by the City Council last year targeted the lap dance — the staple of any dancer's income — by requiring performers to stay 4 feet away from customers, banning direct tipping and forcing clubs to turn up the lights.

Mayor Greg Nickels proposed the rules after a judge declared a city moratorium on strip clubs illegal. The goal of the ordinance, which has not yet taken effect, is to discourage new clubs. Police say it also will ensure that dancers and customers at the city's four strip clubs are following current laws against lewd behavior.

For their part, club owners have spent nearly $1 million on the Referendum 1 campaign to overturn the ordinance, arguing the rules are both intrusive and impractical. Dancers are conspicuously absent from the lawn signs and television ads.

Society has so many stereotypes about strippers, said Jessica, it is sometimes just tiresome. Some people see them as corrupting. Others see them as exploited. Sitting in her living room the other day, Jessica and another dancer, Tina, said they were just working women.

For safety reasons, neither woman wanted her full name used. Both go by stage names at work.

The women described the day-shift drill: a line of dancers in near-darkness at noon, waiting for customers to walk in. As Tina does her lap dances, dressed in a bikini or lingerie, she has one thought on her mind: "This much closer to the electric bill."

The women have heard talk in the media about how dancers earn so much money they can buy new cars and houses. Maybe that happens, they said. But not for them. Jessica makes about $40,000 a year, she says — enough to support her two sons, if she buys Halloween decorations after the holiday, and saves them for next year.

What most people don't know, Jessica said, is that dancers pay at least $100 a shift to perform. The table dance, at $20 to $40, is the best way to make up that cost. Jessica needs 10 a day to get ahead.

Some days she comes away with as much as $400. Other days, nothing. When a customer walks in, there's no telling what kind of woman he'll want: short hair or long, dark skin or light, petite or plump.

Whatever kind of fantasy the dancers are there to fulfill, the women said, the new rules will kill all that in short order. Take the bright lighting, for example.

"We're pretty human women," Jessica said. "We have cellulite. We have stretch marks."

And then there is the 4-foot rule.

Current law allows them to dance naked on stage, but requires some clothing when they are talking on the floor to customers, or performing lap dances. The only real advantage to the table dance is proximity: Customers are inches away from their fantasy, rather than the 6 feet that is supposed to separate them now from the dancers on stage.

The new ordinance takes away that intimacy.

"Nobody is going to want a table dance," said Tina, 30, who started dancing a few years ago, when she was a single mother. "They can already watch us on stage naked."

In Bellevue and Kent, 4-foot rules have either prompted clubs to close, or prevented new ones from opening. In Shoreline, 13 dancers were arrested last month at Sugar's strip club, most for violating that city's 4-foot rule.

Police in Seattle say they can walk into any club and find violations of the current law, which bans everything from sexual contact to simulating a sex act. This week, police issued citations to five dancers at Rick's in Lake City, one of the more popular Seattle clubs, and to two dancers at the Sands in Ballard.

It depends on the dancer, the women said, and it depends on the club. They've seen dancers cited for flashing a customer or illegal touching, but that's about it. They dismissed concerns, raised by city officials, that strip clubs draw drug dealers and prostitutes.

"Prostitution occurs much more in the normal clubs," Jessica said. "And there's more drug activity at your local high school."

The real issue here, the women said, is society's sense of outrage over the job they do. It's clear in the wording of the ordinance, the language about how clubs are "detrimental" to society.

Jessica, a Roman Catholic, can't understand it. A ballet dancer by training, she likes the way she moves around men. There's beauty in it. Even her mother saw that, when she came to visit the strip club. Even her mother lost her reservations about the job.

"There's nothing in the Bible that says this is wrong," Jessica said.

The women have a vision of what Seattle will look like if the new rules take effect. Talk about crime, they said: Men once satisfied with a table dance will move on to escort services. Street prostitution will go up.

And hundreds of dancers could find themselves out of work. No funds available to retrain them. Just plain out of work.

With four years of community college between them, the women said it would be hard to find jobs that would both pay the bills and allow them to spend time with their children. Public assistance, they said, was not an option.

If voters reject the ordinance, the women will move forward with their plan, to keep dancing for several more years. By then, Tina's teenage son will be grown. It is hard for her to imagine what life will feel like then — what dream she might like to pursue.

"I've just been raising my son," she said. "Everything's been going into that."

Jessica wants to go back to school to become a psychiatrist. She has a 2-year-old and 6-year-old. When they grow up, she said, they will know what their mother once did for a living.

She will tell them there is nothing shameful in the work. That she trained 12 years as a classical dancer. That she moves well. And that she is proud.

Cara Solomon: 206-464-2024 or csolomon@seattletimes.com