Life Lessons From a Stripper
Speaking on the theme Courage at Speaker Slam® in Toronto on Aug 6, 2019, June Morrow took the stage with a five minute story.
Transcript
hey baby you want to go in the back room and have some fun no hey baby want to go in the back room and have some fun maybe later hey baby I want to go in the back room and have some fun I'm 32 years old I have a college diploma and a university degree this is not where I expected my life to be I started stripping when I was 26 I thought I'll make some money travel then figure out what to do only thing is somewhere along the lines I failed to figure out what that thing was and so now I am a broken
record hey baby hey baby hey baby have you ever been in a strip club you don't have to answer that if you have you know they are dark places at closing time the DJ turns up the house lights and everyone scatters and this is cuz strip clubs aren't places people go to be seen they're places people go to hide I mean yes the dancers are showing you more than you're normally going to see but they're not showing you the struggles inside and the regular customers well they're hiding the fact that they're in unhappy marriages by purchasing the dancers as their surrogate girlfriends for $20 a
song and me I'm hiding the fact that at 32 even though I know my soul does not belong in this place I'm addicted to the attention and I'm addicted to the money and I don't know what else to do now when we're lost the universe often sends us bread crumbs to help us find our way home and for me my first bread crumb shows up in the change room in the form of a one-page photocopied newsletter it's written by strippers for strippers now when I was a kid my dream was to work at a big-city magazine like cosmopolitan right and cosmopolitan this little one-page thing
it's not but they're looking for submissions and I could do that so that night I go home and I write this little story about how even when no one in the club wants to dance the pole on stage is always a willing partner and they accept it and so I write another and another and another and another after that and eventually they make me editor of this little tiny newsletter yeah which is a big [ __ ] deal for me at the time and let me tell you when that happens something shifts the more I put my truth on paper the less I can pretend
to be someone I'm not and so I teach myself how to edit and I stop wearing makeup at work and I teach myself graphic design and layout and desktop publishing and I stop wearing heels and I teach myself how to manage volunteer contributors and how to do a website and I take this tiny little one-page newsletter and I turn it into a 16 page mini magazine complete with a website to go with it and it is full it is chock full of tips and information that an advice to help strippers with their lives and with their jobs and meanwhile I stopped using my stage name
I stop using hey baby and I stopped making money but you know what I don't care because for the first time in a very long time I am having fun in my own back room and this is how I reinvent myself I find something that I like and I do it again and again and again and doing this little newsletter that gives me the courage to volunteer for a little community newspaper and that gives me the courage to volunteer for a bigger community newspaper and that gives me the courage to volunteer for a big City newspaper and that gives me the courage to go back
to school for journalism and that gives me the courage to apply for a full-time job at a big City magazine which I get where I make a living with my clothes on and I don't have to hey baby anyone I know some of you are a little sad about that okay courage is not figuring out what to do it's doing what you love every single day even when no one around you gets it even when you're not making any money even when you are so in that tunnel that you can't see the light at the end courage is taking step after step after step after
step and with each step letting your inner light shine brighter and brighter and brighter until one day you look around and that darkness is far behind you so hey baby you want to have some real fun do what you love and do it again and again and again
Transcript generated from the recording and lightly cleaned. Some names and wording may differ from the spoken speech.