Naked Confrontation
Email This Post
Print This Post
Let’s just hope they have learned all the positions for prayer, if you know what I mean.
On either end of an Ohio cornfield there is an evangelical church and a strip club, separated by some very nervous Amish folk. The strip club is nothing to write home to mama about. It is a shabby building that oddly resembles a resurrected church, though as a strip joint perhaps Beelzebub performed the resurrection rites. The dancers have requisite Midwest belly pouch, some are decorated with tattoos, and let’s not tally the c-section scars. The Foxhole is a place one web critic called “the shadiest, dirty skank a** hole in the wall I’ve ever been.”
But why trust the word of a Senator.
Left to their own undulations, the Foxhole might never have achieved notoriety beyond being the bottom rung in the “gentleman’s” club ladder. Indeed, such a putrid pole parlor would never have received press unless religious zealots had not made it an issue.
Oddly, Muslims have nothing to do with this story.
Nine miles down the road from the Foxhole sits New Beginnings Ministries, which on the surface sounds like an oxymoron given how long ministries have been a business classification (just ask Saint Peter who started the industry before Christ’s corpse got cold). New Beginnings’ pastor was unhappy about competing for spiritual real estate with an accumulation of discount and not very exotic dancers. As the pulsating pastor pontificated “We cannot share territory with the devil.”
He hasn’t seen the falling real estate prices in Ohio. There is plenty of cheap land for everybody.
The flock at New Beginnings began to badger the “babes” at the Foxhole. For months the congregation has photographed the license plate numbers of Foxhole patrons and generally annoyed the workers with scripture. They stood outside of the club, making a highly visible and entirely contrary environment to the one inside. They shouted at the burlesque princesses, using their stage names and applying a carrot-and-stick trick, offering to pay their living expenses while reciting bible verse. In other words, they have taken all the fun out of either being nearly naked on stage or providing one dollar incentives (there is no fun to be found in buying five dollar Budweisers).
So the bump-and-grinders counter protested at the church.
Come Sunday morning, some Foxhole peelers pop-out of their clothing and into bikinis or less, and stand outside of New Beginnings, no doubt proving a new beginning to teenage boys attending adoration services (and perhaps to some of the teenage girls). They hold signs quoting scripture to give the pastor and parishioners some Christian enlightenment. “Light and darkness cannot exist together, so The Fox Hole has got to go,” is the pastor’s retort.
Light and dark coexist – they just have to time share. Like the master Ray Hubbard says, there are two kind of people – the day people and the night people, and it is the night people’s job to take the day people’s money.
The fact is that extremes have always co-existed as long as nobody thought they were perpetually right and used force to enforce their perceptions (i.e. Osama bin Laden and other porcine syphilitics). Yin and his ugly brother yang. For example, there is currently a strip club in Jerusalem, though historical records do not tell if there were table dancers at the Last Supper. Extremes even blend. I have few doubts that more than one member of New Beginnings has ventured into a bimbo bar before. The dancers are the night people, and it is their job to take the congregation’s money.
If nothing else, this bilateral cluster clucking is an example of American freedom in action. Woman have a right to make money given whatever ‘talent’ or assets they have. People have the right to either peruse the performers or be dedicated to their dogma. Everybody has the right to speak their minds regardless of how empty they may be. Yes, everybody has the right to free commerce, free communion and free speech.
But not in the VIP room. That always costs extra.
Comments