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Live Nude Girls Unite!
*** (Not rated)
June 22, 2001
First Run Features presents a documentary written and
directed by Julia Query and Vicky Funari. Running
time: 70 minutes. No MPAA rating.
This Union Maid was wise, To the tricks of company
spies. She couldn't be fooled by company stools--
She'd always organize the guys. : --Old labor song
BY ROGER EBERT
And not only the guys. When the strippers at the Lusty
Lady, a San Francisco peep emporium, decided to
organize themselves into a labor union, there were
jolly news stories all over the country. People
thought it was hilarious. This may be because in the
popular mind strippers do not really work.
Opposing the strike, the management of the Lusty Lady
argued that taking off your clothes in a peep show is
not real labor so much as an enjoyable part-time job.
The women putting in 10-hour shifts didn't see it that
way--but their customers did. "What's your job?" one
of the clients asks one of the girls. "I'm a
stripper," she says. "I mean," he says, "how do you
earn a living?"
There is the curious notion that strippers and
prostitutes do what they do because they enjoy it.
This is a fiction that is good for business. I am sure
that some strippers and hookers do sometimes enjoy
what they do, but not that they do it over and over,
all day long, week after week, for a living. By way of
illustration, it is possible to take pleasure in
making a ham sandwich, but you might not want to work
behind the counter at Mr. Submarine, especially when
the customers always leave with the sandwiches.
When you think of strippers, you think of a stage, but
the strippers at the Lusty Lady work in a small
mirrored room. The clients enter little booths
surrounding the room, and put a quarter in a slot; a
panel slides up and they can see the girls for 15
seconds. Another quarter, another 15 seconds. It's
enough to bring back the silver dollar. The veteran
girls make $20 an hour, and there are always two to
four on duty, which makes you realize that the hardest
job at the Lusty Lady belongs to the guy who collects
the quarters.
"Live Nude Girls Unite!," playing this week at Facets
Multimedia, is a documentary made by Julia Query, a
stripper at the club, and Vicky Funari. It is an
advertisement for the possibilities of the consumer
digital video camera. It's not slick, it has some
lapses, it sometimes looks like a home movie, but it's
never boring. It follows some 80 strippers as they
hire a lawyer, demand a contract, and threaten to
strike. Query, Funari and two other filmmakers simply
took the camera along with them and shot whatever
happened.
Miss Query is not your average stripper--but then no
stripper ever is. She dropped out of graduate school,
has worked as a dominatrix, and has a mother who is a
famous public health advocate. The mother pilots a van
around Manhattan handing out free condoms to hookers,
and tells Barbara Walters in a "20/20" segment that
her group facilitates 500,000 safe sex acts a year.
"Peppermint?" Walters asks, holding up one of the
condoms.
When Julia turns up as a speaker and stand-up comic at
the same conference where her mother is delivering a
paper, the result is one of the more unusual
mother-daughter arguments in movie history. Julia was
reared to "do the right thing," and expects her mother
to be proud of her as a union organizer, but the
mother somehow cannot get around the stripping. This
although Query tries to stir indignation about the
club's discrimination against strippers who are not
white (or, for that matter, white but not blond).
Julia is a disarmingly honest narrator. When she
decided to earn money by stripping, she says, she was
terrified by the thought of going on the stage because
"I can't dance." The mirrored room at the Lusty Lady,
which reminded her of an aquarium, seemed less of a
challenge, especially since it has silver poles in it.
The other girls use these for posing, but we gather
Julia may need to grab one to keep from falling down.
Still, she's a spirited Union Maid, and she and her
sister organizers make labor history. She's the kind
of woman Studs Terkel was born to interview.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
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