Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Adrienne Farmer

Appalachia is a very painful place. The pain of Appalachians is palpable. The pain of oppression, poverty, misogyny, drug addiction, capitalism, mental illness, and pseudo-scientific snake oil is thick in the air. People wear their pain, and express it outwardly. Is is present when they smile-- their lack of dental care, cultural aversions to socialism, and reliance on free market capitalism's delusion that they are “free” shows it's ugliness with each drug-induced, rotten-tooth grin.

Lilith's real name is Adrienne Farmer. She has been mentioned in a number of posts already. She will be mentioned in future posts after this one. She deserves her own doxx post, although this series as a whole is a doxx of the Brownings with Lilith as an appendage. I thought about leaving out her real name because she was so young when working at Mouse's Ear, but her future coworkers must know who she is, that she has a tendency to scab and snitch to the boss, and she must not be trusted with matters of improving working conditions without some accountability.

Adrienne Farmer said she was from Harlan County, Kentucky. Harlan has bloody great historical significance within the labor movement for coal miners striking and unionizing. The wonderful song “Which Side Are You On?” is about labor organizing in Harlan, a song that has been covered by artists such as Natalie Merchant and Dropkick Murphys. I asked Lilith if she had any relatives who were involved with any of the coal miner strikes, or if she was interested in organized labor. I don't think she understood some of the language I was using. She said that her aunt was involved in some of that stuff decades ago, but talking to Lilith didn't give me the impression that she was interested in any of that presently, or that she thought transferring labor organizing to Mouse's Ear would be a good idea. I get angry when I think about the very real conspiracies to deny Appalachian students of their labor history lessons, of the agenda to remove their rich culture of labor struggles from schoolbooks, the very intentional goal by people in power to pretend like Harlan never happened. Lilith's Harlan heritage is so powerful, and she should be proud.

Lilith was very open with everyone at work about her traumatic childhood, and usually brought it up when first meeting someone. In high school, she walked in on her dad raping a child. She reported him to the police, testified against him in court, and sent him to prison. She has an autistic sister, who she calls a “rape baby,” because she says her mother was raped by their dad at her sister's conception. Lilith says she was moved to a foster home as a teenager after her dad went to prison. At various times, Lilith will claim that her parents are second or third cousins, in a novel way as though she thinks it is grotesquely funny. Her mother's maiden name is Cornett. Farmer and Cornett are two very common surnames in Kentucky. Lilith began smoking cigarettes as a child, chain smoked at Mouse's Ear, and used an inhaler for her asthma. She is worried about having physical abnormalities as the result of inbreeding, and discussed them regularly at work. She looked normal to me, aside from her rotting teeth that resembled grey little pegs. In fact, we used to look at ourselves in the mirror together and note the similarities between our upturned noses and rounded face shapes.

Lilith had a lot of pseudo-scientific beliefs. For example, when she saw me plucking a grey hair off my head in the mirror, she told me that plucking one grey hair will cause exponentially more to grow in it's place. Lilith was a firm believer in the concept of “karma,” so much that she had the word Karma tattooed on her back. A pagan's constant mentioning of karma is not much different than an Evangelical's constant mentioning of god getting people in the end. Sometimes justice happens, but sometimes horrible things happen to people who don't deserve it, and criminals get away with awful things. It's only confirmation bias that perpetuates faith in karma. Lilith believed in earnest that I had magickal powers, even though I told her I wasn't really into that kind of thing except for a soft agnostic whimsy. I used to wear a rose quartz heart necklace that I purchased in the gift shop of Chicago's Field Museum, and Lilith provided a wealth of information about her belief in the powers of rose quartz. Lilith informed me that she is a “crystal witch,” that her parents are crystal witches, and that it was in her blood to have crystal witch powers. I'm not sure what type of witch she thought I was. It is my theory that people who are suffering, who feel powerless, will think they have magickal powers as a coping mechanism to get out of whatever situation they find themselves in. The world around us is overwhelmingly bad, and sometimes it feels better to believe we have a way out of it by casting spells.

Lilith loved triangulating and controlling a social situation however she was able. She often attempted to dominate other people. While I was at Mouse's Ear waiting to audition in May of 2019, she introduced herself and initiated a conversation with me. She told me she would be “training” me on my first night. I avoided her after the audition, and worried what she meant by that. I really hate the idea of being “trained” by a coworker against my will, and I worried it was some kind of rule implemented by the Brownings. When I was alone in the office with Buddy, I asked him what she meant by saying she was going to train me. He didn't know what the hell she was talking about, and stated that dancers don't train each other at his club. I can only assume that Lilith took it upon herself to attempt to “train” me because she wanted to control the situation. At the time, she assumed I was in my early 20s and had limited experience in strip clubs, so perhaps she thought she could ambush me with her control. She tended to do that with most dancers who just started there, which also assisted her in establishing dominance as a dressing room cannabis peddler. She does this Southern thing of talking very gently to people she doesn't actually like, in order to try to find out information about them that she could use to harm them with later. She'd often meander around the dressing room, saying slanderous things about people behind their backs, and then proceed to be nice to them when speaking to them directly. She also has a poor memory, so she forgot conversations days later, repeated things often, and had unpredictable moods. Lilith often whispered to me that nobody at Mouse's Ear was to be trusted, but never included herself in such warnings. She often called our coworkers “a bunch of bitches,” but never included herself in these warnings. She only worked at Mouse's Ear for a year or so when I started.

Lilith never liked how many dances I sold in comparison to her sales. She strongly clung to the idea that she should sit with customers for long stretches of time. She was upset that I'd sell a dance within a few minutes and then walk away from them. She was also upset that I'd approach customers who she previously sat with, but was no longer sitting with. In the beginning, she'd tell me not to work the way that I do. I never obeyed her. One time, I overheard her approach Ralph behind me, to tell him that if he wasn't going to get rid of me, then she'd quit. This happened around August, so I still had a good three months to go. She never quit while I was there.

Sometimes Lilith spoke normally with me, sometimes not. One time nearing the end of my employment, we were conversing in the stair well, between the upstairs and downstairs. She was acknowledging that most people at Mouse's Ear disliked me, and stated that I would never fit in with anyone there no matter how long I stayed, because I was the only sober person working there and most of the dancers were addicted to pills or other drugs as their way of bonding with one another. She stated that it is easy for people to gang up on me because I am alone, sit alone, and do not go out of my way to gather in groups. Buddy walked by and saw us talking, and then he took Lilith aside to yell at her. She began to cry after he walked away, and told me that Buddy was upset with her for speaking with me in the stair well. I'll probably never know the extent to which Lilith interacted with the Brownings, or why Buddy was specifically upset with Lilith for conversing with me in the stair well enough to yell at her and make her cry. I know that often times when strip clubs try to get rid of me, they will isolate me socially, so I have fewer allies than I normally would anyway with my avoidant personality. I know that Lilith was being secretive about explaining certain dynamics to me. Another dancer informed me that Lilith was addicted to cocaine, and I do wonder if she associated closely with the Brownings for that reason among others. Lilith expressed that she knew about my past of suing strip clubs. She was one of the people to spread rumors that my locker was bugged. She often defended her former partner, DJ Rob, for harassing dancers about tipping him and dictating rules to them. She expressed no interest in worker solidarity whatsoever, and was more attached to the men in power. She often taddled to the Brownings about our other coworkers doing things that were not harming her, but that she knew would cause them dismay if the Brownings knew.

In addition to cannabis sales and stripper work, Lilith prided herself on other entrepreneurial pursuits during working hours. She charged other dancers to let her massage their shoulders-- I rejected those offers. She also made artful t-shirts and tank tops, which she once pressured me into purchasing. I didn't want that shirt, but I was feeling generous and bought one from her. She also attempted to sell me some jewelry that I wasn't interested in. Her only other strip club working experience was at a dive bar called Fuzzy Holes, in Johnson City. She also sold pornographic photos of herself on the internet. She often bragged to people about her IQ of 118. My IQ is 138, but I haven't bragged about that number for years, because that would be tacky.

Lilith usually expressed discontent when people were nice to me without her involvement in a conversation or interaction. Near the end of my employment at Mouse's Ear, I made a friend named Bunny. Bunny used to break out in hives and rashes when she was nervous at work, and dancers bullied her about it, by saying her irritated skin was contagious and telling her to wash herself. Bunny had a drug problem, was not very assertive, and also lived at Motel 6 from time to time. Lilith did not like it that I had an ally, so she tried to disrupt that bridge. She would ask Bunny a bunch of personal questions that were none of her business, and force Bunny to let her drive her to wherever she was staying. When Bunny was staying at Motel 6, Lilith told everyone at work that Bunny was homeless, which was supposed to have been a secret. She'd repeatedly ask Bunny how much money she made per night, and ask to see Bunny's money. On one of my last nights at Mouse's Ear, Lilith was having a rough night financially, so she physically took Bunny up to a couple of guys, talking as though she was Bunny's pimp, and offered to traffic her at Motel 6. She was offering them prices for Bunny.

Adrienne Farmer no longer works at Mouse's Ear. Her facebook says she lives in Tampa. I still have so many questions about her involvement with the Brownings. I have a theory that the first time Adrienne Farmer ever received proper care in her life was after she told the authorities about her dad and sent him to prison, that her social workers in foster care gave her so much reassurance and attention, and that since then, she became addicted to talking to authorities or bosses, telling on others as much as she possibly could for validation. It's just a theory. Organized labor in strip clubs should be cautious of Adrienne Farmer. I do pity all of her suffering, but that doesn't make her any less of a scab.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Rachel Roberts

I have very mixed feelings about the complex dancer at Mouse's Ear known as Khaleesi. I debated whether or not I should even use her real name, and decided, yes, I will doxx her because she is aggressively abusive, but I will also celebrate her for the rebellious budding feminist who stands up for labor rights that she is. A coward Khaleesi is not, and I can respect that.

Rachel Roberts is of partial Jewish descent. After her friend Lizzie was fired for putting a hex on me, Khaleesi began taking photos of all the dressing room graffiti, including Selexa's Hitler stuff, while talking about how she was going to sue Mouse's Ear and needed evidence. While she was yelling about Lizzie getting fired and threatening to stab me in the head, I was quietly sitting there thinking,

“I already took photos of all the Hitler stuff Khaleesi, I'll be your witness and I support your future lawsuits rebel girl. Sue, sue, SUE!”

I didn't say any of that stuff though. I just sat there quietly freshening up at my locker, not looking at her. Khaleesi was loudly and maniacally rambling about me being a demon for repelling Lizzie's hex, so there wasn't a lot of room for constructive dialogue. Khaleesi identifies as a Christian, so while she doesn't practice witchcraft herself, she agreed with Lizzie that I was demonic. She was also claiming that Lizzie was fired for practicing her pagan religion, and called it a termination of religious discrimination. I don't think any lawyer would invest in that argument, but I was impressed by Khaleesi's litigious inclinations. Khaleesi has stated that she is bipolar, and I can believe that. The night Lizzie was fired wasn't the first time Khaleesi harassed me; that started weeks before.

Khaleesi had an unpleasant habit of falsely accusing dancers she didn't like of having vaginal infections, telling management about her suspicions, and then wrangling other people around her to try to determine if there was an infection. While the dancer in question was on stage naked, she'd encourage staring in an impolite way. She did that to me as well as others. She expressed concern about going on stage after such diseased people were up there before her, infecting the stage. None of these infections actually existed that I knew of, but that didn't stop her from reminiscing about all the past vaginal infections she thought she saw.

Khaleesi was in her early twenties, and very emotionally immature. She perpetually smoked cannabis out of her vape pens upstairs, and graduated from a high school within walking distance of Mouse's Ear. She had no children, and did rely on Mouse's Ear as her full time job. She mentioned a few times that she spent over one thousand dollars per month on cannabis.

Khaleesi became aggressive with me around mid-June, about a month after I started working at Mouse's Ear. While she was on stage, a customer who was sitting at her stage turned around to talk to me. I don't normally approach customers who are sitting at the stage, because it is a disrespectful thing to do to the stage dancer. It's also against the rules at most other clubs. So, I told him that and tried to defer his attention back to Khaleesi on stage. He got up from sitting at Khaleesi's stage though, and asked to buy a table dance from me. So, I sold him one. While I was dancing for him, Khaleesi got off of her stage, got up close to me and started yelling things at me such as,

“I'll run you out of the club! I'm sick of you stealing customers!”

Khaleesi is much smaller than me, so she wasn't a physical threat. I did tell the Brownings about it though, and they attempted to prevent her from bothering me in the future. After that, like Lizzie, she also called me “cut throat” with regularity, and went out of her way to encourage other dancers to dislike me.

Khaleesi sometimes misplaced her belongings and accused me of stealing them. While I steal from corporations such as Whole Foods, I'd certainly never steal from Khaleesi or any other dancer at Mouse's Ear. It was likely Khaleesi just couldn't find her belongings because of the fog of cannabis and mania.

Khaleesi often made fun of me for having a wave to my hair, because she thought I should straighten it. Many strippers in the past have made fun of me for not straightening my hair. Most strippers use straightening irons on their hair. Khaleesi would say things to me such as,

“If you're going to steal something, at least steal a hair straightener, Fluffy!”

Her nickname for me was “Fluffy,” due to my fluffy hair. Khaleesi regularly taunted me because I am much taller than her, but my bosom is modest compared to hers. Khaleesi is one of those rare women who is very petite and skinny, but with very large, natural boobs. She has done swimsuit modeling because she is so naturally physically beautiful. She was unable to understand why I sold so many more dances than her. While I'd certainly agree that Khaleesi looks better naked than me, many people think I am beautiful as well. Khaleesi was mean to the customers on a near constant basis, did not talk about interesting subjects with them, and did not have as much practice faking it, so those factors probably had something to do with me selling more than her. I don't blame Khaleesi for hating the customers; I hate them too. It just takes practice to fake it when you're not a dumb scab who thirsts for customer attention. I always appreciated the fact that Khaleesi was an angry man hating shrew who called out their disgusting existences. I'm a shrew too. She was never one to sit and talk to them for very long like the scabs did. Khaleesi's disgust for male entitlement has the potential to develop into something good. We agreed on many things, but she did not know it. I was unable to articulate my thoughts to her, because she was so damned mean to me. I do have feelings, and it was hard to handle all that she spewed at me.

Khaleesi and I disagreed on many things as well. She was a Donald Trump supporter. She was anti-abortion and stated that if women didn't want to have kids, “They should keep their legs closed!” She refused to provide dances for Mexicans. She occasionally called Ralph “dad” in order to try to get him on her side during times of strife. She disapproved of gay male sex and called her ex boyfriend “poop dick” for having a relationship with another man. She was just a really awful person at the end of the day, who harassed me for not “tipping” Alex Cave. A lot of these things about her are just the result of her conservative environment down in Tennessee. She has a long life ahead of her, and she may change completely. I felt stressed out around her, and sometimes had small panic attacks when she started ranting. Her toxic presence effected my mood, which negatively effected my money making abilities.

Khaleesi had knee problems from working at Mouse's Ear. Many strippers have knee problems because of the mandatory heels. When she was in extreme pain, she neglected to go downstairs to do the two-for-one feature where everyone had to get on stage together and walk off in a line. She vocalized how much pain she was in, and Buddy came upstairs to yell at her. Ralph sent her home one night when she wasn't cooperating with doing the two-for-one. She was crying at her locker, packing up her belongings, talking about how her uncle is a lawyer. She stared at me, tears running down her face, and screeched,

“I'm going to sue this place and get every WHORE in here to lose her job when I get this whole place shut down!!!”

I'm not sure if she knew about my litigious history at that point. Even though she's mean as hell and thought I was the enemy, I was just sitting there, thinking,

“Good. I hope you do sue Mouse's Ear instead of just talk about it all the time. I hope you sue the Brownings for everything they're worth!”

Ralph told me that he fired Khaleesi for good that night. Some of the dancers who she texted that night said she was threatening to kill herself. At the start of my next work shift, she entered the dressing room and started getting ready as normal. She stated that Buddy called her on the phone and asked her to come back the day after Ralph fired her. She stated that he knew they weren't allowed to fire her and didn't want to get sued, so they let her come back.

In subsequent shifts, Conner began harassing Khaleesi. Conner wasn't nice to Khaleesi anyway, but after she came back, he constantly watched her, reprimanded her, scolded her for not following the rules, and I was watching him. I watched Conner violate Khaleesi's rights. I watched Conner harass Khaleesi for minor infractions of the rules. I knew exactly what they were doing to Khaleesi, because I've had it done to me so many times. Khaleesi didn't have everyone against her in the same ways that strip clubs get the whole workplace against me, because she had enough friends in there to protect her. I knew the Brownings and Conner were after Khaleesi though.

During one of Khaleesi's last shifts with me, we had a nice conversation. We had both danced in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and both got fired in Cocoa Beach, for not allowing customers to put their hands on us. Florida clubs are basically brothels, and sometimes when travelers dance down there, it's easy to get fired if a customer complains that they cannot touch. So, Khaleesi and I discussed how gross managers in Cocoa Beach are for never defending our bodily autonomy or protecting us against customer harassment. She decided she liked me after that, told her friend Aspen she liked me, and was nice to me. Then she was fired.

The official reason the Brownings gave for permanently firing Khaleesi was that she had drugs in the dressing room. They were referring to her cannabis vape pen, which she had for a year and a half at Mouse's Ear and was never fired for before. It was obviously a discriminatory termination because Khaleesi discussed the working conditions of Mouse's Ear and complained about the rules with regularity. It had nothing to do with the vape pen, and everybody knew that. Most dancers at Mouse's Ear didn't use the legalese language or know their rights in a methodical way, including Khaleesi who claimed to have a lawyer uncle. I don't think she ever sued the club. I never saw her again.

Khaleesi is back at Mouse's Ear now, since it is no longer owned by the Brownings. I am happy for her. I hope she's nicer to her coworkers, and I hope she understands that whatever the Deja Vu contract says, whatever lies her managers tell her, whatever misinformation is spread, she can sue the club. Deja Vu would probably offer her a settlement, give her wages for every hour worked, give her all of the illegal house fees back, give her all of the illegal cuts of dances, and every tip she's ever given to staff can be calculated into her settlement. She can file a complaint with the NLRB if she is terminated too. I hope Khaleesi uses her high IQ, angry self to document everything, every hour, every fee that is stolen from her, that she photographs every rule posted. I hope Khaleesi uses her social skills that I don't have, to gather her friends and tell them about their working conditions, how Deja Vu has been getting sued since the 90s but won't change, that unionization is the best way to advocate for the working conditions of the dancers, and I hope she uses all her valid and legitimate rage about male entitlement in more constructive ways than I've ever been able to accomplish with my limited social skills. I hope Khaleesi uses her vibrant passion for justice and rebellious nature for the common good. She has so much potential. I'm rooting for her. I’ve always been.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Leah Ewing

On the night that I took pictures of Lizzie's hex graffiti, I also took pictures of some of the offensive nazi shit in the dressing room. I wanted to make sure I had evidence of it, in the unlikely event that any of my coworkers who were effected by it wanted to report Mouse's Ear to the EEOC or sue for emotional damages. That's an open offer; I'm still willing to testify for anyone who needs a witness, even if I dislike you.

This graffiti was there before I became a Mouse's Ear employee, and not directed toward me like Lizzie's hexes were. I did not find out who did it until after Lizzie was fired. The Brownings knew it was there, and they knew who put it there. Her name is Leah Ewing. I'm not sure if she's associated with the teachings of Louis Farrakhan at all, but that wouldn't surprise me.

On my first shift at Mouse's Ear, I was very polite to Leah Ewing, as I am to most of my coworkers when I first meet them. She went out of her way to ignore me, and to throw my belongings on the floor when they were sitting in a chair she wanted. She had been working at Mouse's Ear for about five years, and socially speaking, was of a certain dressing room rank due to her longevity and work friends. Her stage name was Selexa.

Leah Ewing had a full time day job and no children, so financially speaking, she didn't desperately need Mouse's Ear. Her desk job was at the Jewelry Television headquarters, or JTV. She often talked about working at JTV and brought in jewelry for her friends. She didn't make a lot of money at Mouse's Ear. Sometimes she talked about wanting to throw Molotov cocktails at customers who rejected her. Sometimes she sadly stated, “nobody wants me,” when she was rejected. One time, she stated that she works at Mouse's Ear as her vacation, that she goes there to look at naked women, because she can't afford to go to the beach. While she was a creepy workplace sexual predator, I do think she was at Mouse's Ear to earn some extra cash, but she was always frustrated because she couldn't easily do that, and as a cope, she just pretended like she was there for fun.

One day, Conner told me it was ok to sit down and talk to a customer who Selexa had been sitting with, but was not currently sitting with. I sat down next to the customer, and within a few minutes, he agreed to get up to buy a dance from me. Selexa returned and was infuriated about it. She had been sitting, drinking with him for a good hour and hadn't been able to close the deal. I was able to close the deal within a few minutes, and unlike most newer dancers who were fearful of Selexa's territorial aggression, I didn't fear the consequences of approaching him. It gave me internal lulz. I also just really needed to make money, because I didn't have a full time JTV job, affordable rent, or a kitchen to cook affordable groceries in. It was just business. Mouse's Ear was Selexa's emotional home and family though, so it wasn't just business to her.

In a subsequent shift, Selexa sneakily took a naked photo of me while I was changing at my locker, without my consent. I pretended not to notice, and I didn't tell the Brownings about it because I know there was only so much they were willing to do for me. Besides, she could've saved it or sent it somewhere by the time they got to it. I also didn't want to give her the satisfaction of emitting an emotional reaction to her bullshit. On another occasion, Selexa was speaking with a dancer in the dressing room, loudly, about her desire to shove me into a locker. On another occasion, she approached a customer I had been sitting with and said,

“Don't get a dance from her, she has herpes!”

I do not have herpes, but even if I did, it's not like I make physical contact during dances in a way that would transfer the virus. About 50% of the population does have herpes, and I don't judge anybody for it. The customer who she said that to made sure to buy a bunch of dances from me and tip me on stage, in front of Selexa, to make sure she could see that I was unaffected. Another dancer named Aspen informed me that Selexa said the herpes thing to customers about her before, and it was just something Selexa does to newer dancers who she is jealous of. Aspen had been working at Mouse's Ear for over a year at that point, and had befriended Selexa so she'd stop bothering her. I went and told the Brownings about Selexa's herpes trolling, but unfortunately Ralph just laughed about that one and said he'd talk to her.

Selexa turned her harassment of me up a notch, by following me around when I spoke to various customers, sitting down while I was with them, and attempting to interrupt our conversations. That particular strip club behavior is an abnormal, uncommon, but sometimes a thing that dancers do to each other in order to harass one another during times of extreme tension. Some of the dancers at Mouse's Ear thought that because I sat with customers who they had previously sat with, but who they were no longer sitting with, it was the same thing as approaching my customers while I was still talking to them to interrupt our conversations. It's two different things, but many Appalachians are dumb and territorial, so to them it was hard to tell the difference. Selexa was never able to succeed in convincing a customer to spend money on her instead of me when she did this, so she eventually stopped doing it. She couldn't compete. Sometimes at the beginning of shifts, if just Selexa and I were downstairs, I'd get called to stage and she'd creepily stare at me from across the room. The bratty DJs would play “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, as a little Song War to taunt her while she watched me dancing.

Sometimes Selexa tried to promote untrue notions about my sales, not speaking directly to me, but loudly verbalizing to her friends. She'd say things like, “All her money goes to the bar, but I get to keep all my money!” in reference to how the club took $10 per song of my dances, while she was claiming to make more money from just hanging out drinking with customers and not giving them dances. She drank heavily at work and then drove home most nights she was working. I never once taunted, bragged, or discussed my income with her or her friends, or tried to provoke her reactions. This was all just stuff she was irritated about in her own head and then loudly expressed without my input. Of course, I was thinking that although some of my money went to the club in the form of illegal fees, I'd eventually get that back with a lawsuit, which I did. I am very quiet and shy, so I usually kept my head down when not hustling. Bullies like Selexa are deeply insecure, so sometimes it is better to befriend them as a survival tactic, as Aspen did with Selexa. Selexa is pushing thirty, so it's pretty gross that she behaves like this at all and people have to navigate around it.

Selexa thought she was a witch with magickal powers, like Lizzie. One time she said she did a flat tire spell on me that didn't work. She was surprised it didn't work. Selexa used to tell people a simplified version of what she thought my hustle was, by mockingly saying, “Do you want to see my vagina?!” My hustle is a fine distillation of over a decade's worth of experience, simplified into a few sentences and facial expressions, so Selexa was wrong in that regard as well. Sometimes if I entered the dressing room, she would start talking about her MMA training and ability to beat people up. She never actually laid a hand on me though. She could've easily overpowered me regardless of MMA training, because she was about as tall as me, but with well defined muscles, and likely a much higher level of testosterone. She's very physically masculine compared to most other women.

One time after a customer sexually assaulted me, Selexa and her friend Michelle started laughing loudly, to make sure I heard them. I threw that customer out, which the Brownings were fine with. That happened my first week there, and although there is no reason to laugh at sexual assault, Selexa and Michelle had no reason to dislike me other then their own deep insecurities. At certain times, I overheard Selexa talk like an SJW feminist regarding rape culture and sexual assault, all the while I remembered her laughter when I was grabbed by a customer, and I thought about what a pathetic hypocrite she is.

Selexa didn't necessarily care about Alex Cave, the Brownings, or the DJs, so she wasn't a part of their efforts against me near the end. Near the end of Selexa's employment at Mouse's Ear, she eventually expressed her desires to befriend me in some way, or attempt to speak with me normally. I think she found me sexually attractive, which really grossed me out. I hold grudges, so unlike forgiving Aspen, I was not interested in making friends with Selexa. I guess I could've forgiven her and forged some kind of alliance, but my hatred for Selexa is so strong that I have no desire to ever do that. I didn't want that bridge, even as it could have helped me. I was glad whenever she told dancers not to tip the DJs, but I'd still never want to be comrades with someone so horrible. In fact, since I started this series, I've been thinking about how much I hate DJ Rob and regret giving him that $5 during my last shift. I should've burned that bridge too.

Selexa moved on from harassing me, to harassing other newer dancers, or ones who had previously worked there and returned after a long absence. Dancers such as Brandy, Natalie, and Roxy were all harassed by Selexa after me. One time I quietly pointed out to Brandy the obvious fact that Selexa only harassed white women, and when that got back to Selexa through the grapevine, it sent her into a fiery rage. Brandy was a beautiful, petite and demure blonde lady who Selexa became obsessed with bothering, to the point she attempted to physically assault her. Brandy told Ralph about it. Ralph subsequently fired Selexa, after five years of Selexa's misclassified employment. I guess the dressing room nazi graffiti, herpes slander, unconsensual nude photos, and god knows how many victims before Brandy wasn't enough, but little Brandy was the straw that broke the camel's back. Ralph told Brandy that they had problems with Selexa harassing her coworkers before, and he finally had enough of it. I don't know why it took five years. Her only redeeming quality was breakdancing.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Lizzie

We might as well start with Lizzie; my early Mouse's Ear experiences with Lizzie were pivotal in shaping the rest of my time after she was gone. Some would say she was gone too soon; I say good riddance psycho bitch. I began working at Mouse's Ear in mid-May; Lizzie was fired by Independence Day.

Lizzie's stage name was Lizzie. Lizzie's facebook name has been both Lizzie Jones and Jane Dough. I don't know if Lizzie Jones is her real name. Lizzie told me she worked at Mouse's Ear for about four years prior to my arrival. Lizzie was pushing thirty. Lizzie had a few children and a heteronormative life partner. She stated that he was a scientist and financially supported the family. Lizzie was Alex Cave's friend, who she hung out with outside of work and tipped at the end of the night. Lizzie had many dancer friends at Mouse's Ear-- a clique, one could say.

Lizzie wore black lipstick, ghost white foundation, and dyed her hair green. While Lizzie was naturally pretty, the modifications she did to herself caused many customers to not want her. Lizzie thought she was a witch with magickal powers, including tarot card reading abilities. Sometimes she brought out her entire deck of tarot cards to the show floor, along with her tarot cloth, to sit and play with them during working hours. I thought she was entertaining, but her behavior wasn't the type of thing that most customers came to Mouse's Ear to spend money on. Most customers came to Mouse's Ear to spend money on beautiful, unmodified, natural women, who engaged in interesting conversations with them, talked a little dirty, gave them some attention, and gracefully danced naked for them. Lizzie did not seem to care what customers thought of her. That was probably because she relied on her scientist life partner to financially support her.

Lizzie smoked excessive amounts of cigarettes and spent excessive amounts of time upstairs in the dressing room, talking about psychedelic drugs and hanging out with her other dancer friends. Voluminous amounts of customers would be sitting downstairs by themselves sometimes, with no dancers talking to them, while Lizzie and her friends would be sitting upstairs hanging out. The financial resources were available, but Lizzie usually didn't care to aggressively pursue them. One time when I went upstairs to freshen up at my locker in between dancing, the downstairs quite busy with clients, Lizzie was playing with a canister of glitter in front of the mirror, along with a few other dancers. I'd be cordial with them, say hello to them, notify them that there were customers downstairs. They behaved like typical Southern white women combined with typical strip club cliques-- extraordinarily bitchy to outsiders. I really, really tried to be nice to Lizzie. But, I also had to make money during my work shift. I’ve never been one to stay in unhealthy marriages or relationships for financial gain, as many miserable whore-wives do. I often cut dressing room conversations short, to get back downstairs and sell, sell, sell.

I think Lizzie might've been an alcoholic; she often got plastic cups instead of juice when sitting with customers, so she could drink the alcohol they brought in. Sometimes she left the club drunk. I do not know if she was driving home like that. I feel like if she actually loved her children and wanted to be with them, to provide for them with a good paying job to contribute to her family, then she wouldn't have been smoking so many cigarettes, getting drunk, and wasting hours upon hours in the dressing room. It seemed like Mouse's Ear was more of her social scene with the gal pals, a break from her otherwise unfulfilling housewife life.

Sometimes when I cut conversations short or said things to my coworkers such as, “Well, I gotta get downstairs to hustle now,” they would be confused by the term “hustle.” A number of dancers at Mouse's Ear did not know what it meant, or why I always wore a watch to measure my time. Lizzie was deeply troubled by my behavior. One time she started lecturing me about the way I work, how I go from customer to customer selling dances, always on the move. She attempted to encourage me to sit, drink, hang out with the group, calling it “team work” when dancers all sit around with a group of guys for paltry sums of money. Though Lizzie was all about “team work” when it came to sitting with customers for free, she never expressed any interest whatsoever in unionization, or protesting mandatory fees that the Brownings charged.

Lizzie would sit with the same group of customers for hours, making very little money. Sometimes, she would leave her table, to go upstairs in the dressing room to hang out. One time, I watched her get up from a table where she was sitting with a customer. She had been gone for about a half an hour before I decided she wasn't going to come back, so I went up to his table and sold a dance to him. While I was dancing for him, she came downstairs and looked angry. She later confronted me about it in the dressing room, called me “cut throat” for dancing for that guy, and proceeded to express her anger that I am “cut throat” in subsequent weeks. At normal strip clubs, if a dancer gets up and is gone from her customer for even a few minutes, that customer is fair game for the next dancer who may be able to profit off of him. It is understood that the empty space means someone else might sell to him. That is the widely understood norm most other places, but because Lizzie's cup was sitting at his table, and because she didn't have experience outside of Mouse's Ear, I was villainized for doing a normal thing and doing it successfully. To make matters more confusing, Lizzie was OK with pre-approved dancer friends of hers approaching her table if she was gone, but only if she told them it was OK. I asked both Conner and Rob if it was OK that I approached tables where a dancer had gotten up, and they both said yes. They did not seem to like Lizzie very much or care about her territorial weirdness. I think Buddy was more forceful with his etiquette rules in previous years, but not as much while I worked there. I’d do the bare minimum of drinking a few sips of my juice, and then moving on, not caring if another dancer sat down after me.

As time went on, I stopped being concerned with Lizzie's psychological issues in relation to my sales. She also pretended to stop caring that I was good at sales. She and I were relatively cordial and chatty with one another if I had a free moment. I didn't realize how much she still secretly resented me until the end of her time there. Toward the end of her employment at Mouse's Ear, I glanced over at her coming down the stairs while I was giving a dance. She was staring at me like Carrie on prom night. I subdued a reaction, and continued dancing. Later on in the dressing room, she said to me,

“Hey, Wendy?”

“Yes?” I replied.

“Ah wasn't glarin' at yew earlier. Ah just have restin' bitch face,” she said.

“Oh, hah, I have that too, it's fine,” I replied.

“Yew know what ah was doin'? Ah wuz ad-mah-er-in yew. Ah ad-mah-er yew, Wendy. Yer sew goood at what yew do,” she said.

“Aww, thanks,” I replied.

I have an estranged uncle from Tennessee named Michael who I haven't seen since childhood. He is a homicidal maniac. He and my maw maw had a way of speaking, all sweet and docile and naah-ce. They raise their voice pitch higher than is natural, and say naaah-ce thangs to people who they secretly want to butcher. It's the snaky Southern way, and that is what Lizzie was like. That way of speaking reminds me of a horror movie in a calm before a blood bath storm.

Later on, I noticed two new graffiti items in the dressing room. The dressing room was full of graffiti already, but there were two new things. One was on the bench where I sat in front of my locker, and one was larger, on the floor where I walked away from my locker:

I immediately assumed it was either Lizzie or Lilith, the two occultist cracker hicks who secretly despised me. I pretended not to notice the drawings. At some point, Lizzie and Lilith both came up to me at my locker and asked me if there had been any changes in my night, how my night had been going. My night had been going fine, I told them. I'm not sure what their spell was supposed to have done to my night, but it was average.

At the end of the night while the Brownings were closing up, I was sitting at the top of the stairs dressed, waiting for the DJ to tell everybody we could come down. Aspen was sitting across from me also waiting, while Lizzie, Lilith and their friends were around the corner by the lockers. Aspen said something along the lines of,

“You're so silly with your squiggly lines and stars, Lizzie.”

I was unable to see around the corner to where everyone was by the lockers, but I heard Lizzie saying some kind of a prayer to expel a demon or something like that, and then she was telling the other dancers to “not speak of it, put it in tha yewniverse, put yer thoughts in tha yewniverse” or some shit like that. So, by piecing these things together, examining the photos, and because I am not a fucking idiot, I theorized that Lizzie was attempting to put a hex on me, that she thought I was a demon for selling a bunch of dances, and that she was trying to use her magick to get rid of me by drawing those things on the places I passed. I went into Buddy's office during a subsequent shift and shared my theory with him. I wasn't sure if it was true or not; it was just an educated guess based on auditory and visual observations. I also wasn’t sure if the places she drew were where the dressing room security cameras were pointing.

I didn't think Buddy would do much about the graffiti after I told him. He seemed indifferent about it when I talked to him. To my pleasant surprise, at the beginning of my next shift, I was laying down on a row of chairs in the back when Conner approached me, to tell me that Buddy took Lizzie upstairs to the graffiti, asked her if she did it, she admitted to everything, and then he fired her. This happened when Conner was still nice to me, so he consoled me a bit. I told him witchcraft isn't real, that I believe in science, and he agreed. My reaction to Conner was subdued, because I didn't want him to think poorly of me for being happy about the situation. On the inside, I was bursting over with laughter at how ridiculous, how absurd Lizzie is, and how I couldn't believe she would admit to something that was only a theory with no solid evidence, and how I thought it was utterly delicious that Buddy fired her. I laughed so hard my guts hurt on the drive back to my motel later that night.

Many of the dancers who had worked with Lizzie for years were upset about her abrupt termination. They were a tight knit crew up there, doing magick and getting high, like The Craft. For me to come in and cause such a disruption was definitely a faux-pas. One dancer named Khaleesi said she wanted to stab me in the head, for example. It was pretty tense up there in the dressing room. Conner said to me, “Buddy did the right thing.” The official reason Buddy gave for firing Lizzie was that she destroyed his carpet, but I didn't think that made any sense, because that whole dressing room was vandalized and falling apart. I am completely fine with employers terminating toxic employees who harm their coworkers, and many unions would agree with me. I do not believe that Lizzie's hex had any power against me, but what if it did, and what if her continued presence harmed me in some way? A side-effect of Lizzie's termination was three rumors about me.

One rumor was that I bugged my locker with recording devices, and that must've been how I knew it was Lizzie who drew the hex. That was not true. Of course, I did carry around recording devices on my person from time to time to capture labor violations, but it's not like I could just say to everybody,

“Hey everybody, it is a felony to bug my locker, and something I never considered! I'm a law-abiding spy! I only secretly record conversations that I am a part of, because Tennessee is a one-party consent audio recording state! That means I have to be present for the conversation! I only record labor violations where I am part of the conversation, that's all, not my locker when I'm not there!”

Another rumor was that I am a “snitch.” I got labeled a snitch for discussing my graffiti theory with Buddy. I get labeled a snitch in other workplaces from time to time. I don't think there's anything wrong with whistle blowers trying to get management or government organizations like the Health Department, OSHA, the NLRB, or the EEOC to deal with a bad situation. I also support survivors of sexual assault who choose to report things to the police, or any other survivor who doesn't know where to turn and can't rely on nonexistent systems of “transgressive justice.” There was no way Lizzie staying there would've benefited anybody but herself and her clique of petty bitches. But, I do want my readers to understand that there can be negative consequences after telling on people, and to choose your path wisely, because as ghetto scum who enjoy perpetuating abuse like to say, “snitches get stitches.” Anybody to think negatively about me for discussing Lizzie's harassment with Buddy is just a shitty person, but there were a lot of those at Mouse's Ear.

A third rumor that exploded in Mouse's Ear after Lizzie's termination, was that I am a powerful witch with magick so strong it can eclipse hexes put onto me, that I use my magick to hypnotize customers into buying all those dances, that I cast seduction spells to make customers want me, and that I am a dangerous threat. It hurt a lot. Mouse's Ear wasn't the first time people have accused me of being a dangerous witch. It started happening around the age of 13, and it really bugs me.

A few years ago, I learned that through Maw Maw, I am the direct descendant of a woman named Rebecca Steele Greensmith. Granny Becky lived in Connecticut in the 1660s. She was disliked in her Puritan community, and was considered by her minister to be “Lewd, ignorant, and considerably aged.” She and her husband owned some land, had some money, enjoyed their lives, and their loser hater neighbors got jealous. In 1663, my granny Becky was found guilty of witchcraft and publicly executed in Hartford via hanging, about thirty years before the Salem witch trials. She was one of the first women in the United States to be murdered that way by all of her dumb, jealous, pathetic, plebeian, loser neighbors. I'm so happy she had daughters with her previous husband before she died, that they successfully propagated for centuries, and that I can help carry on her legacy. I thought about Becky a whole lot while I worked at Mouse's Ear being accused of witchcraft by all those dumb cunts.

In true two-faced Southerner/Stripper fashion, Lilith talked shit about her “best friend” Lizzie after Lizzie’s termination. Lilith informed me that Lizzie's hexes were “not proper,” and that she didn't do them the right way. Lilith also informed me that Lizzie performed hexes on previous dancers who had come and gone before me, for years, but nothing bad ever happened to her about it until I came along.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Rain

Now it's that time in a series when I've gotta be the bad guy. These next two dozen or so entries are what piss off the most amount of people and stirs up the most controversy-- dancer doxxing. I have a vague interest in the defending the practice-- the people who I doxx are scabs, sexual predators, abusers who should’ve been fired a long time ago. The world must know these people.

Mouse's Ear had some peculiarities of etiquette that are not found in other clubs around the country. The Brownings created a culture of bizarre etiquette at their club, because they were desperate to sell expensive juice. As covered already, the Brownings wanted the dancers to sit with the customers and drink juice. If a dancer got up to hang out in the dressing room or do whatever, but left her half-empty cup of juice at the table, that was her way of marking her territory on that customer. Other dancers were not supposed to talk to that customer sitting by himself, unless the dancer with a half-empty cup of juice had a friend who she permitted to speak to him. Many dancers at Mouse's Ear also sat with customers to drink multiple cups of juice, over the course of an hour or two, to make him feel appreciated and show her hospitality. Maybe he'd get a few songs after an hour. Maybe not. It was goddamned ridiculous. I thought it was all so incredibly stupid, such a horrible waste of my time, so unlike any other club I have ever worked at in my life. I am so disinterested in talking to most of the losers who patronize strip clubs, and solely focused on their money. My hustle, the hustle of any experienced dancer who needs to earn a living, usually involves sitting with a customer, spending as little time as possible speaking to him before he buys a dance, and then moving on once his cash is transferred from point A to point B. This can vary if the customer is paying to sit and talk, or if the investment of time speaking to him has the potential to pay off. I do not get paid by the hour, and my time is precious. I do not care if customers feel underappreciated because I do not sit with them for free. Many women, particularly ones from conservative backgrounds, have low self-esteem in terms of male entitlement. These women are oppressed and hobbled in many ways. One of the ways they are hobbled is by believing the burdensome notion that men deserve their time for free. Many Southern and oppressed women lash out and abuse liberated women, who they see being awesome. They may call them greedy, cold, brutish, selfish, callous. They do not understand that these kinds of liberated ice queens have risen above their oppression, to maximize profits, maximize free time, maximize liberation. I kindly offer my coworkers advice when they ask, but few listen. I kindly offer to pay union dues and pass out union cards to sign, but nobody wants that either. They just want to rain on my parade.

When I first started dancing, I didn't make a lot of money. I had to rely on FAFSA, a part-time college library job, and monthly rent checks from my parents. I did not understand how some of my coworkers could just sit with a customer for a few minutes before convincing him to go to the ATM. I did not lash out at my coworkers, become angry, jealous, or upset with my coworkers who had this ability. I studied them, learned from them, politely asked them how they did that. Some of them were patient enough to explain it to me. I always thanked them for their time. Learning their various methods helped me maximize the use of my time. One of my first bosses, Laurie Causey, was a former dancer who owned our club in dreary downtown Portland. One day when I was young, I told Laurie that I felt sorry for a customer, and I didn't want to take his money because he had a sad life. Laurie shook her head no, told me to never feel sorry for them, never ever feel bad about taking the money of any man who steps into a strip club. I listened to smart Laurie. One of my greatest hustling mentors was a former foster sister of Kurt Cobain; her stage name was Cadence. She was from wet rainy Aberdeen, Washington. She was so sweet and such an astounding hustler. She wasn't the most conventionally attractive dancer, and at one point she was nine months pregnant. Many more conventionally attractive dancers hated Cadence, slandered her, attempted to destroy her. I befriended her, hung out with her, and learned from her. Laurie never let any plebeians destroy Cadence. Laurie also never allowed any drug use in the workplace, and never allowed male staff to fraternize with dancers. Laurie never hired a DJ. We hated DJs. We used a computer to put up songs just fine by ourselves. Many people in Portland disliked us, and it was goddamned hilarious.

To all the findommes and hustlers out there, keep doing that Rain Dance baby, and stay tuned for a fun month ahead on Mouse's Ear Memoirs.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Time Off

I never wanted to be sexually harassed at my 2019 Chicagoland welding job where I was the only woman on the floor, have a maintenance man come up behind me to bump his crotch against my ass, have the entire workplace exponentially retaliate against me the more I reported harassment to HR, be fired and have to negotiate a settlement check. Union membership started at the 3-month mark there, my anti-union manager bragged about all of the people he didn't like who he previously fired at the 2.5 month mark, and then he did the same to me. I wanted to keep that job, further my career in metalworking, become a steward, and leave the litigious stripper life behind me for good. Unfortunately that did not happen, and in 2019, I never really recovered from the depression of losing that job. I was also having a hard time getting a new craftsman job down South.

After my 2019 trip to Cape Canaveral where I watched a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, I applied to SpaceX in hopes of welding there. I received no call back. I applied to a craftsman job outside Asheville, North Carolina. When the Southern man called me to ask for an interview, he asked if he can speak with “Mr. Campbell.” When I told him I am Brandi who applied for the position, he expressed blatant disappointment, stated he must've read the resume incorrectly, tried to backtrack his desire to interview me, and then reluctantly agreed to an interview at 5AM the next morning. I was too depressed and grossed out to go to that interview and didn't feel like suing him, so I let it slide.

I found a welding job in Knoxville that was only offering to pay me $13 per hour. Coming from a union shop in Chicagoland where I was getting over $23 per hour as a first year welder, I couldn't bring myself to taking it. Even my first non-union entry level Chicagoland welding job in 2018 paid me $16.50 per hour. I decided to just stick with dancing for a while. The return to dancing would only be temporary, I told myself. I'd find a decent paying welding job soon enough, I told myself. I could become a traveling pipe welder, I told myself. I could find a permanent residence as soon as I found a welding job, I told myself. Casually and lackadaisically, I searched for welding jobs that would pay me like my Chicagoland union shop, but never found them. As the weeks went by, I sluggishly stopped looking for both welding jobs and permanent residences in Knoxville. Mouse's Ear money was so damn good. I took off from work a lot, making sure to heal myself by spending all those bucks I saved from not tipping Alex Cave, on having a good time.

Tennessee has an abundance of budget motels that are owned by people from India, much like the rest of the United States does. I've often wondered what Christopher Columbus would think about that interesting turn of events. It seems like many of the motels in Tennessee violate basic health standards. One time I took a vacation to Sevierville, and the motel room smelled like vaporized feces. They told me there was a problem with the air conditioner, but did not offer a discount. One nice motel is called the Valley Inn, located on Raccoon Valley Drive in Heiskell, TN. The husband was very domineering with his wife, she always looked sad in the lobby, but their clean accommodations kept people coming back. It was in my Raccoon Valley motel room where I first saw the 2019 Centerfold ruling from Ohio. The NLRB was supposed to have emailed me about it as soon as the judgment came in, but they forgot to do that. I learned about it a week or two later, from a Google alert that sent me a link to a news article that had already been written about it. I privately cried with joy when I read it, examining the decision's prose that was so eloquently articulated by Judge Gollin, Jamie Lynn Stevenson the hero of it all, a hero to the cause of stripper rights, my hero.

Motel 6 was a block or so away from Mouse's Ear, so it was often tempting to stay there instead of drive out to Raccoon Valley. I think people from India owned that one too, but it was managed by poverty stricken Appalachian white women. They were usually very suspicious and disdainful of me for existing. The rooms were sometimes filthy and sometimes clean. I used my own linens, and requested the cleaning lady take out the blankets provided because I did not need them. One time they forgot that I returned their blankets, accused me of stealing their blankets, and permanently banned me from staying there.

Knoxville is not an exciting place for vegans to eat take out food. There are a couple of boring restaurants that serve mainstream American vegan dishes, but they aren't good. The only way for me to find good vegan take out in Knoxville was to either go to Waffle House, or order Asian curries and stir-fries. I went to one place called Sticky Rice Cafe several times per week. It mainly serves Laotian and Thai food that can be veganized upon request. It is family owned and operated by a mother and her grown children, clean, and absolutely charming-- but then again, what Laotian-Thai restaurant isn't charming? When is Mango Sticky Rice, Bamboo Tofu Stir Fry, and Boba Tea not charming?

Right down the road from Mouse's Ear, there's a lovely Waffle House with a working jukebox. Sometimes in the early AM hours after work, I'd go there to get my smothered hash browns, put on some Prince, get my dry toast with jelly, OJ and coffee, and tip the hard working waitresses 50% or more of my bill-- much more than Alex Cave could bully me into giving to her.

Kroger has come a long way since my days as a little girl making fun of the Southern chain grocery store. The Knoxville Kroger by Mouse's Ear is modern, open 24 hours, with a variety of vegan microwavable entrees, vegan sandwich fixings, fruits, vegetables, and non-dairy milks. I loved looking down every aisle of the Knoxville Kroger and seeing the results of all those years of vegan campaigns against animal agriculture. Some people say there's no ethical consumption under late capitalism, but dammit if I don't try.

Knoxville as a city is boring to explore, with an uneventful small downtown, suburban feel outside of downtown, many drug addicts, and a monoculture collection of eateries and shopping centers that make it feel like any other boring, late capitalist city across the USA. I am a bit of a romantic in terms of geographic places I've never explored before, so I expected more fiddle music, more craftsman anti-authoritarian cooperative living, musical street performers, and a general fondness for life.

Day trips outside of Knoxville can be more interesting than the city. Sometimes on my days off, I'd drive out to Pigeon Forge to eat a Mellow Mushroom vegan pizza in one sitting, loiter around the Christmas hotel across the street, get free coffee from their lobby, and explore the kitschy touristy spots by foot. The rural hollers of Tennessee have a lot of carpetbagging homesteaders and preppers who live partially or fully off-grid, to get away from the rat race and await the industrial collapse. These kinds of people eat a lot of local wild animals for sustenance, but there are certainly vegan options as well, such as poke salad picked from the ground and sassafras tea from freshly sliced wild sassafras roots. Most rural Tennesseans who grew up in the area survive off of fast food and dollar stores. If wild greens aren't filling enough for a vegan in the hollers LARPing as a forager, there's sure to be a Papa John's nearby to fill up on bread sticks. Many Taco Bells and Burger Kings pepper rural Appalachian towns, with items that can be veganized as long as the meth head taking one’s order gets the specifications right. Chattanooga is an hour and a half South of Knoxville, with high elevation hiking trails that'll take one's breath away. The Cumberland Gap State Park is a little bit over an hour's drive North of Knoxville. It's easy to see bald eagles soaring in the clear blue skies at the state park, smell the mysterious moldy cedar aroma that encompasses Tennessee and The Smokies, and just weep at the majesty of it all. There is an abundance of hiking opportunity at Cumberland Gap State Park. Two hours South, opening up into the darling town of Gatlinburg, is Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s easy to find wild black bears around there, and they are awesome.

Passing Eastward through the woods, one will eventually end up in Western North Carolina. North Carolina has a lot of conservatives, anti-union pieces of shit republicans and libertarians, but also a lot of transient communist hipster types, who are attracted to the same romantic ideals of Appalachia that I was. Asheville is expensive and reminiscent of a miniature, Southern version of Portland, Oregon. Nearby Maggie Valley, NC, is a quaint and enchanting small tourist town with cuteness everywhere, including a roadside gem shop reminiscent of Colorado during the 90s. It has all kinds of geodes, amethyst cathedrals, and rose quartz. I bought some rose quartz at the Maggie Valley roadside gem shop, and used it to my advantage later at Mouse's Ear.

Late one night when I was driving from Maggie Valley to Cherokee, North Carolina, the fog was thick like milk against my windows. I couldn't see anything out of my windows except for the fog, and I broke out into a panic, unable to stop trembling as elevation suddenly increased. I took a narrow side road and sat there in park, trying to calm down and adjust my panic attack pinhole vision. I didn't realize how smoky everything got at night time up there, didn't want to continue higher up the mountains, but I also didn't know how to turn around on such a narrow road to get back down, so I just sat in my car for a while, hyperventilating in the fog. I'm not sure if I sat there for an hour. Eventually the fog thinned out and I was able slowly inch out in reverse to turn around and get back down. All of my subsequent trips to the mountains were during bright daylight hours.

The Eastern Band Cherokee of North Carolina are descended from a small but brave group of Cherokee who were able to resist being forcibly removed from their historical homeland by the disgusting United States military and sent on a genocidal death march called the Trail of Tears, through Tennessee and neighboring states, to Oklahoma, where most of the Cherokee were made to live at Andrew Jackson's orders, making way for the imperialist growth of the United States of America, a country which later sent imperialist baby killer soldiers, some of whom were recruited from Native American communities, to countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite their many shortcomings, I can’t help but admire all the Pashtun Taliban studs on their recent guerilla victory, considering the broader scope of their opponents. Whenever visiting Cherokee, I made sure to give as many of my Mouse’s Ear dollars to as many Cherokee stores, museums and cultural centers as I was able. It's a very special place.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: DJ Conner

DJ Chris Conner went by Conner at Mouse's Ear. He has great taste in music. He took most requests a dancer had, put them on our playlists, and actually played them. He didn't mind playing odd, sensual songs, obscure indie songs, or any other weird stuff one might find in 2006 Portland, Oregon. He played Appalachian fiddle music from time to time, and Dolly Parton classics. He is the DJ who introduced me to one of my all time favorite songs-- Steve Earle's “Copperhead Road,” a song I've requested at every workplace since Mouse's Ear. It was such a relief with Conner in the beginning. He used to criticize DJ Rob for making the dancers pick mainstream modern rap songs. He'd explicitly state that dancers should be listening to whatever made us feel most comfortable while we were on stage. He'd explicitly express his disgust for strip clubs that play excessive amounts of rap and other ass-obsessed music. While dancers were on stage, he'd cut the songs off at 3-4 minutes, instead of letting them drag on so we had to stay on stage for extended times we didn't want to be up there. Dancers were still being misclassified at Mouse's Ear by having to go on stage at all, wear heels, and have set lengths dictated by the DJ, but with Conner, it was a bit easier to ignore all of that, especially because there was almost always lots and lots of money to be made at Mouse's Ear by any dancer willing to hustle. I was financially very comfortable at Mouse's Ear.

Conner called the dancers “women” over the microphone instead of “girls.” When I told Conner that I really appreciated the fact that he was not patronizing dancers by calling us children, as so many men in the industry do, he told me that he is a feminist, and that as a male feminist, he tries to do the right thing in that regard. It's sad that I celebrate someone for being a half-decent person, but I am so used to dealing with utter garbage males in the industry, that I was willing to reward Conner with compliments. Similarly, for most of my time at Mouse's Ear, I gave Conner “tips” according to what he expected, even though I thought it was financial exploitation and extortion, even though my rights were being violated, even though if Conner was a real feminist, he would've badgered the Brownings for higher wages rather than expect it from the dancers. I let most of that slide for most of the time that I was working at Mouse's Ear.

I always hoped that Conner would spend some of those hundreds of dollars per night he got from strippers on dental care. His teeth were disgusting looking, rotting and stained all around the edges. His teeth and overall physical appearance fit a certain Appalachian stereotype. I always hoped Conner would spend some of the money that strippers were bullied into giving him on a gym membership. His face doesn't indicate how the rest of his body looks, but when he stepped out of the DJ booth and walked around the club, his lower half was stunningly pear-shaped and clinically obese. Most men don't accumulate fat in the areas of the body Conner does, so that was an oddity to see. One thing Conner did spend his money on were little vaporizing air fresheners and purifiers to keep in his booth. The vapor smelled like fruit loops or other fun scents, and were supposed to keep the air around him less toxic from all of the second hand cigarette smoke that he was constantly inhaling. I do wonder about Conner's health and the long term side effects of sitting in his DJ booth so long, and would like any readers to contact me with information about that. I highly doubt the Brownings gave Conner health insurance or a pension. Due to his poor health choices, he kind of looks like Uncle Fester, but with hair on his head instead of being bald. Here he is eating some unhealthy fast food with his family:

Conner told me that he worked at the club since the year 2000. I can't imagine him not being familiar with the previous lawsuit the Brownings were subject to. I think any DJ able to stay at a strip club for that long, without getting fired or quitting, must be an exceptional douche in order to survive, but Conner was an enigma to me in the beginning, because he seemed like a half-decent guy.

As mentioned in a previous post, dancers were not allowed to leave the dressing room at the end of the night while the club was closing up. Sometimes we'd sit up there, ready to go for a half hour or longer, very bored and eager to leave. It was the DJ's job to tell us when we could come downstairs. Sometimes when dancers went downstairs before Conner told us it was OK, or when dancers did other things to break rules, Conner would strictly tell us we were not allowed to “break protocol.” Sometimes while the Brownings were taking care of business downstairs closing up, but the dancers still weren't allowed downstairs, Conner would come up into the dressing room to hang out with us while we were waiting. There's a legend at Mouse's Ear that the location is some kind of portal to another dimension, or ulterior universe. It was rumored that ghosts haunted our attic dressing room. Conner had some kind of app on his phone that was a meter to detect ghosts. He'd walk around the dressing room like Mr. Funny Guy, scanning for ghosts with his phone meter app. Many of the dancers would be giggling, hooting and hollering as hicks might describe, while the meter sprung into high alert at certain locations within the dressing room. Appalachians have a tendency to be excited by all kinds of superstitious and paranormal things, while eschewing the scientific method. Christianity definitely has it's hold on Appalachia, but so does lots and lots of woo-woo.

Paranormal stuff aside, Conner considered himself to be a reasonable man of science. He visited Florida some time around 2019. Coincidentally, I visited Cape Canaveral to watch a rocket launch in 2019, so Conner and I discussed that a couple of times, and agreed that space exploration is cool. He used to wear some shirt he got on vacation, celebrating science.

There's a rip off scam artist mechanic garage in Knoxville called Pro Toy. They tried to sell me new brake pads when I did not need them, and tried to get me to replace my rack and pinion when I did not need it. There's all kinds of biblical scripture and bible stuff in the Pro Toy waiting room, and they do a great job of advertising. But, they're lying scam artists who I was able to see through. Pro Toy also happens to be where Conner goes to get his car worked on. He left them a great review online, and when I talked to him about it, he stated that they've gotta be honest because they are “super religious in there.” Dumb Conner was assuming that because they're bible thumpers and use their faith in the workplace, they're honest people with the clientele. I genuinely felt sorry for Conner about thinking all that, and recommended that he visit DJ Rob's Michigan guy out in Loudon instead. He didn't seem interested, to which I could only shake my head and walk away.

Conner was willing to play most of my song requests, but was apprehensive about my requests to play songs by the band Hole. He told me that he thought Courtney Love murdered Kurt Cobain, and expressed an overall disdain for her. He told me that he believed Courtney Love had a “darkness” about her. When I raised the suggestion that misogyny causes so many people think Courtney Love murdered her husband, it was as if he had never heard that notion before in his life.

From the very beginning, Alex Cave and I were at odds with one another, because I rarely even gave her a dollar. This has been covered already in the series. I am bringing it up again, because Conner didn't seem to be aware of it happening until about halfway through my time at Mouse's Ear, around August. Conner and Alex have been friends for a long time. Sometimes Alex filled in as DJ when Conner or Rob couldn't work. Around August, Conner decided to start harassing me for not giving Alex Cave my money. He did this in a variety of ways.

If I was going on or getting off stage, Conner started calling me “girl” instead of woman. He began liberally using the word “girl” to describe my coworkers, then making eye contact with me while smirking, as though he was expecting some kind of emotional reaction to his new anti-feminist vocabulary. Conner began letting my songs run for a long time past the 3-4 minute mark while I was on stage, so that the sum total of my time on stage was longer, I was spending less time on the show floor hustling, and forced to stay on stage when I did not want to be there. If I had a customer who I was about to give a couch dance to, he would get on the microphone as quickly as possible to announce there was going to be a 2-for-1 dance. I would have to sell my labor at half-price when he did that, forced to dance for two songs on the couch instead of one song, for the price of one song. He would do this repeatedly, only at times when I was going to give a dance, to ensure that I was making less money and using more of my energy. It was so degrading and upsetting, so counter to any feminist labor rights issues, but I pretended like it didn't bother me and just kept moving. He started shouting over the microphone at the customers that Alex Cave had to be tipped too, and go into detail about how hard she was working at the cash register. He'd engage in ridiculously long monologues about it.

Around the same time that Conner started with the Alex Cave stuff, he began signaling that he knew about my litigious history. Over the microphone, he would describe factors in the Economic Realities Test which favored the club's argument that dancers are contractors, such as our ability to pick up extra shifts or talk to whichever customers we wanted to.

It was also around this time that a dancer named Brazil started complaining about my superb hustling ability in comparison to hers. Brazil had never danced before, and complained to management that I had performed for customers who she also danced for. Brazil was under the impression that I was harming her, when actually I was just doing my job and was a much better salesperson than she was. She was unable to handle the competition, and victimized herself to staff. It became very convenient for Conner and Ralph to side with people like Brazil on the matter, rather than some Yankee villain who sells a fuck ton of dances, doesn't tip the wait staff, and has a history of suing clubs. So, Conner encouraged Brazil to bully me. If I was talking to a customer while most of the other dancers were upstairs in the dressing room, he would text them and tell them to come downstairs to surround me while I was making a sale. He'd play incendiary fight music, in an effort to arouse anger. When I told him that Brazil was threatening a different dancer, as she did from time to time, he brushed me off and ignored me. He'd play songs like “Karma Police” by Radiohead, as though I deserved to endure a toxic, violent workplace because I fight for labor rights and am good convincing clients to go to the ATM machine for me. Dumb people who are into woo-woo have a tendency to apply the word “karma” to whatever situation suits them.

Chris Conner is not a feminist at all. He is a disingenuous piece of garbage who is fine with misclassifying workers and punishing me for resisting, in any way he can think of. Deep into my Mouse's Ear employment, I was able to understand that Conner is the typical Leftist male who pretends to be progressive, but is in some ways worse than the average Trump supporter. Thus, I was relieved when blatantly slimy DJ Rob was working rather than Conner.

I have been called an emotionally “cold” person many times throughout my life. One way stoicism has helped me in the workplace is my ability to suppress the desire to express anger. It helped me out a lot dealing with Conner. Throughout all of his misogynist workplace abuse, I would approach his DJ booth to make small talk about feminism or science, current events or whatever, smiling and laughing as though nothing was happening. He looked utterly perplexed and downright angry that I wasn't responding to his harassment. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and I kept that in mind each time I chit-chatted with Conner in my times of strife. At some point, he brought up my stoicism and said aloud,

“YOU DO NOT GET MAD!” confused, shocked, glancing around as though it was some great mystery, a mystery greater than ghosts in a strip club attic dressing room. I just laughed it off and continued talking to him about whatever. He seemed to really, really resent my jovial chit chat, and I liked that.

I was mad, of course. I was seething and fuming, and to this day I'd love to see a news report of Conner's tortuous death. If Ed Kemper somehow escaped from prison and decided to target strip club DJs, news of Chris Conner's head on a stick would fill me with nothing but excited joy.

Around October, I grew bold enough to not give him the roughly ten percent of dances sold that he expected. While he was walking me out to my car, I handed him $31. $31 is actually a very good amount of money to be giving a DJ, certainly more than I give most DJs. But, $31 was not ten percent, and far less than what he expected me to give him. So, he began shouting at me in the dark parking lot while I was approaching my vehicle, the same as DJ Rob did months before. DJ Conner's feminist male veneer was completely gone, and he fully became another entitled man in the strip club industry, harassing a frightened woman in a dark parking lot, in an attempt to shake her down for more money to compensate the slave wages that his employers paid him. What a fucking coward. What a fucking hypocrite. What a fucking misogynist.

When I got back to my room after Conner yelled at me, I checked my recording device. Unfortunately it was not working properly and I did not capture him on audio. I knew I would probably hear it from him the next day at work, so I made sure to prepare my back-up recorder and keep them both with me on the show floor. I'm really happy I did that, because the next day at work, Buddy had me come into the office with him at the beginning of my shift. Apparently whiny bitch Chris Conner had complained to Buddy that $31 was not a sufficient tip. In the office, Buddy started by explaining to me that it is an “industry standard” to give the DJ 10%. I suggested it's actually not an industry standard to do that and that I have never done that before Mouse's Ear. Buddy disagreed, and proceeded to do some percentage algebra for me with regards to how much money I was supposed to give Conner the previous night. After the math, Buddy started cryptically talking like a mafioso, telling me that I was “going to have a hard time making friends around here.” I had no friends at Mouse's Ear anyway, so I'm not sure what he was talking about. It was definitely threatening, but I was just like, “oh.” Fortunately, that conversation was recorded, submitted to the NLRB, and helped me out a lot. I'm not very tech savvy in terms of transferring the recordings to this website, but I'll try to upload those pieces somehow before the end of the series.

After Buddy's conversation with me, I continued to give Conner “tips” that were less than what he expected each night, and he continued to be angry about it. To this day, I am not sure why Conner would think that he could harass me for weeks while I gave him ten percent, incite fear and violence while I gave him ten percent, and then expect me to continue giving him ten percent after I spent weeks suffering. Early on when I submitted to giving DJ Rob ten percent, he was nice to me right afterwards. Even if Rob was just nice to me because I was paying him, the transactional relationship made sense. With Chris, I paid him what he expected, then he decided to torture me, then I stopped “tipping” him as much as he expected, and then he was confused about it. It's interesting to me that Conner was so willing to harass a dancer on behalf of Alex Cave, to stand in solidarity with her quest to get more of my money, but Conner and Alex were both too cowardly to unionize or demand a living wage from Buddy and Ralph. Their cowardice, their willingness to target a vulnerable stripper instead of their employer, is striking. Neither of those individuals are progressive. Neither of those individuals are willing to make any sort of change in the world whatsoever. They virtue signal liberal ideals on social media, but in practice they do the opposite. They are both disgusting people.

It's interesting to me that Buddy Browning was willing to give me a stern talking-to about Conner, but no such stringent pressure was applied about the wait staff getting paid. Yes, he allowed the wait staff to harass the dancers for money whenever they wanted, but he seemed eager to stand up for Conner in a way unmatched even for DJ Rob. Surely the misogyny of pay gaps between DJs and female wait staff had something to do with that. Surely the scarcity of reliable strip club DJs was part of that. I hope Conner knows that his staying at a workplace for twenty years and being defended by misogynist exploitative garbage like the Brownings is an integral part of how he lives his life, that there's nothing feminist about that.

On 10/17/2019, Conner told a dancer that he wanted to kill me. I never complained to the Brownings about it; by that time I was already planning my grand crescendo. Besides, Buddy already told me I would have a hard time making friends there in relation to not tipping Conner the amounts of money he found sufficient. It's such a sweet victory that I not only resisted Conner, but I also got back all of the money I did give him. I hope Buddy liked including all of Conner's tips into my settlement checks.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: DJ Rob

Does every strip club have a fat douchebag named Rob working somewhere in the building?! Seriously! I can't make this shit up! What's with all the lowly losers named Rob working in strip clubs across the USA? Rob is overweight. Rob is from the Southeastern United States. Rob has a cropped or crew cut. Rob enjoys cannabis. Rob has at least one child from an unwed relationship, possibly more. Rob is middle aged, but Rob preys on barely legal women despite his unsightly physical appearance and lack of financial resources. While working in the strip club, Rob often has one question on his mind,

“How many of my coworkers would let me stick my boner in them?”

That's actually a photo of him when he was younger. He looks way worse now.

Robert Udovich wasn't the first, and certainly wouldn't be the last, Rob in my career, but what's in a name? A Rob by any other name would still stink.

The other day I had a conversation with a retired stripper, about the phenomenon of ugly dudes who work in strip clubs obtaining much younger, more attractive girlfriends who also work in strip clubs. We concluded that it is because these coworkers spend so much time together in a closed space, around blatant sexual energy, that they become attached to one another. If I was a gross ugly loser guy who wanted a much younger and more attractive girlfriend, I'd probably get a job at a strip club too.

Within my first week of working at Mouse's Ear, I bumped into DJ Rob with dancer Lilith, shuffling around a Knoxville Subway together before work. Lilith looked petrified, her eyes grew big, and she didn't say a word. I immediately figured she must've been fucking DJ Rob and didn't want anybody to know about it. Rob was nonchalant and casually asked,

“Live around here?”

I said I didn't. He prodded me about my rent costs where I live. I was very vague with my answer. Later on at work while I was alone at my locker, Lilith approached me, again with a bizarre expression on her face, to make small talk. She didn't mention Subway, and neither did I. I never told anybody, and never brought it up to her. Rob and I never brought it up together either.

For the first half of my time at Mouse's Ear, barely legal Lilith worked all of the same shifts that Rob worked. About half-way through my time there, Lilith had a mental breakdown and didn't come to work for a while. She then started exclusively working DJ Conner's shifts. She then began spreading rumors that Rob “fucks a lot of the dancers,” though she didn't name herself specifically. I'm not sure she even remembered the Subway incident at that point.

When I was hired at Mouse's Ear in 2019, I was appalled that dancers were instructed to give the DJ ten percent of their take home pay, according to what the DJ calculated our take home pay must've been. Buddy Browning told me this percentage, and the DJs told me this percentage. It struck me as an absurdly large amount of money to be giving a DJ, a number I have never been expected to give before, a number which has never been so overtly dictated to me before. I was shocked by their shameless entitlement.

The DJs at Mouse's Ear also functioned as bouncers. Buddy and Ralph were too cheap to hire security, and the DJs were the only other male workers at Mouse's Ear. Part of the DJ's job was to walk dancers out to our cars at night and ensure we safely got in. That was the time we were expected to “tip” them.

One night early on in my employment, when I decided to be brave enough to resist Rob's financial expectations, I gave him a paltry sum. He counted it as I was getting my keys. Before I was able to get into my car, he stopped me. It was dark outside, we were alone in the parking lot, I was intimidated, and he began ranting about mathematics, about how much he knew I must've made, about how I wasn't giving him enough of my money, about how he felt “gyped,” and how that wasn't fair. My audio recorder picked up all of it. The NLRB heard all of it. I replied to Rob by pretending like I did give him ten percent of what I had, that I calculated it correctly. He accused me of under-charging the customers according to our prices. He insisted that must've explained why he got such a paltry sum. I didn't say anything, just got into my car. In subsequent weeks, Lilith began covertly spreading rumors that I was under-charging customers. I knew she was probably thinking this because she was covertly romantically involved with the DJ, and he was telling her about his paltry tips I was giving him. I never brought that up to Lilith; we remained cordial. Lilith was extremely overbearing with me and other dancers, sometimes offering to count my money for me, in a thinly veiled desire to know how much I was actually making that Rob wasn't getting. She suggested maybe I was bad at math and needed help. At that time, Lilith was unaware that I was more than a decade older than she is, and she was unaware that I am great at math. I just didn't want to give her slime ball boyfriend more of my money, that's all.

DJ Rob has really bad taste in music. He played as much rap and hip hop music as he possibly could, which didn't make sense in a place like Mouse's Ear. Mouse's Ear catered to a more alternative, country, indie, folksy crowd-- the opposite of a rap crowd. Rob repeatedly told me to give him lists of songs which included modern rap music, songs produced within the past five years, and specifically songs sang by men instead of women. I do not know why he would think aggressive rap songs sang by men would arouse the average Mouse's Ear crowd, or why he would want to attract customers who like that music. He was displeased with my 90s hip hop selections, displeased with my Rihanna selections. When I requested Sex Out South by Tech N9ne after he instructed me to request male rappers, he excitedly told me how “hot” the song was, how he was happy I finally picked a good one. He'd play Sex Out South once, sometimes twice per night for me.

Despite Rob's affinity for rap and hip hop music, he used to shout “Proud Boys!” over the microphone all the time. At the end of sets, he'd mumble things like,

“aaaalllllriiiiiieeee, PROUD BOYS! Yeeeeeeaaaa PROUD BOYS! Stay PROUD BOYS!”

It was very strange. I was never able to decipher why he was shouting Proud Boys over the microphone, whether he was trying to subliminally promote that awful organization, or if he was just randomly telling customers to be proud all the time. It made no sense to me. I'd never heard a DJ shout PROUD BOYS over the microphone after a dancer's set before. I did know that his girlfriend Lilith had an affinity for folksy Odinist-leaning paganism. If any of my readers have information about Robert Udovich’s affiliation with The Proud Boys, please contact me.

Udovich is not a name normally found in the Southeastern United States. I learned that he previously lived in Alabama, but with a name like Udovich, I'm not sure how many generations of Old Dixie Robert Udovich has coursing through his veins. In some ways, I think of myself as more quintessentially Southern than he is, even as I was born and raised in Illinois.

Robert Udovich used to pry into my business all the time when walking me to my car. He must've noticed all the luggage and linens in my back seat, because he'd obnoxiously ask me where my home is, suggest I didn't have one. I said I had a hemp farmer boyfriend who I stayed with up in a holler in Tazewell, when I wasn't in my “apartment” in Knoxville. That was kind of true; I did have a little project I was working on up in Tazewell that was completely unrelated to Stripper Labor Rights, and it did take place on a hemp farm, but the specifics of that are stranger than fiction, and not for this website. Sometimes Rob would ask me for some hemp from this alleged farm in my alleged boyfriend's holler, and I'd just laugh him off before driving away. Rob didn't actually need any of my alleged hemp from some alleged farm in the Tazewell hollers. His girlfriend Lilith was a popular weed dealer in our workplace.

The strip club DJ with a drug dealer stripper girlfriend is a common archetype I've noticed in clubs. It actually serves an important role in union busting, because while the girlfriend is doing something naughty herself, she also has the advantage of getting to know many of the other dancers on a personal level, being privy to their secrets before a lot of other people are able to speak with them, and ensuring that no labor organizing activities are taking place. The DJ's drug dealer girlfriend may spend significant amounts of time schmoozing around the dressing room when not hanging out in the DJ booth utilizing a bird's eye view of the club. It is in the DJ's best interests to have such a girlfriend, but not tell other dancers they are together, in order to spy on any candid conversations that may take place among workers. The Drug Dealer Stripper benefits from insider knowledge of the dressing room camera abilities, which the DJ can tell her more about. DJ Rob and Lilith fit a certain trope, like so many repetitive human behavioral patterns and personality types found in strip clubs, mirroring themselves like fractals spiraling outwards through time and space. The drug dealer stripper girlfriend sits in the DJ booth, spying and telling on dancers, triangulating everything she possibly could, in the cess pool of the club, stinking like semen and bong water and body spray. Yes, I was onto Lilith and the DJ the entire time, and they were aware of my litigious history for much of the time, but they did not know that I knew they knew. It's always important to stay three steps ahead of all these fucking losers, not that that's difficult to do, what with all their drugs combined with garden variety mental illnesses. Yawn.

Robert Udovich was known among the dancers as the mean DJ. He regularly scolded a gothic dancer named Roxy about her Satan worshiping clothes. He regularly scolded Roxy about needing to look more mainstream, insisted she wear wigs to cover her shaved head, and gave her unsolicited advice on how to attract men. Presumably he said these things to her because he thought it would get her more money, and subsequently a bigger tip for him. Roxy would spend hours in the dressing room crying and obsessively talking about the agony of working with Rob, weeping under the dressing room shower to wash away her tears. A dancer named Rhed gave Roxy a pep talk about her hatred for Rob. A dancer named Selexa kept a written list in her purse about why she didn't tip Rob whatsoever.

Eventually I got sick of Rob badgering me for more money when walking me to my car, particularly because he was a single parent who always reminded me that it was for his kid. So, I just gave in and eventually gave him roughly ten percent most of the time. I really liked living in Appalachia and did want to keep my job despite the labor violations. Sometimes if he was walking out multiple dancers and they gave him absurd amounts of money more than ten percent, he'd take it out of their hands while glancing over at me with raised eyebrows.

After I started paying him more due to extortion, he became very supportive of me in the workplace, at least to my face. He stated that I am a great entertainer, stated that the other dancers bullying me seemed like I was “being crucified” for making lots of money. He allowed me to vent about them from time to time, but also got sick of it sometimes, and told me to go tell Buddy and Ralph about it. He never played mean Song War songs, even through all the Alex Cave stuff, even though all the labor rights stuff. He'd play Jeremy by Pearl Jam when I was being bullied, and other uplifting music about hustlers making a lot of money while their “haters” were upset. Perhaps he was doing all of this so he'd continue getting paid, but I much preferred him to DJ Chris Conner.

Sometimes Rob would play “Mr. Jones” when he and little old Ralph were working the same shift. They'd hang out together at the DJ booth while joyful Adam Duritz's beautiful voice and Counting Crows melodies filled the air, everyone was smiling and making money on a warm Summer's night in Knoxville. It was perfect for a moment. Just a moment. I loved those moments. She's looking at you-- no, she's looking at me, sang Adam Duritz.

I still hated Rob regardless. He was always very patronizing in the ways he communicated with the dancers, always calling us “baby girl” in a sleaze ball way. He posted a meme on his facebook in 2019, about how he refers to “emotionally immature” women as “girls,” because they don't deserve to be called women. Alex Cave “liked” that meme.

I was having mechanic problems with my car in late August/early September of 2019, and unable to make it back up to Chicagoland to visit my trusted mechanic up there. Rob referred me to a guy from Michigan who was living out in Loudon, a rural town outside of Knoxville. I can't remember the guy's name, but he was actually a wonderful and affordable mechanic. Rob's mechanic also informed me that Rob's blue Ford Mustang was a piece of shit that just looked nice on the outside, and that Rob had no idea on how to properly maintain his own vehicle. It was an interesting little unexpected deluge of opinions I got about Rob.

On my last night before being fired, when I knew I'd probably never see him again, I handed him five bucks. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe it was just my way of saying,

“Hey, thanks for playing me nice songs, not doing mean Song Wars, and referring me to a reliable mechanic in Loudon. You are the lesser of many satans, and I truly appreciate that.”

Grey is such a symbolic colour.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: LingLing

LingLing was a waitress at Mouse's Ear who started working there closer to the end of my six months. I can't remember all the waitresses who were hired, fired, or quit during my six months, but LingLing stood out. I don't know what her full legal name is. She once told me that her name is Lynn Lane, but that people just call her LingLing because that is what it Lynn Lane sounds like when spoken. Her facebook name is Nikita Lingling. I think that's just her ho name. The name Ling would indicate Asian origins, but LingLing is a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, NYC.

Most of the dancers and staff at Mouse's Ear hated LingLing. I think her Bronx Puerto Rican accent and assertiveness probably had something to do with that. I was relieved when she started working there, because some of their hatred for me was dispersed toward LingLing instead. Whenever LingLing and I worked the same shifts, I felt like some of the pressure was removed from my situation, and directed toward her. At first I felt sorry for LingLing, but after I got to know her, I grew to dislike her as well.

LingLing was the oldest woman working at Mouse's Ear. During our phone conversations, which I did not record, she hinted that she was some kind of a “call girl” in NYC for many years before meeting her abusive husband and moving to Tennessee to be with him. East Tennessee, particularly the Oak Ridge area, has a decent presence of trade unions that are overwhelmingly dominated by men. LingLing's husband was in an airline worker union. She didn't know much else about unions or exactly what it is that her husband did when I asked. LingLing had a number of grown children in different states, presumably from different relationships she had over the years. She started working at Mouse's Ear to save enough money to get away from her husband, who was physically abusive to her. She did not want to be with him. Mouse's Ear was her escape plan.

LingLing's workplace etiquette was extremely inappropriate and disrespectful toward the strippers, who the business relied on to operate, who LingLing depended on for her job. She constantly made fun of my coworkers, zooming around the club whispering in different people's ears, constantly talking shit. She'd steal money off of tables if customers left to go to the bathroom. She called my cousin Holland a “dumbass” openly in the workplace. Several dancers claimed she was giving out her phone number to their customers and going out on “dates” with them. Even the few non-white women at Mouse's Ear, who generally stuck together, hated LingLing and called her “ratchet,” because she tried to steal their tips off the ground or from tables. LingLing would interrupt my conversations with customers who I was trying to hustle, and try to focus their attentions on her as I was sitting there. Strip club waitresses who interrupt hustling dancers is a serious and growing problem within the industry, something which has caused strikes in cities such as NYC. LingLing was apparently used to doing this to strippers, was entertained by it in a sadistic way, and continued doing it the whole time I was there. This behavior is not something that Tennessee dancers are used to enduring compared to larger US cities where it has become common. The stress of LingLing's actions caused damage to a lot of dancer's income. I tried to discuss the labor issue with LingLing when we became phone friends, tried to explain the strikes in NYC to her, but she didn't care to hear about that. She stated multiple times that she was such an attractive woman compared to everybody else. She usually wore blue contact lenses, and I always thought she looked like Cheddar Man.

LingLing's internet photos, like Alex Cave's, are very strategically taken, retouched, and misleading. She is really, really ugly in person, very short, and exceedingly gross. Strip club waitresses and bartenders have a tendency to see all of the money us dancers are making, covet that which is ours, and try to destroy us.

After we briefly became phone friends, she thought it appropriate to approach me at work multiple times per night, to talk shit about my coworkers. While I do that a lot on this website, it's not something I want to constantly hear while I am at work. LingLing disliked a dancer who went by Rhed, because of Rhed's “attitude” with customers who were harassing her. LingLing would ramble about how she believed women and feminism “destroyed chivalry,” and express all sorts of primitive ideas about gender roles. I strongly disliked Rhed, but not so much that I thought she should endure customer harassment. Another dancer named Summer was harassed by LingLing. When I backed away from LingLing after she maniacally approached me to make fun of Summer, she got upset and completely stopped speaking to me in a friendly manner.

After LingLing decided to stop being nice to me, she'd scream at me at the end of the night for not tipping her. One time she placed her hand on my back, likely in a cultural gesture of feminine communication. I backed away from the physical contact from her, which caused her to gossip about me to my coworkers some more. When I turned down a pineapple juice a customer offered me one night, she ran over to Buddy to snitch on me about it. Dancers were only allowed to use a disgusting upstairs dressing room bathroom without a door. Because I wanted more privacy, I'd sometimes sneak and use the downstairs customer bathroom, which did have a door. After LingLing decided she did not like me, she found me pooping in there and snitched about it to the Brownings. Throughout all of this, while at work, I never told anybody how she hid her tips from the bartenders who she was supposed to share with, how she shoved tips down her pants away from the cameras to hide them from Alex Cave. She and Alex Cave did not get along.

LingLing did have a couple of dancer friends at work who felt sorry for her, and who managed to support her quest to get away from her physically abusive husband. Even as I dislike her, think she is toxic and disgusting, I hope she has had success over the past two years.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Alex Cave

Mouse's Ear in Knoxville did not serve alcohol, but was BYOB. Special plastic cups were required for dancers to drink the alcohol that customers brought in, and these cups were available for purchase at the bar. The bar also sold buckets of ice for customers to put their beers in. The bar also sold juice, soft drinks, and assorted snacks. All of these items were much more expensive than they would've costed elsewhere in Knoxville. The bar area was more like a concession stand one might find at a roller rink or community baseball field. The bartenders didn't get a lot of tips from customers, partially because customers weren't sitting at the bar getting drunk, as happens at normal bars. Therefore, bartenders at Mouse's Ear depended on dancers to compensate their otherwise lowly income that the Brownings paid.

One Mouse's Ear bartender named Atheena wasn't much into bullying dancers for tips, due to her overall sweet and sedate personality. She compensated her income by selling opiates to the dancers, in between slinging non-alcoholic drinks and ringing in snacks. Many Appalachians are involved with opiates. I didn't like it that she was preying on the weaknesses of drug addicts, but I also didn't taddle on her or get involved. Eventually, Atheena was fired for selling pills. A dancer named Aspen theorized that the Brownings caught her on camera doing it. My guess would be that Lilith tipped the Brownings off about it. While I didn't get involved in Atheena's business, I was relieved when she was gone. It was also the bartender's job to take a tally of all the table and couch dances each dancer was selling, but unfortunately Atheena was bad with numbers. She often over-counted the dances with her tallies, and over-charged the dancers.

The other bartender was Alex Cave, who this post is about. Alex didn't sell opiates like Atheena. She just bullied and harassed dancers who didn't tip her at the end of the night, by screaming at them or otherwise insulting them. The Brownings did very little to stop her from doing those things. Alex has worked at Mouse's Ear for a long time, and the result of her status there has filtered out a lot of assertive, intelligent dancers from working there, instead favoring dumb/submissive ones who will just tip her a bunch of money to get her to leave them alone and go on with their lives. The types of dancers who last the longest at Mouse's Ear are unaware of the benefits of socialism, worker rights, or unions, and instead believe it is their duty to give a portion of their income to Alex Cave. She hung out with some of these kinds of dancers, and instructed them to be mean to me, while victimizing herself because I wouldn't give her more of my money.

I mentioned Alex Cave in yesterday's post. She was upset that I wasn't giving her more of my money, so she'd call me Brandi at work, tell customers my real name, and otherwise doxx me. Most people at work knew about my litigious history for most of the time I worked there, but usually just didn't say anything about it in front of me. I didn't tell most people about it myself, but people like looking me up on the internet. I told Buddy about Alex doxxing me one day. He called us both into his office and allowed Alex to vent. On the brink of tears, pointing at me, she said something along the lines of,

“All I know I know is she's making TONS of money and she's not sharing it!”

Buddy didn't seem to care either way, but he did request that she stop calling me Brandi at work, and use my stage name. I didn't say anything to Alex at the time, because I didn't want to rock the boat. But, what I was thinking was,

“All of my money that I make at Mouse's Ear belongs to me. I deserve every penny, working hard fully nude, hustling, risking my knee cartilage and mental health. If you want more money, why don't you organize a labor union and demand higher wages and benefits from your employers, the Brownings, who spend half the night in the office on coke? The Brownings make thousands and thousands of dollars per week off of the dancers, in the form of illegal tips, fees, and wage theft. You are only bullying me because I am an easy target, because dancers are vulnerable to the capitalist patriarchy, and because if you confronted your real oppressor, Buddy Browning, you would be fired. You pathetic fucking coward.”

But, I didn't say any of that stuff. I just passive-aggressively avoided her and continued to tip her like $1 per night, sometimes $0. She still continued to harass me and call me Brandi from time to time, after our conversation with Buddy in the office. One of her nick-names for me was “Sausage Link,” when I wore a leotard that was too small for me and made my body look like a sausage link to her. Ralph overheard this and it made him chuckle. He did nothing to defend me or prevent Alex's harassment.

Dancers were required to pick one drink per night, tell it to the bartender, so that when customers offered to buy us our mandatory drinks and we accepted, the waitresses and bartenders would already know what to bring. My pick was usually pineapple juice. The pineapple juice Mouse's Ear sold in plastic cups were Dole 100% pineapple juice from small cans. The bartender would open one can, pour some of it in the plastic cup, and the customer would pay an exorbitant price for it which the Brownings pocketed. As mentioned in previous posts, I never wanted these drinks, and only said yes because I didn't want to lose my job. Sometimes I noticed a strange film on top of the pineapple juice, or weird looking chunks of ice. I suspected that Alex was fucking with my pineapple juice in some way, especially because I'd glance over and see her staring at me with a sinister expression after being served. I consulted with dancer Lilith about my suspicions, who was privy to a lot of things at Mouse's Ear. Lilith informed me that Alex might've spat in my juice, but that it was unlikely anything else was done, because Alex could not afford to risk losing her job in that way. I also didn't want to lose my job, so even though Alex probably spit in my pineapple juice from time to time, I still put up with ingesting her disgusting DNA.

A year or two ago, I found some Caves who I am descended from. They immigrated to the Carolinas from England a few hundred years ago, before eventually making it to Tennessee. I am disgusted at the thought of even vaguely sharing DNA with Alex Cave.

Alex used to intentionally over-count my dances on her tally so I'd get charged more at the end of each night, and team up with DJ Chris Conner with his tallies. His job was also to tally, and if there were any inconsistencies, the DJ and bartender could cross-reference. The only way I got them to stop over-counting mine was to take my own tally on a dollar, and obsessively check their tallies throughout the night.

One night, Alex got jealous that I was giving Ms. Holland $2 at the end of the night and not her. She shouted some vague comment about needing money to get a vital surgery for her medical condition. I don't know what kind of medical condition Alex had, but again, harassing strippers for money is not the answer to Alex's problems. Organizing a union, finding a job with benefits, promoting socialism, harassing the Brownings for better wages are all better answers.

Alex probably isn't attractive or gritty enough to ever make it as a stripper. While her face is pretty and she is technically voluptuous, her whole body looks like it is melting, from an utter lack of muscle tone underneath lots and lots of flabby skin hanging off her bones in strange places. Sometimes when she was walking around, I couldn't help but marvel at how strange it looked in a Ripley's Believe it Or Not sort of way. I did wonder if maybe her medical condition prevented her from growing muscles or certain internal physiological components. I've tried to find a photo of it online for reference, but with all of the filters and retouching technology available these days, all I could find were very strategically captured angles of her that are not realistic whatsoever. She is so unbelievably ugly and gross looking in person compared to her internet photos. If any of my readers have more information about her medical condition, please contact me.

Alex is liberal in that general mainstream kind of a way, in that supporting BLM, Planned Parenthood, LGBTQIAWTF way. She dislikes JK Rowling and but has Harry Potter tattoos. She likes to read. She's kind of this Appalachian hipster with a Daria Morgendorffer or Janeane Garafalo cynicism about her, which makes a lot of the dancers want to be her friend, support her efforts to get more “tips,” and not do anything about her toxic behavior. I've noticed these days there are a lot of liberal and “alternative” people like Alex who don't give a shit about labor rights or anything remotely revolutionary which would hold business owners accountable. Jeff Bezos would probably get along with Alex Cave. To Alex, she's perfectly fine thinking she's some kind of crusader for her rights by harassing dancers for money. I really hate libertarians.

I want Alex to know that with my settlement, I got every penny that Mouse's Ear stole from me. Every unpaid hour I worked as a misclassified employee, every “tip” I was pressured to give Mouse's Ear staff, every dance tally taken and subsequently charged for, every illegal “house fee” was accounted for in my settlement. What I will never get back is my knee cartilage, the years shaved off my life due to stress, the time spent documenting misclassification, and my lawyer's cut.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Cousin Holland

It's probably safe to assume that all Hollands of Tennessee, with early Tennessee colonizer ancestry, are cousins. My maw maw was a Holland. Mouse's Ear had a waitress who was a Holland. I'm not going to doxx her. She ended up being an ally who was willing to provide a statement to the NLRB for my case. Ms. Holland of Mouse's Ear bore a striking resemblance to my maw maw's side. That is-- short, chubby, with abnormally giant boobs, round face and big brown eyes.

Cousin Holland of Mouse's Ear was not without her faults. One time she mistook a group of Vietnamese customers for “Mexicans.” When I corrected her, she laughed and expressed that she did not care.

Dancers were supposed to “tip” all of the staff at the end of our shifts each night, because Buddy and Ralph Browning were unwilling to pay their employees a decent wage. Blaming the dancers for not paying the staff enough of their money was easier. I was relatively resistant to that idea, so I got badly bullied by the staff. In one of the ways I was bullied by the staff, a waitress named Alex Cave found my facebook, found out my real name on google, and started calling me Brandi while at work, rather than my stage name. Cousin Holland laughed out loud when that happened, and that hurt my feelings. When I told Buddy about Alex Cave calling me Brandi and he scolded her, Cousin Holland expressed her discontents about that too. I gave my Cousin Holland a two dollar tip at the end of each night, but she didn't think that was enough. I always thought two dollars was too much to be giving her, but even I am not completely immune to the efforts of strip club bullies. Giving her two dollars each night was my way of giving in. She was always much nicer to me when Alex Cave wasn't around though, so I suspect a lot of her mean girl behaviors were influenced by Alex Cave.

Ms. Holland was in her twenties, and an unwed mother of a few kids. To make ends meet, she sold cheap photos of her genitals on the internet. Some of the dancers were making fun of her low prices they found on some adult entertainment site.

Cousin Holland knew she was unlikely to get more than two dollars out of me each night, and she knew that the Brownings were not going to pay her a living wage, and she didn't make very much money selling photos of her genitals online. So, sometimes she would try bullying the youngest, most emotionally vulnerable strippers available, like Sunshine. Apparently one night when I was gone, she berated Sunshine in an attempt to get a bigger tip, but Sunshine snapped back, and then Ms. Holland quit. I highly doubt the revolving door of workers bickering for breadcrumbs bothered the Brownings.

When I learnt that Holland quit, I figured I'd never talk to her again. But, as luck would have it, she ended up being one of those rare people offering to back me up when I needed it. After I was fired, I messaged her on facebook. She was very willing to help me. Part of her job as a waitress was to interrupt me while I was sitting with a customer, ask him if he wanted to buy me a drink, make sure I said yes when he offered, bring it to me, and make sure I sipped it. If I refused a drink, if I didn't sip the drink, or if I got up from the table with a full drink sitting there, she was to go tell the Brownings, so I would get reprimanded.

It's always nice when disgruntled former employees of strip clubs can put their differences aside and unite against the common enemy, against the scabs, and against exploitation. The Holland settlers of Tennessee were not historically nice people, but I believe in redemption.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Owners and Management

When I auditioned and was hired at Mouse's Ear in 2012, some guy from the Carolinas was managing the club. He seemed like a rambling idiot, and is part of the reason why I decided not to work a shift out there in 2012. I didn't meet the Browning brothers until 2019.

Buddy and Ralph Browning are the two old white male brothers who owned and operated Mouse's Ear. They managed it by themselves the entire time that I worked there. I was told by a long time customer that they had another drug dealer brother who was murdered. I was informed by this customer that their brother opened his front door after someone knocked on it, and was shot point blank. Apparently this happened many years ago. Mouse's Ear has been in Knoxville for decades.

While I worked at Mouse's Ear in 2019, several of the lower-IQ dancers reminisced fondly and seemed forlorn for some manager who worked there prior to my arrival, but who was no longer working there.

Buddy and Ralph Browning had a bad cop/good cop dynamic in terms of enforcing rules and general treatment of the dancers. They divided their shifts pretty evenly in terms of working hours. Buddy Browning was the “bad cop” in that scenario.

Buddy Browning is tall, very wrinkly in the face, but with a good body and masculine bone structure. He was a former football player and coach of some local team. He has brown eyes and greying hairs, with a deep, assertive, Southern voice. Some might've considered him a silver fox, like a knock-off, Appalachian Richard Gere. He is both jovial and mean, charming and wicked, charismatic and cruel. His demeanor reminds me a bit of Leonardo DiCaprio's slave owner character Calvin Candie in the movie Django Unchained. In fact, given all of the labor violations at Mouse's Ear, it's very easy for me to imagine Buddy being an 1800s slave owner. The year was 2019 though, and all Buddy could do was misclassify strippers. I'm pretty sure someone sued Mouse's Ear before me, but that didn't stop Buddy. Sometimes Buddy would put the club's air conditioner down into the low 60s, all of the dancers would have to put on a sweater, we'd all be shivering and suffering. A dancer who went by Lilith informed me that Buddy and Ralph were cocaine addicts, and when the air conditioner was that low, it meant they had done some lines in the office and didn't want to overheat. Lilith also informed me that Buddy's wife was about twenty years old and “wore the pants” in their relationship. I don't know how credible Lilith's information was. Buddy certainly liked to sexually harass certain dancers in ways such as putting his arms around them, and coming up behind them to be playful while he was intoxicated. He put his arm around me a couple of times, and it was surprisingly arousing. He has a certain BDSM quality to his Southern sickness. I never sued Mouse's Ear for sexual harassment. One time Buddy started interrogating me about my Illinois license plates, because I told everyone at work that I moved into an apartment in town. He felt the need to inform me that I had to get my plates switched over to Tennessee, and that if a cop pulled me over, I could get in trouble. He is such a sadist that I worried he was going to to intentionally call the cops on me about my plates, but it never happened. Besides, I was just lying about that apartment. As mentioned, I stayed in motels down there. Every couple of months, I returned to Illinois to check my mail and visit my legal residence. Buddy loved bossing everyone around whenever he could. One time while it was slow, he made all of the dancers get in a conga line with him in the front, then he led it around the club with him dancing.

Ralph Browning is the “good cop” brother, but as we know on this site, all cops are bad. Most of the dancers liked Ralph much more than Buddy, because he was more lenient with the rules. I fucking hated Ralph, even though I was allowed to chew gum on the show floor during his shifts while Buddy restricted it. I don't like it when oppressive pieces of shit try to be nice to save face. I prefer they are up front about how horrible they are, like Buddy was. Ralph is shorter than Buddy, balding, with much less masculine bone structure. He wears glasses and is generally a little old man with limited self-esteem. Sometimes small men of limited self-esteem are threatened by my strong assertive hustling ability and overall presence. Thus, Ralph developed a delusion that I was predatory toward customers and coworkers in an inappropriate way, which I absolutely was not. He'd follow me around and stand very close to me if I was talking to a drunk customer named Rocky who used to come in, because he thought I might “take advantage” of Rocky. All I did, and all I intended to do, was sell dances to Rocky, but that didn't stop Ralph from bothering me. Ralph also used to follow me around and closely watch me interact with two dancers who went by Brazil and Sunshine. I was a much better hustler than these two dancers. They became very jealous of my skills, so they victimized themselves, complained to Ralph about it, and he was dumb enough to believe them. Stupid Ralph ignored actual abusive, toxic behaviors that were exhibited from certain dancers and coworkers. I will address the specifics of these issues in future entries. You will read much more about both of the Brownings in future entries. This post is just a Browning primer.

One thing I really hated about the Brownings was that they let those stupid bitch church ladies into the club to bring scripture, swag, food, and shame. The church ladies hung out in our dressing room, and it was fucking disgusting.

Indoor smoking was totally allowed at Mouse's Ear. Indoor smoking is generally still allowed in Tennessee strip clubs, and can be quite the culture shock to the average Yankee. My lungs were certainly shocked by all that smoke. I developed legitimate and noticeable breathing problems, and a continuous low-level congestion by late Summer.

There was a second Mouse's Ear up in Johnson City prior to my arrival. Several dancers stated that the Brownings intentionally burned it down, in order to collect the insurance money. I saw no evidence of that, but wouldn't doubt if it was true. Since Deja Vu bought Mouse's Ear Knoxville, they opened up a new Johnson City Mouse's Ear, so the dancers can go back and forth between Knoxville and Johnson City if they want.

While I was working at Mouse's Ear, someone from Deja Vu was hanging out, looking around at the club, and made an offer to Buddy for over one million dollars. At that time, Buddy did not accept the offer. COVID shut down Mouse's Ear for part of 2020. By 2021, the sale to Deja Vu was just about done. One of the provisions Deja Vu had for the Brownings was they they had to settle my lawsuit before their transaction was complete. I got a damn sweet settlement and will elaborate more on that in future posts. Thanks, Deja Vu.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: Misclassification

Mouse's Ear was owned by the Browning family while I worked there. They had much of the same contract language, lawyers, and business model as the Deja Vu corporation. That is-- ignore misclassification issues, do what you want, fire whoever you want, assume you don't get sued. Most dancers who got fired didn't sue Mouse's Ear, so it worked out economically for them to misclassify. Keeping the show going draws in more customers, and to keep the show going, one wants employees to boss around.

Tennessee is a one-party consent audio recording state, so I had ample opportunity to record, document, organize, and submit all of their misclassification rules to the NLRB, as well as to my private attorney. Mouse's Ear also had certain written rules posted in the dressing room. I made sure to photograph those and submit them as evidence. I was a bit amazed at how sloppy the Brownings were at concealing their crimes. If you're interested in having any of my photos of rules or copies of the recordings, feel free to ask and I will dig those out of my mountains of files.

I recently read a transcript of one of the conferences from The Expo in Las Vegas, where strip club owners gather to discuss business matters. They referred to litigants such as myself as “bloodsuckers,” the irony being they they suck so much money and energy from exploited workers. Well anyway, if I am a bloodsucker, Mouse’s Ear was ripe for the picking. Maybe they should’ve just followed the fucking labor laws, respected their worker’s rights, and all of this could’ve been avoided. Who am I not to hold them accountable?

With no further adieu, here is an INCOMPLETE list of the ways in which Mouse's Ear misclassified me. I can’t find my affidavit and don’t feel like searching; otherwise it would be a much more comprehensive list:

• Mouse's Ear was a juice bar which relied on the dancers as their business.

• It was mandatory to wear high heels at all times while on the show floor.

• It was mandatory to participate in a stage rotation, with set lengths according to the DJ's discretion.

• It was mandatory to get fully nude on stage.

• It was mandatory to be in the club by a certain time in the evening.

• It was mandatory to work an entire eight hour shift.

• It was mandatory to work a certain number of nights per week, 3-4 if I recall correctly, unless otherwise approved by the Brownings.

• It was mandatory to fill out vacation absence forms if one was going out of town and couldn't make a shift.

• DJs expected something like 10% of a dancer's nightly earnings, after she paid the club their cut of dances, and after her house fee. Harassment would ensue if DJs were not paid as much as they calculated and believed they deserved.

• Staff expected a few bucks per night from each dancer. Harassment would ensue if staff was not paid. They called this “tipping.”

• It was mandatory to pay a house fee each night, something like $30.

• It was mandatory to pay the club a cut of each dance sold. $40 dances were cut $30 to the dancer and $10 to the club.

• It was mandatory to participate in a checkout procedure at the end of the night, if one's shift went until the end of the night. This checkout procedure included the dancers staying in the dressing room until the DJ told us we could come out, then lining up at the juice bar on the show floor, to pay out what the club told us we owed them.

• It was mandatory to accept a non-alcoholic drink, which a waitress asked a customer if he wanted to buy for us, if a customer agreed to buy one.

• It was mandatory to drink at least a little bit of the non-alcoholic drink that the customer purchased for us, in order to show him that his money was well spent.

• It was mandatory to stay sitting with a customer until most of the juice drink was sipped, in order to show him that his money was well spent.

• It was mandatory to sell dances at 2-for-1 prices during certain times of the night.

• It was mandatory to sell dances at otherwise specified prices during normal times of the night, depending on the location in the club where the dance took place.

• It was mandatory to participate in a “feature” every half an hour or so, which included the DJ calling all of the dancers up to the stage at once, while we stood around angrily, until everyone was up there. Then, we'd walk off the stage in a line one-by-one.

• Certain dancers were not allowed to be on the show floor without their makeup on. I was never reprimanded for not wearing makeup, but hilarity did ensue when certain atrocious bitches were sent back to the dressing room and told to stay put until cosmetics were applied.

• Mouse’s Ear was an air dance, no contact club. I loved that, because I hate touching customers most of the time. Dancers were also not allowed to provocatively touch one another while on stage together, or while dancing for a customer, which I greatly appreciated, because I fucking hate seeing those gross dances where strippers dry hump on stage. None of that was tolerated at Mouse’s Ear. The no touching rules were more strictly enforced than any strip club I have ever worked at in all my years. It was fucking fantastic. I’d like to give a special thanks to the crazy East Tennessee evangelical political figures who made the Brownings enforce that one.

Mouse's Ear Memoirs: An Introduction

There is a certain sweetly scented species of mold particular to much of Tennessee, and even up into Cumberland Gap State Park, past Kentucky state lines. I first became familiar with this scent as a child, when my maternal maw maw sent me birthday and Christmas cards with accompanying cash inside. I'd sniff the cards and cash, and wonder aloud what the smell was. I was instructed by my mentally ill and abusive mother to keep these cards and communications a secret from my aunt and cousins, who I was coerced into hanging out with once a year, who were estranged from maw maw. I was instructed to lie about communications with maw maw. My mentally ill and abusive mother was the only person who I discussed the scent with as a child. While in East Tennessee in 2019, I alone and quietly thought,

“Oh, it's that smell! It's everywhere! East and West!”

This moldy scent, this Holy land, is special to me. Part of my desire to work in Tennessee was to understand the origins of myself, in whatever warped way a person comes to understand one's origins through long term labor activist stripper road trips, anonymously tracking things down. In 2009 when my maw maw died, and in subsequent years, my maternal Tennessee relatives would ask my mother if I was going to visit them. I had only been down there once as a young child. My mother would passive-aggressively avoid taking me with her down there, then lie to the relatives down there, state that I didn't want to go. It wasn't true; in 2009 I was very curious to visit the Tennessee kin in the context of some type of reunion, and vocalized my wishes frequently. It would've been awkward to go alone to visit people I didn't know, so I didn't visit them at all. While working in Knoxville, I encountered many two-faced back stabbing fair weather stripper friends who reminded me of people I share DNA with. Tennessee contains one of the most violent, threatening and bigoted cultures I have ever encountered. The culture of Southern Hospitality often misleads outsiders to believe that Southeasterners are genuinely kind people. They are in fact fake people, liars to the extreme. While “Minnesota Nice” cultural tendencies cause a people to smile politely and icily turn away, “Southern Hospitality” is a tendency to smile politely, engage in conversation, only to cause great distress, harm and possibly death when a victim isn't looking-- there is an unbearable fakeness and threat of harm when engaging with polite Southerns.

More than two years have already passed since I last worked at Mouse's Ear in Knoxville. It does not feel like two years. It seems like just yesterday. I've been wanting to do this series for a long time, but didn't want to mess up my lawsuit in any way by posting about the situation before the settlement checks cleared. I worked at Mouse's Ear from May 2019 until November 2019. I settled my Mouse's Ear NLRB complaint in the Summer of 2020. This past Summer of 2021, I settled the private claims. All the checks have cleared. I can finally talk about everything, about everyone. There's so much to talk about. I noticed some recurring themes among the individuals, labor violations, and cultural tenancies during my time in Knoxville. Those themes will be discussed in this series.

Mouse's Ear in Knoxville had some of the dumbest, meanest coworkers I have ever had in my entire life. I know that's saying lot, considering all past entries on this site. To avoid being emotionally effected by the PTSD, and to keep posting in a timely manner, I may robotically discuss the situations, or otherwise reminisce in a detached way. It is the only way to avoid taking a year or more to make a few simple entries, as happened during the Teazers mini-series. The Mouse's Ear series will be much more dense than the Teazers mini-series, but hopefully it won't take as long. The Mouse's Ear series will not exclusively discuss the labor violations and workplace; my connections and geographic thoughts about East Tennessee will be explored.

Most people don't know that Appalachia and the Scottish Highlands are the same mountain range, which was once connected without the Atlantic Ocean in between. For many years, I have been fascinated by the guerrilla warfare tactics that the predominantly Scots-Irish population of Southern Appalachia engaged in, to defeat the British during the American Revolution. Andrew Jackson, polarizing Indian murderer that he was, is one of my favorite presidents to research. A first-generation American born to Irish immigrants, Old Hickory had a passionate hatred for the British, and is responsible for securing the fate of much of the Southeastern United States.

Knoxville is historically home to the Tsalagi or Cherokee peoples. Most people in Knoxville believe they are “part Cherokee,” and will vehemently claim it with no evidence, tribal membership, physical appearance, or even knowledge of where the Cherokee live now.

Much of my traveling stripper life has been casual anthropology studies, retracing my genealogical steps, backward and forward through time, going this way and that. I stayed in two motels while in Knoxville-- a Motel 6 right down the road from Mouse's Ear, and no-name place which was a bit of a drive away in Raccoon Valley. Not far away from Mouse's Ear in Knoxville is a road called Londonderry, and it joyfully made me think about how cute it was to have a road named after the Northern Ireland town, an homage to a rugged and rag tag group of individuals forced to uproot and relocate, making their way. All interstate going into Tennessee are called "Albert Gore, Sr. Memorial Highway.” It always warmed my heart to speak with Mouse's Ear customers who voted for Al Gore and passionately discussed the 2000 election almost twenty years later, as if it were yesterday.

Pigeon Forge is less than an hour's drive from Knoxville. I grew up repeatedly hearing an anecdote from my mother about her piece of shit dad, about how they once visited the area. He stopped to urinate in the woods, and ran back to the car in a panic, with a black bear following behind him. And so, I feel connected to the mountain range in a variety of ways that make me smile in an ancestral whimsy, admiring black bears from the safety of my vehicle.

I first heard about dancing in East Tennessee at Blackjack's in Elgin, Illinois, around 2011. A young woman was talking about all of the money she easily made down there, simply for having a full set of teeth. While satirically relaying her anecdote, she was making fun of the locals who did not have all of their teeth. She discussed how cruel they were to her, but she was still joyously reminiscing at the insane amounts of money that she made. This particular Chicagoland dancer was of Italian descent, and I was slightly offended that she was making fun of Appalachians. In the Summer of 2012, I spent a day or so in Knoxville while on a road trip. I had researched clubs in the area, auditioned at Mouse's Ear, decided not to dance there after they hired me, and subsequently left the area.

In March of 2019, I was illegally terminated from a manufacturing plant in the Chicago area, after complaining about all of the sexual harassment that I experienced there. They gave me a decent settlement in a timely manner, and I left Illinois. I traveled to the Knoxville area in April of 2019, hoping to find welding work and relocate to Appalachia. I returned to Mouse's Ear in May of 2019, did not mention 2012 to them, auditioned and was hired. I worked for almost exactly six months before being fired.

“Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus was released in 2019, a song which was played with frequent enthusiasm all over the Southeast at that time, all the fucking time, everywhere.

Broke Muh Phone

Several months ago I broke my phone and had to get a new one. All of my numbers were lost, particularly valuable ones having to do with stripper labor rights. I am slowly but surely gathering them. If you haven’t heard from me for a few months, please contact me. I’d simply make a social media post about this, but I was permanently banned from twitter a few months ago, and also deleted my facebook.

Alabama Miners Strike Fund

Alabama Miners have been striking for a long time now with very little media interest. StripperLaborRights.com stands in solidarity with Alabama miners on strike, will donate during the holiday season, and would like to encourage you to donate as well to their strike fund.

Strip Club Shooter Google Alerts

My strip club Shooter post was just this past December 6th. Nine days after I set a google alert, I have all of these articles about Shooters:

Lexington Shooters in strip club parking lot

Dallas Strip Club Shooters

Anaheim Strip Club Shooter

Virgin Islands Strip Club Shooter