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.