Madison Gladstone is from Knoxville. Like many people I met from Knoxville, she does not have a distinctly Southern accent. She was somewhere around twenty when we became coworkers in May of 2019. She was hired within a day or two of me being hired. While she never danced at a strip club before, she has extensive training in ballet and dance. Her stage name was Natalie.

Natalie had great stage presence and movement. She had long red hair, a svelte toned dancer body, and a butter face made pretty through the use of cosmetics. Ralph didn't allow her to bring her butter face on the show floor without makeup on, because it naturally looked like a washed out, freckled orange lizard. Her overall appearance made me think of a Viking shield-maiden on the dawn of invading some helpless coastal Irish village. She had the fierce recklessness and sadism of an ancient bloodthirsty warrior. Natalie and I are the exact same height, but her torso is much longer than mine, while my legs are longer with a shorter torso. Her face is long, lacking a certain cheeky quality. As a compliment when we first met, I told her she reminded me of Mary, Queen of Scots. She got a lot of attention from Renaissance Faire lovers, Tudor romantics, and Norse-Anglo-Celtic fetishists, because of her undiluted phenotype which hearkens back to bygone eras of literature and lore. She's cool looking. Most people think so, and she knew it. She bragged about it from time to time, while simultaneously criticizing the appearances of other people.

Natalie has a voice like Kermit the Frog, which prevented some customers from finding her attractive enough to spend money on. She had a variety of mental health issues that prevented her from being an effective hustler. She had substance abuse issues. She lacked compassion for other people, which prevented her from having soulful connections with customers in a way that would motivate them to give her more money. She had interpersonal problems with multiple coworkers who were also her “friends.” She spent excessive amounts of time hanging out in the dressing room tending to her social life, rather than hustling. She is bold and intelligent, with liberal feminist leanings. She has a lot of potential to do great things. I disliked being around her, due to her behavior.

In the beginning of our time at Mouse's Ear, she told me that my “work” is the best. I'm not sure if she was referring to my hustling or stage presence. Whatever it was that she was referring to, her sentiments toward me rapidly declined after she was influenced by our coworkers. Khaleesi, for example, went out of her way to slander me and wrangle dancers against me, including Natalie. Alex Cave and Natalie hit it off, so when Alex Cave harassed me about not “tipping,” Natalie laughed aloud and verbally encouraged it. Natalie began thinking that I was engaged in prostitution somehow, even though I never did anything at Mouse's Ear remotely related to prostitution. If I was sitting close to a customer without making physical contact, she would slyly point at me, watch me with other dancers, and suggest that I was soliciting. She expressed disgust if I was giggling with, flirting with, or sweet talking customers. Those things are methods to convince customers to spend money, but Natalie was disturbed when I did normal things. She briefly went to work at another club in town called The Ball, where there was more physical contact. She stated that she did fully nude “grinding” lap dances there, and it messed up her “PH balance.” She did not like The Ball, understandably, but it was very odd when she returned and stated that I would like working there, because that's how I work. She inferred that I grind in dances and I wouldn't mind messing up my “PH balance.” I do not expose my skin to customers in a way that would infect or disease me, so Natalie's delusions were very insulting, degrading, and weird. One time, Natalie was called to the stage, and the customer who she was previously sitting with summoned me over to talk to him. Of course I went over there, because that is what any normal stripper would do if a customer sitting by himself summoned her over. I briefly asked him if he wanted a dance, he said no, and I left. If Natalie was an emotionally stable person with any semblance of thick skin, she wouldn't have minded or taken that personally. Instead, she took it as an act of betrayal, proceeded to slander and complain about me, and expressed a desire to “check” me later, by talking to a customer who I had previously sat with. It didn't bother me if a coworker spoke with a customer who I previously sat with, because those kinds of things roll off the backs of most people. Natalie has a very thin skin, which was not fun to be around. She used all kinds of terms like “check,” which are derived from urban vernacular, but it mostly sounded silly when coming from her. Conner used to allow Natalie to stand at his DJ booth to complain about my sales, comfort her, then later he'd tell me that dancers just needed to leave me alone about my sales if they couldn't keep up. He “played both sides” in a very obvious and destructive way. One time, a customer came in who I sat with. Natalie and her friend Codi both came down the stairs to interrupt me talking to him, copied my every gesture, such as sitting with my legs crossed and hands folded, and they brought up subjects such as gardening and ecology, because those are subjects that I talked about with previous customers who they eavesdropped on. They sounded stupid though, because Codi and Natalie don't know much about gardening or ecology. They were just fumbling around with nature language, but without making coherent statements. I later learned that particular customer wasn't a “cold call” for them; Codi and Natalie went to the movies with him previously, which really grossed me out. When a dancer named Roxy started working at Mouse's Ear, Natalie sat with her and yelled while looking at me,

“You need to get hard, because the bitches around here will push you around!”

It's unfortunate that Natalie was so out of touch with reality, to such a degree that she thought she was being pushed around by her coworkers when they sold dances to customers who just weren't interested in her. Being an unsuccessful salesperson is not equal to being pushed around. Natalie was never pushed around, she was just a sore loser and a bad sport. The job isn't for everyone. Natalie bullied her friend Roxy. She regularly talked badly about her work friends when they weren't around, and engaged in other kinds of mean girl behaviors that I didn't really keep up with listening to, because it was so abundant. Mouse's Ear dancers were mean to me as an outsider, but many of them were also very mean to one another, even though they hung out together. It was a toxic stew of losers who I tried not to be contaminated by. One time, Natalie pressured me to buy a five dollar velveteen top from her. A few days later, she forgot that she sold it to me and wondered why I was wearing it.

Natalie's dad died when she was young. She is an only daughter raised by a Narcissistic Mother. Her mother used her in an emotionally incestuous way, by telling her about the intimacies of her abusive boyfriend, telling her about experimenting with bisexuality, treating her daughter as a relationship therapist and life coach. Natalie was emotionally smothered and stunted by her mother, who had bad boundaries and never allowed her daughter to psychologically grow as she should have. Natalie took anti-anxiety medication, drank regularly, and sometimes seemed groggy as though she was on opiates. Lilith told me she consumed illegal pills, but I have no evidence of that. After working at Mouse's Ear for a few months, Natalie had enough money saved for a vacation to Myrtle Beach. She was crying about it, because she was worried about going out of town for a few days. She had not been on a vacation in eight years, and was going to miss her mother who she also lived with. She considered not going, because she wasn't sure if she could emotionally handle a few days away from her mom.

Natalie expressed a desire to start a stripper podcast, to discuss her experiences at Mouse's Ear. Natalie started growing out her female genital hairs after noticing that I and another dancer named Ivywood didn't shave and still made more money than a lot of other people. I'm glad we could provide a positive example for Natalie. Natalie expressed a desire to stop dancing, go off grid, and live in the woods.

Natalie burned through various besties in the workplace during the six months that we were coworkers. It was rumored that she and her bestie Codi stole $40 out of somebody's locker. Codi was fired for unrelated issues, and Natalie had to find new people to cling to. There was a nook part of the dressing room that the security cameras couldn't clearly see, where she and other pill poppers hung out a lot. She seemed to have insider knowledge about the security camera capabilities that I wasn't privy to. One time, Chanel left her purse up there and $200 became missing. I reviewed my sources and found that Natalie was upstairs during the time frame in question, but I did not get involved whatsoever. Eventually everyone confirmed that it was Natalie, who coincidentally was in need of $200 to purchase an unnamed item from another dancer while sitting in that nook. However, because of her gregariousness, she didn't get as shunned for it as someone else might've been for stealing $200 out of a coworker's purse. Khaleesi and Natalie had some kind of a falling out after Chanel's $200 was stolen, but I wasn't really interested in investigating all of those details or finding out the minutiae. One can only fast forward through audio recordings for so long before getting bored. One of her most recent besties was a drug addict named Aspen. Those two used to shame me for my rapid hustling and solitary method of operating, which I thought was odd, what with Natalie still living with her mother and Aspen having mountains of resources from a wealthy land hoarding multi-generational Republican political family in North Carolina. It's not like they knew shit about my life or were willing to add anything positive to it, so who were they to judge what I did? A part of me just hoped they'd both accidentally buy some fentanyl and eat it, for an ecologically pragmatic exit.

I don't really want Natalie to die though. Like Khaleesi, Natalie has wonderful values and so much potential. I hope she finds her way out of the dark tunnel and manifests her inner Valkyrie. I hope she takes those trips to Myrtle Beach and elsewhere, explores the woods when she wants to, makes that podcast, conquers her anxiety, sets boundaries with her creepy narcissistic mother, cuts ties with creepy toxic relatives, and pursues her best life. The possibilities are endless if Natalie gets sober, gets active, and gets militant. The stripper labor movement would be so enriched with Madison Rae Gladstone joining the fight.