Strip City by Lily Burana

From the New York Times Review of Books: Let Me Entertain You By Kate Sekules STRIP CITY A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America. By Lily Burana. These days, when a girl who puts herself through school by lap dancing barely seems eccentric, when porn is yawningly trendy and there is nightly nudity on HBO, the notion of a stripper's memoir appears almost quaint. Lily Burana is aware of this -- as you'd hope from the founder of a sex magazine called ''Taste of Latex.'' As Burana writes in her memoir, ''In the past decade the stripper seems to have gone from a social outcast to a thonged 'whatever.' '' Burana's own six-year stripping career took place in the social outcast era, which partly explains why she ''sleepwalked'' her way through it, never discovering what, exactly, compelled her to remove her clothes in front of strange men. Five years later, as a last fling before marriage, she set out on the ''bachelorette odyssey'' chronicled in ''Strip City.'' For the men along the tipping rail she calls herself Barbie Faust. For us she is frank and funny and very good company. ''The point of this trip,'' she writes, ''is to sort the bright and complicated fragments of striptease.'' She adds, later, ''Anything less than clarity is a wash.'' It is not ruining the suspense to say that Burana's fragments do not quite result in clarity. But it really doesn't matter when her candid, juicy, streetwise prose rolls along so merrily, and sometimes -- though not as often as you'd think -- heartbreakingly. The definitive answer to what Burana calls ''the question on everyone's lips'' -- why strip? -- may not be required, but it does leave you feeling a little cheated when she says, about a particularly satisfying performance, ''I would be helpless to try to explain it, but if you had ever known that sensation, you'd never want to leave that warm, wet spot on the lip of the maw.'' That is not only evasive -- it's mawkish. And Burana is being oddly hard on herself, considering there are at least half a dozen places where she does try to explain the distinctive sensation of stripping -- as well as many where she performs a kind of psychic striptease, showing us a defiant, troubling humility that (like stripping) masks as it apparently reveals. This particularly comes across in moments when Burana passes judgment on her past self -- she was once so bitter, she writes, that ''the brutality and coarseness'' of even the nastiest club would ''suit me perfectly.'' While Burana belongs to the genus suburban rebel (she's from a nice New Jersey family), her stripper credentials are impeccable, and she has the storyteller's gift. She takes us from her debut at a very pre-Giuliani club in Times Square (''It's no great achievement to get hired at Peepland -- all you need is lingerie and a pulse''), complete with crack-smoking co-workers, all the way to the Los Angeles hipster hangout, Cheetah's, which is full of ''Bettie Page look-alikes'' and ''total Rat Pack cool.'' In between we flash back to Burana's days working at San Francisco's ''fun, friendly, feminist'' Lusty Lady Theater and its notorious Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theater (against which Burana, in a dramatic passage, files a class action lawsuit); then we skip to today's raucous all-nude clubs of Alaska; the deluxe dives of ''Pervert's Row'' in Dallas, where nipples must be covered with liquid latex; and the anarchic Shotgun Willie's in Montana, where we meet literature's angriest stripper. Midodyssey, Burana, in a quest for context, visits the Exotic World Burlesque Museum in the Mojave Desert. She meets Dixie Evans, the ''Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque,'' watches the still impressive 72-year-old Tempest Storm's striptease and sees a sword-balancing 22-year-old ''pay respect to the bygone era'' by winning a Miss Exotic World Pageant. ''People look for themselves in books and movies,'' Burana says. ''But for strippers, there is no 'Giovanni's Room,' no 'Easy Rider,' no 'Basketball Diaries,' no 'Well of Loneliness.' '' Well, she's written one. In what other memoir can you learn how to safely set your nipples on fire?

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