I went through a life-drawing-strippers phase once.

One year for April Fool's Day the Cacophony Society decided to visit a strip club called Jumbo's Clown Room while dressed as clowns. No one at the club knew why it was called that name, but no one batted an eye at the sudden influx of face paint and red noses either. Jumbo's was (is?) a tiny little dive bar in a strip mall in a crappy part of town, and the stage is about the size of a small dining room table top while the dressing room is a broom closet. So the strippers come hang out with the bar flies between sets and everyone gets drunk and it's a shabby, friendly place. Some of the strippers are veterans who are probably too far past their best-by date to work anywhere else, but it doesn't have the pretentions or high prices of other strip clubs and they make up for it with enthusiasm, so no one cares.

I didn't have a clown costume so I dressed up as an artiste in a beret and brought a sketch pad to do "art" instead. While sketching one of the dancers I realized that the guy sitting next to me was also sketching and figured I just wasn't that original. But then one of the strippers came out after her set and he tore out a page and gave her a sketch that he clearly had done on another occasion and I realized he wasn't playing a joke, he was really there to do art.

"Are you with the clowns?" I asked and he said no, he had no idea who they were. So I said "I have to apologize, it seems I'm inadvertently making fun of you," but he didn't mind. He was a carpenter who lived around the corner and came in regularly to practice drawing. And he was quite good, able to capture the sense of a particular dancer in a few quick pencil strokes despite her constant movement. I realized this was good practice for me, to loosen up and not be so fixated on realism, so I ended up going back a few times to hang out and sketch strippers with him.

Life happened and for whatever reason I stopped going, but I wonder sometimes what ever became of him. Maybe I'll take up sketching strippers again some day.

Centuries later, art still doesn't have body hair.