“I Strip for God” Part 8
Aquarius Burlesque Theater
Route 130 Gloucester City, New Jersey, 1980
OK I have to get to the theaters & clubs I worked, & all I can say is thank God for ARTICLES written about me in these cities & towns, because the articles tell me the NAMES & LOCATIONS & TIMES of these places. I did NOT deep a diary. I do recall what happened at these places but not their names, addresses & dates. The articles I have Xeroxed – at least a hundred of them – & they also appear on my www.KellieEvertsIStripforGod.com website.
This was a small theater which seated no more than 100 & they sat across & around an extension of the stage. It was all lighted up, the whole room, so I could see everyone – not like the old theaters where only the stage is lit up, the audience is dark.
I was on a super-strict diet at this time – one meal a day – & was lifting weights each day & dancing 4 shows. It was grueling. I didn’t have the energy to TALK – believe it or not. I ate no breakfast or lunch, danced all the 4 shows & only then did I go across the street to the diner & had a favorite meal. It was eggs with home fries, rye bread & dessert – banana cream pie. Never changed the menu. I know it’s intelligent to eat 3 small meals instead – but my system worked the way I did it.
I’ll try to recall whatever struck me here, for good or bad. Nothing huge, but this will give you an idea of what it is like to be in my skin, what a stripper such as myself experiences.
The owner/manager was really nice to me {there are all kinds, some are brutal & cold hearted} & when another dancer {not a good one} was saying things that made me uncomfortable, he said,
“She’s just trying to psyche you out.”
We’re not talking sisterhood here, it’s competition. And because she felt since I was the star, I was higher, she tried to pull me down. I didn’t catch on, just felt demoralized, until the owner told me what it was about. No I was not ‘street smart’ I was spiritually smart & book smart – {that has changed through much observation & study}. Her method of putting me ‘down’ was bragging about another female – Marilyn Chambers. Since I was body building & my body was exquisite she kept bragging on her, saying how her lats stood out. And you could see the look on her face as she said it, that twisted smile where the ends of the mouth point down {into Hell.}
Another female I felt was the victim of a con job – but I didn’t catch on right away. She was partnered with an ordinary-looking tall, thin Hindu, who told her he was going to become a doctor. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but he wasn’t one yet, & by convincing her he would be – & they’d be married – he got to have her body & possibly lived off her. She was so puffed up she seemed trancelike & treated myself & another dancer to our meal. {This is unusual, she wanted to impress us & we were.}
She told the press this was her last dance gig – she was off to ‘marry a doctor.’ The article in the Gloucester paper
tells me her name was ‘Tarzana.’ She was a good dancer & I wonder if she lived happily ever after or if the Hindu was pulling her leg & she danced in dives another 10 years.
There were two other dancers I recall. One was gorgeous, beautiful face & body. The other was ugly – ugly face & body, sort of charcoal grey skin, short & dumpy, spoke like she had an IQ of 80 or less, & she used a big black dildo on stage, which annoyed some of the white men, lol. {The uglier you are, the more prurient your act has to be, sad but true. Not sure what she did with the dildo but I don’t think inserting it was allowed, probably pretended. I never looked at her act.}
Here is my anecdote on her. There was an employee of the theater – a decent looking white guy who was a janitor. Married, he once brought his wife around. What I recall about the situation is this. He belly ached about the price of peanut butter, how expensive it had got, he had a 9 year old son who loved peanut butter. And yet he gave $50. to Miss Ugly of for sex. He could have bought 20 lbs of peanut butter for $50. This taught me something about some men – they will literally take food out of their child’s mouth to give themselves sex pleasure.
Now the beautiful one had a boyfriend or ‘hanger on.’ He was vile. He sat right at the front seat next to the extension on the stage, & when I came by he growled sexual things in a low voice, like an animal – this was totally disrespectful to his girl friend Ms Gorgeous.
And here’s how I found out he was mooching off her. In the old days, beautiful women on stage got flowers,
jewels, & taken out for the finest dining. In our day & age women in the adult trade / show business get pimps, moochers & con men. Once in a while a straight guy comes along – not often.
The owner of the diner across the street was a gay man, kind of chubby. One day he shows up to the owner in a huff, yelling how he has to get paid for what Mr. Vile has done. Vile sat on his vinyl seat in a booth, & the KNIFE in his pocket cut a bit swatch into the seat. Repairing it would cost money – But who pays? The guy or the dancer he’s hanging with? The dancer of course.
Everything had gone wrong for her that day. She sighed deeply & said,
“Some days you wish had never started.”
I was working on a body building book that year. I’d learned from prosperity teacher Catharine Ponder that if you want a thing to get done, start working on it. I did. I tried to write the book, I trained & posed for pictures. But I could not write it {tried & tried, it didn’t come out right} & could not get a publisher. After a few months of trying, I gave up & went on my next job.
Can’t even recall where that job was – was it Pittsburgh or Philadelphia?
And while there someone who wanted to publish a body building book by me – because they had seen my Esquire article in 1975 – contacted me. Mr. Stan & Mrs. Jan Leitner were in St. Louis, Illinois, told me to quit my job where I was, come over there & work on a book – they’d give me 5k. Later, they changed it to 10k. {To me that was HUGE – I’d never had more than 1.5k in my bank account as of then. In 2022 money this would be $35,473}
I told them I could not break my contract, but as soon as this job was over I’d go there.
It was a dream come true. Being housed in their mansion, they got me a ‘trainer’ where I was dropped off daily, they hired the biggest photo/video studio in the city to photograph me & make a video of ‘The Ultimate Woman.’ – A woman who body builds, dances, & runs her own business. Wearing a suit, I am seen seated at a desk giving orders, then body building, then dancing in a club which they arranged.
They put this video/ad for the book on the Phil Donohue Show at a cost of what today would be $56,757.
And so, thanks to the teachings of Catherine Ponder, I got my book published. Not only that, it was the FIRST BODY BUILDING BOOK BY A FEMALE. Mr. & Mrs. Leitner did all the work – all I had to do was train & BELIEVE. I beat Lisa Lyon with her book by several months.
Arnold tried to make Lisa Lyon the ‘poster girl’ of female body building. Was it out of revenge toward me, as I preferred another man? He recruited Joe Weider, the biggest power in body building, to promote her, put her on the cover of his magazine, create a photo layout of her with Arnold. He got a top name in writing to write her book. – Kellie Everts continued with a seminal book, ‘The Origin & Decline of Female Body Building’ & was given the title ‘Progenitor of modern competitive female body building’ in Feb 2007 by the World Body Building Guild.
Forgot to mention. During the Aquarius stay I lifted weights on my breaks, in an outdoor cemented patio behind the theater. How did I get the weights? I asked a man who came to the theater who seemed to be lifting, he brought them. Shows you how nice men can be, you can get favors from them if they like you. I had one of the employees take pics with my camera while I was on stage. There were few times I was that thin & muscular. Every picture had my head cut off.
