Rebecca Wilson, a UC Berkeley grad, is a dancer at the O'Farrell Theatre. She writes in her spare time.

On recognizing opportunity

When I first became aware of the dot-com boom, I was already [dancing], but I recognized the potential for making more money than I had. I definitely felt like I could profit from it. Like, hookers used to follow these gold miners, the forty-niners? Sex workers have a history of following gold rushes, and I decided to follow this gravy train. But I'm not a hooker--I'm a lap dancer.

I realized things weren't the same anymore when it seemed like every time I asked a guy what he did for a living, he said, "I work with computers," or, "I work on the Internet." That started happening 90 percent of the time.

On the new clients

In the late '90s, I could really tell the city was changing. I had to change my approach. I was used to these middle-class business guys that were just sort of normal perverts. Most of the guys were straight-up perverts, like blue-collar horny mechanics or pervert lawyers, and they just wanted you to be a sex bomb, like, "Hey baby!" The computer guys seemed more put off by an aggressive approach. They wanted you to be more demure, to flatter their ego, make them feel like big strong men.

They're mostly white and Asian, but certainly some African-American guys. They definitely seemed like your typical computer nerds, uncomfortable talking with women. Most of them had a similar look. They dressed a certain way. How do you call it--those Izod shirts? Those little-collar polo shirts? Very often they had the little logo from their company, like Microsoft, or whatever, or they'd just come from some Apple expo conference. The supersmart ones, the programmer guys, had scruffy hair, because their whole attitude is, they're so indispensable that they can look however the fuck they want. They dressed more bohemian, but you could still tell that they were brainy types. But the network engineers--they're more conservative. They have shorter hair. Those guys are more like setting up servers and that sort of thing. I got to the point where I could nail what they do.

Sometimes they were smaller, but there were actually some really studly guys who came in. I think maybe they didn't want to fuck around at work. Something like that. They were really horny, studly computer guys, who just wanted some action where they wouldn't get into trouble. Maybe these guys were workaholics. They were cute, but they didn't have time to meet women. Or they didn't want to hit on women at their work, because that would create a problem. They were different types, definitely.

There was also the proliferation of these websites discussing the strip clubs. These computer guys are all in these chat rooms. There's one at Yahoo! There's one for sfredbook. All these computer geeks, they go on the Internet all the time and compare notes. They rate and review the girls. They go on and on and on and on. I think the girls are scared of it, because they're afraid they might be outed somehow, or people are gonna know what they really do at work--there are private booths at the clubs, and some of the girls go a lot farther than lap dancing.

You could also see the misogyny in some of these guys' minds. I remember going on the Internet, I'd pose as a customer, and say, "Hey, you guys should watch what you say, there might be a girl from the club reading this." And they'd write, "You gotta be kidding. None of these girls have enough brains to turn on a computer." I definitely noticed that.

They were completely socially retarded. I think that's why some of these guys became totally obsessed with the dancers and didn't care that it was a completely unhealthy relationship. At the sfredbook message board, sometimes a guy will go on there and say, "Oh, I really think I'm really in love with this dancer," and another guy goes, "Come on, buddy, the sooner you face up to the fact you're a PL, the better off you'll be." And then the guy will go, "What's a PL?" And they go, "Pathetic loser." It's totally geeky. But it's healthier than these guys who thought they could just buy anything. They had all this money and power and they thought, "Oh, I can buy the woman of my dreams now." And they could. But it wasn't real.

Some of these guys started a whole club. It was a club of computer-geek guys who go to strip clubs. They have meetings at some sleazy bar once in a while. I was gonna crash one of them.

On footwear, big spending, and kept women

I started noticing those premolded shoes. Footwear was the big tip-off to me. I saw guys wearing these space-age-looking, black, bubble-toed, rubbery shoes. My friend Susan said, "Everybody's shoes look like they're melting." It was this techno-footwear thing. Everybody in San Francisco used to wear Converse or just these ratty shoes. Suddenly I started seeing these $300 shoes. Fancy motorcycles. Land Rovers. Who needs a Land Rover? And the notebooks in the cafés.

The most outrageous things happened at Mitchell Brothers. You can buy these things called dance chips, which come in increments of $20--and you can buy them with a credit card. So guys would come in and spend $10,000. Right there. I swear to God. Ten thousand dollars worth of dance chips. I know girls who get $2,000 a night, just to sit there and talk to some guy.

I remember these two girls became the kept mistresses of some CEO computer genius, who helped invent some virtual-reality digital-camera thing. That guy was giving girls, like, $8,000 a night. I met him, and he literally was, like, five-foot-three, really dweeby looking. He'd take these girls out to openings, and he'd have his arms around each of them. They'd be holding on to his shoulders. Somebody gave me the lowdown: They were a lesbian couple, but they were working this guy for all they could. He would bring them over to his house and videotape them, live out his sex fantasies.

There's one other girl I knew who became a kept woman for one of these guys. He was a multimillionaire dot-com guy, and he gave her a million dollars to stop dancing. And she couldn't stand him. She was telling me how upsetting it was to go meet his family with him. He'd be, like, "Oh, this is the woman of my dreams." His family didn't know anything about the financial transaction. That was really disturbing to her. She stopped dancing. But she was a heroin addict, and I remember she was in this desperate position, where this guy knew stuff about her. And it was so creepy. It was like The Blue Angel or something all over again.

Every week there were guys who would come in and spend $2,000 in a shift, on one girl. Not on me! I guess I still haven't gotten it down.

On the influx of prissy girls

The industry was changing, too--attracting some women who were more articulate, classier. Because they realized they could work these guys well. It helped that they were articulate, not covered with tattoos or heroin track marks or whatever. When I first started stripping, the only white girls that did it were these punk-rock weirdo girls that were complete trailer trash. It was a total weirdo job. And then it became something that really prissy girls started doing. I even worked with girls who worked at dot-com jobs during the daytime. They would say things like, "Don't ever tell anyone I work here." They were really concerned about anybody in their dot-com world finding out.

I remember this one girl, she was such a priss. You could tell. She'd only wear full-body panties, because she didn't want her bare buns to touch the laps. She was telling me about this dot-com job during the daytime, and I think her deal was that the people she worked with made so much money that she had to keep up or something. 'Cause she was only the receptionist. And she needed money for the nice car, the fancy outfits, to hang out with these people.

There wasn't a real culture clash among the customers. The customers don't really talk. But there was competition between the prissy girls who sat with dot-comers and the really trashy girls with missing teeth. The prissy girls would turn their noses up at the other girls, calling them trashy and stuff.

On the crash, career options, and keeping perspective

I started noticing the downturn when girls were saying, "It used to be great, and now it sucks." The thing is, I came back to Mitchell Brothers after it crashed, but I remember girls kept talking about the gold rush, the glory days. How you were busy all night, you'd make $3,000 like that, nonstop. And now, it was a fifth of that. Girls were miserable.

It was unbelievable. I'd been working at the [Market Street] Cinema. I was just getting a trickle of it. You had more of the kinky weirdos that would go to the Cinema, the guys who would listen to Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. You got some of these kinky hacker types, Dungeons and Dragons nerd types, but you didn't get the classy business ones. So when I came to Mitchell Brothers, I was like, "Wow, this is amazing." They were like, "No, you don't understand. This is nothing compared to how it was." But for me it was better than at the Cinema, so I have a weird perspective. The top club at its worst was still better than the dive. The reason I left the Cinema is that it got terrible there. Yeah, the Cinema went horrible.

I had a friend who was a stripper for years, and her big "out" was to start working at a dot-com. She became a receptionist, and she started making tons of money. It was kind of funny--she really turned her nose up at strippers: "I would never do that again." Lah di dah di dah. But she got canned and couldn't get hired anywhere. She was freaking out and didn't know what to do. So I thought that was kind of funny. She didn't go back to stripping. She's living with her parents now.

I remember being amazed when she told me, "You could get a job as a receptionist at a dot-com place for 40 or 50 thousand a year. All you do is sit there and chew gum all day and answer the phone once or twice, and you could talk to your friends all day." And then she went from that to not being able to get a job. So I was surprised.

On lessons learned

What did I learn from the whole dot-com experience? Don't invest in tech stocks? I don't know. What I learned is: Don't believe the hype. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. It seems to me that silly people who didn't know what they were doing got suckered into it, but smart people cashed out. That's what I noticed. Certain people made a ton of money and cashed out, and other people who were just following the trend, not seeing the forest for the trees, they lost a lot of money. This one guy I know, he lost a million dollars in a year. He was trapped. He wanted to sell out but he couldn't. He was part of a company that could only cash out after a certain period of time. And so he was terrified. But at the same time he saw the illusory nature of it, so he didn't get that bummed out, because he knew it was all on paper.

Another guy that I went out with a couple times was a network engineer for Cisco. He lost $800,000 on paper. And he could have cashed out. But he kept freaking out and thinking the market was going to go back up. It kept dipping and dipping, and he lost 100,000, then 200,000…and he ended up losing it all. And so I learned that some of these people were gamblers. It was like sitting at the betting table.

A lot of strippers bought bad stocks. Some didn't know what they were doing, and their regulars would tell them, "Oh, buy Cisco, buy this, buy that." I kept talking about stocks with girls in the dressing room. Girls were telling me how bummed out they were for putting a lot of their stripping money into these tech stocks--based on what their customers had told them. Thomas Jefferson said, "Invest in land; they don't make it anymore." I decided real estate was a less risky investment.

On working hard for her money

I just wanted the money. I never had the urge to be part of the Internet culture. It didn't really appeal to me. I had more liberal, leftist leanings when I was younger, before I went to Berkeley and had to deal with a lot of these people up close. I used to empathize with all the poor people being ousted from the Mission. I don't know. I feel bad about displacing poor people sometimes. That upset me a little bit. So I didn't want to jump on the gravy train that much.

Two years ago, money was no problem. Like, endless. They kept going back to the ATM, getting $400, $400. Easily. Now they're really tight-fisted. They only come with $80, or $120, or $160. They've got a preset amount. And they're just really frugal, and angry. They compare notes on the Internet now about which girls you can get the best mileage with, for the cheapest price. If we push for more, we get labeled as an ROB, which is an acronym for rip-off bitch.

All these guys were telling me, "Oh, work is really hard right now." Even engineers are freaking out. Even the real smarty-pants ones are freaking out. They're telling me they can't spend that much money, they just lost their jobs, or they don't know how long the company is going to last.

I've changed my approach to my job. I have to be more discriminating in terms of whom I approach. I guess before, anybody you asked was loaded. You could just be a total bitch, and still they paid. And now, these guys are so tight-fisted, and you really have to flatter them. You just have to work so hard for so long. You don't want to alienate them, and you don't want some other girl to come along. It's pretty cutthroat. I have to work really hard not to blow it.