The Girlie Playhouse by V. N. Alexander

“The demi-monde of strippers seen from a female perspective. Beneath the deceptively smooth surface of the story is a more complex train of thought—subtly satirical, shocking in effect, and surreptitiously subversive.”
— Tom Newton, author of Fabian: A Cubist Biography

“Full of surprises, The Girlie Playhouse subverts cliché. Alexander is a serious stylist who is not afraid to ruffle feathers.”
— Charles Holdefer, author of Don’t Look at Me and Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic

“Alexander’s beautiful style with flowing sentences and delicious phrasing glorifies female beauty in a society which often finds it threatening and, in turn, threatens it. She writes with a light touch, apparently following Nabokov’s dictum to caress the detail. Despite danger and tragedy in the background, this is a humorous and satirical novel, highly entertaining and thought provoking. I haven’t enjoyed reading a novel this much since I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal (2007).”
— Josip Novakovich, author of Infidelities and April Fool’s Day

What does the reader expect from the description of a strip joint? Tawdriness, of course. Think of recent depictions of strip joints in film. In “The Sopranos,” e.g., in “Anora.” Low-class and sordid, dark establishments, reeking in lewdness. The dancers working there are underclass, lascivious, as are the people running the place: base, disreputable, sleazy. [….]

How does the more-than-unreliable narrator of this novel, Pixie, describe her workplace, The Girlie Playhouse? As not tawdry. Pixie and her sort-of twin Trixie, to begin with, have both graduated from college and live respectable middle-class lives. Not the norm for a strip joint dancer. Trixie has been a ballet dancer. She has a degree in performing arts, becomes a teacher, gets a job teaching dance therapy. [….]

How do the dancers talk to each other in the dressing room? They use “a combination of false bravado, reserve, and denial.” Okay, that makes sense. But their language is stripped bare of profanity. Let’s compare the conversation of the girls of “Anora,” a film that for some ungodly reason won best picture at the Academy Awards in March, 2025. In “Anora” every other word is “fuck.” When a fight breaks out at the cabaret in “Anora,” they can’t just yell joyously, “Hey, there’s a fight!” They yell, “Hey, there’s a fucking fight!” Sleaze, sleaze, and lots of “fucking” tawdriness. But that’s not the way the Playhouse dancers act and talk. [….] The dancers of “Anora” or “The Sopranos” would be truly perplexed if they found themselves in The Girlie Playhouse. They would be thinking, “Where the fuck is the fucking tawdriness in this fucking place?”
— U.R. Bowie, excerpt from the book review in classical-russian-literature.blogspot.com