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WITH THE CLOSING OF LE STRIP ON YONGE STREET IN THE LATE '90S, THE LONG DRAWN-OUT DEATH SCENE OF TRADITIONAL BURLESQUE IN TORONTO FINALLY CAME TO AN END. Le Strip was the last hold-out of theatre seating strip-tease in an industry that had long ago begun a wobbly tightrope walk between entertainment and prostitution. Dancers performed long onstage routines, to steadily diminishing crowds seated as though to watch a play. In all other adult entertainment clubs around the city, the stage had become an accessory to the more lucrative and personal entertainment of the table dance, at five dollars per two to three minute song.
Dancers in these clubs would spend about six minutes on stage every three hours, and the rest of their evenings were spent walking the floor, hustling for the big money. Stages shrank to tiny, portable platforms the performers could carry from table to table; then the idea of a stage disappeared altogether, replaced by the lap. With the effective decriminalization of lap dancing at the end of the '90s, the private dance trade enjoyed a price hike as men shelled out ten or even twenty dollars per song for the privilege of touching and being touched. And despite a short-lived fad that saw groups of young trendy women heading off to strip clubs to buy lap dances for each other and swap fashion tips with the female dancers, the traditional naked-lady club remains the hangout of an all-male crowd.
Young men at bachelor parties, business men entertaining clients, entire teams of professional athletes winding...