the ultimate strip club list

July 18, 2008  •  Vol. 15, Issue 199

Needs to up the hiring of women coming in this place! They have some stroll girls out here. Damn weekenders ruin this buisness! 1 in 10 might make you wanna stay.

I was passing through and spent a Saturday evening at the Rendezvous Hotel strip club in Kamloops, a cattle and sheep town whose name means “the meeting of the waters.” On this particular evening, however, it was “the meeting of the bachelors:” no less than four stag parties simultaneously chose the Rendezvous Hotel strip club to celebrate the joining of two souls in perpetual love.

The place was a bit run down, but not overwhelmingly so. There was no cover charge, and drinks were $3 to $5. Private dances were $30 in a private VIP area behind a curtain, so I assume that contact was allowed, but I didn’t try one. There was a separate glass-walled smoking area in the main room away from the stage, which was nice for us non-smokers. The stage was well-lit and relatively small, so you could see the dancer well everywhere on it. There were four dancers, all beautiful, and three did superb stripteases (the other kept getting distracted by comments from the various stag parties). Each began her routine dressed in a nicely designed costume and then stripped slowly for about four songs, removing each article quite erotically, and ending up nude. A seemingly interminable, approximately 25-minute break followed each dancer before the next appeared.

At about 10PM, the stag parties forgot their higher purpose and decided to use their collective powers of persuasion for a more earthly purpose: to object rather violently to the long 25-minute breaks between dancers on the stage. About 25 quite drunk guys began simultaneously pounding furiously on the stage, yelling various protest chants, but the only one I could make out was “We want tits!” The stage shook dramatically, and it was impossible to hear anything else. There seemed to be no bouncers in the club to calm the crowd, or maybe they just felt outnumbered and decided to lie low. Eventually, the club management responded intelligently by putting the next dancer on stage (after only a several-minute break), but the crowd continually pounded and yelled, now suggesting garments they felt the dancer should remove immediately. The dancer handled the rowdy crowd extremely well, doing a fine dance and ignoring them, but she admitted to me when I tipped her as she left the stage that she was very scared. I’ve witnessed excited crowds at strip clubs many times, but this was by far the most animated and scary, and I confess that I was a bit scared, too. The situation eventually calmed down a couple of dances later (when the weakest dancer's turn was next) when at least one, and maybe two, of the stag parties decided to leave.

I'm guessing that, when less than four bachelor parties are simultaneously occurring at the Rendezvous, things are likely to remain a bit more under control. But then you'd have to wait the 25 minutes between dancers...