She was not going back into the strip club. On this point, she was firm.
We sat in her Ford outside the Mons Venus. Our conversation went something like this:
“You have to go back. You have to look at the naked people.”
“No, I don’t.”
Tamara El-Khoury was a young new reporter at the paper. I was her appointed mentor. She’d found and written a promising story about mother and daughter strippers, but her first draft was flat. It wasn’t a writing problem. It was a judgment problem. The story wagged its finger disapprovingly.
We both knew the first rule of reporting, taught to us by the editor on this story, Tom French. “Begin with an open spirit.” But that can be hard to do. How do you even know if your spirit is open? How do you filter out the thousands of tiny judgments we all make every day, and make room for a story that teaches you something new?
The story couldn’t be revived inside the newsroom. Tamara had been re-deployed to Tampa’s most famous strip club for more reporting. I was ordered to go along and, you know, mentor.
Tamara: I’m Catholic. I kept imagining my Lebanese mother’s horror upon hearing of her daughter’s sleazy reporting adventure. I wanted to tell a good story, but my morals got in the way. Whenever I saw boobs, I saw Judgment Day.
Inside the club, we chatted with the topless Daughter Stripper while Mom Stripper gave a lap dance in a dark corner. I tried to take notes, but her customer was facing me, and that was too weird. When Mom was finished, I asked her to describe to me the exact technique of her recently completed lap dance, and to tell me what she was thinking while she did it.
Mother Peggy Justus, in foreground, and daughter, Tiffany Schrader, dance together at the Mons Venus in Tampa. (Cherie Diez/St. Petersburg Times)
I was thinking this would reinforce for Tamara how to report for scene detail. I was mentally patting myself on the back for being such a sharp observer when Mom Stripper threw me a curve. She laughed, whisked off her jeans and said, “Sit down.”
There wasn’t time, as she was climbing onto my lap, to think about it or to call my editor or even say, “Can we discuss this?” All I knew was I had to keep Tamara from freaking out, so I had to not freak out.
To Tamara I said, “Take notes.”
Tamara: So I did. “Her thigh is jammed against my crotch,” Kelley said. I wrote it down along with other words I never imagined I’d scribble into my reporter’s notebook: Grinding. Breasts. Figure 8 — words and observations I’d been too embarrassed to write during my first trip to The Mons. Kelley’s cool and Stripper Mom’s humor soothed my anxiety. With Kelley sitting there instead of some creepy guy, it was okay to look. Mom said she thought about her grocery list or other practical ways to spend the money she earned with each naked rotation over a customer. Seriously? Instead of some lustful, sinful act, the lap dance seemed silly, or at least less of a big deal.
I still don’t know if accepting a lap dance on assignment is OK. (Should one tip?) But I do know that it broke the ice. Both of our spirits were jacked wide open by that experience. From then on, the reporting and the conversation were smooth going.
The previously reticent daughter opened up about her aspirations of buying mom a house, about how hard things had been growing up, about watching her mom crying on the kitchen floor.
Mom gave some insight on what it was like to build your living and your identity on your looks, then watch them slip away, then watch your own daughter — a newer, younger version of yourself — take away your regular customers.
They were like any other mom and daughter, as it turned out, full of complicated emotions, most strikingly love and pride:
Tamara: I think of this story every day because, cliched as it sounds, it changed my life. I think of sitting in the sun on a picnic bench on the back patio of The Mons with Mom on her cigarette break as she tells me about dropping out of school at 16. She’s naked, and I don’t care.
Oh, and I did call my parents to warn them about what their daughter had been up to before they read the story in print. They put me on speaker phone and I explained myself, and then just when I thought I had my eyes wide open, they showed me I was still capable of being shocked.
Dad: I took your mom to the strip club once.
What?!
Mom: Yes, but I only went to look at the strips, I didn’t strip. But with my body back then, I could have.
Author Kelley Benham French is enterprise editor at Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times and an adjunct faculty member at the institute. She wrote the piece with Tamara El-Khoury, who no longer works at the paper.
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