Chapter 2: Learning from Las Vegas Showgirls

Chapter 2 “Learning From Las Vegas Showgirls”: Jenna drops acid, goes to a biker rally, gets a tattoo, and gets a sketchy older boyfriend. Carol Doda invents topless go-go dancing in San Francisco at The Condor Club. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Dancing at a strip club is a job.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Men don't want to feel like they're giving us money
to do what we're doing. They want to feel like
we're doing it on our own. Guys have to realize
that the money they're giving a stripper is paying rent
and making car payments.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Jenna Jamison, Welcome to General World. Welcome back to General World.

(00:54):
I'm your host, Molly Lambert. This is episode two, Learning
from Las Vegas Showgirls. After the death of her mother
in a difficult childhood marked by constant sudden relocations, Jenna
Jamison is now a young teenage girl re entering high
school in Las Vegas. After an awkward teen phase where

(01:15):
she felt like an ugly duckling, she has suddenly hit
puberty hard.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
When she was around fifteen years old, boys started to
notice her. Larry Mizzoli, Jenna's father.

Speaker 4 (01:29):
It really pissed me off because I didn't like the
idea of other people looking at my little sister sexually.
Tony Massoli, Jenna's brother brother.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
The minute I turned into a woman, everything changed. My
hormones are rushing so hard. I wanted to have sex
so bad it was uncontrollable.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Teenage Jenna starts dressing provocatively, wearing a new wardrobe of
boxer shore. She rolls up at the thigh, white T
shirts with flower prints, acid washed jeans, red nail polish,
and black eyeliner. She teases out her blonde hair. While
she starts dressing more maturely to suit her new body,
she's still a socially and sexually inexperienced virgin. When grown

(02:18):
men approach her and try to hit on or flirt
with her, she instantly reverts back to being the shy
fifteen year old she really is.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
When I walk down the Vegas Strip, I loved watching
men gasp and turn their heads, especially.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
When they were walking arm in arm with their wives.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
I loved the attention, but whenever anyone tried to talk
to me, I freaked out. I didn't know how to interact.
I couldn't even look them in the eye.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Jenna is not consciously trying to dress like a hooker,
although she's seen them around Las Vegas. She's mulating her
personal role models of beauty and sex appeal the hair
metal vixens from music videos, girls like Tawny Katane, a busty,
jewish redhead from San Diego who rolls around hornily on

(03:14):
cars in White Snakes Here I Go Again video and
Bobby Brown, a bleach blonde from Baton Rouge Who's in
Warrant Cherry Pie video. The hair metal girl style comes
from the looks favored by Hollywood street walking sex workers
and strippers at clubs like the Body Shop, Aspiring rock
star girlfriends trawl clubs like the Roxy, the Whiskey, and

(03:37):
gazaries in hot pants or mini skirts, fishnets, and high
heels to signal availability, much like how showgirls lure customers
into casinos to gamble, music videos use sexy young models
to trick you into listening to the music. The use
of video girls to accessorize legacy acts was innovated by
director Tim Newman in the eighties for a trilogy of

(04:00):
zz Top videos. He used Playboy models as the protagonists
while the bearded Texas blues bar rockers acted like a
Greek chorus, spinning guitars and creating a formula for unphotogenic
bands trying to cross over into image saturated MTV. Tim
Newman also directed his cousin, Randy Newman's music video for

(04:22):
ilave Vla, which means he influenced my own psychosexual development,
where I grew up to be both Randy Newman and
the big nasty redhead at his side. In hair metal's
peak era, young male rock stars like Janie Lane, Brett Michaels,
and Tommy Lee are just as pretty as their girlfriends
and wear makeup too, a lingering after effect of glam rock.

(04:46):
Tight pants have been in vogue ever since Mick Jagger
and Robert Plant first waggled their willies all in it.
People used to claim straight women aren't turned on visually,
but if that was true, we wouldn't have had Elvis Presley,
The Beatle, or prints. As sexy music videos thrive, there's
an emerging panic over what all these sexualized images will

(05:08):
do to developing young brains.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
I would sneak and look at my dad's playboys, and
I remember thinking I want to be one of those
girls so bad, they're so pretty. I would pray that
I'd look like that when I was older.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
Jenna continues cosplaying as an adult woman, but she's sixteen
and still embraces her father. Larry is freaked out by
Jenna's sudden jump into puberty. He continues to prioritize police
work and is rarely around at home, so Jenna and
her brother are free to rome as long as they
stick to a midnight curfew. Jenna wishes her dad would

(05:52):
discipline them and set some stricter boundaries, because it would
mean to her that he cares, but she can't express
this to him. At school, Jenna joins the cheerleading squad
and sticks with it. This time. The cheer captain is
a slightly older girl who takes Jenna under her wing,
giving her the big sister treatment she's always craved. Finally,

(06:13):
there's a female presence in her life who shows her
that girls can help each other out rather than compete.
When Jenna and her brother Tony aretines, they start cruising
around Las Vegas together, getting into mischief again. They egg
people and do a thing Jenna invents where they fog
people up, spraying them with a fire extinguisher out the

(06:35):
car window and speeding away.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
We would go down to Cracktown and see the crack
Hos on the corner and we'd fog them up.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
They drive around, fogging strangers up with whatever chemicals are
in fire extinguishers. They fog up skaters, prostitutes working off
Fremont Street, even gang members. They steal stuff and start
fires and film their pranks with Tony's camcorder, often while
Tony is also tripping his brains out.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
It was just jacking and burning stuff and fogging them up.
We would laugh to the point where we were half dead.

Speaker 4 (07:18):
One of my favorite activities was taking four or five
hits of acid and just walking the streets of Vegas.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Jenna develops crushes on various boys. One day, she's laying
out at their apartment complexes swimming pool when a new
neighbor appears. He's a slightly older Italian American boy with
muscles and long, dirty blonde hair. His name is Victor.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
He struck me.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
As the wild type, someone who could release my secret
desire to.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Be wanted in a seductive manner.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
And to be treated and looked at as an attractive woman.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Victor pursues Jenna by throwing pebbles at her window. He
gives her the first good kiss of her life. Her
dad catches them and tells Victor to buzz off, but
nothing can stop Jenna's lust for the eighteen year old
who conveniently lives upstairs with his mom in her apartment complex.
Whenever Jenna's dad is napping before his night shift. Jenna

(08:25):
and Victor hang out in Victor's bedroom.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
His room was the ultimate teenage pad. It was plastered
with pictures of girls. A Dixie flag was draped across
the ceiling. His bed was on the floor, and his
windows were covered with tinfoil so that his room was
always dark and black lit.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
Victor's fuck pad smells like weed and incense. It's Jenna's
first time in a boy's room, and it feels like
a sacred place. He gives her booze and pot and
tries to make it past first base. He works at
wearing down Jenna's resistance. She's scared to do sex stuff
and insecure about her body. When she lets Victor go

(09:11):
under her shirt, he's so effusive about her boobs that
she lets him see them. After hours of dry humping,
he talks Jenna into looking at his dick, and she
decides to look at it with her mouth a little bit.
After a few rounds of this, he surprised, ejaculates and
starts apologizing, but Jenna isn't grossed out or angry. Making

(09:32):
a guy come for the first time makes her feel
powerful and desirable. She did this to him. Jenna meets
some local guys who are in college. College guys who

(09:55):
date high schoolers are obviously huge losers, but to young Jenna,
older guys fulfill her wish to be seen as mature.
The college guys invite her to a campus party, and
she picks out the one that she wants to deflower her.
Jenna and her high school friends take a party limo
to campus, which is probably the University of Nevada at

(10:16):
Las Vegas.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
The target of my lust was the leader of the pack, Cliff,
a rich pretty boy who had recently wrapped his dad's.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
Porsche around a tree.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
I was only fifteen and a half, but I was
finally starting to fill out, so I felt like the
star of the whole party.

Speaker 3 (10:38):
Cliff is a big man on campus with a trust
fund and all the yuppie trappings to match. Jenna does
tequila shots to relax and assume the role of a
sexy sexual woman at a party full of hot college
dudes by dressing up in what she thinks is a
sexy adult woman outfit, a tight black mini dress with
black stockings. Jenna is ready for for a real romance

(11:01):
with a true gentleman.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
All night long, Cliff worked me, teasing me, feeding me shots,
telling me how beautiful I was, leaving his hand on
my waist a little too long.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
Cliff probably looks like Jake Ryan from sixteen Candles and
smells like Ralph Lauren Polo cologne. He brings her into
the party's bathroom for action, locks the door, and eats
Jenna out a little bit, and then gets ready to
put it in. Jenna is drunk, but not lose her
virginity over a toilet drunk, so she asks him to

(11:38):
wait and he complies, Okay, go off bare minimum. When
they go back out into the party, her friends have
ditched her and taken the limo without her. Jenna is
now drunk as fuck, so she asks Cliff for a
ride home. They go back to his place instead, and
she blacks out drunk on his waterbed in the middle

(11:59):
of hooking up. When she wakes up, she's fully naked
and there's blood everywhere, But instead of being freaked out
or traumatized, she feels triumphant. She did it. She lost
her virginity.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
I got blasted and ended up at Cliff's house.

Speaker 1 (12:20):
And I had sex with him. I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Well, now I'm going with Cliff, and I'm so happy.
It's spring break and I've never partied so hard in
my life. It's so fun. My life is going great.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
I'm really happy. Right later, Love Jenna.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Jenna says she would have consented to sex with Cliff
had she been conscious, but obviously she wasn't. In hindsight,
she knows it's fucked up that she was blacked out
for her first time, but at that moment, at sixteen,
she thinks she and Cliff are in love. Now. Cliff
has a bedroom poster of the porn star Tracy Lords

(13:06):
that Jenna fixates on as they continue to date and
have sex there. One night, Cliff stands her up, so
she swings by his place and finds him in bed
with another girl. She is devastated. Cliff begs for forgiveness,
but she's over it. She dumps him instantly. A lot
of girls would react to being cheated on by their

(13:27):
first real boyfriend who they lost their virginity to by
face planning into bed, feeling insecure and unlovable, but Jenna's
sadness quickly metabolizes into anger, becoming a vengeful horniness.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Sexuality became a tool for so much more than just
connecting with a boy it was attracted to. I realized
it could serve any purpose I needed. It was a
weapon I could exploit mercilessly.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
She gets her revenge by hooking up with Cliff's best
friend and a gorgeous blonde surfer guy who she starts
seeing just to make her ex boyfriend insane. Cliff has
a self destructive streak, enabled by his privilege and easy
access to his family's money. He starts dealing cocaine and
other hard drugs on campus, becomes a serious coke addict,

(14:19):
and ends up in jail for dealing. Jenna also tries
drugs for the first time. She does cocaine and doesn't
care for it. She dislikes pot, but love's psychedelics, which
make her feel expansive and full of wonder. She and
her brother drop acid together and drive up into the
snowy mountains, tripping balls. The Massoli siblings marvel at the

(14:44):
natural beauty of Nevada, which contains both the endless deserts
and the broad shouldered mountains where snowfalls melting down into
water that flows to the profit making arteries of the
Las Vegas Strip. The desert is not a barren, lifeless place.
It just breeds different sorts of life forms. One's naturally

(15:04):
amenable to its extremes for one beautiful year. Jenna is
a popular acid head high school cheerleader.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
I did acid for quite a long time. I really
liked the feeling. I felt invincible and I felt happy,
and that was a departure for me because a lot
of my life I'd been unhappy.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
Jenna is sixteen years old during the summer of nineteen
ninety when Tony takes her to a biker run outside Vegas.
There's a wet T shirt contest and the bikers don't
bother checking IDs.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
They were having a wet T shirt contest. I was like, Okay,
I'm gonna do this. I've got a rock and bod
I'll win it.

Speaker 4 (16:10):
When Jenna would see a contest that means that Jenna
will get the.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
Trophy, some bikers offer Jenna shots from a bottle of alcohol.
She takes two shots, climbs up on stage, and starts
taking off all of her clothes. They proclaim her the winner,
which is when Tony sees that his younger sister is
naked on stage with a bunch of bikers.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
I remember my brother bum rushing me, going what are
you doing? Are you insane? And I said I just
won five hundred bucks. I was like right on high
fives all around.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Larry is concerned about how popular and wild his kids
are getting in Sin City, so he moves the family
again to Fromberg, Montana, population four hundred and fifty. Do
you know how much trouble kids can get into in
small towns? There's nothing to do but have sex and
do drugs. Every time Larry uproots his kids, he yanks

(17:11):
them away from new friendships. Then he's never even around
because you work so much. Jenna is instantly miserable in
Montana and becomes shy again. This time, she is the
type of depressed where you face plant into bed for
days on end. Jenna goes from being a popular cheerleader
in a class of thousands to an outcast in a

(17:33):
twenty student class where she's one of eight girls. Her
new penchant for brawlessness and tight clothes doesn't go over
like it did in Vegas. The other girls in Montana
let her know this by beating her up after school
for courting attention from the limited supply of boys. Jenna
spends time by herself riding a horse on the two

(17:55):
hundred and fifty six acre ranch where Larry has resettled them.
She is a lonesome cowgirl. One night, Jenna goes to
a high school football game. She talks to some players
on the other school's team. They offer her a ride home,
which she accepts. Then they drive her on a deserted

(18:15):
road to a field in the middle of nowhere, knock
her out, gang rape her, and leave her for dead.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
I hate Montana. I want to kill myself, but that
wouldn't be fair to my dad. I'm going to get
out of here and forget all about this place. I
am so sad and torn, apart and confused. I don't
understand people. Life sucks. Goodbye Forever, Diary Jenna.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
Jenna doesn't tell her family about the assault or her
tormentors at school because she's legitimately afraid her dad and
brother will kill them and go to jail. He just
stops going to school entirely. Her dad doesn't catch on
until the school calls and threatens to call child services
on him. Jenna is so pissed that when she goes

(19:11):
back to get her stuff. She confronts her worst bully,
walking up behind her and slamming her locker door on
her head.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
I fucked her up.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
Then I went back to my locker and grabbed all
my things because I was never going back there. I
remember walking out of school for the last time and
having this huge rush of power. No one was going
to take control of my life again.

Speaker 3 (19:43):
Jenna tells her dad about the bullying, and he believes her.
She doesn't tell him about the rape because she feels ashamed.
The family picks up and moves yet again, this time
to Mount Charleston, Nevada, at the dawn of a new decade, nineties.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
I have so often thought of gathering my things and
wandering until I have found my correct place, a place
where someone needs me. But I wonder if there is
such a place to people. I'm either a self centered
bitch or just another pretty girl. I wish someone would
love me for me, not for my looks or body.

(20:32):
I now know that only God could give me a
true love.

Speaker 3 (20:38):
When Jenna World returns, Jenna goes to a biker rally.
Oh my God, Welcome back to Jena World. One of

(21:11):
Jenna's friends picks her up one night and takes her
to a biker rally called the River Run in Laughlin,
Nevada to see a late era hair metal band named
Little Caesar. Jenna is exhilarated by the wild environment, where
bikers offer her cold beers and joy rides. There's an
after party at a local tattoo parlor with motorcycle gangs

(21:31):
like the Hell's Angels and Satan's Disciples. Jenna isn't nervous,
but she can sense there's something dark about it, a
bad vibe.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
I noticed how all these psychotic guys call their girlfriend's
old ladies and treated them like farm animals. I promise
myself I would never let a man treat.

Speaker 5 (21:55):
Me like that.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
Jenna comes home with a new dream of getting a tattoo.
Her brother takes her to a shop and she lies
about being eighteen. She thinks the tattoo artist is cute
and tries to flirt with him while he engraves two
red hearts on her butt cheek. In her memoir, Jenna
calls him Jack. He's a twenty five year old with

(22:23):
dark hair, tattoos and a goatee. He makes a move
on her, but she turns him down the first time
because he has a girlfriend, then returns a second time
to make out with him. Anyway, she asks Tony, who's
also an aspiring tattoo artist, to embellish her heart tattoo
with words.

Speaker 6 (22:43):
I nicknamed Jenna Heartbreaker because every time I looked at her,
she broke my heart.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
My brother tattooed heartbreaker around it. I didn't want just hearts.
I had to be different and extravagant, you know, make
a statement with my ass.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
Infatuated with Jack, Jenna routinely drives forty five minutes to
the tattoo shop to see him. One weekend, Jack offers
to pick Jenna up and take her to a boat
party on Lake Mead. She's excited, but the moment they arrive,
she feels weird. It's all biker guys and their old
ladies on a houseboat called the Arc. The captain is

(23:29):
a freakishly tan, creepy old German Man, a neo Nazi
who goes by Preacher. After Jack's mother died, he grew
up with Preacher and his white supremacist biker gang as
his found family. Jenna tries to blend in as they
tan swim and get fucked up, but she's keenly aware
of how much older everyone else is. Her wariness is

(23:52):
justified when Preacher sexually assaults her on the boat. He
tells her not to tell anyone and that nobody will
believe her. When she tells Jack in tears, he barely
reacts and just goes cold and pulls away. It's one
hundred and five degrees. The boat is docked on a
sand islet surrounded by mountains and desert. Another girl asks

(24:17):
Jenna if she was raped by Preacher, and when Jenna
says yes, the girl says that's what always happens here.
Jenna is afraid to fall asleep on the boat, so
she sleeps on the beach with Jack. A horrible thought
floods her brain that Jack might have set her up
for this, But this fundamental lack of trust isn't enough

(24:37):
to end her relationship such as it is with Jack.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
Precisely because he never opened up about anything emotional or sensitive.
I thought he was the most emotional and sensitive man
in the world.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
Jack takes her home the next day, and she makes
him drop her off down the road since it's eight
hours past her curfew. Her dad has been waiting up
for her and loses his temper. Anger is the only
feeling he can conjure to express his fear that something
bad may have happened. Something bad did happen, but instead
of telling him about it, she gets angry back. When

(25:16):
she wakes up, she's still furious. She decides it's time
to move out and start a new life with her
new boyfriend Jack.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
I moved in with him.

Speaker 2 (25:27):
God, what a bad decision. That was the beginning of
the end.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
In order to shack up with her sketchy boyfriend, Jenna
needs a job. Her resume consists of beauty pageants, modeling
in a local fashion show at Wet and Wild Water Park,
and scooping ice cream at a Baskin Robbins, then quitting
when they make her mop the floor. Jenna decides she
wants to be a showgirl like her mother. She auditions

(25:58):
for the Follies Brugeaire, still the strip's crown jewel, even
as the showgirl tradition is fading into nostalgia. She signs
up as Jenna Hunt, using her mother's maiden name, and
gets rejected. She gets turned down all over town for
being short and sixteen, with braces. She finally arrives at

(26:18):
the bottom an open call for Bob Stupac's Vegas World.
Bob Steupac is a gambling NEPO baby, a pro poker
player turned casino developer whose father, Chester stew Pac, ran

(26:40):
a Pittsburgh dice game for fifty years. Bob Steupac is
known as the Polish maverick. In the seventies, he redeveloped
the faded downtown Fremont Street area, installing a twenty five
foot tall neon sign of a cowgirl named Vegas Vicky
and re dubbing the area glitter gulch. Neon sign and
serve the same purpose as showgirls drawing eyes to make

(27:04):
people draw bills from their wallets. Everything in a casino
that isn't gambling is designed to lure you into more gambling. Showgirls,
neon signs, cheap buffets. It's all bait for suckers. Begas
World opens in nineteen seventy nine with a million dollar

(27:24):
bank loan and insurance money from Bob Stupak's world famous
million dollar historic gambling museum and casino, which mysteriously burned down.
Begas World is outer space themed with a prop lunar
module and a ceiling suspended space suited astronaut mannequin its buffet.
The moon Rock is known for being the worst in town.

(27:47):
There are also actual moon rocks. In nineteen seventy, President
Richard Nixon gave out lunar sample displays from American space
missions as a gift to one hundred and fifty countries
to demonstrate international goodwill. Bob Stupak somehow finesses a moon
rock plaque given by Nixon to Nicaragua and puts it
on display at Vegas World. Of the two hundred and

(28:09):
seventy moon rock gifts sent out by the American President,
one hundred and eighty are currently unaccounted for. There's also
a gigantic mural on Vegas World's Facade of Enormous Planets
and a Roulette wheel satellite done by Paul Whitehead, known
for prog rock album covers for bands like Genesis. In

(28:30):
nineteen seventy two, architects Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and
Stephen Ienore published a book called Learning from Las Vegas
that introduced the idea of postmodern architecture, using Las Vegas
as a prime example. On the Las Vegas Strip, entire
buildings act as signs, and a casino's front facing side
acts as a giant, glittering advertisement to lure Taurus Sin

(28:53):
as they pass by. All of the casino's effort is
put into this front facing fantasy, so the back is
usually just brutalist concrete and parking garages, the unadorned mundane
reality that makes the fantasy front side of the building possible. Now,
I'm from Los Angeles, so postmodern architecture is normal to me.

(29:14):
If a building isn't shaped like a jukebox or Cadillac
fins or a submarine, I don't know her. In Las Vegas, two,
world history is boiled down into castles, pyramids, and opulent
Roman palaces. In the nineteen nineties, Las Vegas became as
popular a destination for families as Disney theme parks, which

(29:35):
led to more theming before a two thousands bust took
casino developers back to original rat pack lux themes emphasizing hedonism.
The promise of any oasis is that it's an escape
from the desert of the real. Customers enter with a
fantasy of fun, winning and getting fucked up with beautiful people.

(29:57):
By the time reality. Sets in the marked pockets are empty,
returning them back to reality. Hungover, broke, and hot. On
the Las Vegas Strip, the absurdism of creating a tourist
city in a remote place is taken to its farthest extent.
Developers build lavish resorts and then blow them up. Blowing

(30:19):
up a casino is a publicity stunt to promote the
resort that will be built in its place. The latest
casino to do this is The Tropicana, which has exploded
via controlled detonation and a drone show in late twenty
twenty four. Desert detonations are a tradition started when the
US government held atomic bomb tests in the Nevada Desert.

(30:40):
Vegas entrepreneurs even cashed in on the bomb with a
misatomic bomb beauty pageant.

Speaker 7 (30:49):
What I'm trying to do for Las Vegas is what
the Eiffel Tower did for Paris, what the Empire State
Building did for New York, what the Seattle Space Needle
did for Seattle. Bob Steppek.

Speaker 3 (31:05):
Bob Stupak gets obsessed with getting the world's largest knee
on sign for Vegas World as a publicity sun in
nineteen ninety he achieves his dream. Then the sign topples
over in a windstorm. It's back up the next day,
then loose wires on it spark a fire that evacuates
the hotel. The sign comes down, but his dream of

(31:26):
constructing something stupidly big continues. Stupac then wants to build
a modern tower of Babel, the world's tallest, with an
observation deck called the Stratosphere. Construction starts in nineteen ninety two.
In nineteen ninety three, the half built Stratosphere catches on
fire and the hotel is evacuated again. One hotel guest

(31:48):
runs through the casino screaming, Bob Stupak did this for
the insurance money. In the parking lot, hotel guests are
subjected to the comedy of Marty Hello Dare Allen, a
nineteen fifties borsch Belt mainstay who now works in Vegas.
Marty Allen drives in from his suburban home to entertain
the fire exiled guests until they're let back into their

(32:11):
Vegas World rooms.

Speaker 6 (32:13):
Helloair, when something like this happens, youmer can play an
important part.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
They kept saying, it's a hot act. You're a hot act.
Marty Allen, comedian.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
By the time Jenna gets to Vegas World, the casino
is like Showgirl Reviews on its last legs. She shows
up to audition with a fake ID and her brace
is concealed. While other Showgirl auditions involved rigorous dance tests,
Vegas World just asks for a few eight counts of ballet,

(32:48):
and Jenna aces it easily.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Though I was painfully shy and antisocial in real life,
when I got on stage, I transformed the personality and
attitude I repress. With everyone exploded out of me on stage,
something inside of me just turned on.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
She is hired.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
They tell her that her height problem can be camouflaged
with ostrich feathers and extra high heels. Jenna's showgirl regalia
is a rhinestone bra in tassels, a G string, high
heeled damp shoes, and a heavy, hard to balance headpiece
with huge yellow big bird feathers. But working as a
showgirl isn't fun or glamorous like Jenna assumed it would be.

(33:36):
The other dancers tell her to go back to high
school where she belongs, and they have a point. Rehearsals
are grueling, and there's two shows every night. Vegas World
and its customers are depressing and the money is terrible,
so after two months Jenna quits Vegas world. All her

(33:56):
boyfriend Jack's friend's girlfriends are strippers and they make good money,
so Jenna decides to strip. In the nineteen sixties, go
go dancing is invented at a French club called the
Whiskey a Go Go in a small beach town near
cann The Whisky is one of the first clubs to
dispense with live musicians in favor of a DJ who

(34:17):
plays records. The club hires hot girls to do hot
dances like the Chicken, the frug, and the swim in
chic outfits. The go go dancers make the scenes seem
swinging and encourage the club's patrons to dance too. The
French Whiskey licenses itself to an American club, also called
the Whiskey a Go Go, which opens in nineteen sixty

(34:39):
four in La on the Sunset Strip, with go go
dancers in a cage jutting out over the crowd. The
go go dancing uniform is a mini skirt dress, often
with fringe and high vinyl boots. In San Francisco's North
Beach neighborhood, a dancer named Carol Doda becomes the first
Go Go dancer to go go topless.

Speaker 8 (35:01):
I was the first to go topless in nineteen sixty
four and started a sexual revolution that's spun as fast
as twirling tassels. Carol Doda Dancerancy.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
Carol Doda is from Vallejo, California. A child of divorce,
she leaves home and starts cocktail waitressing at fourteen. She
attends art school while working at the Condor Club, where
she develops her lounge act. While go go dancing and
doing the swim, Doda is lowered from the ceiling on
top of a white Baby Grand piano that comes down

(35:36):
with hydraulic motors. In a freak accident, the Condor Club's manager,
Jimmy the Beard Ferozzo, and his girlfriend Teresa Hill, were
crushed to death by the hydraulic piano while having sex
at the club after hours.

Speaker 8 (35:50):
In the eighties, the minute I knew I existed in
life was the night I started the Condor thing. The
only thing that mattered to me was entertaining people.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
The Condor Club's publicist, a guy named Big Davey Rosenberg,
suggests that Carol Doda try out her act in a
brand new mono kini designed by Rudy Genrich a topless
bikini follow up. Carol Doda goes topless on stage for
the first time on June nineteenth, nineteen sixty four, and
other clubs quickly follow suit. Doda starts dancing bottomless two

(36:28):
until the California Alcoholic Beverages Commission passes a law that
if drinks are served, dancers can't be fully nude. She's
arrested for indecent exposure in nineteen sixty five and cleared.

Speaker 8 (36:41):
The owner and I ended up in the Slammer. I
was back slamming on stage in two shakes of a
stripper's tail.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
For her role freeing the nipple, Carol Doda becomes an
icon of California's blossoming counterculture. She appears in The Monkey's
movie Head as a character named Sally Silicone. Carol Doda
also gets media coverage for being one of the first
women to publicly enhance her breasts. She gets injections of
a mulcified silicone to become forty four double D. She

(37:15):
becomes so famous in California that a granite dome in
Yosemite is nicknamed Doda dome because it looks like a
big titty.

Speaker 8 (37:25):
I began my chili dancing career as a nineteen year
old with modest but perky thirty four bees. My horizons expanded.
I have no secrets. The procedure involved direct silicone injections,
which are now banned because the plastic tends to migrate,
but I never experienced any problems.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
There is a profile of Carol Doda by the writer
Tom Wolfe called The Put Together Girl, where he can't
contain his disdain for her postmodern body. He finds her
body grotesque and concern trolls her for getting cosmetic plastic surgery,
whose risks she's well aware of. He calls her breasts them.

Speaker 9 (38:10):
Them.

Speaker 10 (38:11):
Carol Doda has had injections of a silicone emulsion put
into her breasts at regular installments over the past three years.
They have grown grown, grown, enlarging like dirigibles, almost as
if right in front of the eyes of the crowds.
They line up out there, those who come every night
of the week to see Carol Doda's topless act. Tom

(38:34):
wolf right.

Speaker 3 (38:38):
But the point of Carol Doda's enhanced body isn't function
If femininity is artifice. Doda takes that to its logical
ridiculous conclusion. The novelty of Doda's topless act and her
cartoonishly large fake breasts cause a sensation. At her peak,
she makes four thousand dollars a week doing her act.

(38:59):
San Francisco So is also where another new form of
erotic dancing is pioneered that will change strip clubs forever.
When Jenna World returns, will tell you about the invention
of lap dances. Oh my, welcome back to Jenna World.

(39:32):
The Mitchell Brothers are two prolific adult industry entrepreneurs from
nineteen sixty nine until the nineties, when Jim Mitchell kills
his brother Artie Mitchell. The sons of a pro gambler,
the Mitchell's run adult cinemas and strip clubs. They produce
Behind the Green Door, which costs sixty thousand dollars to make,
and Net's fifty million dollars, becoming one of pornographic film's

(39:55):
first blockbusters. The Mitchell brothers are among the first filmmakers
to transfer their films onto videotape and market those tapes
with ads in magazines.

Speaker 6 (40:06):
I have been the night manager of the famous O'Farrell
Theater in San Francisco. The Carnegie Hall of Sex in
America honor S. Thompson writer.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
The Mitchell Brothers own the o'farrall Theater in San Francisco's
Tenderloin area, which gets rated numerous times for showing obscene films.
The Mitchells make so much money in the early days
of porn that they're able to fight over two hundred
obscenity charge cases. Winning those cases sets a national precedent
to legally show porn. When the o'farrall Theatre is raided

(40:42):
in nineteen eighty by the San Francisco Police Department at
the behest of local politician Dianne Feinstein, the Mitchells retaliate
by posting Diane Feinstein's phone number on the Marquee with
for a good time call. When the videotape boom kills
the theatrical screening model. In the eighties, the o'pheral Theater
pivots from films to peep shows and exotic dancers. The

(41:05):
Mitchell brothers send an employee on an odyssey through North
American strip clubs and sex shows to report back to
them on what are called customer contact shows. Customer contact
generally means that the strippers are allowed to touch the
customers and not the other way around. At the o'
feral Theater, they start testing the legal limits of customer

(41:26):
contact during a show called New York Live. The dancers
who aren't on stage sit in the laps of customers
and personally collect tips, tips for the dancers lap sitting Skyrocket.
The Mitchell Brothers market this new innovation as lap dancing.
Just like toplessness, lap dances sweep the San Francisco strip

(41:49):
clubs and then spread nationally. While there are laws against
prostitution and selling sex, there's no law explicitly against making
a guidges in his pants by grinding on him. By
the time Jenna is growing up there, strip clubs are
as much a staple of the Las Vegas economy as

(42:10):
casinos with all you can eat buffets. Billy Joe's is
a seventy strip mal disco located on an industrial road
off the Vegas Strip. When the club's original owner dies,
a mob guy named Tony Albanez takes over. Albanese already
owns one Vegas strip club called the Crazy Horse Saloon.
He renames this club Billy Joe's Crazy Horse two too.

(42:35):
In nineteen eighty one, a severed head is found in
the Mohave Desert outside Needles, California that is identified as
Tony Albanese's. Another good fella named Henry Rapuano takes over
and shortens the club's name to Crazy Horse two. Rapuano
then drops dead of a heart attack. Henry Rapuano's son,

(42:56):
al Rapuano, has a friend named Rick Rizzolo, who assumes
control of the Crazy Horse two when Rapuano Senior dies.
Rick Rizsolo purchases the club with his father. Crazy Horse

(43:21):
two has an ancient Roman themed facade with fake classical
statues and gold paneling across halfway between the Caesars Palace
casino and a Little Caesar's Pizza. Crazy Horse two is topless,
only employs twelve dancers, and becomes a popular late night
destination for inebriated pleasure seekers. In nineteen eighty five, owner

(43:43):
Rick Rizsolo beats a customer with a baseball bat outside
the club so badly that the guy suffers brain damage.
Rissolo claims self defense, pleads no contest to a misdemeanor charge,
and gets no jail time. While Rick Rizsolo is running
Crazy Horse two, he gets into a few with the
club's neighbor, a guy named James Buffalo Jim Barrier, who

(44:04):
runs an auto repair shop down the block on a
property he runs from Rissolo, a local wrestling promoter for
the National Wrestling Conference. Buffalo Jim Barrier also hosts a
local public access TV show about wrestling called Jim Wars.
Rick Rissolo wants to drive Buffalo Jim out so that
he can expand the strip club.

Speaker 5 (44:27):
She looked like a baby, so she showed me id
Bennie Ferracci Crazy Horse Do night shift manager.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
In nineteen ninety one, Jenna Mizzoli, now seventeen years old,
applies for a job as a stripper.

Speaker 1 (44:44):
At Crazy Horse Too.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
The manager, a guy named Vinnie Ferracci, accepts her fake ID,
but clocks her braces and tells her to come back
when she gets them off. She is tired of being
told to come back when she's older or taller, so
she goes home and asks her brother if he'll help
her snip her braces off. Tony Massoli comes over with
needlenosed pliers and helps Jenna twist the wires of her

(45:08):
braces loose. It hurts like fuck, but she gets them
mostly off. She goes back to the club in short
shorts in a tube top to flash her new smile
to Vinnie Varacci. Jenna is determined to start that night.

Speaker 5 (45:24):
She came back without the braces, which I never expected.
I asked her if she was interested in working my shift.

Speaker 3 (45:35):
Jenna has done lots of dancing, but this is her
first time stripping. Vinnie asks for her stage name, and
she says it's Genesis j E n Na s ys.
She gets set up with a locker, but the other
strippers are not stoked to see Jenna, whose presence means
more competition for tips. Her shyness also flares back up.

(45:58):
She finds one girl who willing to loan her a
stage outfit, a baby blue bikini and black high heels,
which she self consciously changes into in a bathroom stall.
The DJ asks Jenna what song she wants to dance to.
She picks Fire by Jimmy Hendrix, a solid choice.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
I'm like, you want me to go on stage now? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (46:25):
I walked back in the dressing room all by myself,
seventeen years old, and I.

Speaker 5 (46:32):
Was so scared, just got a little frazzled by it,
ran to the DJ booth, she got a music, put
something on, and she went out.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
Genesis is called up. She stumbles going on stage in
her tottering heels. She gets through her first song and
into her second, Black by Pearl Jam, an insane choice,
even though she barely moves on stage her first time.
She makes a lot of money anyway, because the strip
club's regulars are excited for fresh blood. Jenna gains confidence

(47:10):
on stage hearing the applause and seeing the rain of
dollar bills. She cashes out on her first night with
one thousand dollars in ones.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
I remember hanging on to that poll so hard, not
letting go. And when those songs ended, I remember opening
my eyes and looking around thinking that they were gonna boo,
and all the guys were sitting there, and I was like, yes, power.

Speaker 4 (47:40):
She would use her intelligence and the fact that she
had no top on to clean out whoever she wanted
to their money, and at seventeen years old, she was
like an old pro.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
Most answers call it a good night if they make
a few hundred bucks, but Jenna is wildly ambitious. She
gets obsessed with becoming a top earner. She doesn't just
want to be the best stripper at the club, she
wants to be the best stripper in the world. However,
she is still too shy to hustle customers for lap dances.

(48:13):
Guys have to approach her to ask for a private dance,
but they always do, and she gains more confidence in
cash each night.

Speaker 2 (48:23):
Within weeks of working at the club, I began to
transform from a geeky teenage girl into a money crazed psycho.

Speaker 5 (48:34):
Jenna was a natural, just fit right in. Jenna was
loved by everybody. They could have been a guy in
sneakers or a guy in a suit.

Speaker 3 (48:47):
Jenna relaxes into socializing with patrons. She learns the first
rule of hustling. She can just lie. She doesn't have
to talk much, just pretend to be interested in customers
while they talk about themselves. When she does talk, she
tailors her fabrications to clients, telling them what she thinks
they want to hear. She dresses Lolita style with pigtails

(49:10):
and carries a pink plastic barbie purse like a raver girl.
Although nobody but the club's staff knows she's real jailbait.
She lands a big fish, a Vegas hotel president who
gives her two grand just to talk to him.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
After six months, I looked around and I realized, Wow,
I'm doing really well. I'm making two thousand dollars a
night and I haven't even graduated.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
High school yet. I was living the high life.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
After a month and a half of stripping, reality comes
for Jenna Massoli in the form of her approaching senior
year of high school, and she decides to drop out.
But night after night at the Crazy Horse Too, she's
tetrified someone will connect the dots between Genesis and Jenna Massoli.
Her fears are realized one night when her high school's
varsity basketball team shows up and seems to recognize her,

(50:11):
so she lies. She tells them she's not that Jenna,
and in a way, it's true. She's not the Jena
Masoli they know from school. The quiet girl who only
opens up on stage is now Genesis, a top earning
exotic dancer at Crazy Horse two. No varsity team or
Nazi biker creep can take that away from her. She

(50:34):
is becoming her fantasy dream self, beautiful, seductive, rich from
her own labor and above all in control. A hot
party girl like Jenna needs a new hot party girl.
Best friend Jack, who she is still dating, introduces Jenna

(50:57):
to a twenty year old named Vanessa. He calls his cousin,
who's a stripper too. She looks like Jenna, skinny and blonde,
and they have a lot in common. Jenna looks up
to Vanessa figuratively because Vanessa has the natural self confidence
Jenna wishes she had, and also literally because she is tall.

(51:18):
Vanessa is a soft hearted person whose friendship with Jenna
nurtures them both. She's a mentor too, teaching Jenna pro
tricks to make money, like taking fake shots of water
while patrons get liquored up. She tells Jenna to make
sure her nails are done and her heels aren't worn
down to maintain a fantasy look. Being taken under Vanessa's

(51:39):
wing changes Jenna's life for the better. Finally she has
someone to fly alongside and share her victories with.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
Get him as drunk as possible, and rack those songs up.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Vanessa, Jenna's best friend.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
Jenna and Vanessa start working together on stage two and
the alone her of two big breasted blondes teaming up
is too powerful for the other strippers to compete with.
Vanessa is the coolest, most beautiful, and awesome woman Jenna
has ever met in her life. She is also the
daughter of Preacher, the Nazi biker creep who assaulted Jenna

(52:18):
on his boats, although it's not clear if Vanessa is
his biological child or an adopted daughter. Despite Neo Nazi's
obsession with bloodlines, there's also a found family thing going
on in the white power biker gangs. Jenna starts to
see the whole world as a place where men routinely
take advantage of women, and her only recourse is to

(52:41):
take advantage of men. Jenna develops pure contempt for her customers,
who are so desperate to see a beautiful young woman
naked that they'll pay for it.

Speaker 2 (52:52):
The mentality is that if these guys are going to
victimize us, we're going to totally victimize them right back.
It seemed like a fair exchange, and it was character building.
I was finally learning to take control of people instead
of being so passive in social situations.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
Jenna and Vanessa are addicted to the adrenaline rush of
making cash. The other dancers use their brakes, but not Vigenna,
which is what I'm calling them. The other dancers top
out at a few hundred bucks in tips, but Vagena
are taking in between two and four thousand dollars every
night each. Jenna finds it easy to tease men, and

(53:36):
they want to pay her for the privilege. She spends
her new fun money on frivolous things like trendy clothes,
new shoes, and crystal champagne. Jenna has one rival at
the club, another blonde with ridiculously large fake breasts. Tits
like height are where Jenna comes up short. There's no

(53:57):
real word for when you are emasculated as a woman,
but boobs and height are what do it for Jenna.
Really big boobs, the kind you can only get from
a surgeon, still best even the biggest real naturals as
far as the club's customers are concerned. So Jenna finds
her own superpower as a dancer withholding. Jenna finds that

(54:21):
the less hard she tries to please men, the more
interested they become. There's a lesson in there. During her
private dances, she barely touches the guys, which inversely makes
them get even more aroused. With this technique, she is
able to get them on the line for as many
as a dozen consecutive private dances, edging them to the

(54:42):
point of insanity. She claims she can get guys to
come in their pants just by making eye contact, which
is crazy if true.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
For me, it was all about succeeding and being my
own person and making my own money.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
Jenna starts making more money than ever with minimal touching.
Men love prostrating themselves and admitting they don't deserve her attention.
The more contempt she openly shows them, the more they
want her. Instead of five dollars for a private dance,
she can charge up to one hundred, and guys will

(55:22):
pay even if she never sits on their lap. By
the time she turns eighteen, Jenna has made herself such
a valuable commodity at Crazy Horse two, she can set
her own rate. A modeling agent comes to the club

(55:43):
to scout as dancers for adult magazines. They take a
snapshot of Vanessa and Jenna and label it the Barbie Twins.
This gives Jenna a new idea selling her own image.
She's motivated by money, but also looking for the validation
her boyfriend Jack won't give her. Even though they live

(56:04):
together now, he never opens up or makes any promises
about their future.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
I want something more and he refuses to give it.
He hurts me so bad, but he doesn't realize why.
He says he loves me, but not in the way
I want him to.

Speaker 3 (56:28):
When she tries to communicate with Jack, he just shuts down.
They have a lot of sex, but no emotional intimacy,
so Jenna never feels safe. But she thinks they're in love,
so she'll put up with almost anything, and her older
boyfriend uses this to his advantage. Jenna climbs the ranks

(56:52):
at Crazy Horse to to become the club's top earner.
This excites Jack because it makes him look like a
stud to his friends. It reignites his desire to show
her off, which she misinterprets as affection. He takes her
out on the town to celebrate at the Venetian Casino
and hotel. This simple gesture sets Jenna's heart and crotch aflame.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
He placed my hand on his pants and I felt
him growing hard. I unzipped it and began to play
with it, and then, by some sort of mad genius inspiration,
I scooped a handful of whip butter off a plate
on the table. It stopped and quickly as I stroked
him with it, until minutes later we had made such

(57:38):
a mess of his pants that we had to clean
the butter and come off with San Pellegrino water.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
But their butter lubed public hand jobs that the Venetian
phase winds down fast. In the biker crowd, Jack and
Jenna hang out in Women are second class citizens, and
Jenna no longer quite so shy, feels like she's invisible
when she hangs out with Jack and his boys. Nobody
talks to her, asks her what she thinks about anything.

(58:06):
She's just a living accessory for her boyfriend. She might
as well be a pink plastic Barbie lunchbox. Jenna starts
to feel isolated living with Jack. She wishes her family
would ask her to come home, but her widow or
cop dad is too emotionally repressed to reach out. Jenna
doesn't understand why she feels so bad. She's living with

(58:28):
a man she ostensibly loves, making more money than she's
ever known by staring guys in the eye till they come,
but something is missing. She asks Jack to show up
for her more, and he responds by being even more
emotionally avoidant, abandoning her for weeks to take trips to
California with his easy riding buddies.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
His behavior just made me more obsessed with him, as
I kept trying to find the sensitivity that I believed
he had. I was like a religious There was no evidence.
My belief was based on faith alone.

Speaker 1 (59:06):
No man at the club could get the better of me,
but Jack still could.

Speaker 3 (59:13):
Jenna has never had any interest in doing face drugs,
which Jack and all his friends do. She thinks snorting
stuff seems nasty because it is, but her boyfriend keeps
pressuring her to try crystal meth, telling her it's like
soda or coffee, which you know what. Caffeine is an
insane drug. Too much cold brew makes me feel like

(59:35):
I can rob a bank. It doesn't actually make any
sense that some forms of speed or legal but not
others legalize meth or band caffeine. Jenna keeps saying no,
but Jack wears her down and she agrees to try it.
He chops the line of meth for her on a
CD case for Metallica's Black album. She tries to only

(59:58):
snort a little bit. At first, Jenna is disgusted by
the stuff and with herself for doing it. Her head
starts hurting, then it stops, and another feeling sweeps over
her euphoria, a freedom from all her life's pain. She
does another line. Hours later, she has to go to

(01:00:20):
sleep and can't after being awake nearly forty eight hours.
She promises herself this will be the last time she
ever does upfers, but a week later she breaks her
own promise and does a couple of bumps before work.
She puts on her stage makeup with the elaborate care
of a person on speed, and grips the stripper pole
for dear life.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
I started off doing speed one line a day, just
a little pigmy up, no big deal. Then it got
to be okay, ive rs six lines. Then it became NonStop,
to the point where my nose hurts.

Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
Meanwhile, her friend Vanessa is having a breakdown, toggling between
self isolating and wanting Jenna around all the time. One night,
Preacher sees Jenna and Vanessa together and freaks out that
they're friends. Vanessa accuses Jenna of fucking her dad, which
spurs Jenna to admit that Preacher assaulted her. Vanessa says
he's been assaulting her too, since her childhood. Jenna promises

(01:01:23):
she'll go with Vanessa to report him to the cops,
who they are both naively hopeful will do something. But
when Jenna arrives at Vanessa's place to go file the
police report, she finds her friend hanging from the shower
door in a noose. The cops arrive and confirm Vanessa's death,
calling it a suicide. Preacher appears on the scene with

(01:01:46):
Jack and rules out doing an autopsy. Jenna knows that
Preacher really killed Vanessa, and that Jack knows it too.
She feels all the bad stuff burbling up inside her.
Her best friend's senseless, her cowardly boyfriend, her mother's sickness,
and how it bankrupted their family. It's all so unfair,

(01:02:09):
but letting her feelings out is scary, so she stuffs
them back down. Despite her crash course in adulthood, eighteen
year old Jenna Massoli still feels like a helpless child.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
She had suffered for so many years and no one
had ever cared or helped in any way, and now
when it was too late to do anything, they were
putting on this great show of love and remorse.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
It seems so hypocritical.

Speaker 3 (01:02:42):
When Jenna World returned, Jenna makes a new friend at
the club. Oh my God, welcome back to Jenna World.

(01:03:03):
After Vanessa's death, Jack cuts ties with Preacher and his gang.
He leaves the tattoo shop in order to start a
new one with a rival biker gang and one major investor. Jenna.
Not only is she helping to fund her boyfriend's new shop,
she builds it. Jenna pushes her pesky feelings all the
way down, fires up a soldering iron, and makes like

(01:03:26):
a productive tweaker installing drywall. She loves the feeling that
she and Jack are building something together. On the day

(01:03:52):
that the new tattoo shop is set to open, Jenna
and Jack arrive to find that it's been blown up
by a bomb. Oh it's a warning to stay away
from the white power biker scene, its network of tattoo shops,
and its tentacles into Nevada's three branches of government, local bureaucracy,
law enforcement, and the mob. Jenna retreats back to the

(01:04:16):
strip club. While most strippers wear tube tops or bikinis,
one night, there's a new girl at the club who
dresses like a nineteen forties pin up girl. She has
jet black hair with Betty Page bangs and wears vintage
black lingerie. Her name is Jennifer and she's very quiet.

(01:04:37):
Jenna sees her own slightly younger self in Jennifer's shyness.
Rather than closing ranks like the more experienced dancers did
to her, she decides to mentor Jennifer. She gives her
a whole spiel on how she can be making a
lot more money stripping, but in the middle of Jenna's
always be closing speech, Jennifer kisses her. While Jenna has

(01:04:59):
known she was a track to women since she first
saw Sigourney Weaver as Ripley an alien, this is the
first time she's ever actually been with one. They go
back to Jennifer's place to have sex. Jenna decides not
to feel guilty about cheating because it's with a woman.
She's been with women before to turn on Jack, but
this is different. No one is watching them. When Jennifer

(01:05:23):
fucks Jenna, she makes her feel truly desired. It's nothing
like the superficial lust the customers at the club have
for Jenna and the fantasy she represents, Jennifer wants her
for more than just her body, and also wants to
make her body feel really good. Then Jennifer does something
else Jenna has never experienced before, sexual aftercare.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
When I left her house the next afternoon, I felt
an emotion I'd forgotten ever having experienced.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
I felt loved.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
I was smitten with this woman, and I wanted to
be with her again. She gave me a sense of
security that I never had with Jack. I was confused,
was I gay, was I straight? Or was this aw
some kind of afterglow from this sexual release? But overall

(01:06:18):
I was happy. I felt safe, and in my life,
that was a rare thing.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
Jenna and Jennifer start hanging out all the time, having
an affair that is easily disguised as just a couple
gal pals Palin and Gallon around. Jenna is also impressed
by Jennifer's print modeling credentials. She was a Penthouse pet
in Penthouse Magazine, one of the biggest brass rings for
an adult model, along with the centerfold spread, and Playboy,

(01:06:50):
which runs gauzy softcore shops in comparison to Penthouse's hardcore ones.
Playboy Penthouse, and Hustler make up the big three of
twentieth century nudy magazines. Jennifer says she can help Jenna
hustle her way into print. They carry on their very
obvious affair around town in bathroom stalls, cabs, and a

(01:07:11):
poolside cabana at the Mirage Hotel and Casino rip. Jack
doesn't catch on, but she's pretty sure Jack isn't being
faithful either. Now you might think an emotionally communicative, sexually
pleasurable connection with a woman might be just with the
love doctor ordered for Jenna, but Jack retains a firm

(01:07:32):
hold on her by continually pulling away then suddenly showing
back up. He doesn't come home for days without warning.
Jenna knows she's being disrespected, but she keeps holding out hope.
Jack sucks, but Jenna is still racked with cheeters guilt
because all she wants is to feel loved by Jack.

(01:07:52):
To cope, she starts snorting crystal meth regularly. It works
to blot out her bad feelings and replace them with
an extra dream high, but it's temporary and there's always
a huge come down.

Speaker 2 (01:08:06):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:08:06):
I'm no brain doctor, but if I were Jenna's unlicensed
Internet ketamine therapist. I'd say she's seeking the comfort and
safety she can't get from her family. Larry Massoli was
incentivized to kill mercilessly by the US government and then
returned back to civilian life all fucked up. He cannot
feel true comfort or safety and therefore can't provide any. Jenna,

(01:08:30):
like many nice American girls and protagonists of Lonna del
Rey songs, just wants a man to take care of
her the same way she takes care of him. Instead,
she has Jack, an emotionally unavailable tattoo shop fuck boy.
I'm picturing the Matt Dillon character from Cameron Crow singles.

(01:08:51):
When people romanticize the nineties, they always leave out how
bad everyone's facial hair was. There were so many guys
with chin straps and little circular goatee. Jenna has had
one man in her life that she could always depend on,
her older brother Tony. Tony is a classic Nevada bro
with backwards baseball caps, tattoos, and a rotating wardrobe of

(01:09:13):
loose tank tops. He looks like a boy version of
his sister, with the same hooded eyelids and cute chipmunk smile.
Jenna resents that her brother has a closer relationship with
their dad by virtue of being male. In his teens,
Tony starts drinking and drugging and gets into street fights.
After high school, he moves up to robberies and gets

(01:09:36):
deeper into drugs. He gets a girlfriend named Selena, whose
friends are all meth head hells angels. Tony starts snorting meth,
then smoking it, then shooting it up. He comes over
with a doctor's bag full of his gear and asks
his sister to help him shoot up. This is where
she draws the line. Jenna is totally freaked out by

(01:09:59):
her brother. There's spiral into meth addiction, even though she
is also addicted now too. She convinces herself that snorting
it is less bad somehow, but she notices the effects
prolonged speed use is having on everyone around her. They're
all becoming more crazed and unpredictable. Her brother has wild

(01:10:19):
mood swings. He develops the classic speed user's paranoia that
he's being followed, specifically by the cops, and stays up
every night at his window with his gun drawn, waiting
for a big shootout that never comes. One time, Jack
comes home and says Tony stole their whole stash. Jenna
is horrified that her brother, one of the only people

(01:10:41):
she trusts, would lie to her and rob them. She
calls Selena, who reveals that he's also been stealing from
her and is now shooting up coke and heroin. Drug
addiction has turned him into a stranger. Jenna is so
distraught she calls her dad. I'm sure if he will
help or make her feel worse. She tells her father

(01:11:04):
what's going on, afraid that Tony will end up dead
or in jail, and Larry promises he'll try to get
Tony help. Without her brother in her life, Jenna is
more isolated than ever now her whole world is limited
to Jack and her.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
Job at the club.

Speaker 3 (01:11:23):
Crazy Horse two attracts celebrity clients of a certain type
bad boys. Jack Nicholson comes in, but Jenna can't tell
him apart from any other dirty old man who comes in. Also,
motherfucking Pantera come in, and motherfucking White Snake, and motherfucking
David Lee Roth, formerly of Van Halen, now in the

(01:11:46):
midst of his solo career. Jenna is super excited about
David Lee Roth because he was one of her fantasy
rock star crushes from MTV, but in real life she
finds David Lee Roth to be super annoying not follow
his endless rambling stories. It's Jenna's first peek behind the
flammable curtain of show business, where she finds out that

(01:12:08):
the fantasies other people are peddling in Hollywood are just
as fake as the one she's selling clients at the
strip club. Jenna is shilling the image of herself as
a nympho Lolita, but is really just a young, vulnerable
girl looking for true love. David Lee Roth sells sexual
seduction in his music videos, but in reality, he too

(01:12:29):
is just some guy. And keep in mind that this
is nineteen ninety just a jiggleo David Lee Roth, not
nineteen eighty three peak van Halen Jump era David Lee Roth.
He goes home with another dancer instead. In addition to bikers,
Jenna and Jack hang out with another subculture that runs

(01:12:51):
very strong and deep in Nevada, Rockabillies. The rockabilly subculture
is about being into early American rock and roll, flash
tattoo use, vintage muscle cars, and pin up girls. Even
though rockabilly music is the product of radio stations playing
music by both black and white artists, rock and roll,
R and B, bluegrass, and country. Most subsets of the

(01:13:13):
rockabilly subculture tend to attract a certain type of person.
Maybe you see where this is going, Racists. These rockabillities
are nostalgic for a white, suburban nineteen fifties American pass
that only exists in their fantasies. One night, Jack comes
into the club with his friend Lester. Lester is a

(01:13:35):
leather tanned rockabilly greaser biker dude in a red bandana.
Even though she's still with Jack, Jenna is jealous that
her side piece Jennifer, is flirting with Lester. She takes
this all in while working another celebrity customer, fellow rockabilly
Italian American Nicholas Coppola Cage, who doesn't notice because he's

(01:13:56):
so checked out. Nick Cage is a regular customer, and
Jenna's notes on Cage are that he's a great listener
and allegedly smells very bad. She doesn't understand why he
comes to the strip club and then barely even looks
at her while she's dancing, But it's because he grew
up Catholic. The next week, Jennifer admits to Jenna that

(01:14:17):
she and Lester are now a romantic item. Jenna is destroyed,
even though she knows she has no right to be.
They keep fucking on the side of both of their boyfriends,
but their primary emotional connection is no longer with each
other and at home, the more attention Jenna seeks from Jack,
the less he gives her. This grinds her down and

(01:14:38):
makes her insecure, setting up a toxic loop where he
gives her just enough crumbs of attention to keep the
loop cycling. Her moods follow his, and he is very moody.

Speaker 1 (01:14:54):
There are side effects of the job.

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
It spoils your relationship with both men and money. You
see too much of both, and you lose respect for both.

Speaker 3 (01:15:08):
Jenna is burning out on working at the strip club.
She's reached the uppermost echelon of Crazy Horse two, making
as much money there as any dancer possibly could, and
she started to check out mentally. She's phoning it in
on stage one night in a black cowboy hat while
an eagle song plays. When Jennifer arrives with a busty

(01:15:28):
brunette named Julia, Parton.

Speaker 9 (01:15:33):
Dolly's made millions out of the size of her boobs.
I'm just trying to make a career out of my
body too. Julia Parton performer.

Speaker 3 (01:15:45):
Julia Parton is born in Kentucky on the fourth of July.
She grows up in the San Fernando Valley in Granada Hills.
In the eighties, she starts doing pin up modeling for
men's magazines with stage names like Nina Alexander. Nineteen ninety,
she learns from a family member that her distant cousin
is the singer Dolly Parton, and she starts working under

(01:16:07):
her real name, Julia Parton. As Julia Parton, she appears
in pornographic films like club Head, Night Trips to and
Trick Tracy, which is of course a porn parody of
Dick Tracy. Julia Parton becomes editor of High Society. She
also starts working behind the scenes in the adult business

(01:16:29):
when she meets Jenna. Julia Parton is working as a
talent scout, recruiting girls from strip clubs into pictorials and
movies for a kickback. She scouts new girls and sends
their test photos to magazines like Playboy and Penthouse. If
a photographer books a girl off a test shot, Julia
Parton gets a kickback. High Society is a nude magazine

(01:16:51):
known for hiring a pornographic actress named Gloria Leonard in
nineteen seventy seven to be the first female editor of
an erotic magazine for men, in order to demonstrate that
sex and the selling of it can be a women's
game too. Gloria Leonard also founded the first support group
for porn performers, which includes other Golden age seventies feminist

(01:17:12):
porn stars like Veronica Hart, Annie Sprinkle, and Candido Royal.
Gloria Leonard appears in art film porn crossover hit the
Opening of Misty Beethoven, and is one of the first
porn stars to become a free speech figurehead. Leonard also
invented the exploitative practice of publishing stolen nudes of female
celebrities Okay, girl Boss. She's one of the first porn

(01:17:36):
stars to use mass media like magazines to promote her
own career. In the nineteen eighties, Gloria Leonard debated anti
porn activists from a group called Women Against Pornography aka WOP.
WOP included members like writer Andrea Dworkin, activist Gloria Steinem,
and actress Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, who

(01:17:59):
says she was co first into shooting the movie by
her abusive ex boyfriend who held a gun to her head.
Porn caused an ideological split in the nineteen seventies second
wave feminist movement. There were debates about whether sex work
should be banned or legalized, as well as where exactly
lesbian separatism fit into all of this. Women Against Pornography

(01:18:20):
held clean Up Times Square rallies that made them popular
with the New York politicians who also wanted to clean
up aka gentrified Times Square. For profit Women against Pornography
raised funds by charging for tours of Times Square, where
they charged into strip clubs and peep shows to force
confrontational encounters with the sex workers and clients. In reaction

(01:18:42):
to this, pro porn feminist groups formed whose members included
sex workers. The writer Ellen Willis and the San Francisco
lesbian feminist b Das collective Sam Waw. Ellen Willis coined
the term pro sex feminism. The anti porn contingency said
these pro sex feminists were not real feminists they had

(01:19:03):
just internalized misogyny to be turned on by their own subjugation.
But the bondage play loving lesbians of sam Wois were
living proof that sexual power play preferences weren't automatically determined
by gender or sexuroles. The pro porn feminists think fantasy
images of power play can be arousing and cathartic rather

(01:19:24):
than simply degrading, and that women can affect who makes
pornography and what kind gets made. They also believe in
the ability of media consumers to differentiate between fantasy images
on screen and real life, which takes us back to
Julia Parton and Jenna. Now, look, when a stranger says

(01:19:45):
they want to do a test shoot of you for
a magazine, ninety nine times out of one hundred, there's
no magazine. But Julia Parton is legit. It is a real,
genuine opportunity for Jenna to break into adult modeling and
make more money. So it's brainstorming a new alias to
use for work. Her real name, Jenna Massoli, sounds too

(01:20:06):
mundane an Italian American to her genesis, sounds too made
up and silly. She wants a solid, dependable stage name
that sounds cool, not sleazy or corny. She lands on
an Irish last name, Jamison.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
I had to come up with a good name. I
didn't want a porno name. So I sat down, opened
up the phone book and thumbed to the j's because
I wanted it to match my first name. I came
across James. I'm like, Jenna, James sounds too porno. Right
under that was Jamison, and I was like, Jamison whiskey.

Speaker 1 (01:20:47):
Okay, that's perfect.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
So that night I went to work, I saw my brother.
I was like, Tony, what do you think, Well, what
do you think about Jenna Jamison.

Speaker 1 (01:20:58):
He's like, I'm drinking Jamie right now. And it just stuck.

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):
After that, and thus Jenna Jamison is born in Las Vegas.
Out of Jenna Massoli's wildest fantasies. It's a way for
her to neatly compartmentalize Jenna Jamison glamorous idea and image
from Jenna Massoli The regular Person. Now, look, I was

(01:21:23):
born in Hollywood, California. I don't think any less of
a stage name. It is just a way to designate
the product Tom Cruise from the civilian person Thomas Mappither.
It's like an Internet screen name, acknowledging that this is
a persona not a person promoting an image that's bigger
than life. Jenna has been thinking about how she wants

(01:21:45):
to look on camera forever, like a beautiful, sexy pin
up model. Soon, the San Fernando Valley and then the
whole entire world will belong to Jenna Jamison. Next time

(01:22:10):
on Jena World. Episode three, Djay Before Jenna, Stephen Hirsch's
Vivid video transforms the porn business in the nineteen eighties
and creates the contract girl model for performers with starlet's
like Ginger Lenn Allen. All this and more next time
on jenal World. Jenna World is an iHeartRadio production executive

(01:22:39):
produced by Anna Hosnier and Becca Ramos, supervising, produced by
Bei Wang, produced by Victor Wright, script editing by Jonathan Mills,
engineered by Graham Gibson, and edited by Rory Gagan. Today's
episode of Jenna World featured laurencer Video as Jenna Jamison,
Pull Sheer as Larry Miss, oly Wyatt Fair as Tony Miss,

(01:23:03):
Larry Karazuski as Bob Stupak, Glenn Lambert as Marty Allen
Sirie Doll as Carol Doda, Jonathan Mills as Tom Wolfe,
James Kim as Hunter as Thompson, Peter c Cellini as
Vinnie Ferracci, and Alex Bloom as Julia parton O