Feature Dancer: Little Lupe Fuentes

First of all, I hate feature dancers.  More often than not, they're over-the-hill pornstars with terrible fake tits, they're magnets for large groups of meatheads, they either don't give lapdances or they give shitty lapdances for somewhere around $100, and you have to pay 2 to 4 times the usual cover just to get into the club.  And I hate pornstars whose big selling point is that they look like little girls.  Wearing your hair in pigtails does not make you look young; it just makes you look like a sad 20-something who isn't hot enough to get by in the world of porn without a gimmick.  So when you combine my dislike of feature dancers with my distast for faux-teens, you'd think that spending a Saturday night at the Crazy Horse with Little Lupe Fuentes would be pretty far down my list of things to do.  Well you'd normally be right, but Lupe has been the only part of the Howard Stern show that I've consistently enjoyed over the last year, so I decided to stop by just to hear that voice come out of a real person.

I was in the area all day, but my time was limited, so I stopped by the club in the early evening to find out what time the shows would be starting.  I was told that the three shows would start at 9:30, 11:30 and 1:30.  I showed up around 11:15 for the second show, but after paying the ridiculous $20 cover, was told that Lupe had just gotten off stage and wouldn't be dancing again until 1 am.  I don't know whether the schedule change was the club's fault or Lupe's fault, but I wasn't too pleased about having to decide between wasting $20 and wasting 2 hours of my time.  In the end, I decided that since I'd already spent the money, I'd just stick it out and kill some time with the regular dancers.  According to them, the club had been dead all night because the $20 cover was keeping out everyone other than a few Howard Stern fans and a few borderline pedophiles.  Basically, these weren't your usual go to a strip club and buy a dance kind of guys.  I did my best to make up for it to the point where, by 1 o'clock, I was probably 10 times further in the hole than I would have been if I'd been willing to waste the initial $20 and walk out as soon as I walked in.  Oh well. It wasn't the first and I'm sure it won't be the last time I make that mistake.

Anyway, right at 1 am, the DJ announced for all 2 dozen or so patrons to head over to the Lounge half of the club for the Little Lupe performance.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the Crazy Horse, the main area is just topless, but the Crazy Horse Lounge is fully nude.  Lupe came out wearing a bikini and a feather boa and did a 30 second tease before losing the top, but there really wasn't much of a performance to it.  She basically just walked and crawled around the stage for the first song, then she did one spin around the pole and took off her bottoms during the second song.  She stayed on stage for a song or two after that, but didn't really do much of anything other than hold pictures of herself in her mouth and give them to the customers who gave the biggest tips.  Sadly, I was one of them, with my 4 singles on the stage.  Then she did the same thing with a DVD.  Again, I was the high bidder with $3 out there.  I'm not sure if the lack of tips contributed to her attitude, or if her attitude contributed to the lack of tips, but she did not look happy to be up on stage.  She rarely looked at the crowd, never smiled, and just generally seemed to be going through the motions.  Of course, maybe she was nervous or has no dance skills, or maybe I was projecting my discomfort due to the fact that she looks like she's about 14, but the whole scene was fairly sad.  

After the show, Lupe hung out for a while and signed pictures and DVDs.  I think she was charging for that, but I didn't really want a signed porn star picture (I'd already given my free picture and DVD away to one of the cheap creepers who wasn't willing to throw a few bills on the stage), so I passed on that opportunity.  I did at least get a chance to say hello to her, and she was all smiles and seemed more like the fun loving girl from the Stern show than the distant ice queen from the stage.  I wouldn't have paid the usual $100 feature dancer lap dance price anyway, but it was kind of a bummer that she didn't offer them, because it made it all the more clear that she didn't want to interact with her fans.  Of course, since half of her fans look like they probably spend most of their time trying to hand out free candy to schoolchildren, it's hard to blame her too much for not wanting to interact with them.

Overall, the performance was somewhat of a disappointment, but it was probably worth the $20 and a few singles to put a face to the sound drops that I hear every morning on the radio.  If you aren't a Stern fan though, I don't think there's any reason to bother going to see Little Lupe in person.  I don't mean that as an insult to Lupe, because, like every other pornstar out there, she'd have had to really go above and beyond to make it worth going to see a feature dancer.  It's just that, like 99% of the pornstars out there, Lupe didn't.