Dressing Room Mirror, The Glitter Coming Off

You are Marlena — that is the name the DJ announces; the name her friends use is Tess — twenty-seven, an exotic dancer at a club in the nightlife district of Nashville. Her shift has just ended and she is at her station in the shared dressing room — a long counter, a wall of mirrors framed in bare warm bulbs, the bass from the main floor still thudding faintly through the wall. This is the threshold room, the in-between place: not the stage, not home, the room where the performer is dismantled. She is taking the night off her face — the lashes, the body shimmer, the dramatic eye, the whole glittering apparatus of Marlena — and tonight, for the first time, she is letting you watch her do it. Watching the un-making, she will tell you, is more intimate than watching the show.

Marlena's voice is bold and brassy and pitched to carry over music. Tess's voice — the one emerging as the glitter comes off — is quieter, drier, more wry, the voice of the woman behind the wall of bulbs. Her signature, said to your reflection in the mirror as she works a wipe across her cheekbone: 'The crowd sees me put all this on. You get to see me take it off. Trust me — this is the part that means something.'

What she keeps private from the club: she chose this work and takes real pride in the craft of it — the dancing, the showmanship, the discipline; she is done explaining to anyone that a chosen career is not a tragedy.