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She needs professional help in professional surroundings.
    The Pure Talent School brochure promises to aid students in every area I'm hoping to improve:
Dance Instruction
How to Be the Star in Your Club
Costuming and Music Selection
Pole Techniques
Stage Presence
There's also less-urgent instruction in makeup, diet, fitness, and financial planning. Pure Talent is not an inexpensive school—the five-day course costs 750 dollars. But if I come away looking less like a goof onstage, it'll be worth it.
     
    The last week in January, I kiss Randy goodbye at the curb at Denver International. I land in Tampa, hauling with me a small carry-on bag of regular clothes and Randy's hockey duffel stuffed with costumes. The duffel almost wrenches my arm out of the socket when I throw it over my shoulder at the baggage carousel. While I wait at the rental car counter, I keep the bag on the floor and move it along with me by nudging it with my foot.
    In line behind a dozen harried businessmen in wrinkled suits and tourist families with mountains of luggage, I'm fidgeting foot to foot, nervous because the Journey Has Begun. But I'm glad, too, to get under way after planning for so long. I grab the keys and drag my bags across the paved parking lot to my nerdy economy car. The evening is soft and warm, like the breath of a child—a welcome relief from the dry cold of home. The Wyoming winter is an endurance test—winds gust at night with such force they wake me out of a dead sleep and the storms fell trees, overturn semi trucks, and make a mockery of any snow fence. There is no Currier and Ives cuteness, very little to charm you through the long dark months. I'm so pleased to be in some friendly air for a change. Driving across the Courtney Campbell Causeway at sunset, my eyes move toward the horizon as the sky goes baby blue to pink to purple to the blue-black water of the bay.
     
    While in Florida, I am staying with my friend Jeanette's parents, who moved down from New Jersey eight years ago. Jeanette and I met in gym class on the first day of our junior year in high school. A world-traveled Bronx girl, she had just transferred from Memphis, Tennessee. As a spectral white, six-three redhead dressed in head-to-toe black with three earrings in each ear, she stuck out like a sore thumb among the Jersey girls, buffy and blonde-highlighted from their days down the shore. So did I, having spent the last day of summer vacation on my friend Laurie's bedroom floor, bleaching out my hair. We sat down next to each other in the stands and became instant allies. For the next two years, we were the ringleaders of our school's small band of freaks, salving each other's wounds, shaving each other's head, and trying to stay out of trouble. We succeeded. Most of the time.
    Jeanette flew in from Los Angeles to meet me at her parents' house, where she and her mother, Cathy, come to the door and fold me into a huge hug. Cathy is the quintessential cool mom—her home has always been a refuge, noisily exotic with Indonesian shadow puppets, carved fruitwood screens, and a continuous march of far-flung friends dropping in for dinner, dessert, or a poker game. I knew I could state my Florida business without fear of judgment or pesty inquiry. When I told her about the school for strippers she thought it was hilarious, and rolled out the red carpet.
    "You don't get to wear a hot-pink sequined cap and gown at the graduation, do you?" she asks hopefully. I wish.
    The first day of school, I drive across the causeway with an escort of pelicans circling overhead.
    Tampa Bay—famous for its beaches, famous for its strip clubs!
    That's the station I.D. of a local classic rock station. Florida has the third highest concentration of strip clubs in the country, and the Tampa/St. Pete area is particularly dense. Amidst the well-groomed subdivisions with names like Harbor Woods and Grove Estates, the strip malls, and the beaches with powdered-sugar sand are more than