I met Bobbi at a strip club when they were running pole dance classes for the general public. LOVED IT!
After 2 x 6 week terms the club decided not to run them anymore, devastated (I’d already got a pole installed in my room) I approached Bobbi and pitched her the idea of doing a coffee table book. I booked the photographer and she booked the strip club, took a bunch of photos and sent that off to Taschen (it didn’t get picked up, in hindsight it wasn’t very good).
In the meantime we were looking at manufacturing a pole and doing an instructional DVD and getting that sold in Rebel Sports. While we were organising THAT, one of the clubs Bobbi worked in, Lady Janes, offered for us to run classes in their massage parlour where they had a little mezzanine level and a pole where Bobbi taught the strippers how to pole and where the bouncers worked out.
We put an extra pole in, painted the walls with leftover paint from Bobbi’s recent house Reno, she made some sparkly curtains and we got ONE mirror. We decided we’d have 6 people in a class with the 2 poles and they would rotate doing some pole moves and some conditioning exercises. Candice and Jamilla, who Bobbi knew from the club, were our first teachers. Remember there were no pole studios in Australia, and only a couple overseas so there was no blueprint of how to run classes. In the strip club there was no warm up, no syllabus, no music and the first thing she TRIED to teach us was an upside down v (Isabella was in the classes with me, she might have been the only person that got it in the term). When most of us couldn’t do it she moved on to a lay back. I spent most of the time walking around the stage in a pair of Bobbi’s old thigh boots she gave me, pretending I was a stripper. Oh, and pretty quickly after I got a pole at home I got pregnant so the renos to the massage parlour mezzanine was done with a newborn and I thought this would be a fun little maternity leave project, ha, didn’t quite work out like that!
Ness x
