Cleo counts out crumpled dollars, straightening the bills as she stacks them neatly on her bare leg.
“Twenty-two dollars,” the 23-year-old exclaims. “Not too bad!”
All around her, more than a dozen nearly naked women are dancing on the stage and swinging from a brass pole as music thumps and customers shower the dancers with money. It’s like any other night at this rural strip club on the Colorado-Wyoming border, with one notable exception: While the dancers are all wearing barely-there outfits, every one of them is wearing a mask.
Some are bandannas. Some are surgical masks. One looks as if it was swiped from a construction site. They’re a seemingly odd accessory for women wearing a mix of g-strings, bikinis and lingerie.
But this is the time of coronavirus, and following state rules, the women are wearing them as they feel out their first night back in business. For Cleo, that $22 is the first income she has earned in weeks. And she’s ready to make more, even if it brings her far closer to customers than the state’s 6-foot-social distancing guidelines.
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“I feel like my makeup is sweating off under this thing,” she adds from behind her bandanna, then looks up as the music changes. “Oh, that’s my song. Gotta go.”
Cleo, who didn’t want her legal name used because of potential harassment, clambers up onto the stage and begins spinning around the pole, her 5-inch-high shoes banging together as she bends backward to rest both her feet and head on the floor to a scattering of cheers and whoops.
Read more: USA Today
