![Dancing on a Prayer](https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/13875/649570/60acb25384b7b/DancingonaPrayer.jpg)
AT THE MANOR Adult Entertainment Complex, the only strip club in Guelph, Ontario, you can feel the end coming. Some nights, the dancers outnumber the customers. The women perform pole dance moves with evocative names — the Genie, the Hot Cherry, the Boomerang, the Hello Boys, the Static Chopper — to thin, scattered applause. The top forty that blasts from the speakers becomes a soundtrack of almost unfathomable loneliness: “Nothing lasts forever / but wouldn’t it be nice to stay together for the night?” The ceiling is low and black, the lighting a gloomy throb of oranges and blues. There are no windows. Maybe you think strip clubs are fun; maybe you believe they’re degrading; maybe you see them as just another workplace. The Manor doesn’t feel like any of those things. Instead, the mood is mostly funereal.
Guelph, population 150,000, is a suburban university town about an hour’s drive from Toronto. I grew up here, and the Manor is a local landmark, a source of both notoriety and wry civic pride. The club, once a stately Queen Anne–style mansion, is stranded in a bleak expanse of parking lot, bordered by the slash of the highway, on one side, and a residential neighbourhood, on the other. Above the front door looms a giant, glowing M, gripped by a suggestively silhouetted woman in high heels. Ugly concrete additions extend around the old house like the reclining corpus of a sphinx; neo-Gothic towers erupt in congruously heavenward. Attached to the club is a complex of apartments called the Manor Motel, whose tenants tend to be precariously employed, receiving government assistance, or struggling with addiction.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 2021-Ausgabe von The Walrus.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 2021-Ausgabe von The Walrus.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
![MY GUILTY PLEASURE](https://reseuro.magzter.com/100x125/articles/13875/1721021/ZjBpzYG4o1719492279999/MY-GUILTY-PLEASURE.jpg)
MY GUILTY PLEASURE
I WAS AS SURPRISED as anyone when I became obsessed with comics again last year, at the advanced age of forty-five. As a kid, I loved reading G.I. Joe and The Amazing Spider-Man.
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The Upside-Down Book
In her new novel, Rachel Cusk makes the case for becoming a stranger to yourself
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Pick a Colour
BACK HERE, I can hear a group of women trickle in. Filling the floor with giggles and voices.
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Quebec's Crushing Immigration Policy
Familial separation can have devastating consequences on mental health and productivity
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The Briefcase
What I learned about being a writer from trying to finish a dead man's book
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In the Footsteps of Migrants Who Never Made It
Thousands have died trying to cross into the US from Mexico. Each year, activists follow their harrowing trek
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Blood Language
Menstruation ties us to the land in ways we've all but forgotten
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Dream Machines
The real threat with artificial intelligence is that we'll fall prey to its hype
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Invisible Lives
Without immigration status, Canada's undocumented youth stay in the shadows
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My Guilty Pleasure
"The late nights are mine alone, and I'll spend them however I damn well please"