Today there was a story in the New York Times about a screenwriter whose movie is coming out soon. She grew up in Minnesota and was living what reads as a fairly conservative, advertising-copywriter life when she decided to bust out and take a job as a stripper. She stripped and wrote a blog about it. The blog got some attention and someone encouraged her to write a screenplay. She wrote a screenplay and her movie got made and now she is the hottest new/young screenwriter in Hollywood.

By the way, she changed her name to "Diablo Cody."

Peter was fascinated by the story but I must say, for a young, bourgeois Gen Y female like herself, the stripper thing isn't such a big wow. The choice of names elicits at most an eye-roll from me, but I guess "Diablo Cody" is way more palatable than simply "Diablo." Screenplay by Diablo. No. So it's good, I guess, that she took a second name. Though if it were me, and I insisted on calling myself Diablo, I'd go with Kowalski as a surname. But that's just me.

The story put me in mind of an episode from my life as a young actress trying to make it in New York. This was fifteen years ago. I was doing a god-awful play called The Web of Night. As you may have guessed from the title, it was a play about incest. I think incest plays always work best as comedies - but there wasn't a single joke in the whole excruciating three hours. I was rehearsing in the evenings, after my day job as an assistant research librarian at a law firm in Newark. I was living on the Upper East Side with a roommate and her nine cats and commuting to Newark every day. A girl has to make a living, and it was the early nineties and jobs were scarce and at waiting tables I was abysmal at best. So I had this job in Newark, New Jersey - an hour's commute - at which I made $13 an hour. Even though my rent was relatively low, after taxes and everything I made so little money that I had to think twice about buying a magazine.

Anyway there were two girls in the cast who were a few years younger than myself. I think they were both named Jen. They were both cute with rockin' bods and long blonde extensions. Walking out with them one night, we got on the subject of day jobs. They said, you should work where we work. I said, where's that? And they said, Stringfellow's. What's that? I asked, naive as I was at the time. And they said, oh, it's a high-end strip club on 22nd Street. They went on to tell me how they only worked about five hours a night and brought home around three thousand dollars a week in cash. No sex, they said - this was a classy place. All they had to do was dance, and the bouncers protected them from the weirdos. The Jens were like, come on! It's a great job, we can totally get you in.

I spent that entire night entertaining it, wrestling with it, breaking it down. Me? A stripper? Me? I have nervous breakdown if my bra strap is showing. However, I reasoned, if that's the case, maybe it would be good for me. Maybe stripping is just what I need to bust through my inhibitions. Maybe it would be the best thing that ever happened to me! Think of what it would do for my acting. Confronting my shame in such an aggressive way. I started getting excited. I could solve some of my deepest issues and pull down $3000 tax-free dollars a week doing it. It was the obvious answer. My poverty, my shame - I could solve it all by simply taking this job. Not to mention that dancing naked would force me to the gym like nothing else ever had. It was a win-win-win. I was decided.

So I called my boyfriend Eric and told him my plan. He freaked out. I complained about my job. My body shame. My sexual inhibitions. I spun it so that he might get past his initial shock and subsequent rage and see the long-term benefits my stripping would have for our relationship. But I don't know, he just never got it and we hung up angry.

That night I went to sleep knowing I would never even have the nerve to go in and apply, much less take my clothes off and audition. Much less shimmy around naked five nights a week for bachelor-party douchebags from Long Island. For one thing, my thighs were too big. They don't like that. For another thing, the cost might be too high: I'd be putting my relationship in danger, and possibly my acting career (I was, after all, a serious actress), and possibly my life (wasn't there something in Flashdance....?). And for what? For the money. The money was the reason why I was so intrigued in the first place and tempted enough to actually consider doing it.
It's hard to be a girl in New York with a dream, and fucking expensive.

I made the moral decision: it's wrong to risk your life, your love - and, finally, your dignity - for money.

So that's what almost happened to me fifteen years ago. That's something I almost did. I know that people don't like movies where the hero wimps out - but for me, at the time, even considering becoming a stripper was a dangerous journey unto itself.