Well, today was kind of frustrating. I just couldn’t get a hold of Frank McCourt in any way shape or form. I want him to be in my event at the Strand on September 22. He doesn’t have a website. He has all these handlers. I’m going to try to go after his publicist at his publishing company. I left a message today. But I suspect that I will have to get pigs to fly out of my ass before they will return that phone call. So now for the Strand event on September 22 I’m going after chang lee, the incredible memoirist who teaches at Princeton. And tomorrow I’m going after Elizabeth Gilbert. Fat chance, eh? And I also talked to the guy who runs events at the 92nd St Y.. I’m trying to hook up an event there with Philip Lopate and Kathryn Harrison. Oh, I’m doing an event at the Hustler store on Sunset Boulevard, hopefully in January with Georgina Spelvin, who’s written a fantastic memoir about being an accidental porn star. She’s extremely creamy in every sense. I finished up writing the pitch to Howard Stern. I really would love to cross swords with him. And I finished up the pitch to NPR. Both of those will be going out in the next couple of days. I also did a follow-up with my publicist, the amazing Nicki Clendening, about getting on fresh air with Terry Gross. I met the producer, Amy Salit, in San Francisco last year. I’m so excited about doing the doing the LA events at Vromans, book soup, and Barnes & Noble Santa Monica with Chelsea handler, I think she’s such a revolutionary a very modern person, and funny as shit to boot. I sent a couple of e-mails to Lily Burana about doing the KGB event, but I have not heard from her yet. I’m such an impatient person. I just want everything to be done now. I don’t think it’s an attractive quality. My editor from Canongate sent me a very promising e-mail about promoting the seven short movies I made. But they can’t make posters in color. In fact they’re not really posters at all. They are just slightly large flyers. In black-and-white. On orange paper. Oy. I started watching freaks and geeks today. The beginning of the Judd apatow empire. I watched the first two episodes. The pilot in particular I thought was really really good. Funny and touching. It’s interesting to watch all those actors when they were babies. You wouldn’t necessarily guess that Seth Rogan would be the one who would break out big time. You would however guess that James Franco would break out big time. He is so handsome and charismatic. Such a bad boy. I would definitely cast him in my movie. I guess in the right circumstances I would have sex with him also. I am not expecting my book to sell a million copies, to get on every best book list, to win all kinds of awards, to get on every best-seller list, selling to every language, to be read by adoring fans all over the world. But it would be nice. And I am enjoying the process. I feel like I’ve inherited the genes of my coal mining grandfather, and I get a great sense of joy when, for example, Philip Lopate agrees to do an event with me, or Katherine Harris, or Chelsea handler. Or I get an e-mail from someone who’s read my book. A friend or a stranger. I’m really looking forward to this to work, I want to change the way I live in the world. I feel like I’ve been among cloistered away. A moth in my cocoon. And I want to soar like a butterfly. That reminds me, I have to call the woman who runs the Moth, storytelling event in New York. She’s really great. And the Moth is so cool, it’s one of my favorite places to perform. A writer’s work is never done.

So I thought I would include my pitch to Oprah and my pitch to Howard Stern, in case it’s of any interest to anyone. Well, that’s my two cents worth, and with inflation I owe you one.

OPRAH:

WRITE YOUR LIFE STORIES

“Everybody wants to make their mark. Nowadays, that means everybody is writing a memoir.” – CNN, April 18, 2008

Most people don’t know it, but they’re constantly writing the narrative of their life. And a great way to figure out what you want your life to be, is to figure out what your life has been. Writing down the stories of your life helps you make sense of where you came from, and figure out where you want to go. Scientists did a study in which they asked people to write down their worst traumas. They found that when people did, their immune systems were boosted. Not drinking fresh squeezed orange juice, or taking vitamin C. From writing down the stories of their life. Storytelling is how human beings communicate. It’s how we learn. How we are entertained. How we are touched. In days of yore tribes sat around campfires and told stories. People would take the stuff of life and tell stories that made people laugh, made them cry, passed on the wisdom of the ages. Sadly, with the dissipation of tribes and clans and extended families, the tradition of making the stories from our life has all but disappeared. I am just about to launch my Art of the Memoir tour all over America, where a panel of acclaimed memoirists will discuss the hows and the whys, the joys and illuminations, the catharsis and the self-knowledge of writing the stories of your life. Writing down the stories of your life helps you understand who you are, and who you want to be. And who knows, you might even have a bestseller in you. I did.

I know how this works because writing my life story saved my life. When I was 17 years old I found myself alone in Hollywood, with $27 in my pocket and no place to go. I was standing in front of Grauman’s Chinese theater staring at Marilyn Monroe’s handprints. A very nice man wearing a T-shirt that said SEXY befriended me. He asked me to come back to his place for a steak dinner. I was very hungry. Happy I made a new friend in a strange, strange place. I was really looking forward to my steak. It turned out to be the most expensive meal of my life. The steak was drugged. He raped me. Luckily I escaped with my life. But the boy who walked into the apartment died there, and the young man who ran out was a broken, battered, wreck. I never told anyone about any of this. For many years the toxic waste festered inside me like a demon beast feeding on me. On the surface I was leading a happy life. I was making my living as an actor and screenwriter. I had a three picture deal at Disney. I was on the Fresh Prints of Bel Air with Will Smith (still one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, not just in show business, anywhere). I had a beautiful house. I had a beautiful wife. I had a red sports car. But I had a secret life where I was addicted. To drugs. To sex. I kept putting myself in situations in where death would be a likely outcome. I don’t believe in suicide. It doesn’t seem fair to make someone else clean up your mess. Unconsciously I was looking for someone to do the job for me. I realized a certain point that I was going to have to get some help from a trained professional, or I was going to be dead. After a long exhaustive search I found a very talented hypnotherapist. She would do guided visualizations with me, and I found I had a real ability to be hypnotized. The therapy was Jungian, based on archetypes. First she gave me a system for managing my addictions. Then she got me to talk about my life. Tell the stories I could never tell anyone. A certain point she suggested, since I was already making money as a screenwriter, that I should start writing my stories down. Which I did. I wrote a book. I showed this book to everyone who would read it. Finally an old friend said, Do you mind if I show this to my god-daughter, she’s a literary agent? Do I mind? I asked breathlessly, Please, by all means, do so as quickly as humanly possible. At this point, I had lost my beautiful house, I have lost my beautiful wife, I had lost my red sports car, I was filing for bankruptcy, and I had just been dumped by a fiancée I didn’t even like. I had officially hit the bottom of the rock. I decided that I would no longer hide who I was. That I would tell the true story of my life, reveal myself for who I truly am in a gentle, loving, humorous way, and let the chips fall where they may. It took this literary agent nine months and nine friendly phone calls from me to finally read my manuscript, and when she did she liked it very much. She took me out to lunch. We hit it off. In fact we hit it off so well that we went on a date. The date went so well that we ended up back at her place telling each other our stories. Then I told her the stories I never told anyone before. About the rape. It was staggering how good it felt. What a relief. What a release. That went so well we started making out furiously. That went so well she became my girlfriend and agented my first memoir, Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent, which is being made into a TV series by Showtime. I subsequently made a one-man show of my book, and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where it was named the number one show in the UK. And when I started performing my story, began portraying the man who raped me, to my amazement the horrible, violent, revenge fantasies and nightmares I’d had for decades vanished. At this point my immune system is like the locks on Fort Knox. I have now written nine books in eight years, and my new memoir is just coming out. But more importantly, two years, three months, and 24 days after my first date with that literary agent, we got married high on a hill in Northern California. 11 months ago we had a baby girl named Olive. I now live in a suburb in New Jersey called Montclair. Exactly the kind of place I dreamed of living in when I was a young, raped, teenage prostitute in Hollywood. Exactly the kind of life I dreamed when I started writing down the stories of my life.

Thanks, David Henry Sterry

“Bleach Blonde dug her talons into Large Mark’s arm and in a loud proud voice said, ‘I’ll pay you $500 to snort a line of coke off your dick.’ This was officially my Welcome to Chippendales moment.” - Master of Ceremonies: a True Story of Love, Murder, Roller Skates and Chippendales.

In 1985 I was the master of ceremonies at Chippendales male strip club when it was the hottest show in the city that never sleeps. The mad show business genius who invented Chippendales, a man named Nick de Noia (who was assassinated while I was working for him), wanted to create an environment where, for the first time in history, women could ogle, fondle and sexualize hot male flesh. The question is: was Chippendales the ripe fruit of the tree of the sexual revolution, or just another way for hot guys to make a fast buck? And speaking of making a fast buck, my first memoir, Chicken, about what I was 17 years old at and having sex with rich ladies for money in Hollywood, is being made into a TV series by Showtime. Why do men pay for sex and women not pay for sex? Or do women in fact pay for sex? Would women pay for sex more readily if they could do it safely and anonymously? With a hot young sensitive caring hand picked hunky studmuffin? Perhaps in a high-end spa not run by Heidi Fleiss? What is the difference between women taking their clothes off for money and men taking their clothes off for money? How are men and women different when they pay to watch people take their clothes off? What is it like to be a guy having sex with women for money? It’s a lot harder than you’d think. And what was it like to be the ugliest man at Chippendales? To walk in on the Snowman while he was getting head from a pair of wing-haired blonde twins, knowing I was never going to get laid because the competition was too stiff. Literally. Thanks, David Henry Sterry

http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/Cheesecake-Factory-Author-David-Henry-Sterry-recalls-his-stint-as-the-roller-skating-MC-of-Chippendales/

I found out the interview that I did for nerve.com is up and running.  Here it is.  I booked another event in Berkeley today, with the lovely and talented Melissa mytinger, she of the late lamented Cody’s.  Doing it at first Congregational Church of Berkeley October 15.  I’m just about to write a letter to Frank McCourt to see if you’ll appear with me at the Strand.  Again, I don’t really think I have a snowball’s chance in hell, but I’m going to give it a shot.  Hard-working dreamer or deranged lunatic?  You be the judge.  I also found out that KGB wants me to do an event there, my publisher was kind enough to set that up.  I’ve asked Tracy Quan, of Diary of a Manhattan Callgirl fame, and Lily Burana, who wrote Strip City, to do the event with me.  Tracy has agreed, I’m waiting to hear from Lily.  So I spent a good chunk of my day putting together the poster/flyers/press release for that event.  And that was my day.  So here’s the nerve.com piece.  I really like the writer who interviewed me.

When David Henry Sterry writes about sexuality, it’s like a chef writing about food. Other people may have their trove of memorable moments — a tryst here, a wild fling there — but when it comes to sex, Sterry is a careerist. His first memoir, Chicken — a “studiously wild souvenier,” according to the New York Times — chronicled his youth spent as a teenage hustler in ’70s Hollywood. His second effort, Master of Ceremonies, continues along this vein as Sterry recounts moving to the East Coast in the 1980s to become the roller-skating MC at Chippendales, that infamous New York City temple of over-broiled beefcake.

A twentysomething struggling actor, Sterry finds himself surrounded by cokehead party girls, steroidal strippers and a constant throb of ’80s nightclub noise pollution. At the center of the scene is Nick DeNoia, the megalomaniacal visionary who made Chippendales legendary, and who was ultimately murdered by his business partner in 1987. With anecdotes slathered in Me Decade slang, Sterry reincarnates this mix of glamour and horror from a scene that relied on beauty but, underneath, was often grotesque.

As a show, Chippendales has lost most of its sheen. It’s now a sprawling corporate venture focused on brand licensing, and its main revue — since moved to Las Vegas — is a camp-value tourist stop. This rise and spectacular fall only makes Sterry’s story that much more compelling. Over twenty years after he left the show, he spoke with Nerve about what it was like. — James Brady Ryan

Do you think Chippendales was doomed to end with the ’80s?

It sure seems like that. By the time Nick was killed it was like the lunatics were running the asylum. And the lunatics were in g-strings, you know? So there was this feeling that Rome was burning around you and you’re just grabbing as much loot as you possibly could before the whole thing imploded.

So Nick was the only glue holding it together?

Yeah. People sometimes correct me when I say Nick invented Chippendales. I mean, you might quibble with “invented,” but he absolutely made that place what it was in the ’80s. He wanted to be a revolutionary. He wanted to be the first person to have a place for women to ogle, fondle and sexualize hot male flesh. A safe place. This was really unprecedented. And he was an Emmy-award-winning choreographer, a show-business veteran of decades at that point. When I auditioned for this, he said to me, “I want this to be like the Folies Bergere, a classy, upscale show. I don’t want it to be nasty and rude and crude. I want it to be fun and playful.” And that was an important distinction — people still don’t quite get that women are different from men. When they go to see people take off their clothes, they don’t want a crotch just indiscriminately jammed in their faces.

Right.

There’s this one moment that to me was so revealing. One of the biggest roars of the early part of the show was for the Unknown Stripper — he had a paper bag over his head. First he takes off his top, then the g-string. But the biggest roar came when he took the paper bag off his head, and it’s revealed that he’s this really handsome boy-next-door, just as sweet as sweet can be. Not for the ass, not for the chest, but for his sweet face.

And Nick understood that. He got that. He would have the men bring grandma into the middle. The Pit, we called it. He wouldn’t have them bring some hot chick in there, he’d have them bring some homely, big, beautiful woman into the middle of the pit. He wanted them celebrated, because those are the women in our society that generally don’t get celebrated for their sexuality. And he wanted these men to be gentlemen. He insisted that [the patrons] were never called women, they were always called ladies. Ladies this, ladies that. All these things seem kind of quaint today in 2008.

It seems like when Nick wasn’t there, the place didn’t have that same gentlemanly feel.

Absolutely not. All these guys were basically trying to make their money, and when the cat was away, the mice just played and played. For instance, there was the Kiss-and-Tip at the end of each act when the women would wave their money and the men would go around and grab it and give the kisses. Well, when the show started to lag, you were supposed to get off stage. And if Nick was there and the show was lagging and you were still grabbing money, man, he would tear you several new assholes. But when he was gone, the show would be like tapioca pudding. You’d be like, Ugh, this guy’s still grabbing money? Women were yawning, checking their watches — there was no quality control whatsoever.

When women go to see people take off their clothes, they don’t want a crotch just indiscriminately jammed in their faces.

Yes, I do. I think you can also make a correlation between what happened in the pornographic industry, too. I’m friends with the woman who was in The Devil in Miss Jones, and in 1974 when that movie came out, couples went out on dates to see it — a pornographic movie! And there was a plot. The Devil in Miss Jones is Sartre’s No Exit in the pornographic world. There’s a story that has existential overtones and undertones to it. Chippendales was a show, too. It had a theme. It had massive costume and production values, chorus dancers spinning, jeté-ing and doing their Bob Fosse hands. If you look at the show now, with the big hair and the silly costumes, it looks like a museum piece. But at the time it was breaking ground.

When you worked there, you had a lot of anxiety about being “the ugliest guy at Chippendales.” How did you make it through those years? What do you think stopped from going crazy with steroids or something?

Well, I made a shitload of money, I made all these show-business contacts. So there were great things that had nothing to do with how ugly I was in comparison to all the beautiful men. And I’m an eternal optimist. Many, many nights, I would show up at Chippendales thinking, Tonight’s the night! I’m going to find that MC groupie! I know she’s here somewhere and I’m going to find her and she’ll be just drunk enough. It’s a blessing and a curse to be that optimistic, because almost always my hopes were dashed. And then about a year in I started dating the beautiful costume mistress, this gorgeous, twenty-one-year-old hottie who could have her choice of many of these guys, and somehow she chose me. That was the ultimate affirmation of my self-worth. It was like, “Yeah motherfuckers, that’s right. I’m laying the pipe here.”

Is there any place today that’s similar to what Chippendales was back then? Well-produced and well-known, a place for women that’s sexualized but still safe?

I’m trying to think. I know Heidi Fleiss was trying to open a brothel for women in Vegas, but I don’t think she’s gotten very far. I think our society’s changing in that way of, like, here’s a commodity, here’s a service, here’s some money, why not? Except what are you going to do when you’re a woman? You’re not going to go on Craigslist and have some dude come over. That’s so scary.

Do you think there’s an essential difference between a male strip club and a female strip club? Could there be a Chippendales for men?

Well, it’s interesting to me that burlesque is coming back. I have a friend who’s a very literary writer, and now she does a burlesque act and it’s very quaint and old-fashioned. It’s interesting how the more in-your-face, shocking and raw sexuality gets, the more we see the pendulum swing back to this antiquated art form where women very gingerly and daintily took of their clothes and they perform as a character and there’s a little scenario there. It’s fascinating to me how that has come back into vogue. I think that’s probably the closest you’ll see to that kind of Folies Bergere show.

San Francisco Chronicle
Sex sells. That much we know. For the Chippendales, it sells seats. It
sells calendars. It exchanges fantasy for cash tips. In “Master of
Ceremonies: A True Story of Love, Murder, Roller Skates &
Chippendales,” David Henry Sterry recalls experiences he had hosting
the popular male strip show during the mid-1980s in New York City. He
describes what he saw onstage, behind the scenes and in the “tiny,
mirrored dressing room … full of beautiful, shaved-smooth Men either
putting on or taking off clothes,” and “the bad-cologne, musky-funk,
semen’n’sweat smell” around him, “all soured from not having had a proper
scrub for a very long time.” The passages are compelling, and often
wickedly raunchy. Unfortunately, Sterry’s overall narrative proves
ultimately disappointing.
At 25, Sterry loaded his possessions into an old green Toyota Corolla,
left San Francisco and moved to New York City. He struggled as an actor
and comedian, lining up auditions when he could and scouring the notices.
One day, on a lark, he answered an ad for the Chippendales; they needed a
master of ceremonies. To his amusement, he got the job. Though he was
“a reasonably pleasant-looking fellow,” he found himself intimidated
from the start by the tremendously toned male dancers, with their
“bulging bulges, mountain peak pecs, 6-pack man-rack abs and
cheekbones for miles.” Next to them, he felt like “a frog.”
The self-consciousness helps to establish his underdog persona, and
endears him to us. We learn to trust his sincerity. Sterry takes us
through the details of his debut with the Chippendales, the adrenaline
that night in the club, “packed and saturated with excited
expectation,” the part he played in keeping the predominantly female
audience entertained, and the stumbles he inevitably made.
(As the master of ceremonies, he was the only one onstage who kept his
clothes on - his costume included a top hat, tuxedo and roller skates -
and the only one who ever talked.)
In quick prose, he re-creates the atmosphere around him. He writes, for
example, of a dancer he calls Slick Rick, who, like the other men, flirted
devilishly with the women in the audience throughout his routine. They in
turn tipped generously. “Hundreds of greenbacks sprout up and wave in
the wind. Slick Rick harvests the cash crop with kisses. A beautiful
bride-to-be shoves bills
into his G-string like it’s a bank and she’s making direct deposits.”
He writes also of the Snowman, who had “this little insinuating smile on
his face, like he knows something I don’t know, and I’m sorta stupid for
not knowing it. He’s the kinda guy who swaggers even when he’s standing
still.” Sterry allows us to see what he saw and to feel what he felt.
What the author doesn’t do, however, is adequately discuss the development
of Chippendales. We want further insight, for example, on how the group
originated and evolved over the years and what its popularity means in a
cultural and social context. He does mention Chippendales director
and choreographer Nick de Noia, of course, and his business partner,
Steve Banerjee. In fact, Sterry begins
the narrative with the day-after police investigation of de Noia’s
mysterious death. But we only get glimpses of the true makeup of their
relationship. “Master of Ceremonies” is a simply subjective account
of the Chippendales,
locked in a particular time and place. We are given plenty of show, but
not nearly enough substance.

I am also happy to announce that Showtime is making a TV series out of Chicken, my first memoir. David Janollari, who among many other things produced the brilliant HBO hit Six Feet Under, is producing. Scott Buck, who wrote for Six Feet Under and currently works on Dexter, has written a breathtaking script which truly captures the delicate balance of dark and light, comedy and tragedy which fill Chicken.

I am also proud to announce that my co-editor Richard Martin “a brilliant and hardworking fellow” and I just sold a book to Soft Skull. We are incredible excited to be in partnership with one of America’s leading independent publishers and count ourselves fortunate indeed to be among the ranks of their esteemed authors. The book is entitled: Ho’s, Hustler’s, Rentboys and Callgirls: Prostitutes Writing on Sex, Love, Work & Money. The publication date is set for Spring 2009.