Tera Patrick - Sinner Takes All

I felt like I didn’t get enough sleep. Looking forward, believe it or not, to a little travel. Digital Playground is trying to fight me again. Ugh. It never ends. Anyway, we picked up Sam and are having a fun day. Thank you God for everything.

I had a nice day. I went to a new Pilates mat class, “Happy Now Flat Belly.” I loved it. I miss my baby so much. Chopper and I are on our way to the airport to meet his trainer. Chopper goes to school for three weeks. I’m worried about court and I hope it all goes well. Thank you God for everything.

After things started settling down after my return from St. Vincent’s and my medicine started kicking in, I started feeling strong again. The fog was lifting and I was back in fighting-for-my-rights mode. Evan wasn’t only my rock through all of this, but he also took over as my manager. Evan has managed his band Biohazard for years, so managing wasn’t something new to him and I trusted him.

Evan had a very important thought one night. He said to me, “You’re obviously a very powerful commodity. If you weren’t so special and worth so much, these scumbags wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep you out of the business. So there’s something here, and I really think we should get you back in business on your own terms.” It was hard for me to see the light at the end of the tunnel at the time, but Evan knew what was at stake and that’s why he fought so hard for me.

Evan started making phone calls and lining up allies. We needed people to be in the Tera Patrick camp if we were going to give my career another shot. Evan was calling on anyone and everyone he knew in the industry to get me work. One of his first calls was to his old friend Dan Davis, editor in chief of the adult magazine Genesis . They made me masthead publisher and gave me a column, which I titled “Teravision.” I was honored, and it was yet another way to express myself. It was a great chance to use my brains instead of just my body. It proved that I wasn’t just some dumb porn chick, but that I could actually write and had something to say. I discovered a new talent that I never knew I had in me and felt proud that I could share my experiences in a positive light. And it paid well and we needed the cash. Over the next six years, I wrote approximately seventy columns, appeared on the cover a dozen times, and was featured in a bunch of layouts.

The next ally we found was my old friend Teri Weigel, the former Playboy Playmate and porn star who took me under her wing at my first AVN convention. She’d been in the industry for a while and I needed some sage advice on what to do next.

Teri asked me, “How are you making money right now?”

“I’m not,” I said.

“You don’t dance?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean? Are you doing feature dancing?” she asked.

Unlike many other porn stars, I didn’t come from the world of strip clubs. In fact, I’d only been to a strip club with an ex-boyfriend a few times. It wasn’t really my thing. I always thought that stripping was something you do in order to get into porn and not something you do once you’re already a porn star like me.

“Feature dancing? What is that?” I asked.

“Oh, honey,” said Teri. “When you’re a huge star like yourself, you can make a ton of money doing feature dance shows. It’s notches above stripping and you can make ten times the amount of money a regular stripper makes. You need to call this guy, Tony Lee. He’s going to introduce you to a whole new world.”

Tony Lee is the number-one booking agent for adult film stars on the feature dancing circuit. Evan had already spent all of the money he made from the last Biohazard tour, as well as his music publishing advance, on my legal bills, and we were running out of money. (We ended up spending about $300,000 to fight the suit.)

I soon found out that feature dancers are essentially special strippers. If you have a name and a following, the club makes a special event of your dancing engagement. You’re paid a guaranteed fee. You get to keep 100 percent of the money on the stage and you do a meet-and-greet after your show where you sell the fans your merchandise: autographed photos, DVDs, posters, T-shirts, etc. And you get to keep all of that money too. It sounded like the perfect way to make some fast cash.

Evan called up Tony immediately. “Is Tony Lee there? This is Evan Seinfeld.”

“This is Tony Lee. What can I do for you?” he answered.

“I’m Tera Patrick’s manager, and Tera Patrick has expressed an interest in dancing,” said Evan.

“Can you hold on for a second?” Tony said very businesslike. Tony must have just placed the phone down without hitting the hold button because the next thing Evan hears is this loud, “Whooooo hoooooo!” on the other end of the phone.

Tony got back on the phone, tried to play it cool, and said, “So, Tera Patrick is interested in dancing? This is the phone call I’ve been waiting for my entire career.”

“There’s one catch,” Evan said.

“What’s that?”

“We’re in litigation with Digital Playground and—” Evan said.

Tony interrupted, “I know all about it and I don’t care. I would love to work with you guys.”

Tony Lee became my next ally, and he soon booked me on my first feature-dancing gig. He promised me that I would make more money than any other feature dancer ever did dancing and that I would be paying my legal bills and have money left over.

There was just one more problem. I didn’t know how to dance. Tony wasn’t concerned about that. He hooked me up with someone who could show me the ropes: Lisa Ann, a performer in the business who now runs a talent agency. Lisa Ann gave me a one-day crash course in what feature dancing is all about.

Our first stop was a sleazy lingerie store in Hollywood. She helped me pick pieces that were easy to get off and I ended up going with a four-piece outfit that consisted of a bra, panties, an overcoat/robe, a skirt, and, of course, five-inch stripper heels. I had one piece of clothing to take off for each of the four songs I would dance to. In the early days, I danced in themed costumes, such as a French maid, various schoolgirl outfits, and a few versions of a biker babe—one in leather and one in denim. My idea was to act out men’s fantasies with these various personalities.

After we suited up, Lisa took me to the Spearmint Rhino strip club in Van Nuys to watch some of the girls there dance and hopefully pick up some tips. I took mental notes as the girls would twirl around the pole and do their splits on the shiny stage. I was inspired and excited at the idea of being the girl up there twirling around in fancy lingerie for a captive live audience. It was so different from performing for the camera.

I was intimidated by the strippers’ more advanced moves, i.e., the upside-down pole work, splits, and other fancy footwork. I didn’t know how I was going to pull off all that stripper trickery onstage. “Don’t worry about it. You’re a big star,” Lisa Ann explained. “The fans just want to see you. You don’t need to impress them with complicated moves or fancy pole work. You just need to get up there and do what comes naturally.”

That took the pressure off. Still, I practiced in our Brooklyn loft the night before my first gig, which was at the Admiral Theatre in Chicago. I pretended there was a pole and practiced how I would walk around it and what kind of simple little twirls I could do. I just kept reminding myself that if I didn’t know what to do, the stripper pole in the middle of that stage would be my safety net. I thought out all of the ways I would use the pole to my advantage: I could hang on it, walk around it holding on with one hand, slide down it with the pole going between my butt, lick the pole seductively, etc. But I had no real routine to speak of. In retrospect, maybe I could’ve prepared a little more.