Two links today. First, “At Stadium Club, young, professional women party while others strip,” from my hometown daily:
It’s Friday evening in D.C., and three women arrive at the Stadium Club, a converted warehouse in Northeast. It is flanked by rundown brick buildings and a gritty car repair station. Rough gravel replaces sidewalks, and the street is largely deserted. Other than the club, the only sign of life is a gas station a quarter of a mile away. Stadium is like a diamond in the rough, but in the way tarnished silverware shines when placed next to plastic spoons.The women go inside.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be this nice,” says Rashanda Robertson, 33, an Atlanta native who’s in the city for graduate school.
Tonight is her first visit to a strip club. To her left and right are clusters of women, outnumbering the men. Women in heels. Women who teach. Women who advocate as social workers. Professional women. Heterosexual women. Women just like her.
Unlike many strip clubs — which are narrow, dark and dominated by men — Stadium, with color-changing chandeliers lighting up 14,000 square feet, has become a chic hot spot for young African American women. They host bachelorette and birthday parties here, buy rounds of drinks and chitchat while other women work the pole. The club is a bucket-list item for black yuppies. It falls somewhere between Dupont Circle day parties and concerts at The Park at 14th club. ...
“Sixty percent of the club on any night is women,” Redding says.
and here’s the New York Times, “‘The Waltons’ Meets ‘Modern Family’”:
I AM now a statistic. Earlier this summer, the United States Census Bureau reported that the number of adult children living in their parents’ households had increased by 1.2 million between 2007 and 2010. Shared households accounted for 18.7 percent of all American households in 2010, up from 17 percent in 2007. Most of those children were between age 25 and 34, but I had suddenly joined their ranks at a considerably older age.In August 2010, as my husband, Daniel Rivkin, and I approached our 50th birthdays, we were suddenly forced to move into my parents’ home in Michigan with our three teenage children and dog. Never mind that my older brother, who had lost his job the previous year, was already in residence in one of their basement bedrooms — my parents’ three-story rambling colonial home quickly accommodated us all. ...
Without the emotional support of my extended family (I also have more than a dozen cousins who live in town), I don’t know how we would have readjusted. But I also found it extremely awkward initially when new friends learned of our living arrangement.
more (and I found this link at Rod Dreher’s blog, where there are more such stories—and more discontented ones!—in the comments)
