Strip City
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.10.01 | 8:53 PM ET
When journalist/stripper Lily Burana got engaged to be married, she decided to ditch the latter career to focus more on the former. But she didn’t give up stripping cold turkey. She took the stage name Barbie Faust and embarked on a year-long farewell tour of strip clubs across the US, a trip she chronicles in her new book Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America. “The idea of spending a year stripping my way around the country, a fleeting fantasy of mine, has resurfaced,” she writes in the opening chapter. “I’ve met several women who have done it, and I envied their adventures, their courage to hare off to a strange town with little more than a bag full of costumes and their own curiosity. Now, the thought of taking such a trip myself comes to me all the time.” Strip City has received raves from Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times and Salon’s Charles Taylor, who writes, “If Lily Burana stripped as well as she writes, I can imagine sitting at the tipping bar, watching her happily for hours…[she] brings to life both the world of stripping, the dancers and customers, as well as the essence of the places she visits.”