Because $400 a night isn't the average. You systematically overestimate the amount you're making because you remember the good nights much more vividly than the bad nights. Plus, you're making a mistake no businessman would ever make; confusing revenue with profit. Out of that four hundred dollars comes taxis, clothes, drinks, makeup, tax, the club's take and a whole load of other ongoing expenses. Take those into account and you're making maybe half that.

Because $400 a night, when all the deductions are in, isn't really that much. For a shift that starts at 7pm and goes on to four in the morning, you're making between $20 and $25 an hour, for a job that keeps you on your feet for eight or nine hours at a stretch without breaks and makes you bear all the risks of the business. Sure, on a good night, you're making four times minimum wage. But on a night when the club is dead, the guy washing the glasses will take home more than you do.

Because you have to work late at night. This leaves you tired at the end of your shift, but when you go home to sleep, you can't because it's light and you're body's telling you to wake up. So you take pills to help you get to sleep, or you have a couple more martinis. That isn't exactly the healthiest way to keep body and soul together. Sooner or later, a schedule like this will catch up with you.

Because your personality is affected by what you do all day. Salesmen have salesman attitudes. Journalists are always curious. Cops are never off-duty and teachers can't stop trying to teach. Your current choice of career has you spending eight hours a day hustling for tips, trying to extract a dollar from a half-drunk suit with a smile and a come-on. Maybe you're one of those rare people who can put an impermeable barrier between their work and their home life. But do you want to take that risk?

Because you are putting yourself in a situation where, every night, you are drinking too much and spending too much time in the company of unsuitable men. Have you ever considered what kind of a guy has the money, let alone the free time, to spend every evening in a strip club? Sure, maybe these self-confident guys who seem to have huge bulging rolls of ten dollar bills, but who don't appear to need to get up for work in the morning, may all happen to be millionaire playboys, heirs to a jam-making fortune. But I think you ought to consider the possibility that you are spending your time flirting and teasing with people a little bit heavier than you may be used to dealing with.

Because these places are full of drugs, all the time. You think you're the exception, that you won't be affected by the ubiquitous pills and lines, that even on those nights when you're half-dead on your feet, you'll never be tempted by a little sniff of something to make the evening pass a little quicker. Maybe you're right. But once again, you seem to be making a decision to surround yourself with dangers in return for what looks like an insufficent reward.

Because the women who work with you are not the kind of people you would otherwise choose as workmates. Which is not to say that they're bad people, or that they are not in some circumstances fine company. But you know as well as I do that the culture of your dressing room is one of eating disorders, drug problems, abusive boyfriends, childhood traumas and deep psychological scars. Which might be healed with the therapy that $400 a night could buy, but the money never seems to be spent that way -- I wonder why not? Because attitudes are contagious, and because you don't want to be like the people who you spend half your nocturnal waking hours with.

Because, in the final analysis, you are young and foolish, and $400 is a hell of a lot when you see it in your hand, all crumpled and lovely, a stack of bills about an inch thick. Believe me, I know how nice it is to make a quick four hundred dollars -- that's why I still bet on horses. But the danger is that you make that daily does of cash into your whole ambition; that your hopes for the future recede, that your plans never seem to come about, that your entire future is made up of dancing for four hundred dollars. Again, maybe you're the exception; the odd one who's saving her money away to dance herself through college and who means it. But it seems a hell of a risk to be taking. How many of those dollars you've earned, do you have in your savings account right now?

Because, and when I've made this point I'll shut up, because I feel like I'm lecturing you, nobody is as sexually liberated as you claim yourself to be. Not the hippy chicks in the sixties, not the Led Zep groupies, not Janis Joplin herself. Everyone values their sexuality; everyone thinks of it as special. When you look at me and tell me that you have no problem with imitating a lover twenty times a night, of displaying yourself sexually for a ten dollar bill, that it makes no difference to you to think of yourself as the masturbatory fantasy of a crumpled, sweaty old man on a business trip ... when you say these things, my friend, I'm afraid I flat out don't believe you. Deep inside yourself, you know that it is a shameful thing to do what you do; just as the hollow-eyed pale face men who shovel bills at you in the hope of a glimpse of your labia know that it is a shameful thing which they do.

The choice is yours, my friend. But remember, you will have to live with it.