Life after Hamilton Strip waits for Ed
Co-worker Tom lined up brandy shooters, and several Hamilton Strip dancers stood behind as Ed’s hair tie came off — I don’t know if he uncinched it or they did — and down poured his trademark ponytail.
His long white locks reached below his shoulders. I think maybe it was the first time any of them had seen the ponytail freerange, but then Ed had never retired before, so it was a special occasion.
“Let it loose, Eddie, let your hair down,” they chanted gleefully, and he smiled a smile so wide that the end of it would have been as hard to find as a rainbow’s.
Ed Prociuk has clocked out at Hamilton Strip. Some still call it Hanrahan’s. After 40 years of serving drinks, beer and meals at what is now the city’s last strip club, he was being served.
The other day he put in his last shift. Customers came by to pay their regards, buy him a drink, give him gift bags. His co-workers — dancers, kitchen staff, DJ, other servers — couldn’t say enough good things, so fond are they of a guy who’s always been there for them, encouraging, helpful, funny, respectful.
They brought out a beautiful cake.
“He’s the nicest man I ever met,” says LA, which stands for Laurel-Ann. She was sitting at Ed’s table. No way she’d miss his last shift. “I met him here,” she adds, looking around the darkened room, with an Eminem song blasting out a beat in the background.
LA was dancing back then and travelling. Ed was waiting tables. She left dancing in 1985 and also, by this time, a marriage that wasn’t working. How great a guy is Ed? She came back for him.
“He invited me home, for a cooked meal,” LA remembers. “He had 10 points right there. Most guys, if they bring you home, it’s not to feed you.”
And what was it about LA, I ask Ed; why did he pick her? “I didn’t,” he says, looking at her in an “only have eyes for you” kind of way. “She picked me.”
Ed, a Mohawk College communication arts graduate who was on student council executive, says he never planned on the career he ended up having.
But he didn’t like what was out there job-wise in communication arts when he left college, so he worked tables to tide himself over, got a job at the Collins in Dundas, then from there (a tavern or two in between) went to Hanrahan’s, as it was called.
He enjoyed the job, not because it was a strip club per se, but it was a union bar when he started and because, one shift after another, the work suited him. He liked many of the people he met, LA being an obvious example. And everyone, it seems, liked Ed — his sense of humour, his good nature.
“It’s been like Groundhog Day,” he says — the days often similar, one to the other, but each at the moment always seeming uniquely like the first time he was living it. Suddenly it’s 40 years later, he’s 70 years old (he just celebrated that birthday) and now retired.
That retirement seems an accent in a larger fade. The changes he’s seen — drinking and driving laws, smoking clampdowns, changes in social habits and tastes.
“This is it,” he says of the city’s strip scene. “There used to be 13 at one point.” And the city won’t issue a licence for any more strip clubs.
What he’d like to see is a revival of a more burlesque style to the entertainment. In her wonderful Spectator article on Ed’s 25th at the club in 2003, Mary K. Nolan recounted his memories of some favourites who came through: Chesty Morgan, Raven La Croix, Little Oral Annie and Dianne DeVille, “the Cadillac of Strippers.”
LA agrees. When she was dancing, the burlesque is what appealed to her. “I must’ve had about $20,000 worth of costumes. It was like Broadway. It was the best job I ever had.”
(And she’s had many. After dancing, she went back to school and worked in baby photography, for the Big Sisters Association, and as company manager at Opera Ontario.)
Both Ed and LA say they saw relatively little in the way of real trouble during their respective careers, despite the stereotypes of the culture.
“But I do have a lovely scar,” he says with a wry smile, from some broken glass.
Now they’re both looking forward to more time with their six great-grandchildren and Ziggy, the “spoiled” pug who gets wag-oned around, legs being too short for all the “urban hiking” they like to do.