In 1965, Mary’s became the first club in the Northwest to feature topless dancers. Though it moved to a new space in 2021, Mary’s remains open 365 days per year, and the family business has continued to lead the industry, 60 years on. As Jason Cohen, writing as the husband of a Mary’s dancer, elaborates in this 2007 article, at Mary’s, dancing can be a job like any other. 

Let’s go to Mary’s Club. Even if you’ve never been, you know someone who has, whether for a 21st birthday celebration, a bachelor (or bachelorette) party or a routine night on the town. You also know exactly where it is: on the one remaining gritty block of SW Broadway, mere steps from the august Benson but next-door neighbors with the low-income Stewart Hotel. Its blue-script and pink-accented neon sign is unmissable from Burnside, a fixture of the downtown night. In a city where strip clubs are as ubiquitous as Starbucks—and are certainly more welcome, at least to the “Keep Portland Weird” brigade—Mary’s was the first topless bar in all the Northwest, dating back to 1965. It hasn’t changed much since then: It’s a gin mill and a dive, tiny, unpretentious and in no way like the glitzy pleasure palaces of popular imagination. Those strip clubs are Showgirls. Mary’s is a Robert Altman movie.

Unless it’s Friday or Saturday night, when admission costs two bucks, there’s no cover charge and no one at the door, least of all a burly, blingy, headset-wearing bouncer. If it’s after 9 p.m., the waitress and bartender will likely be 58-year-old owner Vicki Keller and one of her two daughters—Virginia Anderson, 31, and Tracy Johnson, 40—or the two sisters together. Should you do a double-take when one of them begins a sentence with a phrase you simply don’t expect to hear while watching women peel off lingerie—“Hey Mom!”—you’ll hardly be the first to do so.

Mary’s has been run and staffed exclusively by women since 1984, and owned by the same local family for over 50 years—both rarities in an industry that’s generally run by men, for men, under ownership that’s corporate, shady, absentee or all of the above. In 1954, Vicki Keller’s father, Roy, purchased what was then a piano bar and merchant seaman’s hangout (“Mary” was the first owner’s wife), a history that’s reflected—or rather, fluoresced—in black-light murals on the walls. Keller retired in 1982 and died at the age of 90 a year ago this month; he’s remembered with a plaque above the ATM that bears his leisure-suited visage over the motto he lived by: It’s nice to be important, but more important to be nice.

Now, have you got a dollar? Maybe two or three?

It’s not for what you’re thinking (though you’ll need money to tip as well). Mary’s doesn’t have a DJ or an announcer, just a jukebox built into the wall stage-left. This means the dancers get to choose their own soundtrack, often from CDs they burned themselves, but also that they have to feed the meter—four songs for a dollar, a single at a time (one of the dancers’ favorite parlor games is calculating what the bar makes off the jukebox in a year). It’s a fiduciary obligation that most customers will gladly shoulder, ideally covering a few hours’ worth of songs at once, lest the short breaks between sets resemble OPB pledge-drive appeals (albeit with more exciting corsets).

Oi! Oi! Oi! …

And here’s a perky blonde wearing a green-sequined bikini with a silver medal of Saint Christopher around her neck, slithering to AC/DC’s “T.N.T.” She is Beth—not an alias, in her case, though of course for reasons of security, anonymity or just performing arts tradition, most strippers use stage names. A 17-year Mary’s veteran, Beth is one of the three performers who’ll be getting naked here tonight.

Women to the left of me, and women to the right…

She’s on a stage that’s three feet off the floor, with one brass pole, a cushioned wall and mirrored tiles overhead. Six metal-and-black-vinyl chairs surround it, with counter space for drinks beneath the lip where people leave the dancers money. This is the tip rack, or just “the rack”; the barstool closest to the stage is called “the hot seat,” its occupant fixed eyes-to-thighs with all the evening’s entertainment. Posted on the back wall stage-right is a small cluster of signs, most of them handwritten in the sort of too-neat homey script you might find on an eight-grade homeroom bulletin board: Touching of any kind between dancers or patrons is prohibited by law. Strictly enforced. And: Dancers work for tips only. And: Ask about table dances. And finally “NO PHOTOGRAPHY. NO CAMERAS. NO CELL PHONE CAMERAS” (you’d be amazed how often first-time visitors unthinkingly attempt to breach this latter dictate).

So lock up your daughter, lock up your wife… 

A twentysomething man and woman are camped out at the rack; couples, both gay and straight, are as commonplace in Portland strip clubs as a bicycle commuter is on Portland streets, as are all-female and mixed-gender groups. Four dudes fill the remaining chairs, shouting out the “Oi!”s with AC/DC. Soon Beth is wearing nothing but her pink plastic high heels and, yes, a smile, which is big and toothy and in no way coy or pasted-on. Her all-American charm is such that she does not come off as sexual in the pornographic sense, or even as blatantly seductive. It’s more like, “Look at me! I’m cute, naked and having fun!”

“I love you!” someone yells out from the back.

“Are you guys celebrating something?” Beth asks the group of four.

“Life!” comes the reply.

Roy Keller’s smoky bistro on SW Broadway is a part of Portland I didn’t realize existed.… (The featured dancer] brought to my mind only two questions: “Can this really be staid Portland?,” and, “Why hasn’t the joint been raided?” 

—Doug Baker, Oregon Journal, 1965

Full disclosure: I’m married to a stripper. But no…she wasn’t working when I met her. In fact, I’m truly not a strip-club guy. I’d been to exactly three between the ages of 21 and 31, each time in the company of a more enthusiastic friend, and have gone maybe half a dozen times the past eight years, always riding shotgun with my wife (I’ll admit, it beats watching Grey’s Anatomy). One of those excursions was to Mary’s, and it was instantly apparent that the place is sui generis. Last year, I wrote about Roy Keller’s funeral (“King of Clubs,” in the September 2006 issue of Portland Monthly); soon after that my wife became a Mary’s dancer. So you can hardly count me as a disinterested observer, of Mary’s or the industry in general. You certainly won’t find me presuming that all strippers are exploited, Anna Nicole Smith–like screw-ups, or that strip clubs are a thorn in the Rose City.

And with apologies to the late Mr. Baker, I’m hardly alone around these parts. In 1965 (the year Keller took Mary’s topless), the city was no stranger to burlesque. For a time in the early 1950s, the legendary Tempest Storm owned (and headlined at) the Capitol Theater on SW Morrison, but go-go girls who went (almost) completely starkers were a new phenomenon, referred to as “nude discotheque.” Baker found it to be a “ho-hum kind of entertainment,” but he also knew that the times, they were a-changin’. “It’s one man’s opinion that the discotheque joints won’t last six months,” the columnist opined not long after visiting Mary’s, “but then, you must remember I’m the guy who said rock ’n’ roll wouldn’t last that long.”

Now, 42 years later, any downtown hotel guest can get to half a dozen “discotheques” by foot. East of the Willamette, there’s a strip club up the street from every bridge south of the Steel. Take SE Powell Boulevard out to SE 82nd Avenue, and you’ll pass another four or five, including Devil’s Point, the home of Sunday “Stripparaoke.” Broke but craving steak? The Acropolis on SE McLoughlin is famous for its $5 slabs of beef. Up by the airport there’s Exotica International, apparently a welcoming and sympathetic place if you play power forward for the Blazers. It’s not an urban legend: With around 50 clubs (plus at least another seven in the suburbs), Portland not only takes the “most strip clubs per capita” crown, but has more strip clubs, period, than such metropolises as Dallas, San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Credit for that achievement ultimately goes to Article I, Section 8 of the Oregon Constitution, which grants Oregonians greater free-speech rights than the federal First Amendment, and to a state Supreme Court that has firmly and repeatedly defined both nude dancing and sexual content as protected free expression. In the first two decades after Mary’s became a strip club, the law required pasties; if one fell off, or if a vice cop found a single pubic hair protruding from a dancer’s G-string, the club could get slapped with a fine. But in a 1985 ruling, the court removed the pasties and the G-strings (pubic hair has also disappeared, but that’s another story), while still allowing all-nude clubs to serve beer and hard liquor.

This turned strippers into the equivalent of folk singers, big-screen TVs or half-priced happy-hour nachos: another way to get people into your joint. A few years later, dancers around town stopped getting paid sub-minimum wage (like waitresses and bartenders) and began working entirely for tips, as independent contractors. Now any little tavern could put a few planks of wood down in the corner and reinvent itself as a strip club for no cost and very little effort, while the places that were already strip clubs started taking on more dancers and adding stages. It’s the free market in action.

Portland is not just famous for strippers—we’re also famous for “stripsters,” i.e., strippers crossed with hipsters. Because most (though by no means all) Portland strip clubs emphasize onstage performance and (theoretically) obey the state’s no-contact laws—essentially the difference between an eyes-only table dance (allowed) and a crotch-grinding lap dance (not)—all you really need to strip in PDX is a core belief that getting naked in and of itself is neither wrong nor sinful. Which, in a town of hippies, students, punks, progressives, third-wave feminists and epicures, makes for a deep pool of potential personnel. Offstage and clothed, many Portland strippers aren’t all that different from the folks who pull that perfect macchiato, shave truffles at a favorite restaurant or help brew the local beers—independent-minded people in their 20s and early 30s who enjoy creative chaos, value flexibility and most likely devote the bulk of their remaining time and energy to an aesthetic or bohemian pursuit, be it writing, activism, painting, poetry or rock ’n’ roll.

“Any artist is going to be OK with dropping their pants,” asserts Viva Las Vegas, a Mary’s Club stripper who used to edit Exotic magazine and is one of Portland’s best-known dancers. To her, stripping is no more or less respectable than being in a film at Cannes, which in fact she was—Gus Van Sant’s three-minute short First Kiss, which screened at the festival in May (she also made the trip to France, sporting a dress by local designer Adam Arnold). A graduate of Williams College and a longtime writer for the Portland Mercury and Village Voice, Viva laid bare the details of her Zoloft prescription (and suppressed libido) in a 2006 essay for The New York Times, and she has fronted a punk-rock band, Coco Cobra and the Killers. Her signature line upon receiving a tip is, Thank you for supporting the arts tonight. “I’ve always been an actress, a musician and a dancer,” she says. “I don’t see stripping as much different from ballet, or Solid Gold dancers. Degas’s models, Toulouse-Lautrec’s models—they were all considered whores in their time.”

Viva is also a former Clarklewis employee, having been more or less hired off the stage by Michael Hebb and chefs Morgan Brownlow and Tommy Habetz. She’s a poster child for the many ways that Portland’s strip-club culture is inseparable from its creative culture. When Anthony Bourdain visited Portland in the spring of 2006 for his Travel Channel show No Reservations, he asked a group of tattooed cooks what made the city so simpatico for kitchen pros. “There’s a lot of bars here; there’s a lot of strip clubs here,” was the first answer he got. (What, you were expecting “fresh ingredients”?) The distance between Mary’s and First Thursday is also not that far: Duct-tape artist Mona Superhero (a burlesque dancer and stripper) and photographer Marne Lucas (who shot the pictures that accompany this article) are among the many women who were part of Danzine, a nonprofit public health organization for sex workers founded by former Portland dancer Teresa Dulce.

In the music world, the tattooed, pierced and often gothic women who became popular across the nation on the now-California-based Suicide Girls soft-core Web site can be traced back to the downtown rock club Dante’s, where the “Sinferno Cabaret” continues to mash up punk rock with burlesque and other weirdness every Sunday night. Dante’s other pride and joy, Storm Large, is a friend to Vicki Keller and the club, as is Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, while Courtney Love danced there (as “Michelle”) in the ’80s. On a return visit in 2001, the widow Cobain scrawled a message on a Mary’s postcard that’s now part of the club’s homegrown wall of fame: I boght [sic] my first guitar showing my teeny little titties here & y’all were very nice to me. ♥️ thanks,

The most entertaining Portland strippers tend to be Carole Lombard types, cynical and screwball, rather than generic sexual objects. “Laughing is so totally OK,” says a dancer by the name of Blaze, who’s known for lighting cigarettes onstage using her toes, in a variety of seemingly impossible positions. She’s one of two contortionists at Mary’s; the other is Satori, who will tell anyone who asks that she got her breast implants on September 12, 2001. “My mom calls them my tribute to the Twin Towers,” she deadpans. The first time I saw Satori work, she danced to “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” then explained the Righteous Brothers to the rack. “They’re the same ones who did the famous record of ‘Unchained Melody,’” she said. “Didn’t you see Ghost?”

“I haven’t seen that movie front and back,” one of the customers replied. “But now I wish I had so I could talk to you about it.”

Mary’s dancers don’t get naked and engage in playful banter because they dig you, but then chefs don’t cook you dinner ’cause they love you either. It doesn’t mean the food doesn’t taste good, or that the transaction isn’t sincere. “Girls are more friendly here,” says a dancer by the name of Nikki. “They will hang out and talk to you whether they’re going to work you for a dollar or not.” At the same time, most strippers are perfectly blunt about the way they make a living. “You’re showing your pussy to strangers for a dollar,” says Sadie, a former Mary’s dancer. “It’s the most ridiculous job on the earth, right?”

Vicki Keller didn’t consciously set out to make Mary’s a place that gives teeth to the oft-impugned ideal of the empowered stripper, but to many of the women there, that’s what it’s become.

Some of the very conditions that make Portland good for dancers also make it tough. For one thing, supply exceeds demand. On a busy night at one of the city’s more upscale venues, 20 women might be competing for the same dollars, all paying a “house fee” $20 to $50 (in bigger cities it can be $100 or more). Plus, they’re obligated to tip the DJ, the bouncers and the bar staff. Strippers make most of their money hustling $20 table dances (dancing on the stage is just a way to advertise the goods) and are expected to get customers to buy them marked-up drinks. It’s also not unheard-of for male managers or booking agents to promise good shifts in exchange for “dates.” And of course there are Anna Nicole Smith–like screw-ups in the industry: drama queens and drug users you wouldn’t leave alone with your purse in the dressing room.

At Mary’s, the dancers tip out 10 percent of what they earn (anywhere from $50 on a slow Monday afternoon to $500 on a packed Friday night) to the bartender and waitress, with no house fee at all. The entire staff is female, and there are never more than two dancers on the day and evening shifts (with three working after 9 p.m.). All but the most veteran dancers work no more than three five-hour shifts a week, both to spread the wealth and give the customers variety; those who want to earn some extra cash or work full-time often dance at another club. Over the years, Vicki Keller has had rules regarding everything from when to take it off (the dancer must be naked by song three) to drug use at work (zero tolerance); party girls or dilettantes don’t last, and thieving is unheard of. By adult-entertainment industry standards, Mary’s is a place where women feel supported, happy and secure: when Viva Las Vegas’s therapist suggested she might try visualization exercises, her “nourishing and womblike” environment was Mary’s. “I just love it,” Viva says. “It’s red-lit and cozy and just filled with people I love.”

“It’s where strippers go to die,” jokes Satori, who danced at nearly a dozen other local clubs before landing at Mary’s six years ago. Relatively speaking, this makes the 29-year-old a rookie: Five women have been at Mary’s for at least a decade (with a few creeping toward two decades) and can no longer fathom working for anyone other than Keller, “I dare say I’m closer to her than I am to my own mother,” says Nikki, who’s been dancing since 1986. “She’s an incredible woman.”

The woman the older regulars refer to as “Miss Vicki” is a doe-eyed grandmother of 10 in a bar apron who rules over Mary’s with a soft heart and an iron fist. Patrons of all ages flirt with her as surely as they do the strippers, while nasty drunks don’t stand a chance. “I’ve seen bar fights where there are chairs thrown and she’s like, ‘GET OUT ON THE STREET NOW,’” says Viva Las Vegas. “And everyone’s like, OK, Mom.” Outside the club, you’ll often find Keller at a dancer’s rock show, gallery exhibition or dragon boat race; every Christmas, in addition to throwing a party, she writes a poem to all the dancers and employees:

Another year, 2003
We’re still a happy family 
Another day another dollar while some of you have become a scholar 
Schedules, school, work and fun, while we all make some mon.!
Most days are happy but some are sad
But all in all, by the week it’s not so bad!
We are still tolerating the basement floods, 
And a few of our customer duds
But it will get better after while
If we always remember to keep a smile! 
I know we will make it into 2004 
And hopefully many more! 
Thanks to all of you
Without your love what would I do?

At the end of a shift, Mary’s can feel like a sorority, the dancers, bartenders and waitresses exchanging hugs and saying, “I love you.” One night a regular was sitting on a barstool next to Beth, recounting something that had happened last time he was in the club: “I was talking to your mom…” he started, before realizing that Beth was not actually one of Vicki Keller’s daughters. But she may as well be. All the Mary’s women may as well be.

Keller is especially proud of all the dancers who’ve stripped their way through college or grad school, and makes no apologies for the nature of the business.

“I was raised in a numbers family,” she says. “So you think, OK, do I be a ‘respectable human being’ and go work at Macy’s at $9 an hour, or do I go to Mary’s Club and make $59 an hour? Personally I don’t see anything wrong with it—so I’d skip Macy’s!”

At the same time, Keller wonders whether her daughters would be better off if they had chosen other paths. “Sometimes I feel bad that I lured them into this,” she confesses, sounding like the dancers—and there were several—who would no sooner tell me how much they liked their job than assert that they wouldn’t want their daughters doing it. I came to realize that this response was not so much the reflexive hypocrisy of stoner parents telling their kid to keep away from pot as it was the universal wish that the next generation have a better lot in life.

Yet because of Mary’s Club, the blue-collar Keller clan has become upwardly mobile. Roy Keller worked as a welder at the Kaiser shipyards on Swan Island before he purchased his first bar (he owned seven in his life, only two of which were strip clubs). Roy’s son, Jerry, went to work at Northwest Portland’s ESCO steel mill straight out of high school, started at Mary’s two months after he turned 21 (in 1965) and, save for two years in the military, including one in Vietnam, stayed there until 1984. He is now a corporate pilot, flying private jets around the world; his wife, Cherie, still tends bar at Mary’s. Vicki was a grocery checker and a butcher-counter wrapper before joining her dad and brother back in 1979; now that she’s the boss, she works six days a week almost without fail, but when she wants to take a Mexican vacation or attend the Miss Exotic World burlesque convention in Las Vegas, she can afford to.

And actually, in March 2000 Vicki’s daughter Virginia went out and got the sort of job her mother figured she’d be better off with: a position in small-business “customer care” at Qwest Communications. She was 24, the never-married single mother of a 3-year-old, and had been at Mary’s pretty much since turning 21. One reason she left was that being a Keller didn’t get her special treatment—as the shortest-tenured employee at a bar where people stay for years, she couldn’t land the money-making shifts. But during 18 months at Qwest, Virginia found she couldn’t stand the drudgery of office work, and she really hated having her son in day care five days a week, 10 hours a day.

“I just went, OK, this might be for everybody, but it’s not for me,” she says. “I was like, ‘Mom, you have any room for me back there again?’” By the time she returned to Mary’s on September 10, 2001 (that’s right: same week Satori got her boobs), one of the bartenders had left. She nabbed some of the more rewarding late-night and weekend shifts and has gone on to buy a house and a car, as well as have a second child. “I don’t know what I would have done with myself had it not been for one little move my grandpa made,” she says. “I still consider him my boss.”

After midnight on a crowded Saturday, Viva Las Vegas walks offstage and grabs my arm. “Have you ever met Beth’s kids?” she asks.

Coming from a woman whom I just saw naked, this should probably be a disconcerting question. But not at Mary’s, what with Roy Keller’s granddaughter washing bar glasses two feet in front of me, his daughter busing tables, a dancer’s girlfriend working the door and a dancer’s husband—i.e., me—wielding a pen and notepad at the bar. Why wouldn’t Beth’s son and daughter be here for a round if she’s not working?

Like Vicki Keller’s children (and now her children’s children), Beth’s kids—Elise Stewart, 23, and Mikeal Stewart, 22—grew up on the club’s periphery. They can remember ducking in during the Grand Floral Parade to use the bathroom, hands over their eyes; eating with their mom in the adjacent restaurant (one run by the Kellers, now leased to El Grillo) and attending the annual company picnic. For several years, that event was even hosted by their mother, as their home near Scappoose had a bit of acreage. When he was in high school, Mikeal’s friends invited themselves over for one, and were severely disappointed that it was just like any other barbecue. This fact did not, however, stop his buddies from teasing him with a parody of the Fountains of Wayne song “Stacy’s Mom.” (Stewy’s mom, has got it goin’ on…)

Beth became a mother very young and very fast—she was married at 17, had Elise at 18 and Mikeal a mere 8 1/2 months later, and was divorced at 20. She waitressed at a (long-gone) Portland strip club for three years, but dancers made a lot more money, and the job wasn’t too odious—she sees stripping as the female equivalent of manual labor. “When guys get out of high school and don’t go on to further their education, they can get a job working construction,” she says. “They’re not going to become super wealthy, but they can make a decent amount of money. They can raise a family.”

Along the way, Beth earned her paralegal certificate, “but I went nuts working in an office. I decided to stick with dancing because I was making decent money and I got to spend more time with my kids. It wasn’t a bad job.” That’s mostly because she treated it like a job, rather than a lifestyle: “I don’t overparty,” she says. “I’m not out doing crazy things. I go to work; I do my job; I come home; I clean the house; I go to the grocery store.”

“You look at my mother [at home], and you would never, ever guess,” says Elise. “She’s like, Susie Homemaker.”

“Garden this, garden that,” adds Mikeal.

Certainly, being the child of a stripper has its challenges. Take Your Daughter to Work Day? Not an option. In her sophomore year, Elise’s best friend’s mom, a Seventh-Day Adventist, forbade her daughter to set foot in Beth’s house (the same thing happened to Vicki Keller). And during those moody teenage years, Elise wasn’t above playing the stripper card herself: “Half of Portland has seen you naked!” she’d yell, trying to stake out the moral high ground in an argument about her social life.

But even when they weren’t talking, Elise would come home between her after-school job and her evening dance-team practice to find Beth waiting in the driveway with a Tupperware container of that night’s dinner. Then Beth would go to work.

“I have nothing but respect for her because it’s not an easy profession,” Elise says. “She made her choices and she stuck with it, and she’s provided a great lifestyle for us.”

Even with her kids out of the house, Beth remains remarkably industrious—whereas your boho strippers and your college coeds dance because they only have to work 15–20 hours a week, Beth has always treated it like any other full-time job. She now lives in Salem and commutes to Portland five or six days every week, sometimes working Red Bull–fueled 10-hour double shifts at Mary’s and the similarly low-key Riverside Corral in Sellwood. Working closer to home hasn’t occurred to her; being a member of the Mary’s Club extended family is what keeps her in the business.

“It’s a great little place,” Beth says. “When I first started I never thought I would be there for 17 years. Last year I had my 40th birthday, and it’s like, OK, I have to stop sooner or later. But I still make decent money, and I still enjoy it. I dread the day I have to leave.”