Dancing on a Prayer

Why a struggling strip club opened its doors to God

- DREW NELLES

AT THE MANOR Adult Entertainment Complex, the only strip club in Guelph, Ontario, you can feel the end coming. Some nights, the dancers outnumber the customers. The women perform pole dance moves with evocative names — the Genie, the Hot Cherry, the Boomerang, the Hello Boys, the Static Chopper — to thin, scattered applause. The top forty that blasts from the speakers becomes a soundtrack of almost unfathomable loneliness: “Nothing lasts forever / but wouldn’t it be nice to stay together for the night?” The ceiling is low and black, the lighting a gloomy throb of oranges and blues. There are no windows. Maybe you think strip clubs are fun; maybe you believe they’re degrading; maybe you see them as just another workplace. The Manor doesn’t feel like any of those things. Instead, the mood is mostly funereal.

Guelph, population 150,000, is a suburban university town about an hour’s drive from Toronto. I grew up here, and the Manor is a local landmark, a source of both notoriety and wry civic pride. The club, once a stately Queen Anne–style mansion, is stranded in a bleak expanse of parking lot, bordered by the slash of the highway, on one side, and a residential neighbourhood, on the other. Above the front door looms a giant, glowing M, gripped by a suggestively silhouetted woman in high heels. Ugly concrete additions extend around the old house like the reclining corpus of a sphinx; neo-Gothic towers erupt in congruously heavenward. Attached to the club is a complex of apartments called the Manor Motel, whose tenants tend to be precariously employed, receiving government assistance, or struggling with addiction.