SHAY Stephen is an admitted ecdysiast. I know, because she was on the phone admitting it to me personally. A feature catalog for
the idea-impairedAnd I admitted right back at her that I didn't know what the heck an ecdysiast was. The word looks like the result of someone taking a handful of letters and tossing them into an electric blender.
"One who sheds her skin," Stephen said. "It was coined by the writer H.L. Mencken."
Leave it up to grumpy old Mencken to come with a unnecessarily complicated word that essentially means "someone who gets naked in front of strangers."
Stephen is a stripper who bought an ad in a "Feature Ideas" catalog published by an outfit called Bradley Communications. It is sent to newspapers and television stations across the country.
The catalog is chock-full of people just waiting to be interviewed about one strange thing or another. I don't know how many editors actually use the catalog, but it's fun to read. It's like a smorgasbord of the weird and exotic, filled with the kind of people you'd expect to find at Club Jerry Springer.
That's where I found a photo of a sultry Shay Stephen staring sultryishly (hey, if Mencken can make up words, so can I) from under the headline: "Morphing into a Stripper; From Preschool Teacher to Ecdysiast."
She's one of the more normal people listed in the catalog. Here's a sample of some of the other subjects and subjectiasts listed in the catalog:
Interview Aldous Huxley's wife.
SEE? Those ideas kind of grab you. Granted, most Americans' enduring affection for cows runs along the line of consuming Big Macs. (Any other type of cow affection can be too easily misconstrued and is likely against the law.) But the other ideas are pretty cool. You don't hear much funeral humor these days. And readers are always screaming for llama stories.
I don't know what Mrs. Huxley's story is, but Shay Stephen's claim to fame is that after she lost her job as a preschool teacher, she went to work as a stripper in California.
"I thought I'd take this job as a topless dancer for a couple of a weeks and no one would know," she said. "That turned into a couple of years."
Then she wrote a self-published book about her experiences called "The Naked Eye." To grab some publicity, she bought the Bradley catalog ad and she's been pestered by newspaper reporters, radio interviewers and the occasional alphabetically-challenged columnist ever since. So pestered that I couldn't even get to the tough questions like "What powers govern the rules of lap dancing?" and "How can being caught naked in an earthquake introduce you to your higher self?"
I didn't think of those questions. They were questions she promised in her ad she'd answer if you called her. But she received another call and she cut off our interview. Rats. I've never been lucky with ecdysiasts.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
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71224.113@compuserve.com.
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