Terri's Tantalizing Strip Tease

One of my less savory activities during holiday vacation time involved slumming through the wasteland that is weekday daytime television. And for a guy, the pinnacle of slumming is......Oprah. Now, mind you, I didn't even specifically tune in to watch her, I got sucked into a Dr. Phil show as the lead in, and was too far into couch potato mode to change the channel. But the teaser for Oprah kept me hooked anyway. The guests announced in the teaser were none other than the Desperate Housewives themselves - all there for their first interview together. I don't actually watch that show.....okay, who am I kidding. I have all of the episodes on videotape. How could I not? They're all gorgeous, all five of them including Nicolette Sheridan, and the show is complete eye candy.

The teaser for the show showed the sublimely sexy Terri Hatcher demonstrating a strip tease for Oprah. Terri, as we all know, is the harried 40-something divorcee on the show and is still in smoking-hot form. Hot enough to be the cover girl on this month's FHM magazine - prominently featured on hundreds of airport bookstore magazine racks, trust me. I happened to have seen Terri demonstrate stripping on Howard Stern's show before, so I knew it would be hot. I quickly slapped a tape in the VCR and settled back on the couch to watch.

The reason that an A-list TV celebrity like Terri Hatcher is asked by an Oprah to demonstrate a strip tease is that Terri is a practioner of a stripper-cize fitness routine. According to Terri, she goes to class at least twice a week for an hour and a half: one hour for isometric excercises based on stripper moves and 1/2 hour to learn an actual stripper routine, stripper shoes and all! It's an all female class and they work out in a room with no mirrors. They're not trying to turn anyone else on, Terri said, only themselves. It's female empowerment, with a cardio twist. They do, she said, rotate through the chair in the last 1/2 hour and practice giving each other lapdances. (pausing for visual picture.............got it. moving on.)

So, Terri gleefully demonstrated all of this for Oprah on her set. She wasn't in stripper garb - just tight jeans and a top. But it was sexy. Very, very sexy. Terri moved through some poses: on the floor on her back for "the flirt" with her legs raised and crossing into an open vee position, over onto her stomach and slowly up on all fours for "the cat", a slow and sexy transition through an open crouch into a standing position, ending with a slow rotation around her hips with hands caressing up along her sides and breasts up to her head. Oprah's audience was squealing with delight and applause.

An artful demonstrtion of the tease if I ever saw one. Terri clearly gets it in a way that a lot of actual strippers don't ever achieve. It wasn't just that she was perfect and extremely sexy in her slow and fluid movements. No, that was very nice but that wasn't all. It was her obvious joy in doing it. She radiated, with attractive smiles and laughter, and was really taking pleasure in her movements just for herself. And that is extremely sexy.

I'm guessing I'll watch that tape again. Thank you, Ms. Hatcher. Well done. You're making all of us 40-somethings proud. And horny.

Finally, I was rewinding Terri's tantalizing strip tease in my mind this week as I was staring vacantly out of an airplane window at the cloud cover and this thought occurred to me: I wonder if Terri has wanted to take (or actually has taken) the routines that she's learned out into a real club? On a real stage, with a real pole, surrounded by real men, for real dollars. It would be hard for her to do it in L.A. What if she went out into some anonymous club in the hinterlands of the midwest and masqueraded as a house dancer for a night? Some anonymous Star or Dakota or Angel or Heaven? Just a thought. Terri - are you out there? I could recommend some clubs for you. :)