When I was a kid I was always running around naked. It drove my family crazy. One time my mother said, "All right, I'm going to take pictures of you so you can see how silly you look." She got out the camera and I started mugging and posing as any kid would if they were wearing clothes. Being naked has always been my preferred state.

When I got a little older I saw things like Natalie Wood playing Gypsy Rose Lee and Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In and Sally Rand doing her fan dance, and I thought what the women were doing was so cool. It wasn't just that it seemed glamorous to me, although of course it did. It was more that the women seemed to be so in control. It was like they were letting loose and being in control at the same time. I wanted to know how they did that. And it looked like so much fun! My stepsister and I used to do strip tease routines for each other when we were 11 and 12. We'd make suggestions and design shows. We did a lot of work on this. Now she's a furrier. She's a whole lot more clothed than I am--but not so very much more politically correct.

When I first started dancing I was disappointed in the table dance format. It wasn't boring, but it wasn't the same as doing shows. I danced from 1980-1990 before I saw a feature, and then I knew I wanted to do that. I was thirty when I did my first centerfold.

I was so excited, planning my shows. I had plans for a show I never got to do, in which I would come out as Barbarella. I wanted to strip down nude and get on top of a glass table lit from underneath and do poses on it, then have the lights switch to black light only and show designs I had drawn on myself with paint which was invisible except under black lights. It was supposed to go from Barbarella to Geiger. Unfortunately, I was pretty much a small-time feature and I never got far enough in my career to be able to afford to transport the table on the road.

The closest I got to any of my visions was my fire show. I did a very sexual fire show. I would start out as if I was afraid of the fire. I had made myself a skimpy leather outfit with a leather T-strap, and I wore leather gloves and thigh-high boots with it. First I would touch the fire with my gloved hand, as if I was afraid to put it on my bare flesh. Then I would run it over my boots, setting them on fire. Then I would start running it over my body, moving as if it was arousing me, and I'd rub it on my crotch and then I'd eat the fire. Then I'd set my bare hand on fire and blow fire off my fingertips. It was obviously metaphorical to me--the fire was some issue, such as sexuality, that I was confronting, mastering, and finally creating.

I ended up doing a lot of shows covered in food, though. It's easy to make money off a crowd that you allow to eat off of you. It wasn't exactly art, but it was the same kind of control I had always envisioned. In one show I'd cover myself with whipped cream and dump a jar of long-stemmed maraschino cherries into my T-strap. Then when the men came up to the stage I'd slowly pull out a cherry and run it over my body, around my nipples and such, let the guy take the cherry off the stem, and tie a knot in the stem with my tongue. It's weird to say that I was good at this, because anyone who's never done it would think that there would be no skill involved. It's hard to do right, though. A lot of girls who do similar shows think that it's enough just to make a mess of yourself, but it takes finesse to excite the crowd, no matter what outlandish thing you're doing up there.

I quit dancing for a boyfriend once. I was dating a guy who thought that my job was politically incorrect, that it was degrading to women and was contributing to the oppression of my gender. I told him I would stop for awhile to see how I felt about it once I was away from it, but that I wasn't sure I wanted to stop. Anyway, the entire time we were together after I stopped, all he did was remind me that I was the kind of woman who would have done it. He wanted to control me so badly. What a waste of my time! When I went back to dancing, after I broke up with him, he came into where I was working as if to shame me. I danced nastier than I've ever danced before or since. It was like, "Take that!" with a pelvic thrust and "Take that!" with a bending-over. He left, of course. He was the worst guy I've ever dated.

I had been on the road for about a year before anything bad ever happened to me. I went to a club in Miami and they fired me at the end of the first day. My ego was devastated, and I was really surprised because I'd gotten such good audience response. Then I found out that my agent had lost my promo, which had cost me about $500, and because he didn't want to cop to that he had sent them pictures of another feature who resembled me. Once I got to the club they figured out what had happened and decided to fire me, I guess to teach that agent a lesson. My agent told me to sue them, but I told them I'd sue the agent. I have to say, these guys were too scary to sue. My ego wasn't the half of it.

In the meantime, there I was, miserably upset and stranded in Miami where I don't know a soul. I called another dancer and told her about it. She said that other girls had had other problems with that club. I told her that I didn't have any work or a hotel room, but I couldn't change my plane ticket without spending a fortune, I don't remember why. She put me in touch with a photographer named Steve Easton. He and his girlfriend took me in. He actually came to the hotel to get me and let me stay at his house. I did a photo shoot for him and he got me a three-day featuring gig with a club that he knew of that was considering becoming part of the circuit.

It's interesting that this bad experience led to the really good experience of seeing how supportive people can be, even to strangers. Steve and Diane took me into their home without knowing a thing about me except that I had been screwed over by this club he'd heard so many horror stories about. He was so wonderful. It gave me new faith in people at a time when I was getting really greedy and cynical and self-centered. It saved me, in a way.

People always ask dancers what they're going to do when they're too old to dance. It's interesting that they don't ask the same questions of athletes and ballerinas, who have to think the same way. I've never worried about what I'll do when I quit because I have a few options lined up, including making costumes for the dancers, which I did for about two years when I injured my knee. I don't expect to end up rich or anything. But I have this little scene in my mind: I picture myself as a batty old crone of a cab driver, in purple Spandex pants and a Dynel wig. I'll have one of my old centerfolds stuck to the ceiling of my cab, and when a guy asks about it, I'll say, "Sonny, would you like to sleep with that girl?" and if he says he'd like to, I'll say, "Well, now's your chance."

"Tanya Hyde" was Jo Weldon's stage name in the mid-1990s. There is currently another model working under the name of Tanya Hyde.

Photos:
1)Tanya as Cheri Magazine's "Tart of the Month," October, 1994.
2) Tanya doing her first show: at the age of 3 performing in the bathtub.
3) Tanya backstage at the Cheetah, Atlanta, Ga.: in false eyelashes and curlers, sitting at a dressing table.
4) Tanya's fireshow: onstage in New York City, setting her boots on fire.