Mencken's Greek-derived name for a stripteaser, love to put on fancy airs; others, like humongous and palimony, are winkingly playful.

One of them is called, somewhat irreverently, Stripteaser. Perhaps it refers to the skeletal condition in which we are stripped of our flesh by the various items of surgical cutlery (in another room, one finds a glass cabinet displaying several animal skeletons, titled Something Solid Beneath the Surface of Several Things Wise and Wonderful).

Italian American Ann Corio, a stripteaser throughout the 1930s, remembers incidences of state power over sexual representation, and the tricks employed to safeguard illicit shows:

David is picked up, in succession, by a deaf-mute couple, a former stripteaser, and a man who sells rat poison.

Ian introduces her as 'mysterious eastern Princess La La', a stripteaser who offers up the Dance of the Three Veils followed swiftly by Miss Bubblicious with her 10 pink balloons, bursting one by one to expose even more flesh.