A cup of tea and a lie down...
Boredom with her office job was all it took for Lucy Johnson to decide to become a prostitute. The confident and savvy-sounding Wellingtonian never needed to work in a brothel, but tried it out for a night to satisfy a curiosity fuelled by a personality she describes as “experientialist”.
She has an Arts degree, but “never really got off the first three rungs of the ladder,” working in retail and customer service. With the urge to add excitement to her life, keen to try something fascinating, and with the added bonus of “getting laid and having no strings sex,” Johnson enjoyed her night of experimentation so much that the next morning she signed up to work a regular Saturday day shift at the brothel alongside her regular nine ’til five office job.
“Trying it just for one night was unscary and undaunting. It meant I wasn’t going to be immediately sucked into ‘the world of the sex industry’. But I had fun, and at the end of the night I got given a wad of cash,” she says.
Johnson has an unusual attitude towards this prostitution, saying at the end of the day it’s just a job.
“There are two distinctly different portrayals of prostitutes. It’s a job that’s seen in the media as inferior or lacking in value. Then there are the glamourous courtesans like Satine from Moulin Rouge who know the mysteries of the world. But I think it’s just a job,” she says, “About 70% of the time we’re sitting in the staffroom playing Scrabble and drinking cups of tea like Grandmas.”
Just a job perhaps, but one that taught her some valuable lessons about the industry and about herself. Johnson says the girls she works with are “fantastic,” and after terrible first night nerves she quickly realised that her clients were just human. She also says the work gave her amazing confidence.
“I was never unconfident but now I’m super confident and really secure in my body and my sexual ability,” she says, “I enjoy the work and I miss it when I don’t do it for a couple of weeks.”
Johnson has turned her experiences into Part Time Prostitute. It’s the first time she’s done any writing or directing. To create the piece she used information scribbled in notebooks that she keeps on the job. With a penchant for numbers and data, Johnson records information about each client.
“I realised it was a data goldmine. After each job I take out the notebook and fill in the job details with the name, how long, ethnicity, nationality, estimated age and whether or not they were circumcised, then I rated one to 10 for kissing, sex and wrote whether or not I orgasmed,” she says.
She has fashioned the statistics into graphs that are used in the docu-comedy show, which will be performed by burlesque performer Rachel Rouge.
The full Fringe programme will be launched on January 26. The three-week festival will include a symphony of rap-comedy, rock opera, fashion, puppetry, circus and choir and will be performed at 30 sites across the city.
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