*The Birthday Surprise* EXCERPT: I’d never been into a strip club before (except for that one time in Guam…) because I’d always made assumptions about what they represented and what kind of people spent time inside. Now, of course, I was making a habit of questioning everything. Were strip clubs the naughty, gross, exploitive, venues full of lowlifes that I’d been conditioned to believe they were? ‘Let’s go find out,’ said my deepest heart.