LOW PROFILE Never On Sunday

SHANE BONDURANT’S DAILY GRIND ain’t what it used to be.

Once upon a time, from 1966 to 1978, Shane’s 46-32-38 frame was a star attraction (or two) at the infamous Busy Bee and other noted Texas strip joints. “I guess if you ask anybody about those days,” Shane says, “the big four [strippers| would have been Bubbles Cash, Chastity Fox, Terré Tale, and me.”

During those days, Shane’s career path was strewn with the hazards of the stripping business-drugs and vice raids among them. She had no inkling of how that path would lead to the work she does today as a part-time duck-hunting guide and full-time taxidermist. And ordained minister. When Shane found God, she left behind the bump and grind.

As owner of a Casa View taxidermy shop and minister-at-large and minister of outreach for the Rock of Ages church near Seago-ville, Shane spends her weekdays turning lunker bass into trophies and her Sundays preaching the gospel. A lively and inspirational speaker, she is often invited to bring the word to other congregations.

Shane sometimes uses her past to illustrate her testimony that God can change lives, but otherwise doesn’t allow herself much time to reflect on her bad old days. When she does, though, it is with a mixture of laughter and tears. In dialect mixing her native Tiptonville, Tennessee, with Sixties street talk, Shane describes how she began her show-biz days as an eighteen-year-old with a fake ID, full of smalltown awe at the neon glow of liquor “by the wink” Dallas. Shane segued from her first Dallas job as a barmaid for a Greenville nightclub to stripper after meeting the owner of the Athens Strip and “doing him a go-go dance.”

Though her Tennessee grandmother had tried to instill Christian values in Shane, the girl got other messages from her mother, a restless woman who married several times. Shane says her mother taught her that women should be “wild and mean and pretty and bad.”

Shane worked at being bad, but, apparently, not hard enough. Many clubs survived on the abilities of girls to hustle cheap champagne, and Shane’s conscience got in the way. “They taught you how to get some sucker to buy the $135 Jerobaum,” she recalls, “and then you were supposed to shake it when you opened it and pour it on yourself. You were supposed to act giddy and get them to buy some more. Lots of times, they just used the same bottle, I just couldn’t do that.”

So Shane was shipped off to Houston to work clubs like the Crystal Pistol and the Copa, but she hated the Bayou City, she says, and started looking for a gimmick as her ticket out. She thought she’d found it in the form of two pet lions kept at the trailer park where she was living. Though she never actually worked with the lions, they did provide the career boost she was looking for.

Shane was considering using the lions in her act, when one day she “just scruffed this one on the head and…when I felt her teeth go deep in my leg, I knew I was in trouble.” When the lion turned loose, Shane coaxed her 1964 Ford to a nearby liquor store and rolled out. “You know,” she says, “I believe the United Press International got there before the ambulance.” Screaming headlines of “Stripper Mauled by Lioness” made great publicity. The leg healed, and Shane returned to Big D as a headliner.

Wide-eyed conventioneers and regular club customers watched Shane parlay her keen senses of humor and survival-and her self-described “gallon-bucket boobs”-into thirteen years of star-stripper status and notoriety. Busy Bee patrons still regale newcomers with tales of how Shane could twirl a ten-gallon Stetson on one breast and flip it to the other while both hands spun pistols from grinding hips.

As the star of the show, Shane had her own dressing room, TV, telephone, and eventually, a snakebox-at one time, she used twenty-four live snakes in her act. Her celebrity, however, didn’t insulate her from the problems of her friends and fellow entertainers, or the pitfalls of a business operating on the periphery of the law and beyond the edge of Dallas respectability. There were a lot of stories of good-girls-gone-generally-bad, and even some bad and dead.

For Shane herself, there were drugs-amphetamines mostly-and occasional trips to jail courtesy of Dallas vice officers. Sometimes Shane would simply lose her temper and her karate-trained feet would perform a non-erotic dance on some belligerent patron’s head.

By late 1976, Shane was drinking too much and eating “speed” whenever “an eighteen-wheeler full of black mollies came to Dallas.” Creeping doubt about how she was living her life gave way to full-blown nightmares following a trip back home to Tennessee for her grandmother’s funeral.

Shortly afterward, a phone call from a fellow stripper changed her life. Sue Harding, who performed as “Susie Love,” was “beautiful, but wilder than anything you’ve ever seen,” says Shane. “I tell you, meaner than a rattlesnake and tougher than a hobnail boot.”

But Susie opened the conversation with “I got saved.”

Soon after Shane’s flippant reply of “Well, who was after you?” the two women were crying and talking about Jesus. Shane started thinking about getting out of the stripping business.



“People may wonder how a person like Shane can make such a drastic change,” says Rock of Ages co-pastor Darlene Taff. “But people just love her. They feel safe around her, and what a dynamic speaker she has become since I first met her.”

When Shane takes the pulpit, she sometimes calls on her “career in show business” to enlighten the congregation of about 200. Taff recalls one Sunday when Shane laced on a pair of hunting boots and performed a high-kicking march to illustrate a story about Jesus.

“Sometimes when I’m ministering,” says Shane, who was ordained in 1986, “I might think back about my life then as some kind of illustration. You know, to point out that all of us can change. I can say, ’listen, 1 worked on Industrial at a strip joint. Look what God has done for me. He’ll certainly do the same for you.’”

Shane Bondurant’s ticket off of Industrial Boulevard was almost as unconventional as the rest of her life had been: taxidermy, a trade she learned alongside friend and fellow taxidermist Ed Weaver in their new shop. Within a few years, Shane had become known as one of the Southwest’s finest fish and bird taxidermists. Though taxi-dermy is seasonal, she makes a living, and supplements her earnings by serving as a guide during hunting season. She uses her ninety decoys, her Labrador retriever, Widow, and her boat to take clients duck hunting at Lake Lavon.

It’s been twelve years since Shane left the Busy Bee stage and became Shane Bon-durant again. “That old desperate feeling to find God just came over me,” she says by way of explanation.

Things became desperate in a different way at the Busy Bee after Shane’s departure. ’The owner told me that it would probably be some kinda porno movie house within a year after I left.”

It was and still is.