Thanksgiving

Well Thanksgiving is only a few days away and it will be my first one at home in .two years. I've really been too busy to think much about it. All the new furniture got put in a few weeks ago we have a whole new sound system, we are getting a new wall in the back of VIP that will look really kewl… Sometimes I’m not sure what I do with my time but it flies by really fast…


I’m getting back to the gym to drop the 15 pound I’ve put on since I got out…It takes a chunk out of my day to hit the gym but it makes me feel much better. Also, I live in the world of perpetual 20 year olds. When I’m in shape, I don’t feel near as old as I really am.

I’m getting really happy with the feel of the Yellow Rose lately. We’ve been in the same building for damned near 30 years and we will never be new and shiny like some other places in town (the building that is our girls are always shiny). So we really make up for it in personality. I know that sounds weird, but if you have 50 people in the room with positive energy, everyone else in the room can feel it. When I came back from prison, the club seemed to be in a big funk. We literally had to start rebuilding from the ground up. You go from a staff that is used to being asshole to elbow busy to staring around a mostly empty club wondering WHAAA HAPPEN??? Pretty much, as soon as I came back business improved… but I didn’t help it stay that way. I should have been thankful that I was back, thankful I had so many friends, thankful that I had this great staff who had been with me for years… but some how was all escaping me. Instead, I into one of the tyrants that kept me under their control for the last two years.. I found myself treating my friends and colleges the same as I had been treated by the guards in prison.



I’ve never been one to give much credence to post traumatic stress…until now. But that is what the diagnosis was… In June I hired my best friend Don King back. I heard that, at one point, Ricky talked to DK and said, “You gotta come back you are the only one who can control him.” What a sad fucking day when some one who you know and respect has to say that about you. Well soon after DK came back I had another melt down and sent out an email to my managers that was, the say the least, degrading and demoralizing… It is something that I will for ever be ashamed of… Well DK pulled me aside and jumped up my ass the way only friends can do to other friends… and what he left me with in that conversation is what I would call a pivotal moment in “getting myself back” after two years of being locked up. He said to me, “Mike positive energy is infectious, what do you hope achieve sending out a memo like that. Does it make you feel good to make the people who love you feel like shit?” I reflect on that moment a lot. “Positive energy is infectious” Just keep telling your self that because it is true… I’m not completely fixed, I still have my moments but I try to stop and remember “Positive energy is infectious”.

The room feels a lot different at the Yellow Rose now. If you’ve been coming there you already know that. Now you know the story. On December 1st I will have been out of prison for an entire year. I will have a lot to be thankful for next week….

New Furniture

Well it’s October!

First off it’s weird to think I’ve been out of prison 7 months… I still have nightmares about it at least twice a week. I just finished reading my first book since I got out. For those of you that were not around last year…I read about 500 books in the two years I was in. In prison we say “That’s how you do your time” .. Some people play hand ball, some run the track some, some watch TV….I was a reader… I’ve done a lot to avoid thinking about being in that place again; including avoiding reading…. I have to admit that this first book (Dan Brown’s The lost Symbol) gave me the heebeegeebees pretty much the whole time I was reading it. At one point I asked my girl friend, Chelsea, to rub my neck while I was reading, to try to reassociate good feelings with reading… By the end of the book I was feeling much better.. and I’m glad I got it out of my system. Also I discovered that my eyes have gotten worse and I need new glasses. But enough of that…

October is here!

Today The Yellow Rose will get all new furniture. Getting new chairs is always traumatic… the chair manufacturer (in this case K G Furniture) sends me some itty bitty swashes of fabric and pictures of chairs. Then I have to take the fabric swashes and look at them under “Club Light” (because nothing looks the same in regular light, as they do when our club is dark and the colored stage lights are up) and decide which looks the best and goes with the carpet. Then I have to project out if the color scheme will work with new carpet because we will be getting new carpet again before we replace the chairs. I then decide on chair styles from pictures in a book… and send off a check for about 20 grand. So today we get a truck load of furniture and I will hope against hope that I made good choices.



Also, by next week we will have our entire sound system replaced… I have always prided myself on having great sound. I have a friend in the industry, Mark Proct, who gets us the best deals on the best equipment on the face of the earth! It is funny, when ever we send something out for bid, people see “Titty Bar,” and the price goes up about 5 times what it normally should be. Our first bid from one of the local sound companies came in at $25,000…they were charging me more for amplifiers than I paid for them 5 years ago… The price of sound equipment has gone DOWN in the last 5 years.. not up… needless to say… my buddy Mark is going to get it done for under $5000.00 and I know it will sound friggin awesome. The key to sound in a topless bar… is to have it just loud enough you have to raise your voice to talk over it but not so loud that you have to scream. The sound needs to be smooth and velvety…. Not harsh and screaming. It has to be somewhat comfortable…. If the music is too loud or it sounds wrong (i.e. scratchy and harsh) it will get customers to look at their watches. That is the worst thing that can happen in my world. When a customer looks at his watch he thinks about leaving…. Everything we do is to try to keep the customer from looking at his watch. We want people to snuggle in and spend their whole/day evening with us. Bad sound and uncomfortable chairs defeat that purpose.



So did I choose right or wrong…Hmmmm I’ll know in a few hours… more tomorrow with pictures!

September is over

O.K. ,
I've got myself a bog...Well done... I've often thought it might be of interest to some people, what it is like to own and run the Yellow Rose Strip Club... Actually we prefer Gentleman's Club... but I felt compelled to use strip club to make sure I get some love from the search engines.

My name is Mike Persinger and I've owned and run the "World Famous" YELLOW ROSE in Austin Texas for 15 years now (the club actually opened in 1982). I just spent the last two years of my life in a Federal Prison Camp in Beaumont Texas and got out last March (more on that later). In the years that I have run the Yellow Rose we have always been the number #1 club in liquor sales Austin and sold more liquor per square foot than almost any club in the State of Texas. Well, during my absence, a lot of things changed and the club fell back a few notches.... But hey... It was still here when I got out (which is more than most people get) and I have a kick ass staff... and we are rebuilding the business inch by inch in the shittiest economy I've seen in my 30 years of owning businesses.

Back in 1994 when my family bought The Yellow Rose (yes this is a family owned business)there was no such thing as blogging and the Internet was around but no one had access to it. It would have been great to have been able to chronicle my adventures and and share them with the world back then...but hell... back then we still had to take our photos to Walgreen's. Well.... The Yellow Rose is sort of in the same place it was when we bought it...We have a great name and still have a great customers ... and beautiful women. But we are not number one and that bugs me... So this will be a second chance to share the building of the Yellow Rose into the #1 club in Austin.. one more time. If anyone is reading this I hope to keep you entertained... SO...hang on to your hats and enjoy the ride.

I'll write more soon but for right now I have to deposit my pay check and go to the court house to pay my restitution.