Diablo Cody isn't the only exotic dancer with her eyes on the prize

When Diablo Cody (née Brooke Busey), former stripper and phone sex operator, took home the Oscar for best original screenplay for Juno, all of our preconceived notions about exotic dancers blew up like Ellen Page's stomach.

Could more exotic dancers, so willing to shake it for your dub, actually be using that money to finance artistic pursuits? Perhaps, through the haze of cigar smoke and beneath the layers of makeup, clubs are full of dreamers with well-developed left brains.

To investigate, Radar infiltrated some of New York's most popular strip clubs and found out what artistic aspirations strippers pursue when the lights go up and the clothes are back on.

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Randi Newton, 29
randinewton.com

Randi Newton was working as an analyst for Morgan Stanley before she quit to become a waitress at Ten's Cabaret. One night, she got drunk and tried her hand at stripping—she hasn't looked back.

Arguably, Newton made the right choice—she made $100,000 last year and now wants to teach her colleagues across the world how they can do the same. She recently left Ten's and now has a literary agent to shop her book, Wall Street Stripper, which she compares to The Game by Neil Strauss. The book will provide business advice for exotic dancers, including how to invest their money and how to file taxes.

"At the end of the day, this is a sales job," says Newton. "It involves more than fake boobs and looking hot. There are no educational books on how to do this well—so I wrote one."

Newton is also a card-carrying SAG member, having appeared in movies such as Mona Lisa Smile and on television in The Sopranos. (She played Donna, a "big-busted" bartender at a strip club—not the Bada Bing.) She's also currently writing several of her own television show treatments to send to major networks and studying at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. "I have a lot to write about," she says. "I have seen some crazy things."