Falling in love with a stripper is not as fictitious as it seems.
Jordan fell in love with a stripper. Picture iStock
Koek is back.
The award-winning Afrikaans crime comedy, now deep into its second season on DStv, opens with a Cape Town housewife named Christelle who has just discovered that her husband Adrian has been sleeping with a stripper.
The world she thought she lived in turns out to be a very different place entirely.
Christiaan Olwagen’s series, which earned an International Emmy nomination in its first season and swept the Silwerskerm Awards, built its reputation on ordinary suburban life meeting the raw, unscripted reality operating a few streets over.
But falling in love with a stripper is not as fictitious as it seems. Fifty-something Jordan, not his real name, said he did not expect any of this either.
His story is not a Jerry Springer spectacle. Instead, it shows how easily ordinary people can unwittingly drift into extraordinary circumstances and, sometimes, discover something unexpectedly beautiful along the way. It does not have to be right or wrong; it can just be.
‘I went there for her specifically’
It was around 2005 or 2006, and Teasers had just opened in Durban, said Jordan.
“Everybody was talking about it,” he said. “It was the flavour of the moment. It was an amazing place, beautiful women, and at the time, all South African,” he said.
Jordan went the first time to support a friend going through a divorce. He went back because of one woman specifically.
“Every guy was there to see her,” he said, “but I was there to see her and only her.”
He never hit on her. They talked during her walks up and down the catwalk. She would go off to do her set and come back and continue the conversation.
After about a month of this, she told him she had a problem. He waited for the financial ask that never came.
“She said, the problem is that when I make love to my husband, I see your face,” he said. “I said, well, that’s something we can rectify.”
And then, things quickly accelerated.
She was married to a man who lived in Gauteng. Jordan was married too, with two kids and another on the way. But, he said, neither he nor the stripped could keep their hands off one another.
“I had a full-on love affair with this woman for a year,” Jordan said. “I considered leaving my wife and she, her husband,” he said. “She filled an empty space for me, and I filled the space for her,” Jordan said. “It was a really, really beautiful thing.”
‘She filled an empty space for me’
What surprised him was the world around her, and it was not what he expected.
She lived with other dancers, and every single one of them was in a similar situation, in a relationship with a man that had nothing to do with money or the industry.
“They were just normal people who could fall in love,” he said.
She explained it to him one day. Being on stage with men gawking and spewing lewd remarks, knowing exactly what their intentions were, made genuine respect and tenderness something she had been starving for.
“To have somebody actually love you and treat you differently was something that they yearned for amidst all the callousness,” Jordan said.
Dating a stripper also meant that the man by her side had to share quite a lot of her with other men. A friend once put the obvious question to him.
“He said, how do you feel about every guy getting frisky while he’s looking at her?’
“I said it’s a bit like driving a Ferrari. Only I get behind the wheel, though everybody else looks at it with envy. At the end of the day, the keys to her heart were with me.
Watch the trailer for ‘Koek season 2:
Jordan ended his affair the same way it began, at a beach, at dawn.
One morning, he looked at his children, thought about what he was risking, and drove her back to where it had all started, and then ended things.
“It was better for both of us,” he said.
Jordan said he has no regrets whatsoever.
“The memories are in a little jar somewhere,” he said. “It’s on the mantelpiece. And if I want to, I can go and open that jar to access its beauty, albeit temporarily.”
Some stories do not fit the shape you expect them to. You cannot choose who you fall in love with, whether it’s for a season or forever and whether it is adulterous or just a couple up.
Season two of Koek understands this texture completely, but of course, that is where the storyline segues somewhat from Jordan’s lived experience.
Koek is a show that also highlights the fact that contradictions are part of being human. Love and betrayal. Loyalty and temptation. Comedy and violence.
Season two expands that world with Frank Opperman’s menacing Tjoppie Terreblanche and Leandie du Randt as his sixth wife, Veronika, while Sandra Prinsloo and Cindy Swanepoel continue to anchor a story that may not judge its characters as quickly as we might in the real world.
