WORK IN PROGRESS : Playing a Game : Cherry, a single mother and former cocktail waitress, has turned to exotic dancing because the money is good.

Rhythm and blues. With a little bit of rock. Cherry’s favorite, and it thumps loud. It buzzes in your chest, a fuzzy heartbeat.

Music isn’t all there is. On a small TV screen here at Snooky’s Bar on Ventura Avenue, somebody hawks Gatorade. Languid pool games unfold around the room. At the table closest to the bathroom--where the sign inside reads “With all due respect please do not scribble on the walls”--a loud, fat guy is shooting pool with a closed-mouthed old-timer in ill-fitting brown slacks that look like they once belonged to someone else. Both are intent on the game. Both still steal glances at the stage. The sign above the stage reads “Don’t Touch the Girls (It’s Against the Law).”

Cherry is center stage, back pressed against the mirror, hands moving carefully over her hair, sliding slowly past her throat, continuing down at a measured pace, keeping time to the music, slipping over the sequined top, running down her sides. This display has the undivided attention of at least one customer. Sitting at the edge of the stage among friends, dollar bill rolled in his mouth, he’s leaning forward like a crane. Cherry sees this. Cherry doesn’t hurry.

This is a game and Cherry plays it well. She pushes off the mirror, leaving a smudge like light fog on the glass. She comes forward slowly, slides to her knees. Close, but just out of reach. Dollar Bill has stretched his neck to its full extent, his friends egging him on. The bill is still in his mouth, inches from Cherry’s hip. Cherry will have none of it. She smiles, but leans away. Dollar Bill gives in. He pulls the money from his mouth and hands it to Cherry, who affixes it to her hip with a practiced snap of her G-string.

“Men,” she says later. “They’re always trying to make you do stuff you have to say no to.”

But Cherry, 30, is here because she wants to be. First and foremost, the money is pretty good, and that’s important to a single mother with a 7-year-old son. On Saturday night, a four-hour shift, Cherry made $130. On a Monday afternoon, she made $60. Add to that $50 for entering a bikini contest Monday night and you have a $110 day. Not a posh living, but comfortable enough.

Cherry still remembers her roommate coming home after a night of dancing, littering their coffee table with crumpled bills. Cherry, then a cocktail waitress, would look at her small, neat glass of tips and think, “Why not me?” Cherry also remembers the very first time she danced.

“All these guys were screaming and yelling,” she says. “The feeling was like being on a roller coaster. I was scared to death. Scared and kind of excited.”

Cherry, of course, is a stage name. Cherry’s real name is Marie Hernandez, the name she had when she was Miss Oxnard in 1979, the name she uses for doctors and lawyers and taxes. But after five years of dancing at clubs around Ventura County, Cherry might as well be Cherry. Her mother calls her Cherry and introduces herself as Cherry’s Mom.

“We’ll be at a party or a family function,” says Cherry, “and she’ll be saying, ‘My daughter’s an exotic dancer’ and I’m like ‘Mo-om.’ ”

Cherry is proud of what she is accomplishing, supporting a son, maintaining a life. But if she is out with her son and she’s approached by someone who knows her from the bar, she’ll ignore that person entirely.

“He’s not going to meet anyone from the bar,” she says of her son. Cherry is not impervious to what people think, and a lot of people think that exotic dancers are rotten. Cherry figures that she does nothing wrong--”just dance, tease and play”--but she won’t broadcast her business.

“I’m not ashamed of it, but it’s not the kind of thing I go around telling everybody.” She shrugs. “It’s a two-way feeling,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

Her feelings are further muddled by what she’s seen of her fellow dancers. Some of the girls are flakes, partying hard, leaving with customers, she says. Those types, though, quickly pass through town. Most of the regular dancers, the women Cherry calls friends, are taking what she calls “a sidestep.” Dancing pays bills while they go to school, learn to model, squirrel away some savings.

These women, says Cherry, are hard-working and straightforward, not prone to be catty, or point fingers, or be judgmental. Their moral fiber, Cherry says, seems at least as strong as that of the outside world.

“I always thought, ‘Once I get out of the bar scene, I’ll move up, and it’s going to be a better life with better people,’ ” she says. “I’m finding out that’s not the case.”

It isn’t always an easy job. Cherry dances seven days a week. There are dead nights, a few men sitting around the stage like stones. Whatever she does--jokes, smiles, steamy contortions--nothing works. So she clicks it into automatic.

“You’ve got to have days where you just don’t care,” she says.

But then there are nights when the crowd is on fire, when Cherry can look down into the shouting, chanting faces and dance through the dollar bills that litter the stage. When it’s good, there’s a certain addictive quality to Cherry’s kind of dancing.

“They’re screaming, yelling, doing the wave, throwing money at you, asking you out,” Cherry says. “It’s crazy. It’s a good feeling.”

She doesn’t have a high opinion of men. She calls them gremlins, after the movie, because, like their namesakes, men seem to come on sweet in the beginning, then turn mean. She is propositioned regularly.

Sometimes, though, men surprise her. Once when she was upset, a regular approached her and asked how she was doing. Near tears, she turned away. “I can put a smile on your face,” he told Cherry, pressing something in her hand.

“I didn’t look at it until I went into the dressing room,” Cherry says. “It was a $100 bill.”

Cherry says she has never done anything, other than dance and smile, to warrant these favors. She may talk to 45 guys in a night, but that, she says, is nothing more than a dancer’s professional courtesy.

“You work everybody,” she says. “The more you work everybody, the better the tips are.”

She refuses to date customers, again for business reasons.

“You’ve got someone who’s a big tipper, then you decide to go out with them and things turn sour. Now you’ve lost that tipper.”

Dating can be tough. Since her divorce, Cherry has dated several men. Most aren’t keen on her job. One boyfriend came to the bar but refused to look at the stage.

“It eats away at guys; it really does,” she says. “I guess they know how they think of people that dance. But by the same token, it’s just dancing. If they want to be with me, then they have to be secure enough with themselves.”

It’s an odd world and most people don’t understand it. Even Cherry, who thinks that she does, is edging away from it.

She has taught manicuring at Oxnard Beauty College and plans to take a credential test and eventually teach full-time. She’s not so sure that she’ll stop dancing completely; the lure of quick, easy money is a strong one. She is sure everything will fall into place.

Inside Snooky’s, Cherry takes the stage for another set. The managers and bouncers chew on take-out burritos. Customers lean against the walls. The music booms. The grizzled old-timer in the brown slacks looks up for a moment, adjusts his pants and turns his attention back to the pool table.

“It’s not,” says Cherry later, “a life you want to live forever.”