Dorothy Stein gets paid thousands of dollars to bite famous people. I know you came to this article thinking there’s more to it than that, but that’s literally what the massage therapist known as “Dr. Dot” does. She makes up to $250 per hour to sink her teeth into celebs as part of her patented “bite massage.”
While it might sound silly, it’s clearly working for her. Since she started massaging celebs in 1983, she’s counted Def Leppard, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Mariah Carey and Kanye West among her clientele.
Dot says she learned to bite people during a massage from her mother, who asked her to bite her back during massages when she was younger. She didn’t start using her odd technique on others until 1983, when she gave a massage to Phil Collen of Def Leppard.
“I went to every Def Leppard show and massaged them,” she told Billboard. “I built a network with those people and eventually started massaging bands to get into shows.”
Her network quickly grew, with Stein placing her hands and teeth on everyone from Simon Cowell to Eminem. Though she started doing the massages in exchange for free concert tickets, Rolling Stones‘ drummer Charlie Watts suggested to her that she needed to get paid (and then backed that up by giving Stein her first paid gig in 1994).
Stein doesn’t bite all of her clients, but she says she gets positive reviews from the ones she does bite. She told Billboard that Simon Cowell and Juliette Lewis were both big fans. She also added that she gave the treatment to Kanye West for two hours in Berlin and found him to be “very down-to-Earth.”
Her cachet with the rich and famous has grown so much that she even gives regular massages to celebs, though she always asks if they want her specialty.
“I’m not just going to bite someone,” she told the magazine. “Mariah Carey didn’t want it. She’s a germaphobe.”
(via Billboard)
