A Bronx art teacher – removed from the classroom after writing about her past as a stripper and a hooker – has been blabbing about her sex industry exploits at videotaped public open-mic events.
Melissa Petro, 30, an art teacher at Public School 70 in Mount Eden, recently revealed her dark side at the Bowery Poetry Club on the lower East Side.
“My memoir that I’m working on now is about my experiences in the sex industry starting when I was 19 years old and living as a student abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico,” Petro said at the event, videotaped by an audience member and obtained Monday night by the Daily News.
“I started as a stripper and worked on and off for years, and I did other activities in that industry.”
The city Education Department learned of Petro’s past from a post this month on TheHuffingtonPost.com, in which she claimed she was also a craigslist.org hooker from October 2006 to January 2007.
Petro, a public school teacher for three years, has been placed on administrative duties. She refused to comment Monday night. But at downtown open-mic events, she has been anything but shy.
In another video from the website Vodpod.com, aired on WABC Channel 7 News on Monday night, Petro compared teaching children to having sex with her boyfriend.
“I’m a teacher and I teach art to kids. So basically I teach the same lesson over and over and over,” she told a downtown crowd last year.
“So in the middle of the night … I thought I was at work. … I just thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to have to do this again.'”
Later in the video, she read an excerpt from the memoir she’s writing about being a stripper at a place called La Trampa in Oaxaca and being mentored by a woman she called Selma.
“She kissed me, she touched me in ways that a woman had never touched me before. I did it for the money, but it was also true that I enjoyed it.”
A former colleague at PS 70 called Petro a “star” in the classroom .
“If you want to be a teacher and that’s your goal, it’s stupid,” she said of Petro’s openness about her past. “If you want to sell books then maybe not – that’s her prerogative.”
