Colorado- www.gazette.com- Lily Burana [pictured right] met her husband at a historic cemetery while helping a friend do research.

Alysabeth Clements Mosley [left] met her beau when they acted together in “The Heidi Chronicles,” and he played her gay best friend.

And it just gets weirder from there.

Both women were longtime strippers who loved their craft, and both women ended up getting hitched to soldiers during wartime. Soldiers, apparently, who aren’t afraid to hang out in cemeteries or engage in musical theater.

The dynamic duo met on Wednesday to talk about the transition from stripper to military wife, and breaking down the stereotypes that surround their former profession, their current duty, and the soldiers they love.

Burana – who first grabbed the national spotlight with her highly regarded 2001 memoir “Strip City” – was in town to plug her new book “I Love a Man in Uniform” at Fort Carson.

Clements Mosley is a well-known local actress, radio host and feminist writer. She spent 18 years – “that’s about 60 in stripper years” – dancing here at Fabulous TNT’s Strip Club.

She was accustomed to performing for men in uniform. She said stripping even took on a patriotic gleam after Sept 11.

“These guys were leaving, and who knows what might happen to them,” Clements Mosley said, “and it was important to me and a lot of the other dancers to make them feel like big shots before they left.”

But that was business. She didn’t fall in love with a military man until one walked on stage with her. Her husband, Dylan, is a special forces stud, but he was a musical theater major in college and a professional actor until Sept. 11 inspired him to put on the uniform.

“I kept thinking ‘Wow, I’m fairly left-wing, vegetarian. How have I gone from dating standard actors to this guy who has done military time and killed people?” Clements Mosley said.

Burana suffered even more culture shock when she – a punk rock, anarchist, one-time Playboy pin-up – married a lieutenant colonel at the venerable West Point.

“I totally had the ‘military intelligence is an oxymoron’ button and wore it proudly,” Burana said. “Because Cupid is the great comic, of course I fell in love with a military intelligence officer.”

She wrote in her book, “Ours isn’t a red state-blue state relationship – more like red state and smash the state.”

Besides learning to write in pencil in her address book, Burana learned some deeper lessons about military life.

“I was a cynical-hipster-doofus, with the Lollapalooza mentality of ‘whatever,'” she said, “and it really brought me up short to see that level of commitment, passion and selfless service. It’s good to be with someone you admire.”

Once she got used to the idea of loving a man in uniform, she had to learn the written and unwritten rules of being an officer’s wife, and slog through her husband’s deployment to Iraq.

Both women said they swung from fighting the stripper stereotype of a drug-addled bimbo, to the Army wife stereotype of a “flag-waving Stepford lady who bakes cakes and her hair is always perfect.” Clements Mosley and Burana are bright and articulate and independent, but they are not Stepford wives.

“Not meeting that standard is what this book is really about,” Burana said.

And yet, military families are asked to be Army Strong, resilient, through repeated deployments.

“People are going to look back and see this as one of the most challenging times in history for the military family, and the person who bears the brunt of that is the spouse left behind,” Burana said.