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Nudists ask lawmakers not to let their lifestyle get wrapped up in effort to regulate

SALEM, Ore. – In a state where men have legally strolled the streets in nothing but tennis shoes and Portland hosts an annual naked bike ride, nudists appeared at the Oregon Legislature on Monday — clothed — to ask lawmakers not to let their lifestyle get wrapped up in an effort to regulate strip clubs.

Read more:http://www.windsorstar.com/Strip+clubs+dying+city/4708007/story.html#ixzz1Lt6HtHeu

The Burlesque Hall of Fame was founded in 1955 by Jennie Lee, a burlesque performer who also established the Exotique Dancers League of North America as a burlesque entertainers’ trade union.
Lee hosted gatherings for “members of the burlesque league” at her California home and night club “since at least as early as 1957,” according to the federal complaint. “These gatherings have included an awards element, recognizing excellence in the field of burlesque.”
Lee announced plans for the Burlesque Hall of Fame in 1965, and invitations were sent out.
Lee owned both The Blue Viking and The Sassy Lassy nightclubs in San Pedro, Calif., the latter of which is “widely recognized as the first public home of the ‘Burlesque Hall of Fame,” the complaint states.
The Sassy Lassy name and trademark has been used ever since on T-shirts, matchbooks and programs to promote reunions and burlesque events.
Lee and her husband, Charlie Arroyo, bought a 40-acre plot of land in Helendale, Calif., in the 1980s with the “intent of building ‘Jennie Lee’s Exotic World,’ incorporating a permanent burlesque museum, a ‘striptease school’ and a retirement community for elderly exotic dancers,” according to the complaint.
Jennie Lee died in 1990 “before her plans were fully realized.”
In 1990, former exotic dancer Mary Lee “Dixie” Evans moved to Helendale to care for Jennie Lee, and after her death, worked with Arroyo to help Lee’s dream become a reality.
They created the “Miss Exotic World Pageant,” “intending to draw attention to the art of burlesque and the fledgling Burlesque Hall of Fame Museum,” the lawsuit states.
The museum was incorporated as a California Public Benefit Corporation in 1998.
In 2000, Laura Herbert, a current board member for the Hall of Fame, first heard of this “stripper museum in the middle of the Mojave Desert,” and visited with her then-boyfriend, defendant Luke Littell, also a board member and pageant producer.
In 2002, Herbert launched a Miss Exotic World website to promote the pageant, and it became a “hub of the burgeoning neo-burlesque movement” with 1,800 members strong, the lawsuit states.
The event and museum outgrew the ranch, however, and Herbert and Littell sought out new locations for the pageant and museum, finally settling on East Fremont Street.
The show ran from 2006 to 2009 with increasing popularity. It was through staging the show at the Celebrity Theater that Herbert and Littell met defendant Frederic Apcar Jr., then part-owner of the theater, who said he was a member of a “well-known and affluent Las Vegas entertainment/show producer family,” according to the complaint.
Although the Hall of Fame and Apcar and Littell did not enter into a formal agreement, it was understood that in 2010, Apcar and Littell would produce the Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend at the Plaza Hotel on Fremont Street.
After producing the event, the two “took possession of certain property belonging to the [Burlesque Hall of Fame], including items of the stage set and props from the event, memorabilia, T-shirts and other merchandise,” the complaint states.
Apcar and Littel also failed to pay the $30,000 minimum to the Burlesque Hall of Fame as promised, the plaintiff claims.
“When Apcar and Littel realized that the [Hall of Fame] would not sanction their handling of the 2001 Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend and pageant, they surreptitiously entered into their own contract with the Plaza Hotel for their own burlesque event,” thereby precluding the Burlesque Hall of Fame from “holding its event there a second time,” the lawsuit states.
“More egregiously,” the lawsuit states, “Apcar and Littell used their prior connection with the 2010 Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend and pageant to induce the Plaza Hotel to host the event in 2011.”
The Burlesque Hall of Fame says that Apcar and Littell have advertised their own 2011 burlesque event for the same weekend that the Hall of Fame intends to hold its event, and are using its Sassy Lassy Burlesque marks without permission.
The defendants are “taking in application fees, vending, retail and advertising fees and other income amounting to tens of thousands of dollars under the guise that their burlesque show is affiliated with and or sanctioned by plaintiff’s original and renowned Burlesque Hall of Fame,” according to the complaint.
Several burlesque pageant performers and attendees are boycotting the plaintiff’s event because of the confusion as to “which is the ‘real show’ and ‘to wait and see who is still standing in 2012,’” the Hall of Fame says.
It wants the defendants ordered to stop using its marks, and seeks compensatory, consequential, statutory and punitive damages for trademark violations, cybersquatting, unfair competition, deceptive trade practices, and breach of contract.
The Burlesque Hall of Fame is represented by Mark Tratos with Greenberg Traurig.

Written by

Mike Rutledge
mrutledge@nky.com

NEWPORT – In the next year there may be two new films about Newport’s vice-filled past.

Ronald Goldfarb, a federal prosecutor who 50 years ago took to court several people accused of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Campbell County sheriff candidate George Ratterman, has optioned the dramatic rights to a 1995 book he wrote on the subject, “Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes; Robert F. Kennedy’s War Against Organized Crime.”

A script is near completion and a film could be finished as early as next year, Goldfarb said. Efforts to contact the filmmaker were unsuccessful.

Newport during the mid-20th century was the region’s illicit playground. Newport lured affluent couples to glittering nights of premier show-business entertainers and gambling. It was known for its brothels and strip clubs that catered to business conventions. It also was a nationwide hub for organized-crime betting transactions.

Against that backdropm Ratterman was arrested on morals charges after police found him in a Newport hotel room with an exotic dancer with the stage name April Flowers weeks after announcing he was running for sheriff to clean up Newport. Prosecutors later concluded Ratterman had been drugged.

“It’s such a colorful, interesting case that they don’t have to do anything imaginative with it,” Goldfarb said.

Meanwhile, Jerry Gels of Union and others are working on a documentary, “Newport, Kentucky: Gangsters, Gamblers and Girls,” which they hope will come out this fall. It recaptures what Newport was like when gangsters roamed the town. The documentary-makers, who had hoped to release the film sooner, actually have been helped by delays, Gels said.

In February they visited Las Vegas.

“We found some old gangsters and pit bosses who worked in Newport,” he said. That footage is being added to the documentary, which is financially backed by Eric Haas, co-owner of Newport’s Hofbrauhaus.

Gels is creating the documentary partly to spark more interest in the $15 Newport Gangster Tours he and others operate three times on Saturdays – 10:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Keeler, 21, was taken to Halifax Health Medical Center with a gunshot wound he suffered at 2:32 a.m. today near Diamond Dolls strip club at 301 Madison Ave., said police spokesman Jimmie Flynt.

According to the report of the shooting, Keeler was found lying on the ground near a utility pole and claimed a bouncer shot him. Police contacted the bouncers who told police Keeler got into an altercation with them earlier in the morning because Keeler was trying to sell drugs in the club.

The bouncers escorted Keeler out. Once outside, Keeler danced in the street and slapped his belt on the pavement yelling racial slurs at the bouncers, police said. Keeler kept putting his hands in his pocket as if he was going for a gun but never produced a weapon.

A black Chevrolet Caprice approached Keeler as he walked west on Madison Avenue and the driver asked Keeler what he was saying. Keeler then told the car’s driver, “I am not talking to you. I am talking to the (racial slur deleted) at the club,” police said.

The driver of the car then stepped outside and appeared to fire in the air but the adult club bouncers heard the shot and saw Keeler fall to the ground, the report states

The driver, a 69-year-old Pawleys Island man, told police that at 5:30 a.m. Friday he picked up a man at the Penthouse Club and the man asked to be driven to Club There, police said.

When they arrived outside Club There and the man saw it was closed, the driver said the man asked to be taken to an area at Watts and Canal streets, according to the report. The driver said the man told him he had to go inside to get money for the $12.70 fare, but instead jumped from the cab and ran away.

The driver said he went back to the club and staffers told him the man was a regular at the strip club, according to the report. Police searched the area where the man was last seen, but did not find him.

Police located Kenneth Johnson of Inman Street in the 1000 block of Nadia Court after receiving a call that a 58-year-old woman was being robbed in the parking lot of the Platinum Horse Cabaret, 1027 E. Waterloo Road.

The victim told police Johnson came at her from behind shortly after midnight and knocked her down in an attempt to get her purse and car keys.

Johnson allegedly took the victim’s cell phone, which officers found in his pocket when he was arrested, police said.

Johnson was charged with robbery.

Source: Ohio.com

Doctor Sinisa Glumicic told tabloid 24 Sata his client thought she would be more attractive if she had three breasts.

The surgeon said he had been shocked by the idea and refused to perform the surgery.

“She was ready to tattoo a nipple on her third breast”, the doctor from Croatian capital Zagreb commented to the tabloid.

The stripper works in Milan, Italy.

Source: Croatian Times

The second of two strippers accused of servicing the laps they danced upon was cleared of all charges yesterday, ending a wacky Manhattan prostitution trial.

“I knew I did nothing wrong!” porn star Alexia Moore tearily said after court. “I just had to prove it!”

Back before the 2008 police raid at Big Daddy Lou’s Hot Lap Dance Club on West 38th Street, Moore had been famous for her Thursday-night girl-on-girl lesbian floor shows with dancing partner Falynn Rodriguez.

But an undercover vice cop — posing as “Ricky,” an international Mexican fabric trader — had claimed that for the right price, the two would offer even more entertainment.

During a weeklong misdemeanor trial last week, Ricky took the stand to describe reclining with the undies-clad Moore and Rodriguez on a red-draped bed in the club’s Champagne Room — a dim and dowdy little hovel with curtained “walls” hung from 2-by-4s.

Ricky testified that it was there, after a lap dance, with Rodriguez at her side, that Moore offered him a threesome for $5,000 — but at a later date and a never-agreed-upon location, with only the promise that if he e-mailed her through her porn site, she’d “get back to me.”

No such e-mail was ever sent, Ricky conceded in testimony.

Criminal Court Judge ShawnDya Simpson dismissed the case against Rodriguez outright on Friday.

Yesterday, ruling on Moore — whose real name is Cassandra Malandri — the judge declared, “The court finds the defendant not guilty.”

“She’s just an exotic dancer — that’s what she does,” defense lawyer Salvatore Strazzullo said after court.

Moore now says her dancing days are over.

She said she’s going to start “a new chapter, a new beginning — a normal job . . . Anything to do with animals.”

To which one of the photographers camped outside Manhattan Criminal Court quipped: “I’d buy that video.”

Source: SCN Jan 28, 2010