Stripper

An article in yesterday's Today section misstated the name of the actress portraying the trumpet-playing stripper in the production of "Gypsy" at Theatre on the Hill. The actress is Dine Mongold.The Sun regrets the error.Although the musical "Gypsy" is named for stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, the main character is actually Gypsy's mother. A production doesn't stand a chance without a strong Mama Rose (the archetypal stage mother), and at Theatre on the Hill, brassy Valerie J. di-Lorenzo is definitely a strong presence.

An article in yesterday's Today section misstated the name of the actress portraying the trumpet-playing stripper in the production of "Gypsy" at Theatre on the Hill. The actress is Dine Mongold.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 8/04/98

A stripper on Baltimore's Block and two of her friends were charged yesterday in the fatal beating of a cook who was killed soon after he left work at the Brass Elephant restaurant on North Charles Street.The arrests capped a two-week investigation and might end a mystery for the victim's friends and family, who had wondered how the 26-year-old went out to buy beer and ended up beaten in Armistead Gardens in Northeast Baltimore.Police said that the victim, Michael Wayne Cole, who lived in the 900 block of N. Calvert St., walked to the Flamingo Bar on Custom House Avenue Aug. 1 and befriended a 24-year-old stripper who dances under the name of "Tammy."

It's easy to see why women flipped over Dirk Shafer when they saw his charms strategically deployed in Playgirl in 1992: soaring cheekbones above lean cheeks, a rib cage like a tectonic plate, buff beyond buff, blond hair and piercing blue eyes.One problem: Dirk was happily, totally gay. And when he was elected Playgirl's Man of the Year and was sent on a round of TV appearances discussing "What Women Really Want," he got with the impersonation.Built around videotapes of his talk show appearances and restaged "cinema verite" footage, "Man of the Year" is Shafer's amiable re-creation of that somewhat zany experience.

Valley Inn, 10501 Falls Road, Brooklandville, (410) 828-8080. Open every day for lunch and dinner. AE, MC, V. Appetizers: $3- $7.50; entrees, $13.50-$27. **1/2The Valley Inn is full of surprises. You may have thought of it as a stuffy old place where members of the horsy set eat crab imperial in their (respective) pearls and golfing pants, but not so.For instance: A friend attended a bachelorette party there, and the entertainment was a male stripper -- er, exotic dancer. I'm sure it was a very proper exotic dancer, but still . . . at the Valley Inn?

Officials at Black & Decker's distribution center on Hanover Pike in Hampstead have made a standing offer to give their neighbors tours of the facility's ground water cleanup system.Anyone who decides to accept will see all the pieces of an advanced yet simple process that water specialists say has worked well at sites with contaminated ground water around the country.Soon, after years of legal challenges and other delays, Black & Decker probably will get the go-ahead to turn it on.Randall McAlister, an engineer whose firm, Roy F. Weston Inc., designed the system, said the process' "motor" consists of 10 evenly spaced wells that will be used to pump water out of the ground, creating an impenetrable "hydraulic barrier" to prevent contaminants, including the possible carcinogen trichloroethylene, from leaving plant property.

You got to have a gimmick.That advice is given by three strippers to the young novice Louise in the musical "Gypsy" before she is about to take her first walk onstage.The same advice could have been given to Bonnie Daniel, principal of Wilde Lake High School.She has good-naturedly accepted a walk-on role as a stripper in the school's production of "Gypsy" at 8 p.m. today through Saturday.As "Ms. Wilde Lake, the Unknown Stripper," Ms. Daniel will sashay in, say her one line and sashay out."

Q: I have twin sons; one was to marry and the other to be his best man. As best man, he asked his father to send invitations to the guys invited to the bachelor party. The men were asked over to the best man's apartment, where beer, pizza and snacks were available. He hired a van to drive them to strip joints, where the prospective groom was to be teased by the girls. Everyone had a fun time. No hanky-panky to worry about.No one got rowdy, and everyone got home safely. The groom was happy, the bride was happy, and it was the best man's gift to his brother, the groom.

In the relatively small number of films which seriously tackle television as a social influence, two stand out: the powerful "Network" of 1976 and "Broadcast News" of 1987.And the latter, airing at 8 tonight on ABC (Channel 13), is worth another look because the most acute insight of "Broadcast News" got lost in all the big-hit excitement. (The film was nominated for seven Oscars.)Do you recall the James L. Brooks' movie? It was far less a rant than "Network" (by writer Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet)

Famous TV siblings Chip and Ernie Douglas of "My Three Sons" are the real-life sons of a Baltimore Block stripper who performed during the Great Depression under the name Marilyn Primrose.This and other obscure and marvelous facts of Baltimore burlesque fill pages in the personal history of 81-year-old Bernard Livingston, lawyer, author, United Press International photographer, filmmaker, and favorite uncle of Stanley "Chip" Livingston and Barry "Ernie" Livingston."You got it," said Mr. Livingston, in Baltimore this past weekend to screen one of his documentaries in a film festival at the Orpheum Cinema on Thames Street.

Well, at least part of that Baltimore stripper's story holds water. The Scores dancer who claims to have been chummy with Michael Phelps told the British tabloid News of the World that they last got together May 5. Theresa White said Phelps summoned her via a text message, but not to his $1.7 million Fells Point townhouse. "We'd been texting each other sporadically," she told the newspaper. "And Michael said he was alone at a hotel while his house was getting fixed." I made two trips to Scores this week in search of White, to see if she could produce text messages to back up her story.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong, a prosecutor for more than a quarter-century, found himself in the defendant's chair yesterday, charged by the state bar with committing ethics violations during his rape prosecution of three former Duke University lacrosse players. Leaning back in his chair, his chin on his hand, Nifong listened impassively as a North Carolina State Bar lawyer accused him of making prejudicial and misleading statements to the media, withholding exculpatory evidence and lying to two judges.

LIZ RENAY, 80 Actress, artist, stripper Liz Renay, a stripper and cult movie actress whose real life included roles as a gangster's moll, prison inmate, author and artist, died Jan. 22 in Las Vegas from cardiopulmonary arrest and gastric bleeding. She first gained attention as a fashion model and Marilyn Monroe look-alike in the 1950s. She developed a cult following for her role as Muffy St. Jacques in director John Waters' 1977 movie Desperate Living. She appeared in at least two dozen other movies ranging from Date With Death in 1959 and The Thrill Killers in 1964, to adult films like Interlude of Lust in 1981.

Girl in a Box The Devil's Backbone By Kim Wozencraft St. Martin's Press / 400 pages/$24.95. Kim Wozencraft might just be the noir fiction lover's dream: She writes characters so authentic that the reader swears he or she knows them in real life; her prose is spare and powerful with nary a wasted word; and as a narcotics cop turned junkie turned writer, she knows of what she's written about in her five novels. The Devil's Backbone is, as in earlier work, long on character, emotion and conflict, and if the plot - about two very different sisters whose divergent paths come back together thanks to a series of escalating brutal crimes - has been done before, Wozencraft injects the premise with necessary freshness and an uncanny ability to strike deep at the heart of human frailties.

People who were not within 1,000 miles of Duke University have taken sides in the case of a stripper who has accused Duke lacrosse players of rape. One TV talk-show hostess went ballistic when a guest on her program raised questions about the stripper's version of what happened. Apparently we dare not question accusations of rape when it involves the new sacred trinity of race, class and gender. Media irresponsibility is one thing. Irresponsibility by an agent of the law is something else - and much more dangerous.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Janet Clover says she's a nobody, just a 38-year-old stripper with no clout and not much money. But that doesn't give a bunch of rich New Yorkers the right to rip off her life story, she says, to turn it into smutty, animated entertainment. So Clover, known as JC, filed a lawsuit this week against one of the country's most powerful media companies. She doesn't want money, she insists. She just wants Viacom and its cable-television subsidiary The New TNN to cancel the adult cartoon Stripperella.

The death two weeks ago of B film director Doris Wishman in Coral Gables, Fla., brought the name of Baltimore's premier ecdysiast, Fannie Belle Fleming, better known as Blaze Starr, back into the news. Wishman, called "the greatest female exploitation director in history" by drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, in 1962 made Blaze Starr Goes Nudist, in which Starr plays herself - what else? - during a romp at a nudist colony. It was her only movie. Until hanging up her G-string and pasties in 1984, Starr was known as the Queen of Burlesque and the nation's premier exotic dancer, honors she proudly held for decades.

A Baltimore police lieutenant facing more than 50 departmental misconduct charges took the stand in his own defense at a hearing yesterday and denied working at an underground strip club - an allegation at the heart of the case against him. Lt. John M. Mack, a 17-year veteran assigned to the Northwestern District, told a three-member police trial board that the sole reason he was at Ronnie's West Side Gallery, in the 2100 block of W. Lanvale St., in...

It's a good bet that "Gypsy" will always be playing somewhere. One of Broadway's most distinguished shows, it gave theater legend Ethel Merman her greatest role as Mama Rose with its opening in 1959, and has been brought back in revivals there and in film. The latest local production opens Saturday at the Chesapeake Music Hall dinner theater for a seven-week run. Owner, choreographer and Jill-of-all-trades Sherry Kay Anderson will be heading the cast in Merman's famous role. Based on the autobiography of burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical centers on quintessential stage mother Rose Novick, who "has a dream" that younger daughter June can break into show business.

An article in yesterday's Today section misstated the name of the actress portraying the trumpet-playing stripper in the production of "Gypsy" at Theatre on the Hill. The actress is Dine Mongold.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 8/04/98