Stripper

Like soldiers in an honor guard, two police officers were posted yesterday outside the Hampstead home of Courtney G. Brooks, their colleague in the Maryland Transportation Authority Police who died on New Year's Day after being struck by a hit-and-run driver. Brooks and his fiancee, Susan G. Geisler, bought the two-story, 1,700-square-foot house on Dakota Road in March last year for almost $321,000, a firm step toward a future together that included plans for marriage. Instead, Geisler and her parents, Edward and Priscilla Geisler, and members of Brooks' family met yesterday with Transportation Authority officials at the force's headquarters to plan the 40-year-old officer's funeral, which will be held Monday at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in North Baltimore.

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.

Three male strippers sent notice yesterday to the state of their intent to file a claim alleging violations of their civil rights - including allegations that they were forced to pose nude for police photographs. Edward Cloyd, David Lawrence and Derrick Williams also said in the notice that Maryland Transportation Authority police officers who stopped them for speeding early one morning in March took about $10,000 in cash tips that they had earned from "admiring audience members." The men will be seeking $5 million, according to the claim notice, which is required by law and puts the state on notice that a lawsuit is being planned.

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.

Desperation drove the two politicians to pose an unusual question to a Baltimore strip club owner: What would it take for Chubbies Club to end its adult entertainment in steadily gentrifying Upper Fells Point? The response was "ridiculous," recalls Del. Peter A. Hammen. Co-owner Brian Shulman's demands included the right to buy a prized gambling license should Maryland approve slots, a condition so outrageous it was beyond consideration. But the fact that the inquiry was even made by Hammen and City Council candidate Jim Kraft, as would-be middlemen, shows the conflict between Chubbies and newcomers moving in around the corner club on Eastern Avenue.

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.

Two female strippers who danced on the bar while they took off their clothes at a popular Ellicott City restaurant last year have cost the establishment's owner a $300 fine. According to an agreed-on statement of facts, an off-duty Howard County police officer and his girlfriend were in the Phoenix Emporium in the 8000 block of Main St., on Sept. 29, 2000, when two women danced for 30 minutes on the bar, gradually disrobing until only thong panties were left, while patrons stuffed money into the women's underwear.