In NYC, a License to Strip?

Though she hadn’t heard of the permit proposal until that evening, Mia DeFeo, a petite 26-year-old who was working the floor in a sapphire blue gown with a neckline that plunged to her navel, was not impressed. She felt singled out.


“What about the Rockette girls?” Ms. DeFeo said. “Look at them — they show their crotches. Please.” Then, with a flip of her long, highlighted hair, she sashayed toward the bar, where a cluster of lanky colleagues in similarly revealing outfits were surrounded by admiring males.


One of the women, a 21-year-old law student who was wearing a ruby red dress and three-inch silver heels that she called “short,” also opposed the bill. “It would affect my privacy and I wouldn’t want it,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because her parents do not know about her job.


Besides, she didn’t think human trafficking was an issue. “The women I know are here of their own free will,” she added. “Women here are making money and gaining financial freedom they could never get somewhere else.” Working three days a week, she said, she earns about $8,000 a month.


Not everyone disliked Mr. Ortiz’s bill. One supporter was Vincent Parco, a bald, mustachioed private investigator and star of the former Court TV reality show “Parco P.I.” He had stopped by the club to attend a book party for his friend Jeffrey Gurian, co-author of a book of jokes called “Filthy, Funny and Totally Offensive.”


“It’s a great idea to give them a license — that way if they get caught scamming guys, they get their license taken away,” Mr. Parco said as a woman with a pair of tiger eyes tattooed on the small of her back danced for a moment in front of him. “The only ones who are going to object to this are illegals, those who don’t want to pay taxes or if they have criminal backgrounds.”


The dancing woman, 24-year-old Lydia Nikolevic, paused to offer her opinion.


“It really wouldn’t affect me much,” Ms. Nikolevic said as she slid onto the banquette. “To some extent, I think it would help. It’s overcrowded.”