Strip Club's Owner No Stranger To The Bumpiness Of His Business

SEATAC - Naked women have been very good to Larry Miller.

When he first arrived in Seattle years ago, a strip dancer he met downtown wound up marrying him and going through drug rehabilitation with him.

Four years ago, with money saved from Mary Miller's dancing and his work as an Alaska fishing-boat deckhand, Larry Miller opened a nude-dancing club in Ballard, Fan Tan Fanny's.

That was followed a year later by Fan Tan Follies in the University District.

Although Larry and Mary co-own the businesses, he runs them while she concentrates on raising their two children.

Now the Mercer Island businessman, 38, is opening his third nude-dancing club: Club Exstasy, on SeaTac's International Boulevard. Some SeaTac residents have threatened to picket the establishment as soon as it opens Friday.

It's the kind of reception Miller has seen before; pickets marched up and down in front of Fan Tan Follies (now Club Fantasy) for weeks after it opened. Some threw eggs and paint on the building.

He testified two years ago before the Seattle City Council, fighting a failed effort to force his and other strip clubs to close or move to the Duwamish industrial area.

"To me, it's just a business," he said then, adding that if city officials wanted to pay him $170,000 for his investments, he'd turn them into jazz clubs.

Miller is a bit more exasperated these days. In the last month, he has spent thousands of dollars hiring two attorneys to beat back efforts by SeaTac city officials to block or hobble his newest club. Reached at Club Exstasy yesterday, he vented his frustration.

People who link nude dancing to prostitution are wrong, he says.

"I'll tell you what leads to prostitution: poverty," he said.

"Stripping is an art," he said, and has been since the Roman empire. "Strip joints have always existed, and they always will," he said.