If you are the owner of a gentlemen's club, your right to own and operate a gentlemen's club is in jeopardy. Possibly The only thing that can save you is to join in common cause with other adult industry professionals by pooling some of your hard earned dollars and knowledge with other adult industry professionals. I can think of no better starting place for doing this than Exotic Dancer's annual adult conventions which have been held for the last few years in Las Vegas. Called Expo 2003, this year's convention was held at Caesar's Palace.   I hope that all adult industry professionals, whether you are a club owner, feature entertainer, porn star, magazine writer or photographer, house dancer interested in taking her career to the next notch, etc. reading this article will 1. Start making the term, "The Mothers for a More Boring Nation" part of their vocabulary. 2. Realize that no matter how much you think you differ from other adult industry professionals you are still part of the same fraternity, and 3. Seriously consider placing Expo 2004 on your can't miss events for next year.   If the adult entertainment industry is your business, the Mothers for a More Boring Nation are out to get you. This moralistic, self righteous, hypocritical group of men and women are out to shut down your livelihood, and make the culture of the entire country a desert wasteland while making freedom in nearly all its aspects a thing of the past. Make no mistake–in spite of the many differences that you think separate you from much of the adult industry, you are in the same soup together because the Mothers for a More Boring Nation have marked all of you for destruction. At the core of Exotic Dancer's Expo are the seminars with most being geared to club owners. When I first started going to Exotic Dancer's expos a few years ago there was one Legal Panel. This year there were three, so this in itself should be indicative of how much more perilous your right to continue to do business has become. At the legal panel I attended last week, I learned that club owners need to be much more aware about what their state and local governments are planning that could affect their business operations than they have been in the past. For instance, if a new school is planned for a club's neighborhood, the club owner had better be prepared for moving his business well in advance of when the new zoning ordinance is passed so that he can cut his losses as much as possible beforehand. The panelists stressed that to be effective in learning about his options before it is too late, now more than ever before, it is imperative that the club owner be viewed as a friend of the community rather than its destroyer. I left this seminar feeling a little depressed over the future of gentlemen's clubs. But during the next seminar my spirits rebounded. I walked into the room eyeballing the crowd, to see what club owners I knew were there and which ones weren't. I noticed a number of serious minded men I had learned to respect through the years, who were obviously there to learn about the issues that affected the adult industry. Spying an attractive entertainer I had met a couple nights before, I took a seat next to her and asked, "You are taking notes at these seminars and I've seen you at everyone. Who are you doing this for?"   Trixie Racer replied: "I am doing it for myself.   Which puts her, an entertainer, far ahead of many club owners I've met who would either never come to such a convention in the first place or who'd only come for the tax deduction but never participate in many of the expo's many worthwhile events.   That seminar was excellent. Unlike those dealing with legal issues the panel discussed how a club owner could best maximize his magazine and radio advertising dollars. The panelists discussed those ads they liked the best or disliked while showing sideshows of magazine ads on a large projection   screen and playing audio recordings of the radio ads. For this seminar, club owners had been invited to bring in not only the best ads their clubs had used but also the worse. For lightening my spirits and adding to the humor of the moment I want to express my own personal thanks to Tucker Mooney, of Club Oasis over in Philadelphia for having the guts to bring in both the worse and many of the best ads many of us have ever experienced. This is a great chance to network. Example in point was Big Daddy, who owns Big Daddys in Missouri and Big Mike, the General Manager of the Lumberyard in Des Moines, IA meeting outside the auditorium where the seminars were being held. Both men are very similar, being effusively affable promotionally minded risk takers. I saw that each man saw something of himself in the other when they finally met face to face, and now the rumors are starting to fly that the two are planning a series of interstate wrestling "death matches" between entertainers that are bound to get the crowds going.   The trade show like the seminars focuses on the business side of the convention. But even here like Tucker Mooney's worse bloopers and finest advertising masterpieces there were exhibits destined to get the crowd laughing. With close to three hundred booths advertising and selling so many products and services the adult entertainment world has to offer, from the booths of talent agencies occupied by beautiful, tight bodied women, to both hard and soft drink vendors selling to clubs, to the stage and pole performances offered by Spearmint Rhino, there were the unforgettable oddities such as the customized motorcycles complete with legs and breasts provided by R Imagine Enterprise and the electric chair replica replete with sample electrocutions put on by another exhibitor. I must have brought over at least a dozen entertainers for short photo sessions on the large breasted Harleys. This year's Expo was the best ever with the fun starting during the Opening night toga party hosted by Big Daddys Cabaret and D.J. Power. When Leah Layne and I balked at wearing togas, it didn't take long for another feature entertainer friend of ours, Darien Ross, to order fresh sheets from the front desk and fasten them around Leah and me, Roman style.   If you haven't done it already, try wearing a sheet in front of a few hundred club owners, adult convention exhibitors, porn stars, feature entertainers, and house dancers from across the United States. Then practice practice your oratory in front of your new found captive audience. You will be surprised about what comes out of your mouth, such as, "I am Caesar come to order all of you to cast off thy clothes and lie naked with me in the weeds.'   The next night is the club owner's appreciation party at Club Jaguars, reputedly Las Vegas's biggest and most glamorous new club. Here we are treated to dazzling performances of over fourteen Pure Talent feature entertainers, who once again show the agency's determination to elevate the standard for what great feature entertainment is all about.   The first day's trade show starts on Tuesday and goes for two days afterwards but the convention's not over yet. There's still the Feature Feature Fanfare on Friday afternoon at Club Jaguars and the bikini contest at Caesar's pool on Saturday which I have to miss because of a date with an airplane back to St Louis. But it's non stop late night partying every night from Tuesday through Saturday night. There's the Exotic Dancer Awards Party on Thursday night in Caesar's large ballroom during which the finest entertainers in the land perform, and during which the winners are announced with Aspen Reign winning top prize for best feature and Carrie Bare winning newcomer of the year, and still others winning top awards in their category. There's a prize for the photographer winning the most votes for photographer of the year and a number of awards for clubs finishing in first place in their category and region.   The last two nights I partied until 6:30 a.m. in various bars throughout Caesar's. After the awards party ended after 1 a.m. a large group of us wind up at Cleopatra's Barge and end up overflowing into the hallway. And out of this group a sizeable mob of diehards close Cleopatra's and continue socializing at another of the hotel's bars that would never close.   And then the last night...that could have been the best. There was dinner with a slender brunette wearing glasses that librarians wear. She wore jeans also. No makeup or very little, and I had just met her once, one year ago, but I had taken many pictures of her, so I knew what she looked like when she got all dressed up or undressed, and knew that this time she was holding back, not showing off her spectacular good looks. She's a great story and a great model but this will have to wait for a future issue.   There were the four young house dancers all working for Big Daddys over in Missouri, the Show Me State. All terribly young and paying their own way just to know more about this profession they've become a part of. Then all the deserving club owners who didn't win, since their clubs are smaller and less known, and Big Al who deserved to win, his place now an Illinois icon, buying many of us drinks at the bar. It's like a big fraternity with all of us photographers, writers, club owners and managers, features and house dancers all having one thing in common, and that is we are all black sheep. The Expo's not to be missed. For the dancer or club owner who doesn't make it to such events, it's isolation. For those who do each year gets better than the year before as all come to realize, "There really are people out there like me, and from events like the Expo I can learn from others.   It's a pageant, a great learning experience, great time, and it gets us all together as a unified force against the Mothers for a More Boring Nation

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