Tualatin Stars opens to deafening silence from protesters

Much-contested strip club officially open fior business

By Ed Johnson

The Times, Nov 26, 2009

Jaime Valdez / Times Newspapers

Stars Cabaret server Karli Hebisen,23, who was a pharmacy tech talks with a customer at the business' new location in Tualatin.

ADVERTISEMENTS

In the hours before its grand opening on the night of Nov. 19, Stars Cabaret at Bridgeport was bustling with activity.

At least 20 workers were whittling away at various tasks that needed to be finished before the night’s big party. The club’s managers were expecting hundreds of people, and everything had to be just so. Tualatin’s second strip club was opening its doors.

A group of four men were installing what looked to be an intensive lighting system at one of the room’s three stages. A few more carefully applied Windex and elbow grease to a battery of mirrors mounted in the other corner. The place has a lot of mirrors.

Randy Kaiser, one of the club’s co-owners, pressed off his iPhone after dealing with a last-minute permitting issue – something about fire alarms – and pondered the journey it took to get to this point.

“We’ve been working on this for over a year,” he said. “And it’s finally happening.”

In this case “working on” means battling a downpour of negative community reaction, including a mayor, police department and city council who actively opposed the project, saying that it would bring more crime to the city, and a liquor commission that wasn’t exactly gung-ho either.

Kaiser has dealt with this reaction before, when he opened up other locations of his chain of clubs – Bridgeport will be the fourth Stars, besides those in Bend, Salem and Beaverton. Nude dancing is a protected form of free speech under Oregon’s constitution. At this point, he said, he welcomes any attention the business gets, even if it’s negative.

“I guess that’s the uptight masses,” he said of community members who opposed the club’s opening. “And thank God they have that attitude, because people always want to do things that they aren’t suppose to.”

In this case however, the storm of community opposition didn’t materialize. There were no protesters on opening day, and www.changefororegon.org, a Web site organized by anti-strip-club activists, has lapsed into non-existence.

And, as of Wednesday afternoon, Tualatin police had not been called to the club

Kaiser said that he and his partners invested over half a million dollars in remodeling the building at 17939 S.W. McEwan Road from its former incarnation as the Out of Blues restaurant, and it shows. Inside, a bank of flat-screen televisions dominates the south wall. The chairs are black steel and leather. Everything is gleaming, fresh and new. It looks like money.

Kaiser said that the recession has affected his business, just like everyone else. After all, upscale gentlemen’s clubs are definitely luxury items. But he said that he and his partners expect the Bridgeport location to be successful, in part because of it easy access from Interstate 5.

1 | 2 Next Page >>