A Las Vegas Stripper Mobile has commissioners up in arms.
Even the men who hand out "nude girls direct to your room" cards stopped their hawking long enough to do some gawking at the "stripper-mobile" as it rolled down the Las Vegas Strip on Monday night, reports Joe Schoenmann of the Las Vegas Sun.
It's akin to a small U-Haul truck but with Plexiglas surrounding the brightly lit cargo area instead of walls. In the middle is a gleaming stripper pole. Swinging around the pole is a scantily clad young woman. Two of her fellow strippers are in the back of the truck too, awaiting their turns.
County commissioners argue that the Stripper Mobile could cause accidents.
"You could have 10 of them out there pretty quick and a million people just staring," Commissioner Steve Sisolak said Tuesday. "We have to get a handle on it before it gets too out of hand."
"This is what Las Vegas is all about," Larry Beard, marketing director for six business entities including Déjà Vu Showgirls, Little Darlings and Hustler Topless gentlemen's clubs, told the Sun. "You come here to see something you can't see anywhere else in the world."
The reaction, and effectiveness of the advertising, "has been phenomenal," said Fred Robertson, whose company, Rolling Ads, provides the truck. "Most people don't pay attention to billboards. We go out and people are just waiting to see it."
The clubs need this, they say. Business has been bad.
But commissioners like Sisolak argue that this type of advertising is bad.
He cited a woman who wrote a letter stating that her young grandson had seen the Stripper Mobile, which is only supposed to run from 10 pm to 2 am but started early that night around 5 pm.
Mueller said in her letter: "This is not only disgusting but very dangerous" because it could cause a traffic accident.
But nothing about the women or the truck is illegal, a Metro Police spokesman said. "As long as it's not impeding traffic, it's fine," Officer Jacinto Rivera explained.
Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani contends that Metro doesn't enforce the law on mobile billboards in public rights of way because officers don't have the time.
"But just because no one has enforced it doesn't mean it's not the law," she said. "I don't care about the content or that they're female dancers. I'm sick of the women, in fact - let's get some men up there for once. But this is just illegal."
I saw one of those lawyer/courtroom TV shows this year Franklin & Bash and the first episode was pretty similar. The lawyers stalked an intersection that had a sexy video billboard and as soon as someone caused a crash, they ran to the guy to get him to hire them to use the defense that the video billboard was dangerous and the cause of the accident because it takes your eyes off the road for longer than a few seconds. Of course it's a TV show, but they won the case.