Joseph Stevenson
NEW YORK (TNA) – Halloween in New York isn’t safe for exotic dancers – especially the charitable kind.
Strippers and other employees from the Scores gentlemen’s club on the West Side of Manhattan were uninvited from performing volunteer work at a children’s Halloween carnival at a middle school in Brooklyn after an article in the New York Daily News made it appear they would be handing out treats – and implying they’d be dressed as tricks in their working clothes.
Apparently fearing that a horde of French maids, nurses and Vampirellas in six-inch stilettos would descend on the innocent children of Brooklyn MS 51, the school’s principal asked that the Scores personnel not attend.
The Haunted Halloween Carnival, scheduled for this Saturday, is an annual event run by Timothy Young’s Puppetry Arts Theatre, a non-profit offering “visual performing arts to inner-city youth and families through the multi-disciplinary art of puppetry.”
Young was upset after the paper’s article scared school officials and a few parents, resulting in a minor media controversy.
“It is not a school event,” said Young. “It is not associated with the Department of Education or MS 51. Because many children will attend the benefit, it is not an appropriate venue for volunteers identified as adult dancers. The principal has asked the dancers not to be present, and my organization has agreed.”
In fact, only four of the Scores employees scheduled to attend are actually dancers at the club; seven others were from the corporate division. But “the Daily News twisted it into something that it wasn’t,” said Young.
“They made it sound it like I have 12 gigantic strippers coming and they’re gonna perform here and pass out candy. They were not [going to be] handing out candy to children, they were not gonna be scantily dressed, and you wouldn’t have known them had they been there.”
Elda Auerbach, who runs marketing and promotion for Scores, said, “One of the dancers” – stage name Mackenzie – “has a four-year-old kid, you know what I mean? She’s actually putting herself through school [dancing]. And she doesn’t tell her son where she works, because he’s a little kid and he doesn’t need to know that. That’s why it’s called ‘adult entertainment.’”
“It’s ridiculous,” Auerbach continued. “What did they think [the dancers] were gonna wear, you know? They were gonna go in regular costumes. Their Halloween costumes are whatever regular people buy at Ricky’s [costume shop]. They knew it was for kids.”
According to a follow-up article in the Daily News, the girls were going to be dressed as witches, “but covered up,” said Auerbach.
But the original story “made it out to be ‘eye candy’ and blah blah blah. It’s all because it’s a club and it’s Scores. Here [at the club] sometimes, they’ll dress as nurses …”
This is not the first time Auerbach and Scores have run into resistance when offering to give back to the community.
The club had made previous donations to Toys for Tots and City Harvest, but after contacting some women’s organizations in the area, “they found out it was Scores and said no, [the women’s groups] stand for the empowerment of women and it’s not in their best interest to accept our donation. I never heard of that, you know? I never heard of a charity turning down a donation.”
After the story broke, Auerbach hadn’t wanted to comment further for fear of hurting the event “because what they’re doing is really good. They’re giving away costumes, they’re having a carnival-type thing for a bunch of underprivileged kids.”
Young feared that there remained a possibility the entire event might be scotched.
“At this moment because we uninvited them, the focus is the kids, the focus is the outreach, the focus is my not-for-profit, which does a great many things.”
Young’s all-volunteer outreach service brings performances to the poor and people with HIV, among other needy audiences, “and when it comes to our volunteers, we do not discriminate,” he said.
“No matter what you do – whether you’re a stripper or you’re a Republican.”
In an added twist, Young claims that public opinion was solidly behind the event as originally planned.
“We were on Fox 5 [TV news] [on Tuesday], and 76 percent of the people polled said it was not a problem.”