E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cinderella story, continued

TALE OF SURVIVAL

Nick Romano is waiting for me to leave. Having just introduced myself, I’m sitting in front of him at the Slipper while he tries to convince me that there’s no story here. To my right, a dancer onstage lies flat on her back and pulls her legs so far back that her toes tap the stage beside her head. A couple of slobbering spectators stare, when all the sudden — whoosh! — a misty exhalation obstructs their view. That’s the house fog machine, a dishwasher lodged under the bar that breathes steam whenever a bartender unpacks a load of glasses.

I keep asking Nick Romano questions, but since I don’t have my notebook out or my recorder on, his answers are all lost in a blaring memory of Jermaine Dupri’s "Gonna Getcha." At some point, Romano decides I’m not going away and beckons me outside to LaGrange, towing general manager and doorman Danny Wong.

Romano lights a cigarette, offers me one. "So what do you wanna know?" I ask about the past. He tells me he used to own a place around the block, the Silver Slipper. It closed in 1981. Then he opened up here four years later. "We ought to get a medal for what we did to this place. Look, there used to be a lot of thieves, hookers, drug addicts, up and down the street, whores — it used to be the Wild West here. We cleaned up the area pretty good, as you can see. You can walk here. At one time, a girl that would walk the street wasn’t very safe. But now it’s extremely safe." He thinks the biggest misconception about the Glass Slipper is that it’s dangerous. "You’re safer here [on LaGrange Street] than you are at Faneuil Hall," he claims. "Over there, you have people when they drink, that get rowdy. But over here it’s nice."

He talks about the Slipper’s public image. "We’re very low-key. We don’t have any nude photographs out. Everything is in subdued taste. If people want to come for adult entertainment, they know where we are. We don’t have lights blaring, nude pictures in the window, ostentatious."

As for the hoped-for relocation across the street, he’s not thrilled about it. He points to the black-faced building where they’ve already started construction. "We’re moving because the BRA is taking us over through eminent domain. That law is ... " he exhales, "Whatever. I don’t want to get into a discussion [about it] because I don’t want to talk badly about the city. They’re forcing us out. I’d rather stay there, but we’ll have a brand-new place."

Romano is hesitant to say much more about the BRA usurping his business — and you can’t blame him. The city has historically blocked any attempts he and Bennett ever made to expand their brand. In 1991, the pair applied to transfer a defunct local lounge’s liquor license to a vacant place on Washington Street — that would have begotten a sister for the Slipper, the Pink Slipper. That was when the city was still waging war on the derelict ’hood, as it had been ever since a pimp fatally stabbed a Harvard football player in 1976. Fearing that a new strip-club addition would help refuel such crime, community members opposed it.

At the time, Daniel Holmes, owner of a LaGrange Street bistro, in his opposition to a second business told the Boston Globe about a dancer who’d once ordered steak tips from his restaurant in the buff. "When I asked her why she wasn’t wearing clothes she said, ‘You’re only across the street.’ " The transfer was ultimately rejected.

The following year, Romano and Bennett made an offer to buy a different Washington Street property that also would have invariably become a strip club. Then-mayor Ray Flynn, Senator John Kerry, and US Representative Joe Kennedy III all fired off letters urging the property owners not to sell to the Slipper’s proprietors. In the end, the building’s owners went with another buyer.

In 1998, Romano and Bennett again tried to expand, this time on their own premises. They drew up blueprints to double the Slipper’s 72-person capacity and add a second stage. Again, the licensing board rejected the Slipper’s petition.

"We didn’t want to see the situation get out of hand," explains Bill Moy, a member of the Chinatown Neighborhood Council who publicly opposed the extension. "Not that the expansion was so bad, but the individuals that we were dealing with, they might take it as a sign of approval and go beyond that." Asked whether the problem was with the business specifically or with the nature of the business, Moy admits, "It was a moral issue."

Which is why Romano has good reason to call the city "puritanical," as he does leaning back against the building and finishing up his smoke. Then he tells me that Wong will help me with the rest of my questions — except one. "Just don’t ask how much money I make," he says laughing. He shakes my hand. "Come back. Bring your friends, if you’re out bored some night. Get married and bring your husband — it’ll get him revved up." His eyes crinkle as he musters a half-smile. He motions at the entrance. "I gotta run in."

He offers one last piece of advice for my walk home. "Be careful."