Pasties and Politics

By Erin in Miscellaneous on May 3, 2006 12:07PM

Boobs. What can't they drive a person to do?

In a time long ago, in a land 164 miles south, Chicagoist was known to occasionally frequent a strip club in her college town because 1) there was no cover charge, 2) it was one of only a smattering of bars that women could go to and not worry about men giving them a hard time and 3) well, strip club. Chicagoist knows very few women who haven't had a rip-roaring good time with White Zombie blaring in the background and watching their most uptight of girlfriends hestitantly stick a dollar bill in a jeweled g-string.

Mostly, we'd chat with the girls in the bathroom, exchange names of personal trainers after much discussion on how they got their butts to look so fantastic and find out the best places in town to pick up a pair of clear heels. Well, maybe not the part about the clear heels.

But more than anything, we considered our sojourn to the strip clubs a study in male behavior. Certainly not all of the men turned into piles of mushy goo at the site of a pair of well-oiled breasts and shaved nether regions, but a good majority of the patrons with the Y chromosome were driven to freakishy stare at the ladies, form pools of drool in their corners of their mouths and rack up huge bar tabs as a result of all of this naked, expensive glory.

At least in part, that seems to be the case with the president of New Lenox, a village of about 25,000 in northeastern Illinois.

Mike Smith ran up a $1,462 tab over at VIP's, a Chicago strip club on the near northwest side of town, on his government credit card. At first we assumed that perhaps Smith grabbed the wrong credit card to pay the tab, but according to the Trib, it seems Smith forgot his civilian card and only had the village's Amex on him at the time so he used it. Smith paid the tab upon returning home, but seriously: how can you forget your credit card when you have a night ahead of you that includes wanton nudity? That's just poor planning. Especially when you're an elected official and especially when a hefty charge to a strip club will surely show up on the bill. Just the same, we know how it goes. When faced with a face full of breasts, common sense does not always rule the day.

Chicagoist doesn't think anyone should take Smith too much to task over this, despite how silly we think it was for him to go out to VIP's totally unprepared. We are raising our eyebrows a bit over the fact that he spent an additional $1,300 in restaurants charges, some of which he can't recall the places from where the charges were made. Nevertheless, the guy paid the bill out of his own pocket and we here in Chicago welcome that kind of spending in our fair city. It just takes a special kind of stupid to do it using a village credit card, that's all, and you gotta call that out.

Poor guy. Let's just hope that the bill didn't give service-by-service details of his party's actitivites that night and if so, it didn't include any charges to a champagne room.