The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 45

Hie Orlando Sentinel THURSDAY, June 27, 1991 Childhood habits are stress-coping devices Family Life, E-3 TP5" Occupation: Topless dancer 5 ff Greg Dawson TELEVISION Big money lures young women into stripping for a living, but in the long run, many find themselves trapped. By Susan M. Barbieri OF THE SENTINEL STAFF tunes them out. It's a busy Saturday at Club Juana in Casselberry. She thinks about the $300 she'll probably make tonight.

She thinks about her 5-year-old. She thinks about the day she can quit the club to pursue clothing and swim-wear design. "I never liked stripping, but now I can tolerate it better because I don't worry about what people think anymore. It's a job. I go in there, I work, and I come home," says Mary, 29, who asked that her last name not be used.

While some topless dancers are willing to identify themselves, others request anonymity so they won't be harassed in their off-hours. Potter's demotion is boon for Channel 6 The promotion of WCPX-Channel 6 general manager Mike Schweitzer to president of First Media the Potomac, company that owns WCPX, has to be considered good news for the station because it includes the si lease Me, Please Me" by the Scorpions blares from the loudspeakers as a woman with a Bar mm II i 17 bie-doll body steps onto the table. She peels off her gray bikini, holds onto an exposed ceiling beam and begins to dance in high white heels. Posing like a water-fountain statue, she arches her back so that her long red hair cascades down her spine. The men at the table gape and whoop.

After 11 years, she is used to this and From Casselberry to Orange Blossom Trail to State Road A1A, hundreds of Central Florida women are making a Please see TOPLESS, E-6 JUDy WATSON TRACYSENTINEL Deidre Robbio, 21, is a topless dancer by night. By day, she is studying for a real estate license. Robbio says she earns $60,000 to $70,000 a year by dancing. 1 Nobody plays dumb like Leslie Nielsen, whose deadpan portrayal of Lt. Frank Drebin in the 'Naked Gun' films has brought him fame, fortune and loads of fun.

By Clifford Terry CHICAGO TRIBUNE a wftwAK idlimaBteiaw 7 7 7 J7x I77S; multaneous demotion of Glenn Potter. Potter, bumped down to head of First Media's radio division, assumed oversight of Channel 6 when the company acquired the station in 1986. He had never run a TV station before and it showed. Potter's reign of error included the firing of weather anchor Mike Burger in 1989 and a diminished commitment to news that included the replacement of the station's 5:30 p.m. newscast with sitcom reruns.

"I think everyone in the newsroom is looking forward to the change," said veteran Channel 6 reporter Ed Trauschke. "Mike is well-liked, and it helps that he will be here." (Potter rarely visited Orlando.) A newsroom staffer who welcomed the change said Potter had a "financial noose around the operation," meaning Potter's miserly refusal to invest in the people and equipment necessary for Channel 6 news to compete with Channels 2 and 9. Potter, incidentally, now is in charge of a radio division that owns no radio stations. Here today, gone to-Muro? Channel 6's Michelle Muro may soon be dropping anchor at a San Diego TV station, according to newsroom gossip at WCPX. Muro (pronounced mew-row) is on vacation and unavailable for comment.

But one WCPX source said she visited California last week and returned smiling. From Russia, with video. Channel 6 weather anchor Pamela Kister and a camera crew will spend two weeks in the Soviet Union in August as part of a Central Florida missionary group. The mission of the multi-denominational group is to deliver toys, coloring books and God's word to children in orphanages and hospitals, said Father George McCammon, rector at the Church of the Resurrection in Longwood, where Kister is a member. Kister is expected to report on her trip in a one-hour special when she returns.

Also, look for Kister to talk about her upcoming trip in a spot airing on Channel 6 and WKCF-Channel 68, which carries the Channel 6 news weeknights at 10 p.m. Here's the beef. You knew it was coming. A woman's counter-list to my top 10 "Prime Time Women to Die For." It was submitted by a reader who wrote, "I am not signing my name because I am saving my 15 minutes of fame for something a little more dignified than coming up with a top 10 hunk list." 1. Ken Wahl (Wiseguy).

2. Jimmy Smits (LA. Law). 3. Scott Bakula Quantum Leap).

4. Daniel J. Travanti (Hill Street Blues). can shave my legs any 5. Burt Reynolds (Evening Shade).

Tom 6. Rob Morrow (Northern Exposure). cutest smile on 7. James Earl Jones (Gabriel's Fire). the 8.

Gary Cole (Midnight Caller). 9. Don Johnson (Miami Vice). 10. Ted Danson (Cheers).

willing to entertain other Brand X. Did you catch the premiere of Johnny B. on the Loose late Monday night? No? I'm so happy for you. This syndicated mishmash of tired jokes and lame shtick stars Jonathan Brandmeier, a former whiz kid of Chicago radio who has been trying to take Hollywood by storm for about three years. He was in that horrible Thanksgiving movie last year with Mary Tyler Moore.

The first edition of Johnny which airs weeknights after the 11 o'clock news on Channel 6, was about as funny as a wakeup call to a visiting celebrity at the Peabody. "We really like this bit," Brandmeier gushed, hyping the big opening gag. The bit: Johnny B. makes stupid remarks to people going through the drive-in at a McDonald's in Chicago. "Ma'am, there's a hand sticking out of your trunk" and "You have an oil leak, ma'am." Hilarious! Cutting edge! But wait "They keep driving away from me!" Brandmeier said as one bored motorist after another refused to play along.

I ley, that's why they call it drive time, Johnny B. On the Loose just confirms my belief that if you took all the funny, original material ever heard on FM (For Morons) morning radio and put it into a half-hour TV show, you would still have 26 minutes left. CHICAGO Standing in the back of an elevator in a posh hotel, Leslie Nielsen who is known to carry his personal whoopee cushion on his travels unleashes it just as a stylish, prim-looking woman steps into the car. (To her credit, she handles the stunt with aplomb.) It is a goofy prank for a grown man to pull, but this isn't just any ordinary grown man. This is Leslie Nielsen, the onetime paragon of sternness who in the past several years has been taking a fuzzy-pink-slippers performance path that could best be described as "silly." Like that drum-banging rabbit he sends up in a beer commercial, his career just keeps going and going and going.

'Silly' would be a good word," the mellow-voiced, 65-year-old actor agrees as he takes a seat in a corner of the hotel's deserted restaurant, where a hapless staff member has just as if on cue spilled cream all over the table, prompting Nielsen to taunt her with a "na-na-na-NA-na." "Yeah, 'silly' is good. And I feel very lucky to have the license to do dumb and stupid things that are really wonderful to do all those things that your parents wouldn't let you do as a kid. I just love the humor, because it's very much a part of my humor. I love trying to find the epitome of dumbness in people. I used to think I had to go to great pains to find it, but I've discovered recently that it's always been totally right there on the surface." Previously known for playing no-nonsense cops on such TV shows as The New Breed and The Protectors, Nielsen first went the deadpan-comedy route 11 years ago, when he was cast as the dippy doctor in the disaster-movie parody, Airplane! Since then he has played Police Lt.

Frank Drebin in a snappy but short-lived TV series, Police Squad, its 1988 big-screen hit reincarnation, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! and now Naked Gun 2Vr. The Smell of Fear, which opens Friday. The first few moments of Naked Gun 2xh a rambunctious mixture of juvenile sight gags, dopey one- Please see NIELSEN, E-5 I Leslie Nielsen on playing Lt. Frank Drebin: 'As an actor, I'm always finding a way to be oblivious, unaware. It's very subtle, but extremely Controversy accompanies computerized record charts By Stephen Holden NEW YORK TIMES Musicland, Sound Warehouse and Spec's in Central Florida.

When first installed at 2,300 retail record stores and 4,000 department stores, the system took into account some 40 percent of all record albums sold in the United States. Six weeks later, that percentage had jumped to fiO percent, with 2,700 retail stores and 4,500 department stores reporting. Last week, the system tabulated more than 5 million transactions, 85 percent of them at retail stores and 15 percent at other locations. Under the new method, albums by A chorus of record company executives charged that the chart, prepared by SoundScan, a research film in Hartsdale, N.Y., would seriously undermine their efforts to promote new talent. "The chart was implemented too quickly," said Henry Droz, president of the WarnerElektraAllantic labels.

"It overemphasizes the Southwest and barely represents the Northeast." Instead of relying on lists of best-selling albums supplied by record stores, the new charts compute the actual number of records sold through a system that scans the bar codes at retail checkout counters. IThe outlets include Camelot, best-selling pop acts that had previously taken several weeks to reach No. 1 hit', the top in one or two weeks. Paula Abdul's Spellbound entered the' pop album chart at No. 5 and reached 1 the next week.

Two weeks later it was replaced at the top by the Los Angeles rap group N.W.A.'s Efil4zaggin', which had appeared on the chart at No. 2 the previous week. This week, the second album by the hard-rock band Skid Row, Slace to the Grind, enters the chart at No. 1, while N.W.A's album drops to No. 3.

The Please see BILLBOARD, I When Billboard, the music industry's leading trade magazine, began publishing new pop and country album charts last month using a new computerized method, the change set off alarms in the record business that have not stopped ringing. Pop albums by a number of new artists whose careers major record companies were trying to establish suddenly plummeted, while a bunch of country albums took dramatic upward leaps..