Thursday, April 10, 2014 by OU Daily

Sports: The men’s gymnastics team could bring home a national title this weekend (Page 8)

L&A: The best places to nap between class on campus (Page 5)

Opinion: We encourage students to learn about and exercise their first amendment rights (Page 4)

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W W W.O U DA I LY.C O M

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TECHNOLOGY

“This is my

house”

Strip club has storied history in Norman STEVEN ZOELLER • CAMPUS REPORTER

Editor’s Note: All the dancers preferred to be and beer glasses clinking, the men cheer and applaud. identified by their stage names in this story. The bar sits across the room from the stage, This story contains strong language. managed by a small woman in her mid-50s smoking a cigarette. Most wouldn’t even exTucked in the alley between Sage’s pect to see this severe-looking woman workWellness Lounge and Fuzzy’s Taco Shop is ing here, and she doesn’t just do that — she a portal to another dimension. Beyond its also owns the place. threshold, framed pictures of female anatKaren Summers is a subversion, a wrinkle omy adorn the walls of a lounge lit dimly by in the image most people have of strip clubs. colorful bulbs. A woman in lingerie has the The more she and the dancers talk about stage, her barely-concealed hindquarters aimed squarely at the audience as she danc- the story of Suger’s, the more wrinkled that image becomes. es. Over the noise of billiard balls colliding

‘A decent place to work’ Summers opened Suger’s 30 years ago in 1984 shortly after resigning as a dancer at Walter Mitty’s, another strip club on Campus Corner at the time. Suger’s became the only club of its kind when Summers outperformed her former employer and survived the strict zoning restrictions on adult entertainment facilities adopted by the City of Norman in 1987. Suger’s owes much of its success to Summers’ initial vision. She says she set out to “give girls a decent place to work.” “In this business, people have ideas about what goes on in strip clubs,” Summers said. “And I wanted to provide a decent place for dancers to be able to go to, where they don’t feel like they have to do things that they may feel like they have to do at other clubs in competition with other dancers.” One dancer called Savage said she was attracted to Suger’s for precisely this reason. She started dancing 10 years ago at an Oklahoma City club called Playhouse, which she left to avoid a toxic environment. “There was a lot of drug use at the time, and

that was a huge turn-off for me,” Savage said. “A lot of girls going home with customers and doing what sometimes can be referred to as private parties, which was also not something that I was ever interested in doing.” After only a few months at Playhouse, Savage went with a date to Suger’s and was impressed by how much “cleaner” it was. As someone who doesn’t like to be touched, Savage also liked that customers weren’t allowed to grab dancers. Physical contact between dancers and customers is technically illegal, but as Suger’s dancer Lexie Bay said, “Just because they’re not supposed to doesn’t mean they don’t.” Before Bay came to Suger’s four years ago, she also danced in Oklahoma City, where she says sexual contact was encouraged. Bay said people would sometimes find used condoms while cleaning a place at the end of the night. “When I worked at Red Light Nights, I saw a girl sucking dick in the lap dance area,” said Lexie. “That was my last night there.”

Students test new platforms D2L+ and Canvas available in tech. labs MIKE BRESTOVANSKY Campus Reporter

To determine which system best fits student preferences, Sooners are comparing two different online learning management systems: a beefed up Desire2Learn and Canvas. Students can test D2L+, an upgraded version of Desire2Learn — the platform OU currently uses — and compare it to Canvas, a similar competing platform and vote for which system they prefer. Demo versions of both platforms are available at Oklahoma Memorial Union’s OneUniversity store, the Physical Sciences Center computer lab and Couch Center’s computer lab. If students can’t reach a testing location, they can email academictech@ ou.edu for alternate arrangements, said Becky Weintz, Information Technology’s communication manager. “This demo will help us to better understand student needs and desired capabilities,” Weintz said. “Our mission is to provide students with the best possible learning experience, so student feedback on what that experience looks like is critical to our success.” Students can vote for their preferred system via email or via Twitter by using the hashtags #useitou and #loseitou. Students who test the systems in the OneUniversity store can also win a $25 gift card to the store, Weintz said. Mike Brestovansky mcbrestov@gmail.com

PROJECTS

Taste coffee for science

SEE CLUB PAGE 2

Students turn lab rats by assisting researchers AMBER FRIEND

TRIVIA

Campus Reporter

Some legal trivia about Suger’s In a business as regulated as adult entertainment, places like Suger’s are inevitably defined in part by the limits of the law. Many of its bizarre or goofy aspects can be traced back to some obscure statute on the books. When they arrive at Suger’s to work, dancers check in by flashing their breasts at the bartender. This is for the manager on duty to verify their areolas are covered with latex, in accordance with the law. A dancer cannot expose her butt crack or genitals, so that explains the barely-there lingerie. Sometimes dancers wear two pairs of bottoms just in case one falls off. It’s a way of covering one’s ass, literally and legally. Norman zoning laws ban adult entertainment facilities from outside the C-2 and C-3 districts and within 500 feet of a church, school, residential area or park. Suger’s wasn’t affected, but other clubs weren’t so lucky when they were passed. In Sugers’s owner Karen Summer’s words, “they zoned them all out of business.”

Sooners gathered Wednesday at the Stevenson Life Science Research Center to drink some coffee — and they did it all for science. This semester Ron Halterman, chemistry and biochemistry professor, and Steven Foster, mass spectrometer lab manager, have led six students in the Coffee Project, a research experiment that aims to determine the molecular components of coffee affect factors, such as flavor. This is a science known as molecular gastronomy, Halterman said. The six students are part of the First Year Research Experience. Through the program, select first-year students can research alongside OU professors and mentors. While most of the program’s students work individually, the Coffee Project called for a group. On Wednesday, they presented their findings to all 32 First Year Research Experience students, several chemistry and biochemistry faculty members and administrators, Halterman said. SEE PROJECTS PAGE 2

WEATHER Partly cloudy skies. Warm. High near 85F. Winds SW at 15-25mph

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