When Big Bird won’t do, send Sally to strip to her essentials. : Care Bear and a Bar Minimum

Iknew the company did not deal exclusively in sending Care Bear to entertain at children’s birthday parties the minute I walked in the door.

A wall was filled with photographs of women in their underwear and men in G-strings, living it up with a person of the opposite sex who either beamed with pleasure, frowned with despair or simply stared at the camera in a state of catatonia.

This was not, my friends, Care Bear Country.

In the first place, Care Bear, however inane the cuddly cartoon creature might be, would not disrobe in public. But, forced to under threat of having his cuddly cut out, he would never end up on a woman’s lap waving at the camera like Caligula at a Tupperware party. Care Bear would weep with shame and hide his face behind his Care Bear paws.

I was in the Sherman Oaks office of what I thought was an organization called Kiddie Antics. It was in one of those grim stucco buildings that also houses telephone answering services and mass-mailing experts who hustle miracle kitchen gadgets that peel potatoes, dice tomatoes and pipe in the Best of Phil Donahue.

I had gone to Kiddie Antics in the first place because they do a nice job furnishing costumed cartoon characters for childrens’ birthday parties. He-Man, Superman, Wonder Woman, Strawberry Shortcake and the aforementioned Care Bear.

Naturally I was shocked at the semi-nude photographs on the wall until Cyndi Winikoff and Helene Bakker explained that they also run a business called Bare Minimum, which rents out strippers to fun festivities ranging from divorces to police roll-calls.

Both businesses operate out of the same office, which must come close to representing the full dichotomy of home entertainment in fantasy-conscious America. When Big Bird won’t do, send Sally to strip to her essentials.

The two who run Kiddie Antics and Bare Minimum are decent enough women of about 30, give or take a few years on either side. They dress in a manner that is not particularly representative of either business. No paper party hats but no brazen decolletage either.

They look like any woman in line at a supermarket checkout stand buying cat food and Diet Pepsi.

Cyndi and Helene began Bare Minimum four years ago. It was one of the first businesses of its kind in Southern California and in the nation, since a lot of places would run you out of town for merely suggesting establishment of a cadre of strippers who make house calls.

Kiddie Antics is only a year old and is almost as popular as Bare Minimum, which gets about a hundred calls a week. Both businesses use unemployed actors and actresses and low-income people like schoolteachers. Applicants are carefully screened and auditioned. There is never a crossover between the two firms.

In other words, you can’t be Strawberry Shortcake and a stripper too, although Strawberry Shortcake isn’t a bad name for someone twirling her tassles in a waterfront bar. Sailors like their women sweet and their dancing dirty.

To hire one of Bare Minimum’s strippers costs about $75. They also wear costumes, but only to disguise their original purpose.

For example, a nun appears at your Encino doorstep in what she says is a program to bless the neighborhood. You are a devout Catholic, so naturally you invite her in. Once in your living room, she breaks out a cassette player and turns it on. The music you are hearing, however, is not a 16th Century Gregorian chant.

While you are mulling this over, she kicks off her nun’s habit to reveal a skimpy dress (definitely not ecclesiastical) and begins to take it off. She strips to a half-cup bra, a G-string and a garter belt.

Meanwhile, the good old boys who set the whole thing up have come bursting out of a back room to wish you happy heart attack and to enjoy the final stages of the strip. The whole thing, including your (1) pleased (2) stunned or (3) disgusted expression, is recorded on film and everyone goes home.

“The women strippers never have problems,” Helene said, “but someone is always trying to rip off a male stripper’s G-string. The girls can get pretty wild.”

“What do they do when the G-string is gone?” I asked.

“Put on their pants and leave, I guess,” Cyndi said. “If they do anything else, I don’t want to know about it.”

Once in a while a stripper is thrown out of a restaurant and occasionally a guest of honor who fails to find either humor or enticement in public gymnosophy walks out in the middle of a strip. But otherwise, there have been few problems for Bare Minimum.

“They create a moment of fantasy,” Cyndi said of both businesses, “and is there anything wrong with that?”

I suppose not. It simply proves that our childhood penchant for make-believe never really dies. It just turns from one kind of cuddly to another kind of cuddly, and I for one hope that the two kinds of cuddlies never merge.

Even in L.A., we aren’t ready for Care Bear stripping to a heavy-metal beat.