Move like it’s the last thing in the world you’ll do,’ said Rita Rhinestone.

At work she may have to be a pillar of conservative respectability, but there can be times when a female lawyer or executive would rather slip into the role of Mistress of Evil or Mata Hari, just for a change of pace.

With the proper training, maybe she can.

A small group of women that includes two lawyers, a public relations agent, two nurses, a stewardess and a secretary is trying to find out. They meet one night each week in a Studio City dance hall to learn the art of striptease.

Their teacher, Mariana Cahill, asked me to come by and observe her small part in the liberation of women.

Women, she suggested, and especially those in business careers, have been made to think that the seductive, sensual part of them is trivial or foolish, deserving to be stamped out.

“For a little while, it was almost like if you were appealing to men, you were debasing yourself,” she said.

To be honest, Cahill has never experienced that herself. She is Rita Rhinestone, an exotic dancer who has toured the United States and Canada and performed with the Folies Bergere in Paris.

She now lives in Los Angeles and is producing a film on the history of stripping and the nude in art and ceremony.

It was a few of her friends, she said, who decided to release that seductive and sensual part of their femininity and pressed her into service as a teacher.

“The first five classes scared some,” she said. “They hadn’t moved their hips in 15 years, so it was a little bit scary.”

Right now, she is concentrating on releasing sensual body motions rather than taking off clothing. But she hopes to teach each woman a routine, such as the Sexy Nurse or Jungle Girl or Mata Hari or Mistress of Evil.

“I think the idea is to be able to do it well enough that, should they choose, they could dazzle somebody,” she said.

I stopped by the Moro-Landis Studios on Ventura Boulevard one evening last week to see how a woman learns to dazzle somebody.

The parking lot next to the aging, crusty building was full. Several young dancers stood near a side door that had been flung open, allowing a skull-thrashing beat to roll out and envelop half a block of the boulevard.

Men and women in colored tights danced across the wooden floor, leaping through the air and waving their arms exuberantly. A sort of drill instructor in purple tights yelled orders and encouragement as he danced the same routine.

In a small room upstairs, Cahill stood at the front of her class, a foot or two from the mirror that covered one wall. She wore yellow tights, yellow socks and sneakers and a yellow T-shirt cut off at the sleeves and waist.

Three students stood in line behind her. Three others had canceled out, possibly being a little nervous about their audience.

Cahill put a disco cassette into her portable stereo.

“OK, so we’re just going to warm up our necks and shoulders,” she said.

At first she did simple aerobics, bouncing up and down, throwing her arms out and sometimes shrieking with enthusiasm.

The three women behind her followed, a little more stiffly.

Then she did several sensuous deep-knee bends.

“Bend your legs, raise your heels, straighten your legs,” she said, doing so as she counted, “five-six-seven-eight.”

A short woman, full in the middle, winced and collapsed, rubbing her calves.

A tall, slender woman with an athletic stride had no trouble doing the exercise but couldn’t copy the sensuous movements of hip and shoulder that Cahill was doing.

Cahill danced over to her side and took something of a fighting stance. Then she did a version of the Ali Shuffle, putting a hostile look on her face and exhorting the young woman with each gesture.

“Move now like it’s the last thing in the world you’ll do,” she said.

Cahill changed moods frequently.

She would show the students how to lift their back ends as they wave their hips back and forth in a bit of classical burlesque.

And, as soon as they got that, she would switch into a belly dancing move.

After half an hour of this, her tights were dripping sweat. The other women weren’t sweating, though. They seemed to be having difficulty getting so many parts of their bodies to move at once.

At one point, the short woman flopped her arms down and walked to the water bottle.

“Oh, what a pansy I am,” she protested.

Halfway through the class, Cahill instructed the women to put their high heels on.

She played a Peggy Lee song and started a slow and provocative routine.

“Don’t try to follow it exactly,” she said. “Just try to get the quality of the movement.”

The students followed the steps well enough. They had a harder time getting the quality.

Finally, the third one, who was wearing blue tights and black leather boots, seemed to catch on. She broke from the routine. She started to repeat some of the simpler moves from earlier in the lesson. Her hips rotated a little more. Her back end went up and down. Her face flushed. Sweat popped out on her neck.

She was finding that sensuous part of herself. And, as far as I could tell, it was mostly fundamentals.