Topless Bar Owner Isn’t About to Say She’s Sorry : Business: Sandra Dease, who runs Sandraella’s nudie joint in Anaheim, views herself as just another grandmother making a living. Not everyone agrees.

Please pardon Mrs. Dease if she’s a bit reluctant to tell people exactly what she’s up to these days.

She manages her employees’ United Way campaign, which is nice. She makes sure that Maria, her precocious 14-year-old, gets in before curfew every night. You know how teen-agers are. She checks in almost daily on her first grandchild, 6-week-old Victoria Lynn. Who wouldn’t? And, oh yeah, she owns and operates that place on South Brookhurst Street where willowy women bare their chests to the delight of hundreds of baying men.

Yeah, that place. Sandraella’s. The nudie joint. The den of disgust. So go ahead. Let her have it. Tell her she’s a hussy. Or worse. Say what she does is filthy. Vulgar. Sinful. Tell her she’ll get her comeuppance. That she’s hell-bound. It’s OK. Honest. She’s heard it all before. And then some. And she’ll hear it again. That much, she knows.

“I’m not ashamed in any way, shape or form,” the 46-year-old businesswoman says. “People just don’t understand. This isn’t the type of business that people think it is.”

Whatever one thinks of Sandra Dease (yes, that is her real name) or her trade, she seems a far cry from the stereotypical silk-shirted playgirl that people usually associate with her line of work. At the moment, in fact, she has been absorbed with her teen-age daughter, who, like many kids her age, is testing the roiled waters of independence. Then there’s the attention-grabbing grandchild whom Dease helped usher into the world Nov. 15 as the Lamaze coach for daughter Gina, 27. As for Dease, “Once you get to know her, she’s like anybody else,” says Victor Maksymenko, 40, an office machine repairman and close friend. “That just happens to be how she makes a living.”

Others say they’d just as soon see “Mrs. Dease” make her living elsewhere. “I don’t want it in my city,” says Anaheim City Council member Irv Pickler.

Says Dease of her critics: “They’re wrong. Before they pass judgment, why don’t they actually come in and see for themselves? Meet the people who come in here. Talk to the employees who work here. We’re all just real people. There’s no funny business going on here. We have strict rules. If you start a problem, you will be eighty-sixed. Period. We even recycle all of our glass.”

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For Dease, owning and operating places where women prance around stark naked or close to it is in the blood. Back in the 1950s, her mother, Judy, ran the Griggs Road Lounge and the Bullpen, both strip joints in Houston. In those days, Dease says, Texas law allowed teen-agers to work in taverns if their parents or legal guardians worked with them. So Dease, with her mother’s support, dropped out of school and pulled shifts at the bars to help foot the family bills.

She regrets never having graduated from high school, but her earliest memories of watching women perform striptease remain fond ones, which probably helps explain why she eventually took up the craft herself. “You’re looking at one of the originals,” she says, modestly. “In the 1960s, when Southern California started going topless, I was one of the first.

“When I was a kid I thought I was ugly. But these women who danced were so beautiful. I can remember thinking it was really an art. I didn’t see anything filthy in it.”

Over the years, she has always enjoyed the full backing of her mother, herself a onetime striptease artist. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Dease bought Sandraella’s, formerly the Wounded Knee Saloon, in 1991.

She spent the better part of the next two years entangled in a much-publicized legal dispute with Anaheim officials over how much flesh her dancers could bare. She won the freedom-of-expression case in federal court last summer, and, at the time, became the proud owner of the city’s first topless or nude club to open for business in a decade.

Riding on her legal coattails, an all-nude club, the Sahara Theatre, opened shortly thereafter. Dease could have opted for all-nude dancing, too, but she says she stuck with topless because she thinks it has more class. “It’s not just letting it all hang out,” she says, adding that she also banned whipped-cream wrestling contests because she thinks they, too, border on the crude.

Several months ago, undercover police officers lodged allegations with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control that Dease’s dancers were showing a bit more of their backsides than they were allowed to. Dease vehemently denies the accusations, and the bureau took no action.

But “recently there haven’t been many problems out there,” says Sgt. Mike Patterson, head of the Anaheim Police Department’s vice squad. Deputy City Atty. Mark Gordon, who worked on the Dease case, says the city has done all it can for now to restrict Sandraella’s. And, no, as a matter of fact, he hasn’t ever gone into the club to see exactly what it is he’s been fighting against in court. “What’s there to see?” Gordon says. “A 16-ounce glass of beer, and a woman with no shirt? I’d rather go to a Kings game.”

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It is late afternoon on a recent weekday and Sandraella’s is nearly deserted. While dancers prepare for the night’s festivities, Dease is in a back office, attempting to balance the books--something of a challenge these days. While she says she could pull in $1,000 or more in a six-hour shift as a dancer, she won’t say how much money the bar makes, if any. “Let’s just say I’m making a living,” she says. And the modest 5-year-old black Mazda MX-6 parked out back suggests as much.

Her husband of eight years, Bob, an oil technician, pops his head in the door. “I’m going to run home to make sure the animals are fed.” That would be her five cats, including Smudge and Purreau, a play on the name Ross Perot, whom she supported for president in the 1992 election. And two Great Danes, Big Boy and Quincy, the latter of whom is named after the television series starring Jack Klugman as a crime-busting coroner. It’s one of Dease’s favorite shows.

Her 15 dancers include, she says, “girls who work part time and go to college . . . girls who have day jobs and want a little extra money . . . and single mothers who are just trying to raise their kids, trying to eke out a living.”

As a former dancer, Dease fiercely defends their welfare, enforcing a hard-and-fast rule that bans husbands and boyfriends from watching the women perform.

But she is not above on-the-job high jinks. Asked to explain a pair of huge plastic breasts perched atop a sinkload of dishes, she recalls the night she and some friends dolled up a male friend and watched as several men at the bar approached her . . . er, him.

At night, the place turns decidedly more rowdy. A dancer on stage sporting a come-hither look shakes, flips and twists her barely clad body to the throbbing pulse of a rock ‘n’ roll tune. The small audience, all men, showers her with applause, lusty hoots of approval and money, mostly small bills.

Dease, sporting black pants, a conservative blouse and white Asics sneakers, seems to enjoy the fact that the men seem to enjoy themselves. She doesn’t see it as exploitative or dirty. “It can be, but it doesn’t have to be,” she says.

Asked if she would ever consider doing something else for a living, she says, “This is what I’ve done all my life.” She hesitates when pressed about whether she’d like to see her youngest daughter carry on the business. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want my daughter to be a dancer, but. . . .”

But what? She shrugs. “I’m very, very proud of my girls. I’ve tried to give them the family life that I didn’t have growing up; I was more or less shuffled between homes, you know, from pillar to post. I just want my daughters to be whatever they want to be.”

The point appears moot, however. Although Maria, a high school freshman, professes to be a huge fan of her mother’s, she is not necessarily a huge fan of what her mother does. “It’s not for me,” she says. “I would not get up there and strip. My body is mine. And when I get married, that will be between me and my husband.”

At the same time, she minces no words in defending her mother, who, she says, has not had it easy. “One of my mom’s friends, when she heard my mom’s bar was going topless, told me: ‘Well, I don’t like that one bit.’ I said: ‘Leave my mom alone. This is how she makes a living. This is how she’s taking care of the animals. This is how she’s taking care of me.’ ”

Dease says Maria’s mixed sentiments are a product of her youth.

“She’s very outspoken. She’s a great deal like me, which,” the mother says with a pause, “is good . . . I guess.”