She Just Wanted These Girls to Have Fun

A mother wants her daughter to be happy. She wants her girl to have a good time. She wants her to have a lot of good friends. And if she can help it, Mom hopes that she will never embarrass her daughter in front of those friends.

You know, be a real pal.

That’s why a 39-year-old woman up in pleasant Pleasanton--not to be confused with Pleasantville--said OK when her 15-year-old daughter asked to have 40 or 50 school friends over to their house on Hansen Drive for a party on Halloween night.

Mom wanted to be a nice Mom, a swell Mom, a friendly Mrs. Brady/Donna Reed/Beaver Cleaver’s Mom kind of Mom.

A mother who says, “Sure, dear.”

So, the party happened. And around midnight, a man came to the door, where the girls had hung a sign that read:

“WELCOME, CLASS OF 2001.”

The man--the one in the police uniform--was invited inside.

He didn’t make the girls turn down the music. In fact, he turned UP the music.

And then he danced, stripping down to a magenta-colored G-string.

*

Mom has been arrested. On Tuesday morning in an Alameda County courthouse, she was arraigned before a judge and charged with exposing minors to lewd entertainment.

Carye McGrath could do three years in prison, if convicted.

And a deputy district attorney, Deborah Streicher, hasn’t much sympathy, calling Mom McGrath’s behavior “unforgivable” and “atrocious.”

I can’t quite place this case up there with that Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom of a few years ago--the notorious one who paid a guy to kill a girl who got picked over her daughter at cheerleading tryouts.

Yet you wouldn’t believe the fuss this case is causing.

“You should see my desk,” Det. Sgt. Joe Buckovic of the Pleasanton police told me Tuesday.

“Messages from Maury Povich, Leeza Gibbons, ‘Inside Edition,’ ‘Extra,’ a station in Seattle. . . . I think Leeza’s doing a whole show on it.”

The amount of interest surprises the Pleasanton police chief, Bill Eastman, too.

Then again, Eastman says, “I can see it’s got some juicy elements . . . suburbia, sex, even a little ‘if Bill Clinton’s doing it, why can’t we?’ ”

Mom and the Male Stripper. It’s a story I don’t recall on TV with Florence Henderson or those Brady kids.

The stripper is Steven Schmitt, 29, of Walnut Creek. He is out on bail, charged with four felony counts of sexual contact with underage girls.

Schmitt says he was there because McGrath ordered a stripper from the agency for which he works.

Mom, meantime, claims it was her 15-year-old daughter who hired the stripper, without her knowledge. Mom told police she heard “giggling and laughing” and emerged from a bedroom, to find Schmitt stripped.

“That’s not the story the girls tell us,” says Sgt. Buckovic.

In interviewing 40 party guests, mainly sophomores at Amador Valley High, police were told that not only did Mom pay for the stripper, but she sent out the girls on a Halloween scavenger hunt--asking neighbors for condoms instead of candy--and gave instructions on what to do when the stripper got there: “No licking, touching or crowding him,” according to several girls.

They did not obey.

Some stuffed $1 bills in Schmitt’s G-string. One paid $20 to do much more. There are eyewitnesses and photographs.

Schmitt says he thought the girls were 18. (His employers insist clients be.)

McGrath says she didn’t stop the stripper because she didn’t want to humiliate her daughter in front of everybody. Sure, dear.

Not just a Mom, she’s a Supermom!

*

A number of students are upset. Why? Because a bunch of boys held a similar party, months before, with a woman stripper, and didn’t get caught. (Kids do the darndest things.)

Nobody called the police after that one. This one got investigated because a few girls told their parents, who called the school and then the cops.

When they got to Schmitt’s house, to see if he matched a description, Sgt. Buckovic says the suspect answered the door in a G-string “and was just fastening his Velcro.”

At least frisking him wasn’t necessary.

A while later, a cop came to Mom’s door too--a real cop this time. Hmmm. I wonder if she’ll be free to throw the Class of 2001 a nice graduation party.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or e-mail mike.downey@latimes.com