Female-run strip club is one of nation's few

PHILADELPHIA - Here are a few things you might not know about Delilah's, possibly Philadelphia's most popular strip club:

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A woman owns it. A woman is the general manager. A woman runs the bar. Women handle the marketing.

It's the only female-run strip club in the region, and one of only a handful of such clubs in the country.

What's the philosophy behind Delilah's?

"Women know better than men what men want," said Maureen Lafferty, the operations manager, who has worked there for 10 years.

And, though it's advertised as a "gentlemen's club," women, more often than you might suspect, are now in the audience as well.

Greta Shamy considers herself the owner of Delilah's. Her husband, Joseph, with several partners, opened it in a shopping center on Spring Garden Street near Delaware Avenue in 1992. By 1998, Delilah's was ripe for a makeover, but Mr. Shamy's health had turned shaky, and he handed the business to his wife.

Mrs. Shamy, a petite, elegantly dressed woman of 60 who looks 15 years younger, had owned a Boardwalk jewelry business in Atlantic City.

She shopped throughout Europe and South America for unusual antique jewelry and sold it to winning high rollers and celebrities.

"I certainly had never run a gentlemen's club," she said. "I saw it was being mismanaged, so I went about it in a businesslike way. I located revenue sources, tightened up the operation. I got used to the entertainment."

As long as it wasn't too exotic.

"In the beginning, I actually stopped an entertainer midsong and told her she had to see me," Mrs. Shamy said. Tone it down, she told the dancer.

Mrs. Shamy also changed the club's name, dropping the word Den. "Den sounds like it's underground," she said. "We don't have to hide."

Slowly, decision by decision, Mrs. Shamy began to achieve her vision for Delilah's, which is to say, the club began to take on a patina of respectability.

And when she meets people, "I tell them what I do, and then I tell them how much I make. And that settles it."

Customarily dressed in a tailored suit, Barbara Friel, 33, is the face of Delilah's. She began working there as a part-time bartender shortly after the club opened. She so impressed Mrs. Shamy that four years ago, Mrs. Shamy made Ms. Friel the club's general manager, a demanding six-day-a-week job.

"I thought this kid would make a great manager. She is smart, savvy, knows the business," Mrs. Shamy said. "I figured that a heterosexual woman is a good person to run a gentleman's club ... actually protect the girls rather than exploit them."