Dressed in a fitting black T-shirt and gray slacks, Peter Feinstein, a managing partner of Sapphire Gentlemen's Club, sits in a skybox overlooking a stage, talking about, of all things, prostates and charity.
Reclining in a fuzzy brown chair, next to a statue of the hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil, see-no-evil monkeys, he briefly touches a book of Sapphire matches while discussing the time a year ago when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He's since had surgery and his doctors tell him he's doing fine. But it was an eye-opening experience. And one that swerved towards tear-jerking when he read about a man who was also diagnosed with prostate cancer and didn't have the funds for treatment or insurance. In the last few months of the man's life, a nonprofit organization paid for a trip for him and his wife to Las Vegas.
Perhaps because it hit so close to home, geographically and mentally, Feinstein seems almost as stricken by this as by his own diagnosis. He decided to organize a golf tournament and raise money to send to prostate cancer charities, and help people like this man. But all the charities he spoke with turned him down. They didn't want his money.
"Most of the times they wouldn't give us a reason," he says. "Sometimes the reason was that the board of directors said they had not accepted because they would not associate with a gentleman's club."
What to do? Start your own foundation. He began the Sapphire Prostate Cancer Foundation a couple of months ago, and recently raised more than $75,000 in a golf tournament at Bali Hai Golf Club, complete with 75 entertainers who agreed to be caddies.
"We're going to actually try—and I'd assume that we'll have no trouble doing this—trying to break the world's record for the most people ever tested for prostate cancer," he says, while the B-52s "Roam Around the World" plays in the background. "So we're going to do a free screening here at Sapphire, sometime in the fall. ... And maybe you'll get a free lap dance if you do it, or something like that."