State of Carolina

A cymbal crashes, the saxophone purrs, the bass rips into a bump-and-grind, and vavoom! Who’s that girl?

She springs from behind a curtain, all dolled up in a red low-cut gown and matching boa, her black bra peeking through, unmatched stockings full of naughty holes, stilettos high and pointy.

Slender and athletic, sexy and playful, she sashays and struts inside the spotlight. Her big green eyes and thick black lashes are all come hither. Her lips curl seductively. Now she’s dancing, now flirting, now gyrating, and, oh, she’s hotter than Georgia asphalt.

“Yeah!” yells Andre Blake, 36, jumping from his seat at the center of the Forty Deuce horseshoe bar. Others around him are hooting and clapping. Some, obviously regulars, yell, “Caro-leena! Caro-leena!”

Carolina, who are you? What are you doing to these people who have come to Ivan Kane’s cozy, stylish Melrose lounge?

Exactly what Kane, who also owns the racy Deep on Hollywood and Vine, was envisioning all his dancers would do. “She leaves the guys and the girls wanting more and hoping for more, but not getting it, and being fine in the end because they feel so satisfied,” Kane says.

Similar acts have been titillating Hollywood in recent years--the Pussycat Dolls and Velvet Hammer burlesque dancers occasionally perform at such clubs as the Viper Room and, earlier this year, the Sunset Room put on “Sunset Rouge,” a full burlesque act complete with acrobats and clowns.

But Forty Deuce, open for two months, is slightly different. It is Kane’s throwback to New York City’s old strip clubs on 42nd Street, “the back-alley” lounges he frequented as a teenager when he skipped school with his buddies. Kane gutted his first Hollywood bar, the eponymous Kane, which had been open for five years, to create Forty Deuce, a 125-capacity, sophisticated lounge with a low bar, lounge chair seating and cocktail tables with tiny, inviting lamps.

“Back then, we called 42nd Street ‘Forty Deuce’ and after Sept. 11, I just wanted to pay homage to my city,” Kane says. “The vibe in the club is right for the name because it has that old Times Square feel to it. This is not a gentleman’s club or an in-your-face strip club. The dancers are professional dancers. They are not strippers. I wanted to go back to the days when erotic dancing was an art form, and the tease was what it was all about.”

Teasing, Carolina Cerisola has discovered, comes naturally to the 22-year-old Argentine world-champion salsa dancer. Her sultry act--which incorporates traditional bump-and-grind a la Gypsy Rose Lee with modern salsa and samba steps that make climbing the Santa Monica stairs seem like a Sunday stroll--is not X-rated. She does not bare all; it just seems as if she does.

“She’s phenomenal,” says Blake, who says he is partial to her Latin rhythms because his mom is Venezuelan. “She is sexy but at the same time refined. She has a lot of class to her. She’s a baby, but up there, ay, Dios mio! Burlesque is a hard thing to do. We live in a very sexual society, and we’ve gotten away from the class of it all. For me, this is refreshing.”

Offstage, there’s still a lot of girl in this woman whose act is so hot that she is the only dancer Kane schedules to perform every night the club is open, Wednesday through Saturday. At 5 feet 6, she’s thin but still preoccupied with the flatness of her abs, which she mentions often in conversation. She eats only once a day on the nights she performs “because I don’t like my [stomach] rolls.” She also worries what her boyfriend and mother would think if they caught her act. Knowing how she makes her living, she explains, is “very different than actually seeing me.”

“I’ve discovered a whole new side of me, my sexy side, since I started dancing for Ivan,” says Cerisola, sipping some orange juice, the only thing she’ll allow herself four hours before her show begins.

Before Cerisola met Kane through a mutual friend a year ago and started dancing at Deep, she was on the salsa circuit and spent five months as partner to Johnny Vasquez, the “Prince of Salsa.” She danced in Marc Anthony’s “I Need to Know” video and Guy’s “Dancing” video, both in 1999.

Now, the “Latin girl,” as club-goers are prone to call her, has become Forty Deuce’s headliner. Hollywood celebrities, such as Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney have stopped in to see what the fuss is about. Last weekend, Daryl Hannah, Vince Vaughn, and Kiefer Sutherland were among those in the audience.

“I can’t believe what’s happening,” says Cerisola, who has lived in Los Angeles for two years and is still learning English. “Wow! I’m super happy. More than anything, with myself, which is very important. I never expected people to respond this way. When they yell my name, it always takes me by surprise. It’s all very new to me because I’ve always been in a Latin environment.”

Between the hourly acts, a disc jockey spins everything from the theme from “Peter Gunn” to Nelly. Then the Forty Deuce Trio, a three-piece jazz and bump-and-grind combo, takes to the stage setting the mood for the dancers.

“It’s so much fun to interact with the girls and get them excited to take their clothes off faster,” says bandleader Joey Altruda, the bassist. Sometimes they draw it out too long “and I have to yell, ‘Take off the glove!’ ” to get them started, he says.

Except with Cerisola, whose 10-to 15-minute numbers include titillating the Forty Deuce Trio. Strutting all over the horseshoe bar, without ever knocking a drink, she paces herself, waiting for the perfect moment to peel off one glove, then the other, and toss them on the heads of mesmerized men, like Chick Friedman, 36, a real estate developer from New York. Seconds later, she’s bending down, wrapping her boa around a man’s neck and handing a drink to another as she winks at him.

She heads back to the stage, a part of the bar that is hydraulically lowered to make room for the dancers, hangs from a string of pearls and faces Willie McNeil, the drummer whose expressions could be a comedy act of their own. “I’ve always mugged a lot,” says McNeil, 40. “I’m a showoff, and it adds a comical element to the show. This is a perfect gig for a ham like me. Carolina is great. She’s very musical. I can play a riff once, and the next time I play it, she catches it. No matter what the other girls do on stage, she’s always on top.”

McNeil’s mouth gapes when Cerisola gets close. She rips off her dress in one smooth swoop, revealing a pair of sparkly panties that match her bra. Men whistle and scream. Kane hollers and then catches himself: “Gotta support my girls,” he says wickedly. Cerisola moves in front of McNeil’s drum kit with her back to the audience. He pounds salsa on his drum, and her feet go off.

“She’s sensational,” says Mia Dalsemer, a former dancer who is enjoying a girl’s night out with three friends. “This is a very cool thing to do. What she can do with her body! There were three martinis on the bar and she didn’t knock one down.”

Women, Cerisola has been surprised to learn, are among her biggest fans. She throws back her head and smiles, making another round of the bar. This time, the saxophonist is her target. Coquettishly, she gets him to follow her across the bar like a panting dog. She dances for him and around him, takes off her bra and hangs it on his sax.

When she moves toward the crowd, she’s in a nude-colored second bra with flowery designs. She spots Friedman’s pal, who wants to be identified only as Peter, and tosses her panties on his head and laughs. Now she’s in black briefs. And this is the way she stays until the lights go out and she falls into her chair in her dressing room, exhausted.

It’s not always this smooth. Once, she swallowed a feather from her boa and it got stuck in her throat in the beginning of her number. Another time, her second bra unsnapped before the lights went out.

“It was so embarrassing,” she says, red-faced. “But those things always happen when you’re onstage.”

For her boss, it’s working out just fine.

“It’s all about interacting,” Kane says. “We’re a lounge, not a theater, but this is the most theatrical thing I’ve ever done. I wanted to put the class and taste back in the striptease. I don’t think people want to come out and see something that is so obvious. A girl takes off her top in 10 seconds, and where does it go after that?

“Carolina is so much fun and is so good at this. I had no idea she was going to shine the way she does.”