Stripping away free expression: a Pennsylvania town tries--and fails--to ban a form of exercise.

• Author: Macomber, Shawn
• Position: Zoning case

DRESSED IN A low-cut pink shirt, tight black booty pants, and thick, plastic platform stilettos, Stephanie Babines doesn't look the part of a political rabble-rouser. Yet an activist is exactly what Babines became when her efforts to help women shape up through fully clothed, decidedly G-rated stripper-inspired aerobics ran afoul of overzealous officials in the small western Pennsylvania town of Mars. This unyieldingly perky 31-year-old entrepreneur, standing in the small forest of steel poles that shoot up from the floor of her mirrored dance and fitness studio, has taught dance-phobic authorities an expensive lesson in federal court.

"It's pretty surreal to get calls from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, never mind Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, and America's Got Talent," Babines laughs, leaning back beneath a bookshelf filled with such revolutionary tomes as The World According to Mr. Rogers and The Housewife's Guide to the Practical Striptease. "It's not attention I went looking for."

A few years ago Babines was a senior executive at a financial services company, nary a feather boa dancing in her head, struggling with an 80-hour workweek that severely depleted her enthusiasm for the gymnasium. One night over dinner a friend mentioned that pole dancing had become the hot new fitness trend. On a whim Babines purchased a pole online. "I thought it would be something silly to laugh about with my friends" she says, "until I started losing weight like crazy and fitting into cute jeans."

With the fire of a convert burning in her rapidly shrinking belly, Babines took a pilgrimage to the Las Vegas studio of fitness pole dancing's grand doyen, Fawnia Mondey, known more for her work in the instructional DVD Strip To It: Bump n' Grind than for her appearances in such post-apocalyptic feature films as White Slave Lovers and Forbidden Rage: White Slave Secrets. Babines returned home as the first Pennsylvanian to hold one of Mondey's pole dance instructor certificates, signifying mastery of more than 60 moves and routines as well as basic first aid, should it ever be necessary to treat a client for excessive gyration.

Babines printed brochures and began teaching what quickly became overflow classes three nights a week at a local dance studio. Realizing she needed a place to stake her own pole(s), Babines rented space to pursue a more expansive, vampy fitness vision, including Power Lap Dance ("challenge your core and unleash your inner vixen!")...