Sebastopol man is the original ‘Magic Mike’

Edward Felix Foglia prefers to be known by his stage name: Felix, the Italian Stallion. Especially when swapping stories about his 27 years as a male stripper in California, Florida and the Middle Atlantic states.

Between 1974 and 2002, Foglia performed 200 to 300 shows a year, stripping down to a G-string by night and stripping furniture by day. It’s the stuff of a memoir, which he is in the process of writing.

“I am the original Magic Mike, or Sonoma County’s Magic Mike,” Foglia will tell you. And he has scores of photos to prove it.

Now 62 and living in Sebastopol, Foglia is referring to the popular 2012 movie “Magic Mike” that featured Matthew McConaughey and starred Channing Tatum as a man who strips to raise fast and easy money to start a custom furniture business.

In the sequel, “Magic Mike XXL,” due for release July 1, the male strippers of the Kings of Tampa troupe reunite three years after retiring for a blowout performance in Myrtle Beach.

The first film painted an accurate picture of life in a male revue, Foglia said, minus the standing-room-only crowds and McConaughey’s trip down the runway. “Except when we were touring, we had well under 100 women in the audience most of the time,” he said, and most club owners were too old to take off their clothes.

Foglia was barely out of school when he started his career. That was 1974, five years before the first Chippendales venue opened in Los Angeles. An Oakland native, Foglia joined the Navy at 18 and was stationed on the USS Kitty Hawk when female dancers at the Classic Cat Theater in San Diego invited him and other sailors to join them on stage.

“They put dollar bills in our pants. It was the first time in the country a club had male strippers dancing,” Foglia said. “The Classic Cat Theater’s owner, a guy named Ray, said, ‘Now there’s a million-dollar idea.’?”

Foglia and five other men started appearing one night a week until the Navy lowered the boom. A captain’s wife recognized Foglia, and he was charged with indecent exposure.

“I beat the court-martial; they dropped the charges,” he said. ‘My defense was, ‘If a woman can do it, why not a man?’?”

From 1978 to 1980, Foglia posed for Playgirl photos and auditioned with 61 other men for 12 jobs as dancers in the Guys Next Door troupe at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Miami.

“The cocaine was flowing, and the girls put it in the rolled dollar bills they tipped us,” he said. “We had to unroll them carefully.”

After a falling-out with the club owner, Foglia headed to The Bachelor’s Inn in Syracuse, N.Y., at the invitation of an amateur stripper he met at the Crazy Horse Saloon.

Soon, the club’s Guys Next Door bought a bus and took their show on the road. By this time, their costumes had gotten more varied, in part because the Village People had scored big with their hit song “YMCA.” “Felix” traded his collar and bow-tie for leather and bondage.

Protests against male strippers were frequent outside clubs in small towns in New York in the early ’80s, and arrests for indecent exposure were not uncommon, Foglia said, “but there were women who wanted us to dance. Every show sold out.”

Inspired by that success to start his own traveling show, Foglia teamed up with five amateur body builders he met at Gold’s Gym, forming the Body Workers troupe.

“They wanted me to teach them to dance,” Foglia said.

In turn, they helped him build his own girth. Foglia carried 190 pounds on a 5-foot, 11-inch frame when he started the business, but by the mid-1980s, tastes were changing. He started lifting weights in earnest, and over a decade of five-day-a-week workouts added 50 pounds of muscle, eventually boasting a 54-inch chest.

“I was better known with the Body Workers,” he said. “That was the height of my career.”

By the early 1990s, the boom was going bust. Too many men were willing to strip, and club owners weren’t willing to pay them.

“The dancers were working for tips,” Foglia said.

Although he danced socially as a young man, he said, “I was never known as a great dancer.” He compensated by adding handstands, front flips, splits and other gymnastic moves to his routine.

That dexterity helped him develop a second career to fall back on when he retired from stripping in 2002. While working at The Bachelor’s Inn, the Italian Stallion had found part-time work at a woodworking business across the street from club, “stripping furniture by day and my clothes at night,” he said.

Time spent raising and building barns with an Amish community near Bradford, Penn., taught him more about wood and helped him get established when he moved back to California about 15 years ago.

Foglia now enjoys the pace of finishing and restoring antique furniture, most recently at Nothin’ New Antiques on Highway 116 west of Cotati.

“He’s pretty fantastic,” owner Linda Martin said. “He’s done amazing things with furniture that was considered basket cases. An old dentist’s cabinet he worked on came out fabulous. He has a lot of followers. People ask for Ed.”

Foglia supplements that work with a new way of enjoying the club scene, a hobby he learned from DJ Pete Macias at Friar Tuck’s Inn in Cotati.

“He taught me how to play the music,” Foglia said. “It opened a whole new world for me. I’ve worked at more than 100 weddings and some senior proms.”

He also volunteers as a fitness trainer and nutritionist at Energy Gym in Cotati while continuing the five-day-a-week workouts, and when he’s not working, stays busy sorting through 3,000 pages of diary entries, the grist for a memoir tentatively titled “Take It Off.”

Now that the book is about halfway done, Foglia said, he plans to meet with two publishers this month while visiting family and old friends in New York.

Not all the stories are tame enough for a family newspaper, but Foglia likes the memory of an 80-year-old woman who came to see him in Syracuse in 1981. She brought her mother to the show on her 100th birthday and arranged for the dancers to bring out a cake. They let the birthday girl lick icing off their chests and then posed for a photo with her. She left with a signed poster of that photo.

“The mother died about six months later, and a nurse said she died in her sleep with the rolled-up poster in her bed,” Foglia said.

He’ll save other, racier stories from the heyday of an Italian Catholic who became a stripper for his book.