She wants you to ‘Find Your Sexy’

By Jerry Fink (contact)

Monday, June 9, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Leila Navidi

Meg Bertini produces the feel-good show “Find Your Sexy in Las Vegas and Take It Home With You.” With assists onstage of a hypnotist, magician, vocalist and comedian, she wants to help her audience find their inner confidence.

Finally a seminar about feelings and emotions that men can drag wives and girlfriends to and not be embarrassed to tell the guys.

“Madame Meg’s Find Your Sexy in Las Vegas and Take It Home With You” debuts Friday at Ivan Kane’s Forty Deuce.

It’s a feel-good show with a twist. Strippers and magicians put on a lively performance that masks an underlying message of getting in touch with your inner self.

“It’s about helping people feel better about themselves, finding their spiritual path,” says Meg Bertini, the former lawyer who is producing the show. “It’s about finding out how to think positively.

“To find your sexy concept is finding your inner confidence, your courage. I think you need that to be able to make the right decisions.”

Sounds pretty dry, until you learn Bertini strips to help make the lesson palatable.

“First and foremost this show is entertainment,” Bertini says. “We want people to have a good time. We want to leave the audience feeling great about themselves, so we’ve put together a combination of burlesque and variety show. All of the performers are going to keep everything positive and at the same time toss out little knowledge nuggets.”

Knowledge nuggets?

“Like the importance of choices in controlling your destiny,” Bertini says.

The striptease is merely a diversionary tactic to make the nuggets easier to swallow.

“We’re keeping everything light,” Bertini says. “If someone in the audience is not in the mood for the lesson, they can ignore it and still have a good time. But if someone is open, it will kind of stick with them.

“We want people to feel good after they leave, to go home and think about the possibilities and to feel what their potential can be.”

Bertini makes her appearance near the end of the 75-minute show. She will come out in a business suit and then strip down to her briefs.

“I’m just stripping down to two pieces,” she says. “I’m not even going down to tassels.”

The cast includes host and sleight-of-hand magician Steve Dacri, hypnotist Kellie Karl, vocalist Amanda Kaiser and burlesque comedian Emily Lauren.

Bertini is a native of New York. She received a law degree from Emory University in Atlanta but didn’t practice law. She taught legal ethics, was a ghost writer for lawyers, headed a foundation, did legal recruiting and finally founded a publishing company, Dream Time Publishing.

“We publish books that are sort of a cross between the ‘Chicken Soup’ and ‘Dummy’ series,” she says. The company, which has offices in Las Vegas and Florida, has printed 14 titles in its “Open Your Heart” series (among them “Open Your Heart With Gardens,” “Open Your Heart With Bicycling,” “Open Your Heart With Art”).

“The same thing that led me to do the publishing company led me to the show,” Bertini says. “Basically, it’s helping people feel better about themselves, finding your spiritual path, learning that you control your own destiny with what you think and how you feel.”

She says presenting the lessons in the guise of a burlesque show is a stealthy way of doing it.

“But if someone doesn’t get it, they’re still going to have a good time,” Bertini says.