The Dad Legacy of the Striptease King of Denver

Have you heard the one about the son of a strip-club owner who moved to NYC and became a standup comedian and dentist?

That's not a setup to a bit: It’s the story of Mike King, son of the “Sultan of Striptease” Sid King, who ran the Crazy Horse Bar for nearly four decades at 1201 East Colfax Avenue. There’s still a Crazy Horse nestled between Marion and Lafayette, but it’s a new place paying respect to the site’s history (the Irish Snug was there for nearly twenty years, too). Sid’s original was open from the 1940s through its closure in 1983, spawning a history as colorful as the owner's trademark oversized and multi-colored sunglasses. The joint was spotlighted in Clint Eastwood’s 1978 hit movie, Every Which Way but Loose, and it’s said that Elvis himself was a frequent patron when he’d shake his hips on into town. It was all neon and nudity and no small amount of nonsense — note the nude mannequin riding the signage above the entrance.
Back in 2016, Westword spoke with Sid’s son Mike ahead of the opening of his play, The Fifth Dentist in Search of Sid’s Treasure, which the younger King wrote and starred in. He’s still working on that stage production, while at the same time paying his bills as both a successful dentist and a standup comedian in New York City. Clearly, Mike is as much an interesting character as his late father, who passed away in the summer of 2000 at the age of 86.

So what would a guy like Mike write a book about?

His experiences adopting a child, of course, which he portrays with panache and no small amount of comedic flair in Dad Spelled Backward: A Journey Through the Maze of Love, Marriage, and Adoption, on shelves now.

“It all started with JoAnna Beckson,” says Mike from his dentist office in NYC. “A lot of comics out here took her acting course. Ray Romano recommended me to her years ago. That was when I was working at some of the best clubs in the city. Bill Maher was hanging out in the same places. Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld. I was pretty friendly with Paul Reiser. Back then, if you were any good at softball, you got to know people because you got on the Catch [a Rising Star] team. I wasn’t all that athletic, but it was the way things worked.”

Romano and King became friends, having both gotten their start in the early ’80s at Dangerfield’s, the famed Lenox Hill comedy club that closed during the 2020 shutdown but has announced a reopening in 2024. "Here’s the thing: Everybody out here is working on a one-man show. Ray’s career had taken off, and he was just winning one comedy award after another, got the best agent, all that. He has that likability factor," says Mike. "Me, I was working on my own one-man show, all about a dentist and comic whose father owned a strip club. I worked on that for a while, put it aside for a while, came back to it. I got a director who decided to make it a two-person show — me and my dental assistant, who’s also a stripper — and we ran that for about five years at a place in the Village called the PIT [People’s Improv Theater] Loft.”

It got great reviews, if not huge crowds. “It’s tough to put people in seats,” Mike laments, which is something that challenged his father for decades in Denver. It was during this time that the show came to Denver for one night, where it naturally sold out. Mike eventually turned that show into a musical, The Lap Dance Kid, which ran at Studio 54. “We got standing ovations,” he recalls. “Everyone who sees it falls in love with it. I could still be doing it when I’m in a walker.”

Dad Spelled Backward, Mike says, came about when he sat down to write a book about his famous father. “It started as more a memoir of growing up in Denver with my dad," he explains. "He was a character, but a great dad. And that turned over time into the story of me becoming a dad, and that’s a lot of what the book is really about.”

It’s not Mike’s first published work — that would be the children’s book Enamel the Camel, all about “a misfit camel with excellent dental hygiene,” according to the School Library Journal. But Dad Spelled Backward is his first book specifically not for the kids he welcomes into his dental practice in NYC. “We tried to have a child naturally,” Mike says about him and his wife, “but it didn’t work out. And we were on the fence for a long time.

“But once we had the kid,” he adds with a smile, “the instant you have that child, you realize that’s what life is all about. At least it was to me. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not the only thing. If you never have a kid, you’ll never know what I’m talking about. But if you do, it becomes everything. It was dramatic. I’d never experienced anything like it.”

Mike believes in fatherhood — especially supporting those couples that want to be parents but for whatever reason turn to the adoption process — to such a degree that he’s donating all the proceeds from the sale of Dad Spelled Backward.

“It’s no joke,” King says. “The love of a child — your own, or even a niece or nephew or whatever — is the purest form of love. We forget that. And I wanted people to know that it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.”

And then King switches gears with a grin: “Of course, my daughter is now thirteen, so I’m just hoping my hearing goes pretty soon.”

So back to where we started: Have you heard the one about the prince of Denver strip clubs who became a New York dentist and comedian/playwright? He adopted a kid, wrote a book about it and lived happily ever after.

Mike King’s Dad Spelled Backward is available now at bookstores and online.