The subject is Liv's need to be the center of attention, a familiar one for her parents, and one they don't like to think about.

"She just would come alive on stage," her mother says, remembering how much Liv loved to perform even as a little girl. Christine Osthus' eyes dart about the room and then settle again on her interviewer. "I guess," she says with a sigh, "I thought she would become an actress, you know, in regular plays."

Liv's father winces at his wife's words. The longtime Lutheran pastor is sitting beside Christine with a pained look on his face that suggests he'd rather be talking about absolutely anything else. "Who wants their kid to do that," Mark Osthus finally says, "if they could be a rocket scientist if they wanted to?"

Liv Osthus certainly could have been a rocket scientist. The 42-year-old Williams College graduate, who speaks fluent German and French and even has a working knowledge of Swahili, could have been a lot of things. And she has been a lot of things. That's why Mark and Christine Osthus are being interviewed. It's for a feature-length documentary about their daughter called "Thank You for Supporting the Arts."

The title refers to what Liv says when a customer, impressed by her erotically charged removal of clothing, plunks a bill down on the bar for her.

***

Carolann Stoney recognized it right away.

Four years ago the executive producer at Blacktop Films happened to be sitting in downtown Portland's Mary's Club one Monday afternoon when Viva Las Vegas came on stage. Stoney was doing some advance work for a planned movie about a local nude-dancing contest, but she decided almost on the spot to abandon that idea. She didn't know that this Viva Las Vegas -- that's Liv's stage name -- was a Portland underground icon, a stripper, singer, writer and activist with a dedicated following. But she did instinctively understand that the striking woman undressing before her deserved a movie all to herself.

"There's a sort of gift the dancers give men," Stoney says, meaning the strip-club version of both the female form and women's sexuality. "It's not the way men typically see women naked."

That fantasy can come at a high cost. A lot of the erotic dancers you see, Stoney says, "are 18, 19, and look like they're on drugs." They stare off into the middle distance as they move through their gymnastic performance, mentally removed from the scene. They are being viewed as things -- as objects, as toys, as sci-fi dreamscapes -- and nothing more. They know it, and the customers viewing them know it.

Not Osthus. Within a few minutes of Viva Las Vegas taking the stage that long-ago afternoon, Stoney saw that this woman was a long way from the stripper stereotype. For starters, she was older than almost all of the other dancers -- and she didn't try to hide it. Then there was her scarred, slightly cockeyed left breast, altered by the cancer surgery she went through in 2008. Osthus seemed rather pleased with that breast, raising a toned arm and bucking her hip to offer a good view.

Finally, there was her routine. She eschewed the athletic pole-swinging of her strip-club sisters. Instead, she lounged on the bar and started a conversation with the customers, her smile easy and natural. The smile fell first on one patron, then another and another.

"Her gift is what she gives back to the audience," Stoney says. "Her gift is the connection she makes."

That first time Stoney saw Viva Las Vegas in action, however, she didn't quite get what the stripper was doing. She approached Osthus after the performance and introduced herself. "What is going on here?" she said. Stoney had been watching erotic dancers at work for weeks, but she'd never seen anything like this.

In the days that followed, the filmmaker started to get to know the stripper, this "very intelligent, very sweet person, very loving, very centered." Stoney found herself wondering: "What is it about stripping that would appeal to a woman with an education and speaks four languages?"

***

Osthus doesn't appear in regular plays, like her mother would prefer, but she is an actress.

Viva Las Vegas, of course, is her most beloved character. She's also known as Coco Cobra, Portland's most fearsome punk-band frontwoman. And Lila Hamilton, the persona she took on when she lobbied city hall for greater protections for sex workers.

They all tend to be better company than Liv.

"If I was Liv up there [on stage]" she says, "it would be depressing."

The single mother of a 22-month-old daughter has been battling depression for most of her life. She was a teenager in Minnesota when it first became debilitating, leading her to begin taking antidepressants. She was going through another bad patch nine years ago when she learned she had cancer. The diagnosis confirmed for her what seemed inevitable and all too right -- that she was doomed.

Then she returned to the stage. The best way she has found to deal with her depression is to perform, to be the center of attention. Preferably while taking off her clothes.

"I've learned a lot about myself by going through this," she says. She's now "mostly drug-free" -- that is, she's not taking anti-depressants anymore. She focuses instead on diet and exercise and talk therapy. She's also part of a vocal trio called Bergerette that sings old French love songs that "sound churchy but are all about sex and drinking."

"I feel very proud of myself," she says, her voice lifting, filled with possibility.

This is how she sounds at Mary's Club too. She is happy and playful and funny while performing; she asks her customers questions, gets them to laugh with her.

That's because Osthus considers the club a sanctuary, her fellow dancers family. Having cancer, she says, "just revealed how lucky I was to be doing what I was doing. I think I was way too ambitious before. I'm now trying to enjoy the little things more."

She never expected it to be this way. Her decision to get into stripping 20 years ago, when she was a struggling writer in need of rent money, came on the heels of a hellish breakup.

"It was a f--k-you to love, a disavowal of any sort of normal future with a decent husband and 2.5 children," she wrote in her 2009 memoir "Magic Gardens," published by a local small press. "... [T]his was my idea of my new career: Fallen Woman -- preacher's daughter thrown to the wolves in a dirty timber town. A descent into the dark side."

Her parents fed that self-lacerating attitude by being appalled by her new job. Though their reaction was hardly a surprise, it still hurt. She'd always admired her father's approach to ministry. "Welcoming to all," she says. "No judgment."

She pauses, then adds: "Except of your daughter."

Osthus chuckles stoically at the thought. "Everyone but your daughter."

***

Viva Las Vegas learned from her father how to connect with people.

"When you're a pastor you belong to everybody," she says in "Thank You For Supporting the Arts," which Blacktop Films plans to submit to film festivals. "You're helping everybody. You're everybody's dad. I see my dancing kind of the same way. I need to take care of a lot of people."

That sentiment hasn't softened Mark Osthus' view of his daughter's calling, at least not that he's been willing to admit.

Getting Liv's parents involved in the documentary "was a rough process," admits Jessica Daugherty, a producer at Blacktop Films. "She has a very close relationship with them now. But when we got to what she does for a living, it was uncomfortable."

Osthus hasn't tried to make it comfortable for them. Stripping isn't just a job for her. She embraces the radical feminist notion that making money with your body is an empowering act, that sex can and should be a political statement.

"It's revolutionary still -- a woman being naked on stage for herself, for her living," she says.

She adds that she "was very shy, very body self-conscious" during her teen and young-adult years. "[Stripping] helped me feel comfortable in my own skin."

But dancing at Mary's Club really is more than that for her -- much more. She takes her parents' example seriously.

What she describes as her "sociological, outreach" approach to stripping is obvious as soon as she climbs the stairs from the basement dressing room at the club. No matter who came before her on stage, the mood now shifts, becomes more intimate, more casual and conversational.

"If you want to make money, you can give them the tits-and-ass show," she admits later. "You can make more money getting into the hypnotism of the stage show. But I like to find common ground."

In her view, she represents shelter to those gazing up at her on stage. She believes Viva Las Vegas and the club are a respite from the vagaries of real life, from dark moods and constrained finances and even disapproving parents.

"What I'm giving is a smile and [the message that] everything's going to be OK," she says in the documentary. "Just reset yourself in current time, enjoy being in the moment and then go back out into your world."

-- Douglas Perry

thank you for supporting the arts from Blacktop Films on Vimeo.