PROVIDENCE — [www.projo.com]- When Christine Sherman saw the insurance on her Fall River home jump $180 a month, there was only one thing to do. Go to the Foxy Lady.

Not for Legs and Eggs, mind you, but a job.

The Chalkstone Avenue strip club held a three-hour job fair yesterday, seeking applications for about 35 jobs such as dancers and massage girls, waitresses, bouncers, floor managers, DJs and “house moms.”

Besides more than 150 applicants, publicity about the job fair drew television cameras from Rhode Island and Massachusetts as well as photographers and reporters who prowled about the club, interviewing the job interviewees as they waited in line or were on their way out.

Like Sherman, they were all looking for some extra income. Tania Azevedo, 21, a student at New England Tech studying to be a surgical technician, said she was confident of getting a job after graduation, but there will also be about $45,000 in student loans to repay and the tips from a nighttime bartender job would help.

And David Leach, a burly Community College of Rhode Island student hoping for a career in law enforcement, who said he was looking for a parttime job that will help him with his bills while also giving him the kind of crowd control experience that may help in a police career.

Club co-owner Tom Tsoumas was getting benefits beyond a list of prospective hires. A strip club job fair was an irresistible hook for television stations and newspapers looking for an angle to the state’s high — 10.5 percent — unemployment rate. Tsoumas spent part of the morning being interviewed by television and newspaper reporters. By the time he arrived at the club, he’d been on the cable channel MSNBC and done a telephone interview with a radio station in Tampa.

Tsoumas said the club’s business began to slow down in January to the point where management felt it needed to respond. The idea was to roll back prices to what they were in 1979, the year the club opened, Tsoumas said. The strategy worked and business has rebounded to where the club needs to fill vacancies in all aspects of its operations, he said.

The applicants congregated in the parking lot, filling out name, address and educational background forms. They were led into the club in groups of about 30, past the shiny black and sliver bars lit by ultraviolet lights that turned any white shirt a bright computer-screen blue. Then it was down the stairs, past lifesize pictures of Marilyn Monroe and down a hall with a wall of glass-door lockers holding bottles of champagne to the Solid Gold Room, where interviewers for different groupings of jobs waited.

Though strippers are main selling point for the club, a vast majority of the applicants who lined up yesterday morning were men. And most of the women who were interviewing for jobs were seeking to be waitresses or bartenders. Or, like Sherman, house moms.

Sherman declined to give her age, but said her youngest child was 20 and buying her own house, so she now had time on her hands and bills to pay. After raising three children, she said house mom, where you work mostly back stage getting the dancers ready to go out and to generally watch out for them while they are on the job, sounded like a job her life experience had prepared her for.

She called two friends and they headed out for the interviews.

Kelly Lewis was one of those friends.

“She called me yesterday and said I’m going to a job fair,” Lewis said. “And I said, ‘For what?’ ”

Lewis said she had no desire to working the front of the house, but said the house mom job appealed to her, despite the type of business.

“We grew up in Rhode Island. We all heard about the Foxy Lady,” Lewis said. “Though I thought it would be bigger.”