(FORTUNE Magazine) – We begin this item by quoting from a recent Washington Post article datelined South Bend, Indiana, and describing certain goings-on in JR's Kitty Kat Lounge there: ''A red light revolves overhead as a blond woman in green lame and lace shimmies down the runway, hiking up her outfit to reveal nothing underneath. Topless, she faces a mirror and wiggles her bare bottom at an appreciative audience of men who stuff dollar bills into her garter . . .'' Sometime soon -- possibly even before you read these words -- the U.S. Supreme Court will decide a question never contemplated by the authors of the First Amendment: whether the amendment offers constitutional protection to the lame lady and other Hoosier femmes in the nudity game. Based on the oral arguments in the case (Michael Barnes v. Glen Theatre), we make it 8 to 5 the Court will answer in the affirmative. The transcript is a howl. In amusedly perusing it, the first thing you fasten on is the impossible position of deputy attorney general Wayne E. Uhl of Indiana, who is gamely trying to uphold the state's indecency statutes, which ban public nudity. The poor chap knows, and acknowledges, that the Supreme Court long ago ruled nudity allowable when it has a communicative function furthering artistic expression. (One such ruling concerned the Broadway show Hair.) So Uhl has to start out saying that the dancers and other undressed ladies in Indiana were not communicating anything and so were not engaged in ''speech.'' But this entirely reasonable view leads to problems when you are dealing with the Supremes. The court has ruled in other cases that rock music is protected speech, so Uhl had to pretend to believe that rock music conveys an artistic message even if dancing does not. Under questioning, he also found himself asserting at one point that, since dancing is not speech, Indiana could in principle ban tap-dancing by fully clad tappers. After that, things just got worse. At another point, Uhl seemed to be arguing that one of the nude dancers had admitted to being in it only for money, and so maybe the court should consider this a matter of commercial free speech, an area in which constitutional protection has been minimal. Uhl was right about the court's persistent lack of interest in free speech for business, but he was apparently not prepared for Brother Scalia's retort that Dickens was also believed to have written for money. Feeble riposte: ''Your Honor, it's different. Dickens wrote his books largely because he needed income, not only because he needed income . . .'' Bruce Ennis Jr., formerly national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, represented the other side and had an easier time of it, mainly because the ACLU's expansive view of protected speech conforms pretty well to the court's record. Ennis did, however, have some difficult moments. Our favorite came when Justice Anthony Kennedy asked him whether the Constitution would protect not only nude theater but an ''adults-only carwash'' -- one that, say, attracted customers by hiring a nude lady to perform. Grave answer: ''I think it would ((be protected)) if it was intended as expressive activity.'' In some odd ways, the issues in this case echo those in the great flag- burning row. Both burning flags and dancing nudes have their judicial supporters, who will, by and large, be the same. They will be jurists who see the First Amendment not only as a shelter for ideas of every stripe but also as protection for a right of self-realization. A 1989 Keeping Up item, bounced off the flag-burning decision, bemoaned the court's commitment to this ''expressive'' interpretation of the amendment. We noted then that the expressive rationale had been lengthily articulated in American Constitutional Law, by liberal lodestar Lawrence H. Tribe of Harvard. Turning back the other day to Tribe's elaboration of the rationale, we came upon a passage in which the author was quoting from a Supreme Court opinion but italicizing one passage to register his own strong endorsement. He was saying that ''the right of free expression'' rested on the belief that ''no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political system rests.'' How much individual dignity he would discern in JR's Kitty Kat Lounge is a nice question.