Evan Weiss is excitedly holding out a copy of the Daily News from a couple of weeks ago. He’s pointing to a picture of several beautiful women in teeny bikinis cavorting in a hot tub at Club Flow. But Weiss is not paying any attention to the eye-popping display of flesh. He’s interested in the tub. "That’s one of mine," he says, beaming like a proud father.

Weiss, a 31-year-old Philly native and East Falls resident, is the self-appointed "King of Hot Tubs," and since April 2002 he's been the boss (and sole employee) of the city's only hot-tub rental company.

If you think hot tubs are just for rich people and Playboy Bunnies, you haven't met Weiss. That's not to say these people don't also make use of his wares -- about half of Weiss' business comes from nightclubs like Club Flow, often using the tubs to show off scantily clad models and dancers. But he's rented to private parties, Philly's PrideFest, mushroom farmers in Kennett Square, even a couple hoping to perform a home water birth (the woman delivered before her boyfriend could finish filling and heating the tub, Weiss notes with a trace of relief).

A little over a year ago, Weiss was himself a novice to the hot-tub biz, having recently been laid off from a telecommunications job. When he "hit one of those proverbial crossroads," he thought back to his college days when he would visit friends up at Penn State. "I saw these portable hot tubs being towed around on trailers and I had never seen [that] before and I thought it was the coolest thing. I figured if they could do it up at Penn State, why can't it work here in Philly?"

So he took out a credit card to buy a tub from a company called Softub, which specializes in portable, lightweight tubs made from what Weiss describes as a "very durable foam." The empty tub (it seats between six and eight people, depending, Weiss says, on how friendly you want to get) weighs about 90 pounds, and he rolls it around on its side like a big wheel to get it where it needs to go. He fills the tub up with a garden hose, attached either to an outdoor spigot or a kitchen sink for indoor installation. The 300-gallon tubs take about half an hour to fill. Once the motor is plugged in, the tub warms up overnight to 104 degrees (Weiss sets up the tub the night before you want to use it).

After one month on the job, Weiss already had enough demand to purchase another tub (according to Softub's website, each tub goes for about four grand). Now Weiss has four tubs and is looking to purchase a fifth. He generally rents out all of his tubs each week.

Though people do rent hot tubs for a quiet, relaxing or romantic evening, most of Weiss' jobs are parties. When Weiss returns to pick up his tub, he says, "I can tell how successful the weekend or party was by how much stuff is floating in the hot tub." While the most popular floating items are glow sticks and earrings, sometimes the items are stranger, like after a New Jersey man's 30th birthday party. "There was a deflated blow-up doll floating in the tub," he says, laughing and demonstrating with his arms the state of the sprawled-out doll. "It was like crime-scene tape." Weiss is quick to add that the tubs are sanitized after each rental.

The only thing crazier than what's left after the party is what happens during a steamy soiree. Weiss rents a tub weekly for a club party hosted by Q102, and he says "they get the girls practically naked in the hot tub, so it's usually pretty entertaining." Weiss also recalls, "We did a promotion at Coming Out Day at the Philly PrideFest in the Gayborhood, and we had a tub out there filled up for people to go in, and we had drag queens, beautiful drag queens, stripped down to their pale boy bodies in the tub." Weiss enthusiastically recounts the tale of a concert at the Liacouras Center for WMMR featuring Live. "We had two hot tubs set up in there and [WMMR] partnered us with Wizard's, the gentlemen's club, so they had a bunch of their girls in our tubs. Half of the arena was turned around looking at the tubs, not paying attention to what was going on onstage."

Amazingly, Weiss says he's never had a problem with damage to the tubs. "And I've left them with fraternities, which is the ultimate test." His one caveat when dropping off a tub: "Don't put anything besides water in the tub." As in, no beer or Jell-O or even a substance like dish detergent to create a bubble-bath effect. "It gets just like The Brady Bunch," Weiss says, "a huge thing of foam."

He's already planning to expand his kingdom -- he'll be servicing the Jersey Shore this summer, and in the fall he will open a branch of his company to serve the Pittsburgh and Penn State areas. As for the future, Weiss says, "I'd like to expand to the whole East Coast. I checked on the Internet and there's really only a few people doing this throughout the country."