Take 380 to Crazy: Pornstar’s Ball at Woody’s Showclub

Photos by Distraction Photography

“Pornstar’s Ball. Tits and techno. This is going to be crazy.” On hearing that last utterance in my friend’s pitch for potential weekend plans, I couldn’t help but clench my fist. “This is going to be crazy” is usually all I need to shoot down whatever proposal follows. Say this to me in conjunction with the mention of “hitting up the bars,” “festive outing” or “indie rock band,” and I am liable to just lose it. Don’t abuse the language. Just because something is mildly fun and enjoyable, doesn’t make it crazy. No one knows this better than an unreconstructed thrill-seeker like myself whose enjoyment hinges on things actually being crazy.

But the mismatch of “tits and techno,” the event’s rallying cry as I eventually learned, was enough to give me pause. It did have the genuine ring of crazy. Things sounded only more promising as the details filled in. Pornstar’s Ball was an all-night rave being thrown at Woody’s Showclub in Cedar Rapids. It was being put on primarily under the guidance of Matt Rissi, a DJ whose Iowa City shows I always turned out for, in a locally notorious highway stripclub which, from what I could gather, represented everything right and wrong about a Midwestern gentleman’s club. I was sold. Here was something with the promise of actual craziness—out of the ordinary, unpredictable, unedited. Something that might actually push the envelope rather than just repackage routine nightlife fare.

On March 8, I cabbed it up I-380 with a few friends to the Pornstar’s Ball. Upon entering Woody’s, the first sight that greeted me was a stripper with a crazy fit body, clad in nothing more than a pink thong, turning her ass out to the crowd as if to wordlessly pose the question, “Is there any way I could make this look better?” A second later, she was giving the stumped onlookers the answer, letting loose a mean yet effortless twerk. The DJ setup to her right was flanked on its left by a collection of neon-skirted and tank-topped raver chicks seeming to cheer on the gyrations, waving their arms back and forth to the music in fluid, aimless zigzags. Out of the ordinary? Check.

The first major challenge of the evening was the crowd. Apparently, the 500 RSVP was no joke. My desire to carve out semi-permanent space to mill about soon gave way to my curiosity about just who turns out for Pornstar’s Ball.

After making a few rounds about the crush of people packed into the club, I came to recognize that this was likely the most diverse electronic dance music (EDM) show I’d ever attended. And I don’t mean the kind of token diversity you find in a college-brochure with everyone united in zombie smiles of togetherness despite their differences in skin color or manner of dress. No, I mean, raw, real diversity. People coming from all walks of life—race, class, gender, social scene—who wouldn’t otherwise associate with each other.

There was black, white, the whole gamut of brown, advanced degrees, no high school, wannabe thugs flashing their money, well-off kids looking to slumming it up, trance hippies mingling with house heads, hipsters and dubsteppers, kandi ravers crossing paths with emo scenesters, some weird thing that looked like a cross between goth and hair metal that had guys wearing way too much eyeliner—all of these people, who normally devote enormous effort to defining themselves against each other were now united in one place, all lured out on a chilly March night to a truckstop stripclub by the simple promise of “tits and techno.”

The fact that a bacchanal summoning thrill-seeking perverts of every stripe was achieving
the idealized level of diversity the most upstanding, straight-laced, civically minded person lusts for while simultaneously perverting everything they idealized about it—no, it’s not thoughtful, reasoned pleas for Kumbaya-flavored togetherness that actually brings people together, but instead the endless undulations of bodies and bass—well, that was just crazy hot.

After making my own way to the dance floor to join up with friends and appreciate the crowd from the inside, and more than a few drinks in me, I found my mind riffing on sound clashes in electronic music. A DJ strings together a disparate set of sounds in a way that first jars the listener to attention and then gradually tries to habituate them to all these pieces that don’t seem to fit. This train of thought wasn’t driven so much by trap music I was hearing as by the chaotic visual scene I was witnessing of the crowd coming together with music in fits and spurts.

I was mesmerized by the sight of a très chic duo in designer dresses that danced side-by-side a heavyset, gangster rap fan (a fact his t-shirt declared in no uncertain terms) who bobbed his head in time with the beat while sucking on an LED pacifier. Next, I found myself tallying up what seems like the most multicultural display of fauxhawks I’d ever seen in such close quarters until my heart sank upon discovering the last one I spotted belonged to a person making out with the girl I’d moments earlier judged as the hottest thing ever. But there was no time to indulge my misery as I found I desperately needed to make room for a middle-aged woman who was using the full force of her generously proportioned backside to propel her perplexed but smiling dance partner across the length of the dance floor. Yeah, it was weird, and unnerving and just a whole lot to take in. But I kind of loved it.

Matt Fee’s trap session wound down and Matt Rissi took the stage next, starting in on a set of bass-heavy techno. The space in front of the stage began to fill in with raver girls who danced and circulated the ubiquitous EDM “Crank It” sign to one another. The next few hours were a welcome assault on the senses, as I cycled back and forth through various states of arousal driven by conversation, chemicals and lust, all while never seeming to have to move to anything below 130 bpm. I dwelled on other analogies between electronic music and the interactions of the crowd, but, frankly, it is hard to pick distinct memories out of the beautiful blur.

The line between amateur and professional dancers blurred beautifully as well, as the strippers casually mixed in with the crowded assortment of ravers over the course of the night. And that’s not some glib dig at EDM’s penchant for risque fashion. It’s true that attire honed for the stripper’s stage, from nipple pasties to cheek cleavage flattering hot pants, are now mainstays of EDM festivals. No, what got me was seeing the strippers at Woody’s bring all of that full circle, donning rave accessories like rainbow striped stockings, glittery tutus and UV body paint for the night.

The pinnacle of this melding of styles was embodied by the stripper with porcelain-pale skin, framed by multi-colored furry boots and a shock of blue hair. If it wasn’t for the ease and grace with which she balanced her body against the pole, I’d be willing to believe she just came in as a regular EDM kid and, at some point during the night, elected to try her hand on stage on a whim.

That ease and grace stuck out in my mind so much that I blithely concluded that this girl could be a professional dancer, one of the non-exotic variety. This followed immediately by a rolling of my eyes as I realized she’d probably be making a fraction of her current income in that scenario. And with that, my mind shifted from parallels between ravers and strippers to parallels between strippers and DJs.

Just the way I respected this girl even more for how lucratively she was using her talent, I felt the same esteem for Rissi bringing his DJ skills to the stripclub. Rather than putting on another warehouse show in purist fashion, Rissi had the entrepreneurial savvy to put on an event in the one local venue that would actually have no problem holding an event on a sun-down-to-sun-up rave timeframe. Add to this how the off-the-wall venue choice actually draws people in by the hundreds, rather than turning them away. Whatever its rocky moments, when seen as a whole, Pornstar’s Ball series is nothing less than a stroke of genius.

Jerome Algiers is a writer based in Iowa City who has clearly spent much more time thinking about the relationship between EDM and stripclubs than he has about his pseudonym.