Major disappointment, this place. I...

Major disappointment, this place. I was in Milwaukee on business, and I looked up a few possible clubs to visit. For some reason, Rickey's interested me, and it seemed like a good idea to check it out. I think I read somewhere that it was an older, established venue, so I I guess that made me optimistic, not knowing anything about the Milwaukee scene. I arrived at 8:30 pm on a Friday night, expecting the place to be in full swing. Alas, they had just opened minutes earlier and nothing was happening—it was totally DEAD, and I was the only person there, but they still charged me the full $10 cover charge. (No singles in change for tips, incidentally, which I thought was odd.) I ordered a $6 beer and thought I would wait a little while and see what would happen. After around 10 minutes, some of the girls started to come out to sit around the bar and dance up on the stage, but there was no seating around the stage itself—you have to watch from the bar, which I thought was an odd configuration. What's more, the dancers remain in bikinis or lingerie on stage—not topless, as THIS SITE had led me to believe. I imagine they might get topless for a private dance, but I wasn't interested in staying long enough for that.

So, the place was dead, and there was not a lot of excitement happening on stage. More interesting, if not more appealing, was the fact that one of the dancers was having a dispute with the manager/bartender over her pay, and she was not exactly discreet about it. The two of them were screaming at each other in front of the customer (or maybe customers—I think someone else had come in by then). This, of course, enhanced my desire to leave after finishing my beer. But getting out of there wasn't exactly easy. Rickey's is not in a great part of town, so if you don't have a car, you'll want to take a cab to and from. Thing is, cabs don't come by this neighborhood, and you can't exactly depend on prompt service when you call.

So all in all, it was just a shitty night at Rickey's. Maybe if I'd gotten there a couple of hours later, it would have been worthwhile. I just didn't expect that it would be completely dead during primetime on a Friday night.