Sometimes change is bad

After my first visit to Hots at the end of May I wrote a very favorable review. However, this time it was not nearly as enjoyable. For one thing, this club feels like it's in an out-of-the-way industrial corner of Battle Creek, even though it was easy to reach by driving a couple of miles east from downtown on E. Michigan Avenue and then less than a mile north on Raymond Road. For another, the first three dancers I saw on stage never took their tops off, probably because the crowd was small around 10 on a Sunday night and no one was tipping.

This leads me to my third and chief objection to the new and "improved" Hots. Since May the club has been completely but, in my opinion, unsuccessfully renovated. In the past the club was darker and felt more crowded but it was possible to get close to the stage to tip. Now when you enter you encounter a bright, airy interior with a long bar running across most of the middle of the room and the stage above and *behind* the bar! Customers sit around tables or at the bar and must look up and towards the back to see the strippers far away on the single stage. The three poles seem to extend 15 feet or more from the stage, which is already as high as the bar, to the high ceiling of this two-story building. There is admittedly a five-seat "Perverts' Row" at one end of the stage, but I never saw anyone sitting there and seldom saw anyone tipping besides me.

I avoided the $5 cover because I had a free admission pass from my previous visit. I bought a Bud Lite for $5 and was pleasantly surprised when the waitress later refunded $2, stating that it was on special that night. I was also pleasantly surprised by the $3 cost of the soft drink that I bought for a very personable and attractive young blonde who spent some time chatting with me after her stage set. Eventually she asked me if I wanted to do any dances and explained that lap dances cost $20 each and the VIP room costs $75 per 15 minutes (unlike Heart Beats, where it's $50 per 15 minutes). In the VIP room she stated her rules very succinctly: "Don't touch my crotch and don't put your mouth on me". Within those somewhat restrictive rules I had a good enough time with her but I'm not sure it was worth $75. Soon thereafter I cut my losses and left, hoping to return to Heart Beats the next night (though for meteorological reasons it was not to be -- see my review of that club).