sinclair's Review

I was traveling down Highway 61, the Blues Highway, on a Saturday night around 20:00, so I decided to check out Illusion’s Gentlemen’s Club in Woodville. This strip club has not been reviewed in over seven years, so I was unsure if it was even still open. I pulled into the gravel parking lot, and it turned out that Illusion’s was just opening for the night at 20:00. I paid a $10 cover charge at the door. The outside was not well lit and there were bags of trash all over the front patio of the building. The first room you enter is the bar. The next room past the bar has the main stage and is filled with tables and chairs. The stage is fairly large with a spinning pole. The DJ booth is at the back of the stage. There are two side rooms that branch off of the main stage room. The right wing has more seating and a secondary stage. The left wing is full of couches and is where the private dances take place. Private dances are $50 per song or two songs for $50 during frequent two-for-the-price-of-one specials. There were overflowing trash cans and bags of trash all over the place. Ashtrays were full of ashes and half drunk bottles of water and beer were laying everywhere. Two things became clear: (1) This club doesn’t have dumpster service. (2) This club needs to hire a cleaning crew. The club does not have heating, so there were several space heaters turned on. The filthy washroom did not have soap or towels and reeked of ammonia.

A Sincweiser was $5 and imported beers like Corona were $6. Small 7.5 ounce cans of soda were $4. The club does not get served by beer distributors as all of the beer came out of retail size packages. All of the coolers behind the bar were apparently broken, so the bartender had to walk outside of the bar to a refrigerator on the other side of the room to get the beer. There was no hard alcohol served, but apparently you could bring your own.

There is a phrase that sometimes gets tossed around when talking about dive strip clubs: “where strippers go to die”. Illusion’s is an embodiment of that phrase. Quite possibly, every dancer working on Saturday night was 40 years or older. I did not find any of the four entertainers even remotely attractive. Dancers are supposed to strip to nude on stage, but none of them did. The annoying DJ kept saying the dancers wouldn’t get nude unless there was at least $20 tipped on the stage. That never happened. The next hour he said at least $15 needed to be tipped on the stage before a dancer would get naked. That never happened. The dancers were so nasty, I am glad they did not strip.