When you think of strip club...

When you think of strip club cities, you don’t think of Minneapolis, and with good reason. Sure, the city is nice, but there are enough rules here – and enough enforcement of those rules – to dissuade anyone from making a special trip up here. The reason for that, I think, is the same conundrum many cities have to decide: Either serve alcohol but keep your panties on, or go all nude but be a dry club. The best SC’s, IMHO, get to do both. Yet, there have been three clubs to either open or reopen in downtown Minneapolis within the past two months. It should be a mere coincidence (I haven’t heard of any more clubs opening), but overall the scene in the Mill City has improved by a tad.

Club Sinners is the last of these three. I don’t know how or why, but since it started up last month, I’ve been in here three times. It’s operated by the guys who own the rite-of-passage smut emporium Sex World right next door. I can’t foretell its future. The second night it was open it was dead, but it’s improved in attendance since. It has the Sex World imprimatur, yet I believe that turns as many people off as it does on. The best thing going for it is, of all things, location: Sinners and Sex World lie on Washington Ave., Minneapolis’ main northern drag. With the company putting out signs pointing to it, at the very least you can’t miss it, even if stumbling drunk.

Cover’s fifteen, eight to get in, seven for the proverbial bottomless drink in a plastic cup. (Sinners, as well as Divas and the recently reopened Whispers, are all non-alcoholic in exchange for getting to show the hoo-hah. The clubs that decided to take the wet route include the Seville Club, Rick’s and Schieks.) After you slalom through chairs and ottomans, you see what I think is the best part of Sinners: the look of the club itself. You’re immediately struck by the interior design of the big, longer-than-wider room, a color scheme of red and black, with plenty of space in between the 15 tables to stretch your legs. All the Pop Art chairs are red-and-black pleather, with backs that get halfway up your back and wheels that make them very easy to roll around in. The left side of the room is the stage, and it’s uncomfortably long. It’s humped on both ends like, well, a set of tits if you’re looking from up top; when it’s their turn, the dancers walk off the floor through the beaded curtain at the right end and step out through the beaded curtain on the left end. Depending on the night and time of night, each stripper does either two or three songs (topless first, nude second) that are three minutes each, give or take 30 seconds.