Not Bad, But Not My Thing

A recent Saturday night found me at The Pony for the first time in well over a year. I've been skipping the club partly because it's inconveniently-located for me and partly because my previous couple of visits were disappointing, but clubs in Indy can change a lot in the course of a year and I have had good times there before, so I decided it was finally time to give it another try.

Nothing was different on the outside; it still has the distinctive pony statues marking its parking lot. (While I have never personally felt unsafe in its parking lot, trouble in this area isn't unknown.) I arrived around 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night and found the door charge was up to $20; increasing door charges has been a recent trend in Indy, and this club has long been notorious for jacking up the price for late-night arrivals, but even so this seemed excessive to me for a mid-sized club which doesn't have a focus on showing sporting events. The layout on the inside was the same as always: a single mid-sized room with the main stage on the end opposite the entrance, a small, single-pole stage at floor level near the entrance, the sizable bar to the left, and a sizable raised VIP seating area (maybe the biggest, proportionately speaking, in the Indy area) to the right. The door to the outside smoking area is by the main stage, and private rooms and couch dances areas are beyond the bar to the left. The main stage looks like it was set up to have shower dances at one time, but I've never seen that happen on any of my previous visits over the last decade.

This club typically doesn't hit full stride until very late (usually well after midnight), and this night was no different, as attendance was still modest when I arrived at 10:30 p.m. The racial breakdown of dancers here has always been mixed, but this visit saw a pronounced urban trending in both dancers and music; only two of the dozen or so dancers were white, with a couple of Latinos also in the mix. (This is also a recent general Indy trend, with a few mid-range clubs that weren't originally urban having pushed partly or entirely in that direction post-COVID. I was told that this is partly because some of the long-standing all-black clubs in the city have closed down, and so those dancers have migrated out.) I got to talk at least briefly with several of the dancers during my roughly 80 minute visit and was given the impression that the club is much more orderly than it was at the time of my utterly-wasted early 2023 visit; dancers actually have a regular rotation on the main stage now, with an electronic sign board in the back posting the order, rather than just going up whenever they feel like it. The small back stage is still a volunteer effort (at least at this time of night), and I saw a few go back there for at least a couple of songs during my stay. Standard dance prices are $25 (currently the Indy norm), with private rooms being available.