[image]
[title]Never have I ever had sex with two men. Never have I ever gotten it on in my parent’s bed. Never have I ever peed on a fire hydrant. Mimicking HBO’s Real Sex, these taped street confessions, jotted down onto a dry-erase board by passersby in Wicker Park—okay, that last one’s from a dog—loop on Evil Olive’s TVs. The footage is the early evening visual entertainment at a recent installment of Porn and Chicken, the club’s Monday-night electro rager.
At the front bar, the party’s masterminds, Dom Brown and Mandi Huber, sling drinks to tatted-up early arrivals, the majority of whom look as if they’re only days into their 21st year. A transplant from Wrigleyville’s Risqué Café (where the pair started the event in May), Porn and Chicken upgraded to Olive in August. “It just snowballed. We were having capacity issues every week,” Huber says.
With fried chicken catered in, mostly from Evil Olive’s sister bar Cans, and vintage smut curated by the cult-film buffs at Odd Obsession, the concept isn’t new. But usually it’s dive bars coupling the tits and ass with eggs and bacon in the wee hours of the morning. Here, the humping plays from 11pm sharp and it’s paired with the relentless speaker rattling of resident DJs J-Sephora, Macabre Monster and Orvtronixxx.
Surrounded by paper plates and grease-soaked napkins at the Never Have I Ever night, hipsters queued up to smile nice for nightlife photographer GlitterGuts and scrawl innocent proclamations on the photo booth’s backdrop. Other nights have not been so chaste. Recent weeks have seen Heavy Petting Zoo, a furry dress-up party, and the Dr. Feelgood party, dedicated to dirty doctors and naughty nurses.
“We’re the eclectic, strange party option,” says Brown, his blue and black tiger-stripe glasses and camo army helmet easily backing up his claim. “We’re cultivating a different culture, no more of that tacky, ignorant downtown shit.” This could be the future of alternative clubbing: sexed up and welcoming. Gay, straight, preppy, goth, the crowd is big, diverse and ready to wile out on a school night. “The shit that goes down is absolutely absurd,” says Olive’s general manager Eric Bollard. “We had over 400 people last Monday, that speaks for itself.”
For Brown, 23, and Huber, 26, Porn and Chicken has become like a full-time job. Both are bartenders by trade, but recently Brown transitioned to work at Evil Olive exclusively. Huber has taken on more shifts as well. “When we’re behind the bar we can help create a brand and sell it,” Brown explains. “You know, brand awareness. I went to Columbia, I remember that shit.”
To call Brown a loudmouth is putting it lightly. Outlandish and charismatic, he’s often shirtless, strutting across the bar top, cordless mic in hand, egging on the crowd. “He’s pretty unfiltered,” Huber jokes. “He’s the crazy one that gets everybody hyped and I’m the one tending to business at the bar. Unless I get too drunk and then Dom has to do both.” With a blond bob and “maneater” tattooed across her fists—and sleeves of ink riding up both her arms—Huber could be mistaken for the more intimidating of the two. Then she smiles brightly and does a shot with you.
Both roles were in full swing by 1:30am at the Never Have I Ever event. Ammunition, a local fire-breather, was getting ready to heat things up; the party’s videographer Jason Knade was filming two girls getting hot ’n’ heavy on the dance floor—one’s red panties peeking out from beneath a too-short mini dress—and there was Brown, bare-chested and broadcasting from the DJ booth, imploring the crowd for a girl with bigger boobs to take to the go-go-dancing cage they’d set up for the night.
Porn and Chicken keeps it lewd every Monday at Evil Olive.