On Friday night at Woody’s strip club in Islamorada, owner Michael Pinter stood against a wall with his arms crossed. He was looking at a crowd surrounding a dancer — a barely controlled chaos of booty popping, flying dollar bills and yelling against a backdrop of neon palm trees and ear-splitting hip-hop music.
In his late 70s, Pinter wore a ponytail and, with his eyes half closed, an unreadable expression on his face — a pose that has probably been honed over his five decades of owning all-nude exotic dance establishments.
But tonight, he was sad, he told Keys Weekly. This was the last weekend that Woody’s Adult Entertainment Club would be open.
“I feel like my left arm has been cut off,” he admitted. He had just sold his business to a trio of owners who would probably keep the name “Woody’s” but turn it into a sports bar.
“It was just time to move on,” he said. “My partner passed away, and the drive down from Orlando was getting longer.”
Pinter, who lives in Altamonte Springs, had owned Woody’s for 36 years. He reminisced about the Florida Keys from back in the day —“We used to be able to lie down on U.S. 1 in the middle of the night”— and about Big Dick & the Extenders, his house band for more than two decades.
He is proud of his legacy. His family has been running strip joints in Florida since the 1960s, he said, starting with a club called Club Juana in Orlando.
“I was the first to introduce nudity to bars in the state of Florida,” he pointed out.
Pinter had announced the club’s closing on social media a few days before, and the word was slowly getting out to locals.
“The end of an era,” one commenter had said on the Facebook group “What’s Happening Key Largo/Islamorada.” Other commenters had asked friends to snag them a Woody’s T-shirt before they were sold out.
Back on the floor of the club, the crowd was getting hyped. Manager Jason Jarocki weaved efficiently around the partiers, bringing bottles to the high rollers and whispering directions to bouncers wearing black “Staff” T-shirts. The “clients” included silver-haired businessmen and couples dropping by during date night. And groups of young men wearing T-shirts, shorts and baseball caps sauntered around —possibly, they were members of boat crews after a day on the water; one of the men had a giant gold lobster charm on his necklace.
But the demographic was 50 percent women, who had traveled in packs that were clearly on a ladies’ night out. The dancers would often pull a female onto the stage, while the males roared approval.
Yet the customers were always under control. When one took pictures of her friend gyrating on the stage, a bouncer suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Politely yet firmly, he asked her to delete the photos from her phone. She complied without an argument.
A sign on the front door says, in all capital letters, “If total nudity offends you do not enter.” Case in point: A dancer wearing the stripper outfit du jour— fishnets, seven-inch-tall platforms called “Pleasers” and little else — assumed a position on the stage’s tiprail that would make a gynecologist blush. A young woman, dressed in a long and modest sundress that would have been appropriate in church, approached and tucked a folded bill into the dancer’s fishnets.
That young woman in the sundress was from Tampa and declined to give her name. She dropped her jaw in surprise when told that Woody’s was closing.
“That’s so sad,” she exclaimed, yelling to be heard over the crowd. “We used to come here to be ‘in the Keys,’ and now it’s just a bunch of resorts.
“Our family would bring our trailer on the weekends, and now that trailer park is Isla Bella,” she said with a shrug.
Meanwhile, in a tiny dressing area just off the stage, a dancer named Miata was packing her bag to go home and discussing the bar’s closing with Jarocki.
“This was my last set. I made this outfit just for tonight,” she said, pointing at her bikini, which was made entirely from bandages with Chanel logos on them.
“I’m devastated,” she said. Her eyes welled up. “There’s no place like Woody’s. The people are so nice. They come back on vacation to say that they have great memories. Miami is cutthroat, and the girls are dirty.”
“I run a clean operation,” said Jarocki.
“I don’t know where I’ll go from here,” said Miata. She sighed and stood up straight. “But I’ll be ok.”
