This happens at Medusa’s the Mission: You step into the thump thump thump of the dance floor, the vibrations oozing up your legs, your knees, your pelvis — but it’s not a hip rhythm, it’s not a funky sound.
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This is crashing stuff, hard claps that you feel in the arches of your feet, in your chest, in your suddenly quivering shoulders. You’re jumping in place, your arms swing above your head, then swoop down so your fingertips touch your toes. The strobes are flashing and you’re shaking, shaking, shaking. There are whole rivers of sweat running down your back, your solar plexus, your hands.
The way the lights play, all movement around you is fragmented, slowed — even the drag queen in the baby doll dress flying by on the swing; even the mighty-bosomed Mya, in her Carol Channing hair and skin-tight body suit swirling in the cage just off the mezzanine; even Angel, the girlish boy, a cross between Madonna and Juliet Prowse, who’s jutting his derriere out at the crowd — at you — from the stage.
None of this, believe it or not, happens in the city, in the dark shadows of some resurrected factory in a neglected neighborhood, or in a chic, multimillion-dollar room in the Loop. All these goings on take place in “downtown” Elgin — the quotation marks an integral part of the fliers advertising the new suburban Medusa’s, as if everybody knows the notion of a downtown in Elgin is at least partly fictitious. As if to drive the point home, Medusa’s’ patrons enjoy free parking in an all-night garage right across the street. (Honest.)
The new Medusa’s, a little more than a year old, draws about 400 people a night to its large, rectangular room. There’s a touch of the gothic here, a dash of red behind the darkness, large copies of early Leonardos, the notorious swing (don’t get any ideas, though, because for insurance reasons no one but employees can even touch it), a large chalice that looks more like Aladdin’s lamp dead center, and a large table that, while seemingly perfect for a Valhalla-like banquet (the drag queens the obvious Valkyries), remains empty most of the time. There are skylights and windows (on the staircase they look out on the parking lot, just in case you need to check on your vehicle for some odd reason).
At the far end of the room, there’s an ample stage on which performers — go-go dancers, really — like Angel and Mya perform when they’re not on the swing or the cage. Tonight there’s a shaven-head, muscular guy, a leathered co-ed trying to look tough, some silly fellow playing with green flares as if he were helping a plane land at O’Hare, and the security guard who occasionally decides he needs to shake shake shake, too.
Most weekends feature a schedule of performance artists such as Joe Silovsky and Reginald Metcalfe, Eduardo Martinez, and Marsien and Snatchleen. But the work is more what the British call “live art”: textless scenes, extravaganzas, usually vaguely shocking, certainly sexual, often homoerotic.
The patrons here are congenial, mostly white, mostly young, often looking like college students home for spring break. There’s a dress code that bans gym shoes, but there appear to be plenty of exceptions on any given night. There is a smattering of gay men, some dancing in groups, others in couples, some alone. (There are no gay bars in Elgin, so the gathering intensifies on Sundays, when Medusa’s holds gay night.)
Up on the mezzanine, there’s a full-view of the room and of the visceral dialogue between the performers on stage and whoever’s in the cage. The best are Mya and Angel, who push each other to greater heights: At one point, Mya leans way over the cage and a young man below reaches up as if to cup her breasts with his hands. His buddies laugh and hoist their beers in a toast. Up on stage, Angel shakes for what seems an eternity. The gay guys stare, too cool to applaud.
Between the mezzanine and the dance floor there’s a separate bar area, this one projecting videos on a large back wall. The videos may be commercial or sometimes by independent artists, depending on programming. The volume’s considerably down here and groups of friends cluster in the booths, yakking as if they were at a Howard Johnson’s.
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the facts
Fridays and Saturdays, 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., Medusa’s the Mission, 209 E. Chicago St., Elgin. $5. 847-488-0320.