VooDoo Lounge

111 SW Second Ave. Fort Lauderdale 954-522-0733

I'm usually pretty healthy, but last week, I was afflicted with a bad case of a jitterbug bite. After two failed attempts (on Friday and Saturday) to find a club where my better half and I could break it down, we crawled into VooDoo Lounge on Sunday. I was skeptical at first, since this 2,500-square-foot Fort Lauderdale icon has been around since 2000 and has a reputation for catering to a VIP-type crowd. Since I'm more of a pub-crawler type, I had to sport my Sunday best, which pretty much means I didn't wear sneakers. When I arrived at VooDoo, I walked in expecting Cristal bottles popping, paparazzi snapping shots of celebs, and Diddy and company tossing money from the booth. What I found was a drag. No, really. There was a drag party just getting started. I often think of myself as a man's man, but the six-foot blond bombshell across from me is twice the man I'll ever be. These guys — uh, girls — dance, take pictures, and party like the rest of us, except they do it with an attitude that can't be faked. Their strangely cool elegance goes well with the ambient blue and red lighting and the super-swanky décor. The state-of-the-art sound system (the website boasts 50,000 watts of boom boom) will get you dancing. Or you can be a wallflower, but know that you'll just look silly vibrating against the wall. Either way, you're gonna move. The main room blasts the "hottest" dance and house, while the outside deck pumps hip-hop into your skull. Rodman's Rehab, VooDoo's new room, is a kind of Everyman's VIP lounge where you might actually see the man himself. Wednesday is ladies night. On Sunday, you'll find Life's a Drag featuring Babylon T from midnight to 1:30 a.m. Needless to say, this experiment had me toss out all my preconceived notions.