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It’s one in the morning at Angels PDX, and dancer Lexus* is AWOL.
“Lexus to the stage! Give it up for Lexus!” the strip club DJ announces for the third time, trying gamely to keep the vibe going with no music and no performer.
As the crowd’s attention starts to wander, I head for the bathroom. As I do, a dancer—apparently not Lexus—blocks my path. She’s at least a foot taller than I am in her stripper heels, pregnant and completely nude.**
“Lexus? Lexus to the stage, please!” the DJ implores as the towering presence before me—whom I have never exchanged a word with—grabs my hands and places them on her bare breasts.
“Lexus! Going once!” the plaintive voice intones, still trying to bring order to the chaos.
I’m a modern guy, so I’m not passing judgment on anything that’s happening here. Still, I can’t help thinking, This is not the kind of place I’d expect to find any of the top dozen or so people in the line of presidential succession.
Nevertheless, in the unlikely event that Donald Trump, JD Vance, Mike Johnson and eight specific cabinet officials had been disintegrated by alien death rays on April 18, 2025, this room might well have borne witness to the swearing-in of the new leader of the free world.
By now you’ve probably heard about the ouster of scandal-plagued U.S. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. What you may not have noticed is that Chavez-DeRemer, who was the mayor of Happy Valley and represented Oregon in Congress, is arguably the first-ever Trump cabinet officer to be fired strictly due to scandal. Kristi Noem had her peccadilloes, God knows, but she was mainly fired for saying Trump approved her $200 million cowgirl commercial. Pam Bondi also stepped on her share of rakes, but we all know she got the axe mostly for failing to jail the president’s enemies. Chavez-DeRemer is the first and so far only Trump cabinet member to be fired solely for being embarrassing.
Needless to say, you’ve got to cut some pretty spectacular didoes to provoke shame in this administration. Here are just some of the things that Chavez-DeRemer stands accused of (for the record, both she and the White House categorically deny all of them): pursuing (apparently successfully) a relationship with a subordinate member of her security detail; drinking frequently during the workday from a stash of liquor kept in her office; demanding that underlings perform menial tasks and run her personal errands (including bringing wine to her hotel room); pressuring young female staffers to flirt with and entertain creepy texts from her husband and her father (two reports of inappropriate touching led to the husband being barred from the Labor Department premises); and asking staffers to find ways to make her leisure travel look like fully reimbursable government business.
It’s behavior like this that gives drinking on the job a bad name. Given this zone-flooding litany of bad acts, perhaps it’s not surprising that an allegation of particular interest to us here in Portland barely registered in the public discourse. Specifically, the New York Post reported that during a 2025 trip to Portland (I’ll restrain myself from using the word “junket”), Chavez-DeRemer celebrated the conclusion of a successful work week by taking a group of staffers to a strip club.
Spoiler alert: It was the aforementioned Angels PDX.
I’m not one to be scandalized by a little consensual nudity. As far as I can tell, (allegedly) springing for a field trip to the titty bar is one of the nicest things Chavez-DeRemer ever (allegedly) did as a boss. Still, one has questions: What did her party do there? Did they have fun? What led them to pick this particular place? We’ll probably never know for sure (at least not until someone’s tell-all book comes out), but as you’ve probably already gathered, I recently made my own visit to Angels to try to reconstruct a version of the alleged events.
The national media outlets that did take notice of Angels were, unfortunately, not too kind. The Post published a Google Street View photo, prompting one podcaster to call it “the most depressing building I have ever seen.” Several stories insisted on the adjective “seedy,” which seems a bit harsh. That said, the mental image you get when I say, “It’s a good strip bar to go to if you’re also going to the Pick-n-Pull auto salvage yard” is probably pretty accurate.
There’s also the fact that this location has a bit of a history. Until recently, this building housed a different club, Tommy’s Too, which in 2014 came under federal investigation for prostitution and money laundering. That December, one of the club’s owners, Craig Desmarais, was shot in the parking lot and later died of his injuries. (“Since it was the week of Christmas, business was slow,” began the East PDX News account of the killing.)
It’s not entirely clear when Tommy’s Too ceased operations, but by 2022 the business was registered to a new owner, Ramin Razilov, as “Angel’s Strip Club.” (The building itself is still owned by Desmarais’ brothers, Gilbert and Corey.) Razilov did not return calls seeking comment.
Anyway, back to our reconstruction of LCD’s visit. Depending on the layout, there are a number of ways you can go to a strip club. Some of the fancier ones have tables and waitstaff and maybe even a decent menu. Sure, there’s a naked lady over there, but for you and your friends it’s not that different from going to a conventional restaurant or bar. It’s almost like dinner theater!
Angels, however, is not that. There’s a stage with a rail, a bar with maybe eight stools, and two small rickety-looking tables. There is a menu (your choice of wings, chicken strips, mozzarella sticks or poppers), but this is a place where the uniformed security guard is also in charge of dropping the fries, and I feel confident that people aren’t coming for the food. (On it, maybe.)
There’s nothing wrong with any of this, but it rules out the possibility that the labor secretary’s party was there for that genteel “gentlemen’s club” experience.
Neither of the dancers I spoke with had seen Chavez-DeRemer there. In fact, Lexus and her colleague had never even heard the story at all. One of the bartenders remembered that something along these lines had happened “a while back,” but clearly no one at Angels is lying awake at night thinking about Strippergate.
So we are left to wonder how the U.S. Department of Labor spent the evening. Did they belly up side by side to the bar? Split up to play video lottery? Sit at the rail throwing dollar bills at the dancers? Those seem to be the options, and it’s hard to imagine a cabinet secretary (other than Pete Hegseth) doing any of them.
But maybe it shouldn’t be! Isn’t this the plainspoken authenticity modern voters crave? I bet Graham Platner slapped a few bills on the rail in his day. In any case, I, for one, am sorry to see Secretary Chavez-DeRemer go. To be honest, she’s been one of Trump’s better cabinet officials, if only Kristi Noem and RFK Jr. had confined themselves to petty corruption and a little light sexual harassment (alleged) rather than banning vaccines (attempted) and killing people (confirmed). Compared to that, getting wasted on the taxpayers’ dime seems pretty harmless.
Oh, well; at least we’ll always have Kash Patel.
*I changed identifying details like stage names to make sure the dancers don’t get in trouble for talking to me, though it seems unlikely that they would.
**I know this anecdote seems to violate my rule of not giving enough detail to identify the dancers, but in this case it’s OK because more than one of them was pregnant.
