A tall, skinny man in a baby-girl pink colored suit walks onto the stage and introduces Kat, the “midget entertainer.” A little person wearing fishnets, lingerie, and a top hat starts dancing around a stripper pole to Michael Jackson music.

Welcome to The Dirty Show.

Billed as a “world famous international erotic art exhibition,” The Dirty Show takes place in a warehouse-converted theater in the middle of one of the dirtiest cities around, Detroit.

Inside is an orgy of arts, visual and theatrical. Kat is one of the many performers who takes the stage, surrounded by walls of artwork that you’d never let your grandma know you’ve looked at.

Most of this art, by any definition, is pornography. You’ll see a spread of man parts, lady parts, and both man and lady parts together. Nipples of all colors, shapes, sexes and sizes. Completely normal things now have genitals and genitals are made out of various materials. There’s a woman on all fours made out of black metal and a three-foot-tall stone penis statue you can buy for $9,000.

Yes, if you really did want your grandma to know you looked at this stuff, you can buy most of it and take it home. And a statue of a wang really brings a living room together.

Cages are built around support pillars in the warehouse with dancers inside them. One is clad in red stockings and red colored wings with demon horns on her head. Another is an obese school girl. One man walks around wearing a bath towel, knee-high latex black combat boots and a tattoo on his shoulder. One of the performers, and I may have heard this wrong, called himself “Liat von Monkeyfetish.” And these are just the people working the show.

There is no dress code for the audience either. One woman leads around another woman with a leash around her neck. A man … or woman … or something in between (or even outside categories) walks the floor nearly seven feet tall. The voice says man, the figure looks woman, the colors in the hair and the floor length black garb that starts at its nose screams Star Wars.

This is what happens when the circus takes The Matrix, meets The Rocky Horror Picture Show and invites along Alice in Wonderland at the Detroit Institute of the Arts with a dance company and lots and lots of tassels, finally blending it all together with a porno mag. This year the event is sponsored by Larry Flynt’s new Hustler Club that opened recently in Detroit.

Imagine how I tried to explain where I was going to my mom. I left out a lot of details.

The Dirty show doesn’t just push boundaries; it shatters them, crushes up the pieces, smokes this powder and laughs in the face of anyone who looks differently at all this. All while wearing a leather catsuit.

One man’s taboo is another man’s timid. To some a fear, others a fetish. This show demolishes any conservative notions about sexuality. Did I mention that the main bar wraps around a stage where volunteers can be bound up with pantyhose, suspended off the ground, and spanked by a man wearing a kilt?

Some people have already stopped reading this column by now. Good, this wasn’t written for them. This was written in spite of them.

While I like how The Dirty Show pokes fun at preconceived notions of alternative sexual practices, the fact that it has to be called a “dirty” show invokes an unclean and unsafe connotation to it all.

Yes, there are pictures of women covered in chocolate syrup but that’s not what I mean. That’s messy, not dirty.

On the scale of porn and art, I would really put most of this stuff as art. There is a floor to ceiling mural of an orgy in one of the smoking rooms. The doorway to this room is a massive vagina decorated with Christmas tree lights. One performer, Hayley Jane, did a beautiful show-stopping rendition of “Mein Herr” from the musical Cabaret. The fact that she sang it while removing her garter and bodice was just a plus.

There was a world champion pole dancer, who has competed in tournaments in Japan and Amsterdam. The things she did made Cirqe de Soleil performers look like drunken toddlers, all while wearing a dress. Belly dancers proved that sexy can be achieved in t-shirts and jeans.

To think that these artists and the audience are in any way depraved, perverted, or unstable because of what they enjoy is ridiculous. And I know ridiculous; I just looked at a painting called “What Happens In Vegas Stays Inside Me.”

Are these people freaks? No. Do they do freaky things? Yes. Like a Swan Lake performance where ballerinas dance around two people suspended from the ceiling by hooks jammed through the skin in their upper backs, swinging around, smiling most of the time.

This isn’t for everyone and I in no way think that people who enjoy this stuff should do this around children or in public. I just don’t like the fact that some people instantly disregard The Dirty Show and anyone who took part in it simply because of what they enjoy. Kinky is not dirty, naughty is not unlawful, and sometimes, handcuffs aren’t just for law enforcement.

That girl over there, in the bright purple corset and cat ears? That’s your barista. That woman wearing a leather police officer’s hat, black leather pants, a red shirt and a waist clincher that looks like it’s killing her? A clerk at the court house.

I saw a cute older couple, dressed in normal clothes and around the same age as my parents, holding hands and walking around looking at paintings together. Even “normal” people enjoy the show.

The logo for The Dirty Show is a woman half naked, as seen through a key in a door. Let people enjoy what they like behind closed doors. And let those of us who want to see keep looking through that key hole.

Stay dirty, Detroit.