“We wanted a place to blow off steam after work, and Aria had a great voice,” co-host Wankus told XBiz of the first PSK in 2003. Wankus, who is also program director at KSEXRadio.com, brought KSEX personality Aria to Sardo’s Bar in Burbank where they met up with DVSX director and production manager Constance “Konnie” Le.
The trio had such a good time that Wankus mentioned it on his KSEX show the next day, inviting industry members to Sardo’s the following week.
“The first night we had eight people. The next week we had 80, and now there are people lined up to the corner,” Wankus said.
Aria has since left the adult industry, but Wankus' KSEX bully pulpit is credited for bringing in the porn world's A-List as well as talent visiting from out of town, where the weekly event serves as a booze-fueled networking opportunity.
PSK regularly draws a Who’s Who of the adult industry, with stars old and new, savvy adult business owners who “sponsor” an evening for about $300, fans, amateur photographers and bloggers big and small. It also attracts its share of mainstream types, with frequent appearances by Mickey Rourke, “Queer as Folk” star and VH1 talking head Hal Sparks and voiceover artist Jesse Harnell.
Sardo’s operations manager Seymour Satin, who is on a first-name basis with most of the clientele in the small bar, said he moved to Burbank on the same weekend that he started managing Sardo’s, which was founded in 1968 by the late John Sardo.
“We closed down for a few days and re-opened with a new format. Porn Star Karaoke came six months later,” he said. Now PSK nights, always held on Tuesday, are as popular as Saturday nights, if not more so, for the bar that shares strip mall space with a doughnut shop and a parking lot with a grocery store.
Wankus said he burned out after a few months and took a hiatus to concentrate on KSEX business. PSK attendance slowly fell off during that time because, as Le said, “Wankus brings the bitches.”
The driving force of any PSK is Wankus’ patter and duets with co-host Kristen Owsinski, who discovered PSK in May of last year. After regular attendance and several performances, Owsinski was asked to co-host PSK with interim host Nikki Hunter.
Both Owsinski, who is a nursing student at Santa Monica College, and Le are often asked if they are adult performers — or if they would be. They are not, and neither plans to enter the business. Instead, both leave the outrageous behavior to Wankus, who stalks tables to improvise lyrics about PSK attendees.
“This is the only social time a lot of people in the industry have,” Le said, pointing out that most of the people she knows in the business work very hard and are picky about which events they attend as porn stars. <[p> Fans, whom Wankus estimates make up half of the audience, rarely harass or hassle the talent, and Satin can only remember three times in the two years he has been overseeing PSK that “situations arose — but we got [them] under control very quickly,” he said.
Wankus believes that PSK is a necessary outlet for the industry but he is feeling a little itchy after two years. “I’d like to do it maybe once a month,” he said, but he does worry about a replacement’s ability to keep the PSK spirit alive.
“My saving grace is that I don’t give a rat’s ass about what people think about me,” he said. “That’s a commodity in this business.”