Chris O. Cook Mara Mayhem, Ashley Bad, Maya Sinstress, DJ Xris Smack, DJ Jeffo!

The Howl! Festival wasn’t the only extravaganza of eccentricity to take the neighborhood this past weekend, and even with Low Life in full effect, maybe not even the most outlandish one. That honor, as you might have guessed from Thursday’s “Beat and Greet,” may have gone to the New York Fetish Marathon. But on Friday night, the festivities were hampered just a bit, as frisky fetishists were spanked by rain and disciplined by bouncers at Webster Hall.

Despite a posted start time of 9 p.m. and showers that began at 10 p.m., ticketholders weren’t admitted until nearly 11:30 p.m., meaning that waiting fetishists were sitting ducks for the occasional snide remark from spiky-haired gawkers hitting the neighborhood from Jersey and elsewhere. Still, the rubber-clad types kept their chins up as event workers repeatedly materialized in the doorway to announce that they would be ready “any minute now.”

Once fetishists were finally admitted, though only intermittently in groups of five, they made their way up to the venue’s top floor where pumping music, a stage set for performances, and plentiful “prayer benches” for spanking play implied that the evening would be worth the wet wait.

Chris O. CookNikki LeVillain

The first guests were greeted by DJ Xris Smack and his girlfriend, latex fashion designer Ashley Bad. Other luminaries included DJ Jeffo!, who cautioned the Local to remember to spell his name with the exclamation point, and the comely fetish burlesque trio of Maya Sinstress, Mara Mayhem, and Sultry Susan, in from Chicago to perform at the following night’s “Superheros Vs. Supervillains” costume ball.

Performance highlights included music from Kayvon Zand and the Zand Collective, an 80s-inspired electropop band whose members included transvestite men as well as unmistakably real women like fetish model Anna Evans. Arden Leigh, a professional “seduction coach” and the author of female-centric pick-up guide “The New Rules of Attraction,” performed a pole-dance act with plenty of upside-down aerial work, and Nikki LeVillain brought the house down – and scared any possible mice far away – with a striptease performance that included plenty of self-applied hot wax and an assist from her sizable Burmese python Ezili.

Chris O. Cook Mara Mayhem, unidentified man, Maya Sinstress,
and Sultry Susan.

Many interested partygoers ended up missing these acts, however. A number of fetishists, including Ms. Special K, were trapped on the third floor for over an hour in the early morning after heading downstairs to use the restrooms. Webster Hall staff claimed that their wristbands were the wrong color for them to be let back upstairs. Did they think the rubber dresses were just a coincidence?