There's something about dancing in a cage that just feels so natural, so right.

I don't know if I spent a previous life as an orangutan or what. But put me behind a set of steel bars, and I'm the cock of the walk - beating my chest, hanging from my toes, tossing my feces all over the place.

Of course I'm talking about the fantastic new cage-style setup around the perimeter of the dance floor in the Back Room of the Viking Lounge.

Anyone who's had occasion to visit this den of iniquity will no doubt recall the awkward VIP-style seats that used to loom around the floor.

You'd be balancing a gin and tonic, trying to get into the fourth DMX tune in seven songs, hoping to avoid the four girls from Yakutat swinging counterclockwise from the pole.

Inexplicably, there'd be four expressionless dudes sitting in the VIP, all wearing the same puffy white parkas with their hats tilted at 35 degrees. They'd probably be drinking something with Hypnotiq and a splash of Rohypnol.

I could never tell whether those guys were checking people out, or just freaked out by the black light. But the audience made the place feel like the Coliseum. You were the gladiator, and the Yakutat girls were the feral, snaggletoothed, prehistoric beast-cats.

No one can really claim to be a VIP in the Back Room. Not when it's 2:13 a.m. and they're playing "Back That Azz Up" for the 64th time.

Thankfully, those days of pretension appear to be over. Saturday night was my first visit to the Back Room in a few weeks. That is, the first that I can recall since that unfortunate January evening when I was inadvertently kneed in the butter-biscuits by a Filipino woman in a tube top.

The seats were gone! And replaced by ... 40 parallel steel bars?

I wondered if I had taken the wrong exit ramp to Hell. Maybe, for the first time in my life, I needed to embrace Jesus Christ.

But I couldn't take my eyes off those bars. And by then I was an iron filing, irrevocably trapped deep in the electromagnetic current. I just had to freak it in that damn, dirty cage.

Ah, yes. We all become our own animals in the cage. The shy sprout wings. The extroverted often become paradoxically apprehensive.

I saw two young ladies, dressed like dominoes, pull off a remarkably uncoordinated maneuver that I can only describe as "the disabled Cheetah." My best guess is that they're now either pregnant or dead.

Myself? The cage takes me back, way back, all the way to when I was still free, roaming the endless plains of the Serengeti. When the rains came in April, our pack would circle back across the Mara River. It's a brutal pilgrimage, made tougher by the notorious predators of the short grass.

That's where I was tagged by biologists, and that's how I ended up at the Viking: dancing with four other people in hoodies to Jaheim's "Fabulous."