The Real Zola

Five years after she lit up Twitter with her tale of a strip-club road trip gone awry, A’Ziah King’s story has become a big buzzy movie. Now she’s ready to make it her own again.

- By Allison P. Davis. Photographs by Ashley Pena

Zola maybe notices her because of the neon-green rhinestoned leotard she’s wearing, or maybe it has something to do with the campy, USO-lite theme that permeates her stage persona, or it could be her beret, a quirky choice even here at the Clermont Lounge, where dollar-throwers come more for the kitsch than the sex appeal of the dancer. Or it’s possible that she’s adhering to that subclause of the laws of attraction, the one dictating that on any given night in any strip club in America, someone will fall a little bit in love. But tonight, at this dive bar–cum–strip club where Zola is sipping a gin-and-tonic, waiting for the room to fill and the energy to surge, she has just noticed a dancer, Amira, the woman who will temporarily become the object of our collective affection.

It’s Zola’s first night out in a while. She has been living in the suburbs just 30 minutes outside Atlanta with her mother, her younger sisters, and her daughter for more than a year now, writing, painting, recording music, birthing and taking care of a second daughter, and posting Instagram Stories and OnlyFans content. But mostly, she has been waiting for the movie based on her life—well, a specific incident in her life, one she originally relayed in 148 viral tweets—to come out.