Porn Valley- Midori was the last person I expected to run into on a porn set Thursday afternoon. But there she was. Dr. X ran into her on the street and dragged her into the LF Studios.

Midori had traveled in Europe on a concert tour and has been back for awhile. She’s now working in porn again.

“I’m just trying to clean up the mess I’ve made of my personal life,” she says. “I hate this whole getting back into the industry. I never really left. One thing kind of took precedence. I married a knucklehead.” Midori starts to laugh.

Midori says it wasn’t a guy in the business that she probably would have been better off had she done so.

“Like TT Boy for an example,” she says. “He seems to be doing really well for himself.” Midori laughs again.

“I’m dealing with real life stuff. My daughter is 12- she’s growing boobies. And I’m watching her like a mother hen making sure she’s not reading porno mags in the bathroom.

“And I’ve noticed that the industry is turning to shit,” she continues. “I’m trying to figure out why. I asked Sharon Mitchell if she was doing anything for Katrina. She’s like, I’m not doing shit for anybody. No ones doing anything for anybody any more. It’s just like that. I’m, like, damn. There’s no parties. What are people getting dressed up for? Just AVN? It’s sad.”

Before she starts shooting full time, Midori, who’s with World Modeling, says she’s trying to find out who’s who in the business.

“There’s this whole new batch of people I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been making my rounds.”

“Diana DeVoe called me and she’s doing a knock off of Desperate Housewives,” Midori continues. “She didn’t tell me I was playing somebody’s mother. The last scenes that I’ve done I’ve been playing the older woman. I’m trying to figure out why do they keep casting me as the older woman. It can’t be because of the way I look. I look younger than some of the young girls that are being casted but it bums me out. There’s this guy, Deep Threat. I play his mother and he’s supposed to be in college. Right. So I’m super MILF.”

While in Europe, Midori played a lot of musical festivals.

“I did the whole eastern Baltic area,” she says. “Finland, Latvia, Estonia- gosh, I went way down to New Zealand. There they don’t care if you’re black or do porno, if you sing, rap, as long as you’re giving a show and giving it your all. If it’s something interesting to watch and you’re sexy, they’ll hire you. I incorporated all the stuff that I did from singing to dancing, rapping, gymnastics, my costumes and feature dancing and took it over there. I was well received. I had a single and a video that was released in Poland. I did that and loved it and I wouldn’t have come back. It’s like I’m back to selling myself. There they sought me out. All the work that I put in over the ten years, that’s how it’s supposed to build. But I come back here and I’ve got to have an agent, a so and so who’s new to the industry, and never heard of me before. I’m, like, okay. I talk to people who say ‘I don’t know you.’ Have you ever watched a porn movie before? Who are YOU, I should be asking.”

I ask Midori what prompted her to get married, especially to “a knucklehead”. She says after Kid Rock she was on the rebound.

“Kid Rock and I were dating. I went on tour with him. When I got off the tour, I found out I was pregnant. We were having some problems and I told him to fuck off. Then I found out I was pregnant. Then I’m calling him. He told me, uh-uh, you told me to fuck off. So it ended up ugly. He went on Howard Stern and bad-mouthed me. Whatever. I just let it go and went through a depression. Then I called up one of my friends who I ended up marrying four months later- the knucklehead- who told me he could handle the whole business. No big deal but any time that I would mention Lexington Steele or TT Boy, oh my God, he’d hit the roof. So I was, like, I’ll quit and become a housewife. No problems. Time for me to stay home anyway. But he didn’t pick up the financial slack. So some years go by and I found out that he has a whole Internet profile on all the sexy friend finders and fuck a stranger for free websites. He’s giving me shit for doing what I do, earning a living, but he’s going behind my back. So that caused some problems and basically I’m starting over. I ended up losing a house and when I went to Europe I put all my stuff in storage. When I came back he stopped paying on it. My whole life got auctioned off for $600. All my work, my AVN awards- you know I’m still the only African-American woman that has won an AVN award- but that’s gone.”

Adding insult to the $600 injury, Midori discovered that her husband was also hanging out at different dungeons.

“I’m, like, couldn’t you have told me this before, so we could have made some money at it? That is when I realized that the so-called normal people on the outside of the business are the ones with the problems. I really believe we’re the normal ones. We have no problem in wanting sexuality. It’s the other people that have the twisted minds and can’t be comfortable with themselves to go, hey, I like being slapped aside the head and told to go lick the bowl or something.” But Midori also admits she’s never licked the bowl.

“They call us the strange ones- the ones with the dysfunction, but they’re the twisted ones. It’s almost like a jealousy-thing because we have the balls to say we do it and do it well. We actually want to be paid for it. There seems to be a problem copping to your shit.”

Midori runs a website called www.allmidori.com.

“I’ve been doing that myself,” she says. “That’s my site, and like I’ve said I’ve been learning the business- if you can call it a business now.”

“It’s really sad when rappers can jump in and not take any clothes off, smack the girl on the ass and make a hundred grand, take off and leave,” Midori goes on to say. “It’s amazing that they are getting away with that and it really pisses me off. Like that Snoop Dog video. Who were the girls in it? Do you remember their names? No, it’s Snoop Dog.”

For now Midori will perform as she puts together some “exciting” project. She hints at some new hook on interracial.”When you think of interracial, what comes to mind? Black guy-white girl or black girl-white guy.” I give her the obvious answer, black guy-white girl.

“That’s what I thought,” she says. “That might be the avenue I’m going to go down. I was surfing on the Internet and looking for interracial especially clips of myself. But all I find is Sean Michaels, Mr. Marcus and all these black guys with white girls. What do they call the things I’ve done with Mark Davis?”

I tell Midori, extraterrestrial. Midori howls.

“That’s when he picks you up and spins you around,” she laughs. “Or maybe me and TT Boy when I’m trying not to get choked.” Since she brought TT Boy up, I ask Midori how he was to work with.

“He’s an old friend of mine,” she answers. “We used to go to San Francisco and work for Rex Borsky [Alex deRenzy]. He is what he is- what you see is what you get. Believe it or not, the muscle head has done very well for himself and I’m very proud of him. He still can get it up and doesn’t take Viagra.”

Midori tells me how she met Kid Rock.

“When I was shifting the focus on my music, the record company that put out one of those compilations, Deep Porn, or Porn to Rock, one of those, Kid Rock did a re-mix for them. He wanted to meet me. We ended up doing a photo shoot. He sent for me to come to New York and we did a shoot for an alternative press magazine. One thing led to another and we ended up dating. You can’t keep porn stars and rock stars apart.”

It was noted that Kid Rock has had more than his share of those including Jesse Jane.

“I’m glad I was the first,” Midori laughs. “And he didn’t put me in a cage dancing in the background. I was in the front with a microphone right along with him. The person that replaced me when I got off tour was Ron Jeremy.”

Midori states that being back in the business isn’t as exciting as it used to be.

“I really miss the old days,” she says. “And I had something to look forward to. The industry is going backwards. All the court cases and all the First Amendment-stuff these people have fought is getting fucked up. I used to be proud to say I’m a porn star and defended the business wholeheartedly and sincerely. Now it’s, like, part of me doesn’t even want to talk about it. All the glamour is gone. I guess Jenna Jameson is the last of the porn stars because, honestly, I don’t know who anyone else is. If they weren’t performing along with me, I don’t know who they are, now. I’ve heard of Jesse Jane, but other than her, I don’t know who any of the new girls are. I’ve heard that’s what the deal is- they don’t want to make porn stars any more. They want the companies to have the name, not the girls.”

“The guy is going to be at home with his computer,” she adds. “Because that’s the only place he can get comfortable now. I guess it’s the same thing that happened with the theaters and VHS. The Internet is taking it away. What’s happening to the feature dancer now? They’re not making porn stars. It’s all about the company and the company’s name.

Midori started in the business, technically, in 1995, she says. She did one scene with Jake Steed but didn’t do anything else for a year.

“Because I had to plan out what I wanted to do and how I wanted my career,” she explains. “I knew once I got in it wasn’t a game. I had to become a professional. I didn’t want to be swallowed up by the business. Luckily, I had Nina Hartley and Sharon Mitchell and Seam Michaels- all these people that had years before me give me all this great advice. I wanted to do something with myself. You can do the business or let the business do you. I wanted to do the business. So it took me a year to plan out everything. And pretty much I did everything I wanted to. I just didn’t know it was going to end as soon as it did. I told Diana [DeVoe] I hit the wall and the ceiling at the same time. I think I was before my time with a lot of the ideas and stuff. Like the whole rap-stuff. I remember with Christian Mann trying to combine the two, and I remember him saying I don’t see how hip-hop can enhance the sales of my videos. And four or five years later here comes Snoop Dog and all these other rappers.”

“You’ve got Lil’ Jon suing Larry Flynt for 30 million,” I remind Midori.

“Can I sue somebody?” she asks. “Shit!”