This weekend is Club Townsend's last; since the building that
houses both Townsend and the King Street Garage is across the street
from the new ballpark, the owners were made an offer they could not
refuse, and sold it. I heard it was going to become lofts, but that
was a while ago, perhaps those plans have changed. But regardless, its
time as a nightclub space has ended: that's two more down. And that
place was gigantic.
So tonight Barry and Alexis and a few other folks headed down to
Townsend to witness the madness of the closing weekend, and I tagged
along briefly. Very briefly. So briefly that I bailed and walked home
before we'd even made it into the building. The crowd was just a
complete horror: it was like an intersection of the Marina and MTV
spring break: ``we've got both kinds, yuppies and
meatheads!'' I lost count of how many gelled-up crew-cuts on guys with
fake tans and wifebeater t-shirts I saw. So I figured I'd seen enough:
I could be inside standing uncomfortably close to these same people,
and listening to awful music, or I could just cut my losses
immediately.
Ordinary fuckin' people. I hate 'em.
How did someone as misanthropic as me end up in this business
anyway? What the hell am I doing here?
At T.R.I.P.
this friday, they brought in an ``oxygen bar.'' This is a set-up where
they sell you a pair of plastic straws to stick up your nose, and then
blow slightly-oxygen-enhanced bottled air at you for a couple of
minutes. After trying it, Sarah said, ``you could get the same effect
by sniffing the box that a Barbie Doll came in.'' But to ``enhance''
the ``effect,'' they also had bubbling colored tubes and blinking LEDs
for you to look at!
I'm telling you, selling oxygen is the stupidest thing I've heard
of since
bottled water. But hey, we got a cut, so who am I to say that
fools should not be separated from their money...
There sure were a lot of smelly people at that party. Our
coat-check staff would like to remind you that they have to spend the
whole night in a very small box with your crap, so it would be
considerate to check in your never-washed wool sweater before
you have soaked it to the point of dripping with your secretions.
Bathe, people. BATHE! No, patchoulli
is not an adequate substitute for soap.
And how insane do you have to be to take your shoes off in a
nightclub? I feel tainted just thinking about it.
And for those of you who do keep your shoes on: be advised that
handing people money or coat-check tickets that are soaking wet because
they have just spent six hours marinating in your sock is also
considered bad form...
As long as I'm asking questions that will never be answered to
anyone's satisfaction: why -- WHY -- does
someone keep stealing the pump-tops to the soap dispensers in the
upstairs bathrooms? Of what possible use could those to be to anyone?
They're built into the sink -- they don't work anywhere
else. But of course, they're expensive and ordering replacements takes
time. Unfortunately, with the kind we have, it's not possible to lock
them in place without also making them no longer dispense soap.
Saturday night we had our longest single event so far:
OM opened at
9pm and didn't close until 9am, and it was really busy pretty much the
whole time; we had to stop letting people in for a while because it was
so crowded. (In my announcement email, I mentioned that ``Farina goes
on at 5am,'' and my mom thought that I meant we would be serving the
breakfast cereal of the same name...)
Someone pointed out that we should have gotten
FIRST CALL templates to go in the
LAST CALL lights, to announce the re-opening
of the bar at 6am. But Barry said that, as it happens, that's
something that announces itself. Starting at around 5, people would
start asking the bartenders if they were serving again yet. Up until
around 5:40, when the answer was ``no,'' they'd get a water and leave,
but as it got closer, they decided they'd just stand at the bar and
wait. So by 6am, there was this wall of people converging on the bar,
trying to all order at once. Ka-ching!
The first hundred people that night got in free, which led to our
stupidest customer quote of the evening: ``it's pretty unscrupulous of
you to let people in for free, and then charge $6 for drinks!''
The last hour or so of the sunday morning webcast archive got lost;
there was a bug in my scripts that trim the silence off the beginning
and end of the archives. The script runs at 7am, because we're usually
closed by then. It was supposed to notice the case where we weren't
actually closed yet, but... it didn't. So everything from about 7:30
onward got clipped. Oops, hopefully it'll work next time.
