The Vintage & Handmade Market Author's note: As a bartender, I found the following story off the Associated Press wire to be interesting and pertinent:
“Customer upset about getting carded at San Diego nightclub” (San Diego/Oct. 29, 2002): Shocked and offended, bar patron Jill Meyerdierks fumed over an ordeal that occurred at the front door of an Ocean Beach night club last night, when she and her friends arrived at the bar dressed in exotic Halloween costumes and were suddenly halted at the entrance by a doorman.
“He asked me for my license!” says the 21-year-old Meyerdierks. “What is that about? I was so mad. I just rolled my eyes and grunted, ‘Um... I'm in a hurry here. I have to get inside the bar and start looking cute, so the boys can begin buying me drinks, and I can start giving out fake phone numbers.'
“It's hard to believe something like this could happen here in San Diego,” continued Meyerdierks. “There I am, in my Little Orphan Annie costume, when this giant scary Negro doorman starts interrogating me. I couldn't believe it. I'm like, hello-don't you see how cute I am?”
Bars hire giant, scary Negro doormen because state law requires customers to be 21 years old or older to enter establishments that serve alcohol.
“He wanted me to remove my Annie wig!” added the San Diego State University freshman. “He said he needed to compare my real hair with my license photo. It's just ridiculous. Why does that big Black bouncer really have to go around scaring everybody?”
Meyerdierks insists she is not a racist.
“Look, I don't have anything against Black people-just the ones who are really large... and really dark, too. They're the ones you gotta worry about.”
“Yeah,” adds Meyerdierks' friend, Cindy Martin, who was dressed in a sexy librarian outfit. “He even asked me to take off my librarian glasses; I guess because I'm so cute and white.”
Tony Jansen, former assistant vice president under co-director of the California Alcoholic Beverage Control, says that on and around Halloween, minors intentionally wear elaborate facial costumes to conceal their age. But that doesn't relieve doormen and servers of their legal responsibility and liability.
“Just because Halloween is the time when the Walking Damned rule the night streets,” says Jansen, “doesn't mean we should just allow our youth to meander into these... these... these watering holes of Hell-with the demonic rock bands, that undulating upright orgy they call a dance floor and metallic vats filled with Satan's yeast. If we let that happen, well then we let the Walking Damned win.”
Meyerdierks says she doesn't care about all that legal mumbo-jumbo.
“Look, I know it sounds bad,” she explains, “but you gotta understand, my daddy buys most everything I need, and everything else I get from 50-year-old, married businessmen. I'm used to having my way. So why should I have to listen to some dumb old liquor laws when the only thing I have to do is sit on the beach all day and perfect my adorable tan, which, oh my gosh, makes me so cute... I'm going to vomit!
“You know last year, when I was only 20,” continued Meyerdierks after she gagged back the bile of her beauty, “I wore my sexy Elvira costume, with lots of makeup to make me look older. Nobody doubted my fake ID then. Now I've got a real ID, and all of a sudden, I have to endure this terrifying interrogation. It upset me so much, it depleted some of my cuteness. Granted, I have some to spare-but I need to save my cuteness reserve for later, when I get stumbling drunk and start screeching like a ferret in a house fire.”
When asked to comment, the big scary Negro bouncer said only, “I eat little white chicks for sport,” then cackled like Satan as he picked his teeth with the snapped-off, stockinged leg of some unlucky white chick in a catholic schoolgirl's costume.
Seven Good Reasons Why You Should Just Shut the Fuck Up and Show Your ID
1. Because you need a beer more than I need a $1,000 fine.
2. Because I hate asking more than you hate showing.
3. Every bar customer receives three strikes-whining about showing your ID is strike one.
4. What about the children, the children?
5. Because Hell is a terrible place, where flaming eyeworms bore out your optic nerves and wretched demons flay your skin with barbed whips.
6. Because grunting and rolling your eyes makes you look like a retard.
7. Because 40 years from now, you will wonder what sort of moron you must have been for feeling insulted about looking young and how you would give almost anything for a cute boy to ask for your fake phone number just one more time.
