Last night, my friend HK and I were searching for a bar on the Upper West Side. This seems like an easy task, but for some reason, I haven’t found just the place to hang and get a cocktail, nor the place to get a pint of beer. I do know one decent pub, but they don’t have a lot of room to sit, and they no longer have my favorite beer (Newcastle) on tap.
So HK and I poke our heads into a few places and reject them, and then wade through the crowd of smokers outside The Racoon Lodge and walk two steps into the bar, at which point the bartender shouts out from waaaaay across the room: “I need to see some IDs, ladies!”.
Of course, everyone in the bar turns to look at us, and we have already determined the place is WAY too much of a dive for our mood, but its too late—we can no longer leave without appearing to be guilty under-age Columbia students.
You see where this is heading, right? HK and I are about to be susceptible to negative inferences about our age from this obnoxious, drunk bartender. See, if she had said, “Welcome, come have a drink!” we would have turned and exited immediately. But be rude, obnoxious and totally wasted and suggest we don’t have a right to be there? We’ll prove it, damnit! We’ll drink two rounds, in fact! Who cares that we’ve wound up in a bar far worse than the other ones we have rejected, paying $5 each for a bottle of Heineken (this, of course, is the problem with going to a dive bar on the UWS—its not even cheap!).
Even better, when we go up for our second round, she IDs us again (once obviously not being enough to convince her we are 27, not 20). I’m suprised we didn’t stay for a third round, just to prove ourselves one last time.
So if anyone has any UWS bar reccomendations, I am obviously wide open to suggestions.
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