Silly Rant Warning AKA First World Problems!
If I see one more “speakeasy” bar open in L.A., I swear I’m going to scream. First of all, if it’s not illegal, then it’s not a speakeasy to begin with! The growing trend of themed bars is spreading across the city like an unstoppable contagion that emerged once we dug up the zombie corpse of the first 1920s bar.
Then there’s that one Hollywood bar (that shall remain nameless) that requires you to jump through a refrigerator door to enter. One trip there was enough for me. I feel like you can’t even start a joke with “A girl walks into a bar...” in this town anymore, because you literally CAN’T just walk into a bar without having to press a magic button or yell some obscure password nowadays.
(The Magic Castle is my one and only exception to all of this-you MUST go! And they’ve been doing this stuff since the sixties, so they get to do whatever they want. Also, it’s not a bar. It’s literally a castle filled with magic shows.)
And while I’m on this topic, I’d also like to express my deep inner rage whenever I’m invited to a themed party these days. No one just meets up anymore! Now you have to dress up as a space age flapper if you want to have friends! And I feel like all of this-the themed bars, the costumes-are just putting more layers between us as we navigate a new environment in which every moment has to be transformed into some kind of a photo op. Can’t we just “be”?