The Boston Globe has an extraordinary story on a woke lesbian bar named Last Ditch that has a mandatory masking policy and has been hit by a backlash after choosing to make Saturdays mask-optional. Read the whole thing, as they say — from the pronouns to the grievances of boutique identity groups to the overall insanity. Tom Wolfe in his prime couldn’t have done any better.
There are so many good lines that I thought I’d ask some of my colleagues to share their favorites.
I’ll go first:
But by the time of Last Ditch’s monthly community meeting on September 11, only one of the original founders, [Jackie] Matellian, is still involved. The two others stepped back from the daily operation months before, Matellian says, citing various pressures and health issues. One had enrolled in clown school.
The clown school thing is such an absurdist touch that, if this were fiction, you’d think it was over the top.
Here is Charlie Cooke’s favorite:
Noire [one of the bar’s critics] spends the hours after the meeting posting furious Instagram stories about Matellian and Last Ditch. Matellian (who uses she/they pronouns) had been shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS,” he writes. The bar was not “a safe environment not interested in revolutionary praxis.”
Yes. The bar was not a great venue for the pursuit of “revolutionary praxis.” That’s because it’s a bar.
Here is Jeff Blehar’s:
. . . [a patron] wonders aloud about holding a Lady Gaga themed night, but [the bartender] Mixxy demurs. “Gaga is canceled, she says. “Gaga is Zionist.”
That right there is gold.
Here is Daniel Foster’s:
Nevertheless, Last Ditch, which opened last year as a bar for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends,” is struggling.
Like a complaint later in the piece about “white and white adjacent” voices, this list of categories gets more expansive after each comma. Workers and their friends? By the end of the sentence, I started to wonder whether even *I* might be welcome there.