Dealing with Drunks: A Guide for Nightlife Natives

Part 1
By Gamal Hennessy


Drinking is good. Getting drunk is not good, especially the next day. Dealing with a drunk isn’t much fun either. Unfortunately, encountering a drunk can happen in any type of venue, no matter how high class or hipster. This doesn’t mean that your night has to be ruined. As a nightlife native there are a few things you can do to contend with any drunk that crosses your path or stumbles into your table.


The first tip for any nightlife native is responsible indulgence. The whole point of nightlife is going out for pleasure. But if you drink so much that you don’t remember what happened the night before your pleasure is severely curtailed and you can’t take care of a drunk. In fact, you become the drunk that someone else has to handle. Also, if you drink so much that you are unaware of your surroundings, you won’t be able to handle a drunk because you are too busy sorting yourself out. So the goal here is to drink, but not get drunk.


The second tip is choosing the right approach for the particular drunk that you encounter. People often identify several different types of drunks with labels that remind you of the Seven Dwarves. There are sleepy, happy, angry, flirty, loud, friendly and weepy drunks. These tips don’t deal with all that nonsense. Your objective is to have fun, not try to understand the drunks underlying emotional issues. Let Dr. Drew handle all that stuff. For our purposes, there are only two types of drunks; strangers and friends.


No matter what type of drunk you are dealing with, you have to be able to recognize them first.
The editors at Wikihow offer the following signs that a person has had too much to drink:


● slurred speech
● inability to stand or sit up straight
● a strong desire to lie down or roll over
● stumbling or a questionable walking technique
● unusual, loud, or embarrassing behavior
● violent reactions
● bloodshot eyes
● feeling extreme temperature differences


Keep in mind that a display of any single behavior does not indicate drunkenness. I have friends who do some of these things while they’re sober. Also, this is not an invitation to play watchdog and stick your nose in everyone’s party. Just know that a combination of these or other behaviors in your general vicinity is a clue that you might have to use your anti-drunk skills.


Strangers: When drunken strangers rain on your parade, you’re probably not interested in taking care of them any more than you have to. While you might decide to get involved in extreme cases, your main goal is normally to remove them from your space and continue your fun.


This is more complicated than it sounds, since it is difficult to have a logical conversation with a drunk. It is usually counterproductive to argue with or try to bully someone who thinks they are stronger, faster and smarter than they really are.


There are two keys to distancing yourself from a strange drunk. First, isolate them. This could mean moving out of their general area, misleading them into leaving your space, or enlisting the drunk’s friends to collect their associate and move him for you. The second key is to notify an operator in the venue that the drunk is wandering through the venue since isolation is only a temporary solution. Any drunk who leaves could easily come back.


If you are the type of person who doesn’t like to get other people into trouble by calling the bouncer, keep in mind that you are helping and not hurting the drunk in this situation. Operators often have more training and experience in dealing with drunks than you do including TIPS (Training for Intervention ProcedureS)  and Nightlife Best Practices. It is actually their job, not yours, to deal with drunks in the club. Finally, if the drunk could potentially endanger themselves or someone else, then you could be preventing a problem before it happens.


Again, this is not a suggestion that you blow up the spot of every dude who looks at you sideways. It is a concept to help you go back to your carousing with as little hassle as possible.


In part two of our drunken guide, we will tackle the delicate situation of dealing with one of your friends when they get drunk in public.


Have fun.
G

Fashion Week and Nightlife: Love at First Sight

By Gamal Hennessy


Fashion Week and Nightlife go together like models and bottles. There will be hundreds of official and unofficial events, parties and shows going on while the tents are up. A, B and C list celebrities will spend more time drinking and taking pictures than they will spend sitting by the runway. But why are these two industries so enamored with each other? What is the connection? There are a variety of reasons both superficial and fundamental that link these two industries and many of the people who inhabit both worlds.


There are several reasons that boil down to the hustle . The fashion industry is a business. Like any business, they need to generate excitement and positive energy when they are trying to sell their goods. Seducing buyers, marketers and writers from around the world with beautiful women, liquor and music might not be the best way to make them happy, but the best way is probably illegal.


At the same time, operators know that they get at least two benefits from hosting Fashion Week parties. First, they get the corporate revenue, foot traffic and secondary spending that pays the bills and keeps the doors open. Second, when a venue is featured in magazines, television segments and online, it helps build a club’s reputation. This can go a long way towards attracting tourist patrons and bringing in dollars long after Fashion Week is over.

Finally, the press is more than willing to take the pictures and write the stories that will elevate a rather insular and specialized trade show into a worldwide media spectacle. All we want in return is a few dozen parties and a lot of liquor.


There are also deeper reasons that link Fashion Week and nightlife. Both are based on fantasy. The advertising flooding any fashion magazine depicts scenes that are idealized at best. The models strutting down the runway have no realistic relationship to the size and shape of the average American consumer. And even if the majority of Americans could fit into the outfits they will see next week, they probably can’t afford to buy them. A designer once told me that for most of us, fashion and Fashion Week are aspirational. They give us an image of how we want to see ourselves or what we want to look like, not how we really look from day to day.


Nightlife is also a fabrication. It is a machine built to satisfy our need to escape. We go to bars to get away from life at work and home for a few hours and connect with friends or strangers. We drink to alter our consciousness. We see shows, listen to music and dance for experiences that will take us beyond the everyday. We hustle to break out of our daily grind and make some cash on the side. We spend money to make ourselves feel like celebrities for a little while. We give our libidos the freedom to express themselves more fully than we do during the day, hoping to find someone who can satisfy that constrained energy. Nightlife isn’t real life, which is why we are drawn to it.


Nightlife and Fashion Week will never get married. They are both too promiscuous for that. But there is a connection there that will last for a long time. Even if boutiques try to become clubs for a night or bottle service continues to decline, nightlife will be a home for Fashion Week. The fantasy and escapism that they both represent connect them much more than just models and bottles.


Have fun.
G

Defining the Three Nightlife Operators. Type 3: The Rebel

By Gamal Hennessy

On Realists, Rebels and Retros (Part 3)

Click here to read Part 1: The Retro
Click here to read Part 2: The Realist

On one side you have the retro who pines for the past era of nightlife culture. On the other side you have the realist who sees nightlife as a prudent business decision. In the center you find the rebel. He is the one who understands that enhancing the culture of nightlife is good business. He knows that the business of nightlife is the only thing that can support the culture. To put it simply; he wants to have a good time and make some money doing it. You might think that every club owner and manager wants to have a profitable party, but the rebel goes beyond this surface explanation.

She understands what nightlife used to be, but she isn’t willing to abandon the industry just because things have changed. When external forces threaten the bars and clubs, the rebel is there. She is at public hearings arguing against laws that would shut clubs down early. She is fighting for fair treatment by various government agencies. She is debating with, working with and in many cases joining the local community boards to ensure clubs aren’t completely pushed out of the city. It can be argued that the nightlife we have left exists because of the work that rebels do.

At the same time, rebels push against the internal forces that push nightlife towards uninspired and clichéd models. They don’t want their club to look like the last ten major venues. They want something different. They don’t want their DJs to play the same 15 songs that are playing in every other lounge. The want to open up their venue for both the forgotten classics and inventive new music. The rebel wants famous artists and celebrities in their club, but they are more interested in having them perform rather just than stand around flossing. The rebel wants to create a unique experience, a memorable party that patrons will want to return to again and again instead of something they’ll get tired of in six months before they move on to the next big thing.

The realist doesn’t see the need to change anything because they have found a way to benefit from the current situation. The retro doesn’t see the need to change anything because he doesn’t see anything worth changing. The rebel is about change.

This is not to say that rebels are somehow the saints of nightlife who are supporting the industry out of some sense of self-sacrifice. The rebel wants to be successful, just like any other business person. The struggles they engage in protect their business interests as well as the interests of other operators. The unique direction that they take their venues in are, on a certain level, an attempt to create a point of difference that will attract patrons who are tired of the average venue. For the most part, these are not overly romantic idealists when it comes to nightlife. They simply see the need for change and are willing to make that change happen.
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Defining operators as retro, realist or rebel is not an attempt to call anyone out or cast dispersions on any one group to benefit another. I’m not saying that one type is better than another or that all operators should be one type instead of another. Nightlife probably needs all three types. Many successful venues from Studio 54 to Marquee and 1OAK had or have a combination of operators running the show. The point of this piece is to show that among operators there is a diversity that is just as varied as the difference between different types of patrons and various types of venues. Knowing which operators run which kind of venues will make it easier for you to decide where to go out and have an experience that is good for you. And in the end, having a good time is what nightlife is all about.

Have fun.
G