Speakeasy

On the way home tonight I found myself riding over the Westgarth bridge. Nothing all that exciting about that, you would think... except it was (please imagine a voiceover now, of a certain 1960s "duck! and take cover!" era vintage, entoning the next part) clearly an hotspot of some type of gathering.

Well that's totally not interesting, I thought. Hey, heaps of people are walking under the bridge. Sort of like an en masse Sunday night in Melboure re-enactment of that song by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Whatever.



Only despite that I somehow found myself locking my bike up on the other side of the bridge and turning around. What if its the speakeasy, I asked myself, the one you were always too lazy to check out? It clearly isn't another squat party like what you feared it was. It could be... interesting (unlike my internal monologues).

So although the beer was nowhere near as cheap as I assumed it would be, it was, in fact, that speakeasy, complete with some band that looked like it could possibly be fronted by martin martini. (Unfortunately possible M.M. was summarily kicked off around the midnight mark by a pill chewing group called... oh I don't care what they were called. The tuba was good. The guitarist sat there and looked bored.) As I stood around, enjoying listening to people effusively greet people that they subsequently realised they didn't know at all (it was dark), I found myself chatting to some guy who was persistently interested in how i'd come to be there.

"By bike", didn't seem to cut it. Neither did admitting that I was just riding past and was bored enough to see what everyone else was doing. Eventually the horrible truth came out.

That's right: even in the bohemian environs of a speakeasy, marketing researchers walk amongst us.

Goddamn.

Still, it was good to be able to confirm that the whole reason for the set up appeared to be amply summed up in the statement "just because". And he was concerened with lighting. How nice.