Okay, so as you may or may not know, school is back in session. This is a good thing, because parties become more, well, let’s call it interesting. And all of the bars and clubs in the city, having been starved for cash in the lonely downtown month of August are eager to start raking in mommy and daddy’s cash that you’re supposed to be using on Easy Mac and iPod speakers. Of course, by the time that’s spent, then the refund checks start flowing and the sky’s the limit for how many Jager shots you can down in a night. Bitch please, we went to college.

So on the club’s end, it’s a real cut-throat season to get your business, and honestly we think that’s pretty healthy — the creativity that gets mustered in order to get the kids’ business can be just blind-siding — or hilariously disasterous!

Case in point: Darren Mallane, minority owner over at the very theatrical behemoth, The Colosseum. You see, in the weeks prior to the colleges coming back, Darren, like any good club promoter owner began laying down plans for a successful back to school season. He managed to snatch the prestigious Pantheon Promotions group from our long-established State Sundays (please Darren, not them!) and in a valiant imitation that we’re going to loosely interpret as flattery, began plans for their own Colosseum Sundays. Well, as much as we’d like to, even we can’t own an entire day, so we wished the new team good luck on filling a space the size of an airplane hangar on a Sunday and sent them on their way. We won’t even get into Darren Mallane’s plans to solicit State Sunday party-goers in State’s parking lot (or inside the bar, for that matter), or Pantheon’s blatant abuse of our tab at State to gain acquaintances eager to use him for a free drink. No, none of that is amusing to us, and isn’t particularly ethical or appropriate either, and is especially unbecoming of an actual club owner (small as his share may be).

What does amuse us, however, is Darren Mallane and his band of misfit promoters, stationed outside JWU’s Gaebe campus as the college kids are lugging their Hello Kitty pillows and trash bags filled with Hollister hoodies into their dorm rooms… dressed as gods and goddesses of Greek and/or Roman mythology… passing out flyers in a clear attempt at solicitation, and looking like total creepers in the process! Can you see it now? “See son, that old man in the loin cloth is the type of man we want you to steer clear of while away at school.”

Joking aside, it didn’t seem anyone was particularly impressed with this ill-conceived stunt, and the gods and goddesses were promptly escorted off campus by the authorities, having been unable to produce a vendor’s permit that they probably did not know they would need in order to harass college students without being harassed by the police.

Welcome back, kids!

UPDATE:

Just picture this, except in the daytime… on second thought, we’re really sorry for making you do that.

UPDATE #2:

The following picture of Darren came from the same night — LOL we can’t handle this!

She’s clearly a paid, youthful dancer, he’s dressed like an old man and not wearing any pants.

Like, how is this okay?!

Poor New Dark Lady! The place hasn’t even opened its doors yet and already it’s suffering from an infestation… of the Fat Scott kind! We heard this crazy story from a reliable source that Mr. Birchall, having been employed by our two favorite Dark Lady owners to complete necessary electrical work in the building, has fallen on some hard times and taken up residence INSIDE!

So you’re outside Alleycat and you kinda see something moving through that frosted Dark Lady glass, then you think you feel eyes moving all over your body, Clarise? Well you probably do!

Seriously though, let’s look to Buck and Rande’s good nature and hope to Litter that this isn’t true.

But if it is, you’re gonna need more than RAID to get rid of that pest, honey! (the jokes about this one are just endless)

You know, our mid-week is usually pretty boring until inevitably, some messy situation comes back to cause a commotion. Messy situation of the week this week is something you may already know a lot about. And why, you ask? Because this person has been involved in so much shit around the city that we feel it necessary to start putting this puzzle together, and so far the picture taking shape ain’t pretty.

We’re talking specifically about Nick Merollo. Now we’ve always liked Nick, but there’s just too much crazy here to ignore. Let’s forget (for the time being) about that nasty incident at State, followed by trips to the hospital, charges filed and eventually a criminal trial that didn’t end too hot for Nick.

Then, Nick picks up a job from Mark down at GLO, and gets fired from Gallery by the crypt-keeper for it. However, after a few weeks at GLO, Mark was forced to fire Nick as well for getting into a drunken fight involving his boyfriend, while he was working, while the bar was trying to close, which entangled GLO’s entire staff (basically everyone who was in the bar at the time), culminating in the only fight we’ve ever seen that involves everyone in the bar. Bitch just can’t catch a break!

Then, because he lost the criminal trial, Nick and his lawyer decide to sue the defendants in his criminal trial, probably to cover his hospital bills (which the court already ruled were his fault, but we’re not opening that can of worms). Now the procedure for carrying out a successful lawsuit (if you didn’t already know) goes as follows: File a lawsuit, the court notifies the defendants, they answer back what amounts to “guilty or innocent” (usually “innocent”, which leads to the hearing in front of a judge), the judge hears the case and makes a ruling. Simple, right? So the defendants in Nick’s lawsuit answer back, and in addition choose to counter-sue (you see that shit on Judge Judy like, constantly, in fact, this case should totally go to Judge Judy!). The trouble is, Nick and his lawyer did not provide a response to the counter-suit, which is going to create problems. Now we all know that the court system is a little fucky, and to get anything done properly you have to be on your shit and jump through the right hoops, and not trip up and forget (we assume) to answer to the counter-suit. And while all of this lawsuit shit is swirling around, definitely do not (repeat: DO NOT!) get pulled over and hauled off by the state police for DUI and possession (for the second time), as has happened with Nick earlier this month. This is not a good look!

And it’s definitely not a good look for his pending lawsuit. Now we will say, we never thought of Nick as being a mess, but all of this has taken place in the last six months — and we’re starting to think of him as our own local Lindsay Lohan!

In fact, in honor of all of this, we’re adding a new category which has been needed for quite a while now, “Bartenders Gone Bad”, as a sub-category of our much-used “Bars Gone Bad” category.

You know, we hate (and yet, love) to say this, but the bullshit in Providence just never ends. In fact, during the summer time it seems to just heat up and curdle once the college kids head home, leaving a condensed version of the community to drink and stew together. Not always a bad thing, although it can kill block parties and charity events.

Anyhow, after a rather interesting Trannymania last Wednesday night at the Dark Lady, we headed back to GLO for one last drink and to catch a ride home with one of our DJs, Tommy Stylez. Meanwhile back in the Dark Lady parking lot, Ms Sarah Beyers and girlfriend were walking out of the bar after one of the most successful Trannymania‘s ever (likely due to the absence of one Suzie Parks). Also in the parking lot, having walked from Mirabar were another group of gays (whom also are known to us) on their way home. After what some call a “misunderstanding” and others say was basically the guys yelling that Sarah was hot and that her girlfriend was not, a fist fight broke out between both parties in the boys’ car! Be forewarned, gays, Ms Beyers is a bad bitch!

So in effort to get away, the boys take off in the car which had accidentally snagged Sarah’s jacket and hair, creating the possibility for an already dangerous situation to escalate. Luckily the jacket came loose, but the hair flew off!

Why it happens, we’ll never know, but here’s where we come into the picture.

While getting a ride home from our DJ (because we’re neighbors), we had to stop at his house quickly so that he could allow a friend of his to retrieve his car. The friend meets us just as we arrive, holding a bleach blond wig! (with dark roots) Obviously after such an incident, everyone in the car is excited and going on about getting into a fight with some tranny in the Dark Lady parking lot and how they stole her wig. Now at this point we had no idea what had just happened, but offered to take the wig and return it, because the likelihood of us being friends with its owner was high.

Not about to waste any time, and finding this all very funny already, we take the wig home, take a picture of it with our webcam (that we didn’t even know we had), and post the image on Facebook with the caption, “who’s WIG is this?!”. Within minutes, the stories came pouring out and we were able to make sure Sarah’s shit got returned!

Facebook, reuniting trannies and their hair.

So last weekend on Allens Ave, our beloved, sacred guilty pleasure, Balloons, was shut down. “No! Not Balloons!”, we cried. Temporarily shut down, of course, but the sleazy video booth flat screens and Silence’s bouncing sand-dollar nipples still remain completely inaccessible regardless as the city declares the place a “public safety risk” (which personally we think is rather an understatement). And what act could be so vile and heinous as to deprive us of one of Providence’s seediest night spots? Well, someone getting shot in the face, of course! Like, duh!

Yeah, apparently someone got shot in the face, died, and now Balloons is off the radar for a while. Honestly, how embarrassing! Like seriously, you died at Balloons?! Total. Life. Fail. Where will we go between downtown and Therapy now????

And to top it all off, our buddy Alex DiPrato got the honor of reporting on TV.

So this Saturday at the Dark Lady, you will have the opportunity to attend The Litter’s annual Christmas In July fundraiser. Now you may remember the feelings we took away from this party last year, and this year we have no choice but to expect more of the same. Don’t get us wrong, we are all for a mid-summer fundraiser to boost revenue for all parties during a time of year that notoriously lacks in cash flow, but Christmas In July AGAIN? The first time, sure. The second time? Sure, but weird. But we are now into at least the 5th or 6th of these abominations and it’s starting to give us the feeling we get when we drive past one of those houses that keeps their Christmas tree up all year long — it’s just plain Michael Jackson creepy (too soon?). We have a feeling that The Litter got this idea from the Home Shopping Network (which you’ll notice is currently in the middle of their own “Christmas In July” sale), and no doubt where she buys a lot of the costume jewelry she wears.

Plus, repeating it doesn’t strengthen a cherished tradition, it beats a dead Santa Claus horse, and the heavy red and green deco in the summer reminds us of a dark, dank, tacky lake house — like if we decided to hold a Christmas celebration in a moldy basement. Then there’s the drag costumes — because none of them have more than two or three bright red and green gowns, we now get to see the same ones in the summer and the winter, and nobody even looks good in those colors anyway! Seriously bitches, there’s really nothing at all attractive about this.

So what to do, you ask? Well, if they really can’t think too far away from the silly Christmas theme, how about New Years? White lights and champagne never go out of style, or maybe a Thanksgiving thing (which is probably a little more in line with the concept of charity anyway). Honestly, we don’t really care — just switch it up! It’s confusing the old people who have trouble enough remembering what year it is!

So it’s been a couple weeks since our last post, which is almost unheard of, but we figured it was time to let you bitches know that we aren’t floating in a scum-topped pond in Scituate or something equally as wretched by the hands of the Axis of Evil. If that little reference needs any explanation then just look at our last three weeks.

It’s just been hot! Who wants to sit in front of a computer screen and write this crap when there’s sun to soak up and mojitos to down? Moreover, who wants to read this crap when there’s sun to soak up and mojitos to down?!

Not us! But we still find ourselves downtown several nights a week, and therefor still see the bullshit that takes place on a nightly basis. Take for example, Dark Lady’s presentation of the “Queen of Adult Southern Comedy”, Savannah Georgia. Apparently she’s touring, and the show is meant to be “uncensored”, as though there’s someone out there censoring foul-mouthed drag shows… well, maybe in the South. Anyway, very little of it was original content, comprised mostly of cultural parodies of songs by the likes of Lady Gaga and Madonna. The trouble is at the Dark Lady, we’ve heard most of what she “performed”, completely neutralizing any shock or surprise impact that the parody may have ever had to begin with. And on that subject, if you are a local drag queen performer (or not local, this is pretty universal) do not perform parodied popular songs for laughs unless you can guarantee-positively-100% that nobody has ever heard it before! Don’t you realize that Faviana lip syncs all of the words back to you when you’re up there dying on stage because nobody’s laughing?! But we digress…

So this bitch, Savannah Georgia is up there performing just about every cultural parody that she can get Limewire to download (including a particularly painful and bizarre 20th Century TV theme song parody medley, no joke), and while she don’t really know the words exactly (isn’t she “touring” with this material?), the real horror is when she speaks between the songs — it wasn’t her deep, powerful voice (a probably very capable voice if she used it in a performance), it was her treatment of the crowd! You know when The Litter singles you out and while you feel kind of belittled and a little pissed off after, you can basically drink it off pretty quickly. Well when Mzz Georgia sets her sights on you, it’s like being eyed by some rapey clown, and you’re repulsed in the place deep down that made you cry when you sat on Santa’s lap in the mall. Maybe that’s harsh… No, no that’s about right.

The only way to remedy this, of course, was for Ada Adore and our girl Whitney to go to Therapy later that night. Now it took a little effort to get in, on account of being Cape Verdean night (which has never stopped us before, we like it!) because just about every door-person and security man on the way in felt compelled to remind us that it was Cape Verdean night, and that there was no “techno” to be played. We decided with Ada that it was because we were white (and because Ada was sort of white). So we take refuge in the old DJ booth tower for a while to chill with Tony T, the lighting guy (who, incidentally, setup all of the lighting for us at Colosseum last year), and around 4am a fashion show breaks out. Now we’ve been to a lot of fashion shows, but we’ve never seen one start at 4am, it was like Prince’s fashion show or something. So we leave the tower to go get a closer look, and these curvy (really curvy) black and latin chicks are modeling the most ghetto-ass, blinged-out swimwear you can imagine. Obviously it wasn’t meant to be gotten wet, more to be used in a bikini contest somewhere, or removed by R. Kelly in a music video. We all voiced approval.

OMG Pride, why did you do this to us?! We are definitely still in recovery from the very long weekend that was swallowed up by Providence’s Pride celebration — but have no intention of letting that stop us from talking about it now.

Let’s start with the outdoor Pride festival that took place this year on South Water St. In case you didn’t know, this festival has taken place in a variety of places around the city over the last several years, but none as picturesque as this one. The river, the buildings in the background, the perfect weather and breeze coming off the water — every bit of it made for some very pretty pictures. Other than that though, it was a total carnival. “Causes”, charities and mayoral candidates mixed up with Dippin’ Dots, fried dough and awfully tacky pride flag-wear. A complete mess… but we knew it would be and headed straight for the booze tent! That of course, is where we found everyone we knew — which turned out to not be all fun and games. You see, we’re all pretty used to seeing each other in the clubs, in the bars, in the streets — whatever — but at night… And not for nothing, but half of us are looking ROUGH in the daytime! We always joke about how popular Providence’s gay scene would be with the world if we were to be documented by a reality TV film crew, but we’re starting to change our minds — this is not a good look!

So we headed out of that mess and back over to GLO to fix the giant Pride flag we single-handedly installed on the front face of its Clemence St. building, which by the way was fabulous — it’s the only Providence Pride flag in the city that you can see… from spaaaaaccceee.. We finally got back downtown after some… unpleasantness… at the Renaissance Hotel just in time to see the very, very end of the parade, which is pretty much the same every year so we weren’t too broken up and we just headed to the block parties to gather wrist bands before any of the lines got too crazy.

Now it’s no secret that Dark Lady’s block party gets bigger and more ambitious every year (and taller, poor DJ AV8 was stuck atop his DJ tower all night), but this year was just ridiculous — it was even bigger than Mirabar’s, which is an impressive benchmark to surpass especially since the Dark Lady wasn’t even around ten years ago. What we enjoyed most about this party — was that they themed both the Dark Lady and Alleycat not centered around pride, so it wasn’t a total rainbow-fest which everyone by now had had quite enough of. Instead, it was called the Snow Ball, which is obviously so wrong on so many levels, but at least it was refreshing! And hands-down, Alleycat totally had the best party — the music, the vibe, the size, the bubbles and dancers — everything was right. We know this is “bitch”idence, but it honestly didn’t suck at all!

Most everywhere else though was a convoluted mess though. It consistently took 20+ minutes to get a drink, 20+ minutes to go to the bathroom, everything was expensive and it took forever to find people we knew. And did you happen to notice who was added to the Dark Lady’s outside bar that would normally have been over at the Stable????

So local drag icon and fundraising queen Miss Kitty Litter simply refuses to stop making an ass of herself. Okay, that’s not really new — and the ways in which that simple fact manifests itself are endless, but hey, when it throws itself in our face, we form opinions!

Take our latest example — third floor of Mirabar at the bar with Haley Star and the lovely LaDiva Jonz. Kitty lurking by the bar, wrecked off of Irish cream, suddenly begins berating us with F-bombs and other nonsense! We could have only hoped she had a mic handy so that the other half of the room could have heard the tirade. Something about being a scumbag piece of shit something something… So we spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what brought this about — we haven’t posted any pictures of her crotch online in like a year!

Then today it hit us! Military Ball was a benefit for AIDS Care Ocean State! And it’s clear that Kitty was not impressed with our luke-warm reception of the event — this type of Litter-fallout is exactly what happened when we wrote that her Christmas In July party last year sucked (which is universally agreed to have been the truth).

You just can’t criticize The Litter!

It’s Pride season, bitches, and we brace for it. And we’ve just started.

Why do we brace for it? Because it’s a damn mess!

And it’s because we like the drama. Well, we don’t — you do. Before we get too far ahead though, let’s go back. We know that Mr. Chris Harris would probably rather us all forget about Military Ball last Sunday night at Therapy, but let’s re-hash anyway, you know, before we actually do forget.

Military Ball wasn’t always at Therapy, you know. A few years ago before the unpleasantness that lead to Chris Harris letting his bar staff conduct open bar at Roxy for two hours, it was at Roxy! And it was fantastic. And then it was at Therapy for a couple years and it was fantastic there too! But something happened this year that was probably inevitable, it began to suck. And Harris knew it, you could tell because he got wrecked and left early… Attendance wasn’t bad exactly, it just wasn’t lasting — there was no show, no headlining DJs (yes, Joe and Dena are lovely people, but you know Harris got them both way cheap specifically for the night), and frankly the whole night felt a little forced.

In years past, hosting the gay community at Therapy was kind of a risky bet; not everyone knew that there wasn’t normally a bar there, the little dark back rooms turned immediately into sex rooms and cruising halls, and the big room feel of the main room felt like nothing else in the city — you might have forgotten you were in Providence. And in effort to recreate that feeling, Harris installed mesh netting in the dark back hallways (because the old sex rooms were now blocked by the downstairs DJ booth) to encourage sexual activity, and we caught Harris a couple times unscrewing light bulbs in the mens’ bathroom! He even kept the bar open late for bitches could think that this crazy after-hours club was a total free-for-all — put simply, it was just forced.

No drag queens, no trannies, no regular Providence crews (except us, of course). And it closed down, lights on and everyone out by 5am — we were on the dance floor later than that the night before!

So whatevs, thanks for that. Pride predictions up next…