Digi-vigilantism | Emails

My email to Hoo haa Bar

Jonathan

Earlier this month, two young women tried to get into a venue on Melbourne’s Chapel Street by the name of Hoo haa Bar. They happened to be partners. They happened to be holding hands.

The women say that they were not permitted entry, and suspect their sexual orientation had more than a little something to do with it. Several witnesses support their claim.

Of course, it’s all “alleged” at this stage.

What’s not alleged is Hoo haa Bar’s Facebook-page response to the ensuing furore. It’s real and you can read it here.

I get confused, flustered, but ultimately excited when private enterprises show a willingness to respond to questions and criticism. And I feel like I have cola-activated Wizz Fizz in my underpantal region when they choose to play the woe-is-us victim.

This, combined with the fact that I recently found myself a  patron at this particular establishment, meant that the following email flowed as easily as hypocritical drivel out of Kyle Sandilands’ mouth:

Dear Hoo haa Management Team,

I’m writing to seek clarification on an incident that took place at your establishment earlier this year. In hindsight, and in light of recent events, I now consider the event in question to be enormously distressing.

On Saturday the 26th of May, I travelled to Prahran to attend the birthday party of a friend at Hoo haa Bar.

I was let in.

This is causing me great consternation and I desperately need to know why it took place.

The obvious answer, of course, is that I am now one of Melbourne’s A-list celebrities and should be granted access to every single establishment in the city. But this doesn’t really cut it, when you consider that I have earned my reputation as a bloggospherical deity by working almost exclusively as a semi-anonymous cyber vigilante. Despite the fact that most Australians know and adore me, very few know what I actually look like.

And what I look like is really at the crux of this matter.

Recently, it’s alleged, your door staff denied entry to two women on a Saturday night at around about 9pm. Their names are Kay Girardi and Ari Missikos. Now, the old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder generally holds true, but let’s be honest here: unless the Herald Sun has gone into a PhotoShopping frenzy and given Kay and Ari’s faces a complete digital reconstruction (and we are talking about a News Limited publication here, so I concede that anything’s possible), these were not unattractive people you told to bugger off.

And even if you wanted to mount a case that they had been given a couple of lashings with the proverbial ugly stick, everything is relative. Relatively speaking, these two women are smoulderingly, wickedly, incomprehensibly sexy hotties. Relative to what or to whom, you ask?

Relative to me.

While I may be the world’s most promising and precocious literary talent, this doesn’t change the fact that I am as ugly as sin. And I’m not talking about one of the spurious Catholic ones like “original sin” or one of the piss-weak Deadly ones like sloth or gluttony; I’m talking about the absolute shockers like wrath, Avada Kedavra and, by far the worst of all, vanity. (I absolutely abhor arrogance and conceit, and as the owner of a Chapel Street night club, you undoubtedly do too.)

I’m so unattractive, my wife employs a Perseus-style mirror-plated shield when conversing with me. I’m so unattractive, I’m reluctant to have children because I fear that if my son or daughter got my face genes, I’d be dragged to The Hague and charged with crimes against humanity. I’m so unattractive, when I sent an email to Ben Polis earlier this year implying that he looked like “a rodent with mange…a loathsome mouse-dog… a repellent maggot… a rosy-faced cretin… a small, podgy dipshit and an angry little gerbil [resembling] Jake King… a dead carp’s slowly disintegrating prolapsed anus and an unctuous, ulcerous semi-human” I feared that he would respond with “I know you are, but what am I?” and his case would be water-tight.

(Speaking of emails to famous people, last year I sent an email to the well-known human/dinosaur hybrid Margaret Court (she still hasn’t responded – RUDE!) and told her that a boy at school once described me as looking like a pig with Down’s syndrome. His jibe, though cruel, was excruciatingly accurate.)

What I’m getting at is that if you want to argue that the two women you didn’t allow into your alcohol-serving-sauna-with-very-loud-music are not aesthetically pleasing enough, you have to take into consideration me. Not as an arbitrary point of reference, but because just a few Saturday nights before you told them they weren’t what you were looking for, you told me I was!

Now maybe you’ll argue semantics: it wasn’t so much what they looked like as their look. Again, I’m the hurdle that will make that argument’s finishing line very hard for you to get to.

To be fair, I don’t know what Kay and Ari were wearing on the night in question. But you do. So perhaps you can tell me: was it a pair of off-white cargo pants purchased in the late 1990s, a blue and red Melbourne Football Club tie with an old-school AFL logo on it, an ill-fitting white Rivers shirt with uneven stripes or a beanie of a similar vintage? Did they at any point produce a multi-coloured, multi-textured wallet with a small cowrie shell embedded in it?

The reason I ask is that’s what I was wearing on that chilly, and dare-I-say-it, soon-to-be-infamous May night.

Plus, my hair was as shit as ever and my beard was poorly trimmed, to the point where if you poured three litres of liquid on to the crotch of my trousers and squinted, you could easily have mistaken me for Biff Pelican.

Apparently, your hired muscle told Ari and Kay that they might consider coming back on a Wednesday night when the venue was “more liberal” about who it gave the thumbs-up to. In my experience, however, your Saturday night at 9.00pm policy is more liberal than a hippies-only Swedish key party at a vibrator factory incorporating a swimming pool filled with champagne jelly and Enya playing in the background.

So what’s going on here? Why didn’t you tell me to go back to Thornbury and put on some more appropriate clothes? Why didn’t you tell me to come back another night, even though I was there for a friend’s birthday? Why didn’t you look me up and down, smirk and tell me with undisguised disdain “Not tonight, buddy”? Why did you let me in?

WHY?

WHAT DID I DO RIGHT?

WHY?

Thanking you in advance for your considered response and wishing you all the very best in your (sensible, in my opinion) public campaign to have consumers consider the potential impact of their actions upon innocent businesses before launching their vicious, inane and destructive personal opinions and experiences out into the social media universe,

Jonathan Rivett

I’m looking forward to Hoo haa’s response even more than I’m looking forward to The Shire on Channel 10.

Haught fact of the day

Enya’s most famous song isn’t named ‘Sail Away’; it is in fact called ‘Orinoco Flow’.