The view from on high
With winter still a few weeks away and temperatures averaging around 25C every day, it seemed strange that so many people had come down with colds already.
But, on the night Bruce and Fran finally made it out for a pub (or should that be bar, given the paucity of any real pubs in St Kilda) crawl around Acland Street, the number of people with sniffles was astounding.
In the toilets of almost every bar they visited throughout the night, there was a cacophony of sniffs and snorts. Some people were suffering so badly they had to lock themselves into cubicles to attend to their runny noses. A handful of girls were so desperate to find the nearest piece of tissue paper that they were forced to use the men’s toilets; in a handful of cases they even had to take their friends with them to make sure they were OK; Bruce was always relieved when they came out laughing.
Al Pacino in a public service ad warning of the dangers of too much Lemsip
Other than suffering unseasonal maladies, the folks heading out on the weekend around Acland Street seemed a fairly homogenous bunch. Every bar had opted for a steady stream of um-chi-um-chi-um-chi beats to which the shade-wearing, tight-topped crews could wiggle their botox-enhanced booties.
Many of the bars were nice to look at, such as Big Mouth with its carved dark wood, red drapes and low-lit chandeliers, while the balcony upstairs at Veludo was a good spot to cool down and inhale the passive smoke from 50 cigarettes at the same time. Veludo’s sweaty Friday night entertainment upstairs featured an admirable bunch of loons in various states of Sun-Ra inspired undress banging out dirty live house music to entertain the conveyor belt of folks making their way back and forth from dancefloor to toilet.
Earlier in the night, Fitzroy Street’s Saint Bar, famed for its midget and Jaegermeister stunt, offered two-for-one drink deals that made it worth a visit, while the night ended in The Vineyard: by day a very popular bar / restaurant, by the time Bruce and Fran arrived at 3.15am, home to a gaggle of drunks, one of whom approached Bruce on the strength of their matching beards then took it upon himself to introduce his new friends to the door staff, the wonders of Archie’s pizza slice and wedges combo and very nearly drag them into the hellhole that is Traffik.
They wriggled out of that one and escaped home, trading the nightclub for an invite to the bearded man’s house party the following night. After all, Traffik looked so unhygeinic, they shuddered at the thought of how many people would be attending to their colds in the loos.
