In my contributor’s blurb in this month’s Boston Magazine, I lob a tomato at the City of Boston for cracking down on hair salons serving free drinks to customers without a license. The popular stereotype of Boston in the world at large is that we’re stodgy, uptight, schoolmarmish, anti-fun, and usually dressed to match. The barbershop speakeasy crackdown reminds us that just because it’s a stereotype doesn’t mean it’s not absolutely true.
I remember the first time I went for a haircut after this particular pogrom, and the receptionist regretfully offered me an espresso or some sparkling water and explained that they could no longer offer me a glass of the finest sauvignon blanc one can get in a moderately-priced box. It was a tiny little thing, but it was a thing of happiness, and the City took it away from us.
There are many possible options. The simplest would have been for officials to just look the other way and use the existing laws to go after businesses that served minors. Barring that sort of common sense, they could have created a license appropriate to the situation, that could be obtained at reasonable expense, and brought the scofflaws in out of the cold. Or, they could have rewritten the license laws specifically to exempt the sort of thing that probably 95% of Mitt Romney’s congregation would declare to be outside the scope of bar and restaurant licensing. But no, they did the dumbest thing possible, and simply sat right down on top of everything.
No one has probably ever decided to up and leave Boston because of this one thing. But stack a dozen or two such pinpricks, and eventually you may conclude this place is just terminally lame and provincially-minded.
Keohane
November 9, 2011
When I worked in the South End, I used to get my hair cut at State Street Barbers. For the first few months I’d walk in to the handsome wood-paneled room, take a chair, and a glass of scotch would appear as my Chechen barber went to work, regaling me with suitably hair-raising tales of the old country. Sinatra was usually on the stereo. It felt like entering another world, one where minor transgressions were coolly overlooked instead of being immediately stamped out in a Puritan tantrum. Then one day I walked in and they handed me a ginger ale.