Going straight home after a show every night on an empty stomach (that took awhile to get used to) is no big whoop. I'd much rather read, listen to music or fall asleep watching The Tick on Comedy Central than go to some loud, smoky bar and drink until I'm sick to my stomach. Don't get me wrong. I'd go out to a bar every once in a while, but there doesn't seem to be any cool ones around here, near the theater. These places are filled with well-heeled drunken ultra-Anglo looking white people, or old run-down, skid row-type alkie freaks. The kind who have an assigned seat at their favorite bar. The kind who stay drunk all the time. Don't get me wrong.  I like the freaks. It's the yuppies that scare me.

I see them as I leave the show and I feel for them, standing there in their expensive suits, their ties flailing, oblivious to the cold. Some of them yell up and down the street like banshees. Some of them gag and puke in the freshly fallen snow. Some of them stop whatever they're doing to look at me for a moment before going back to their cold weather hi-jinx.  Ex-frat boys, all of them.

I go straight to bed. Why would I want to be in places filled with people like this?

Their bars are decorated with neon, or an exotic mark-up of some sort, or tackier still, a mixture of both. They have names like the Alley Cat, The Rattlesnake Bar, names that say only one thing to me: super-whack. The music is horrible, a nightmarish blend of the very worst that a marriage of low-grade pop and house music can offer. Not that I have anything against either category, but when it's so  relentless in its lack of variety or imagination, it's all I can do to pass by without throttling someone. People actually line up behind velvet trimmed barricades to get into these funholes.

To me, bars are cool if they have a vibe, and if the people in the bar are vibing off of each other in a righteous way. Like, the drugs/alcohol aren't necessarily doing it, the conversation is, or the music is, or it's the ambiance. To make that happen, you need that spice of life called variety, something that Boston's nightlife (and daylife) is far too segregated to ever encompass.  Unless you're on a college campus.