After Lamar Odom was seen collapsing while out for a night of drinking at Bootsy Bellows nightclub on the Sunset Strip I had a novel idea: maybe if you own or manage a bar, don’t give Lamar Odom any alcohol.
This is for the both of your benefit. First of all he could easily die in your bar on any given night and he should probably start wearing a Flavor Flav clock to mark the exact time of death. Despite the high prestige this would temporarily grant you in Hollywood’s herpetic trust fund kid scene, it would subject you to various legal liabilities.
For example, everyone knows it is illegal to serve an obviously intoxicated person alcohol. This is an absurd notion, as the only reason bars exist is for people to become intoxicated.
The keyword is obvious. You don’t want frat boys butt funneling Jaeger and keeling over in your super awesome VIP section, so as a trained server or bartender you must establish criteria to assess whether or not a patron is impaired.
The first clue is if they yell out I Love This Song! every time a new one comes on, and especially if that song is by Drake. Then you have to see if they are slurring their words. But you know that trick. Some dude with cerebral palsy might be looking to bait you into a discrimination lawsuit.
Better just to let people determine their own fate. If you have four Mai Tai’s and proceed to drive down the boulevard while throwing hatchets out the window at unsuspecting pedestrians, that’s on you. I’m trying to make a few hundred bucks, not play God.
For that reason it is total legal to serve booze to a pregnant woman in most states of the union. Put another way, it is actually illegal not to serve them.
New York City clarified last year that they most definitely want pregnant women to be served alcohol at drinking establishments, as their Commission on Human Rights articulated:
“While covered entities may attempt to justify certain categorical exclusions based on maternal or fetal safety, using safety as a pretext for discrimination or as a way to reinforce traditional gender norms or stereotypes is unlawful .”
To clarify, the Commission on Human Rights spent a sizable amount of time deliberating this issue and decided that pregnant women should be allowed to drink alcohol, as a humanitarian right, in the same city that outlaws large sodas.
They also apparently consider the fact that women become pregnant to be a socially constructed “gender norm” and a dangerous stereotype and sound like they were the dumbest most dour chain smoking cunts at their elite grad schools and all of them should be fired and deemed forever unemployable.
So exclusive, yet so ghetto and lame.
I suppose it can be difficult to tell a potbellied woman from a pregnant woman, but luckily the human brain carries with it the capacity for judgement. For example, is the woman carrying a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting?
Or, is she just obviously pregnant based on the old fashioned eye test? That common sense that the government assumes you don’t have?
In that case, maybe don’t serve her. I’m pro choice, but isn’t this valuing the delicate sensibilities of the mother over the health of the unborn child? Who cares if some slob with nothing to do but hang out in bars while pregnant is offended you denied her a chardonnay? I’m more concerned about the baby. I don’t think there should be a law against doing jiu jitsu while pregnant, that’s the judgement of the woman. But if some chick who is crowning is showing up at your boxing gym to practice her body shot defense, she should be turned away if not arrested.
Even though it’s not your personal responsibility, there are times when you should make a decision to not serve someone.
That person, if you only get a few times to play that card in your life, would be Lamar Odom.
If you work at IHOP and some diabetes ridden four hundred pound dude who smells of antifreeze comes in like clockwork every morning and orders the Red Velvet pancakes, his arm so fat he can barely lift the fork to his mouth as he wheezes whipped cream out of his mouth, don’t worry about it.
That dude has made a conscious decision to slowly deteriorate his own health, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it.
One time I saw a documentary on Nat Geo about morbidly obese people. This one guy weighed 700 pounds and lived on his bed in a diaper. He knew he had this uncontrollable eating problem, so he would make all of his caregivers and visitors sign a form saying they would not provide him with any junk food, no matter how much he pleaded or tried to manipulate them into doing so. About midway through the episode he somehow got his flabby mitts on a kabob and chips.
That is the guy you shouldn’t serve. That is Lamar Odom, whose internal organs resemble cream of wheat.
If you work at a bar you’re going to get the guy who comes in every day and most certainly has a tremendous problem with alcohol and acts eratic and sad and is slowly ruining his life, and that’s fine.
Then there’s the guy who’s acutely trying to kill himself, George Best rocking the dialysis machine.
Lamar Odom has literally already died from drugs and booze and come back to life. I’m not a religious man, but I wouldn’t want to meddle in that.
Imagine getting a text from Lamar Odom right now. Hey, do you want to go out and grab a few drinks?
The only suitable response would be absolutely not. Clearly all of his buddies who joined him at the club are prodigious losers, and they share the most blame.
But you’ve got to take into account all of the lost souls in their retarded outfits in Bootsy Bellows partying with Odom, the owners and managers of the place, and the hot 22 year old server who makes six hundred dollars a night and still complains fervently about her job and will not offer to split the dinner check.
Nobody’s asking you all to become moral arbiters here, but the dude already died once and is still partying hard, so let’s just assume, despite how much money he’s spending, that from now on he is obviously intoxicated.