Onetime St. Louis Blues enforcer Tony Twist is doing his best to exhaust whatever residual goodwill he had stored up with us. First he bullies one of our fellow comic-book geeks from the wrong side of the First Amendment. Now he's campaigning against girls' going wild. Is nothing sacred?
STLToday, the online version of the St. Louis
Post Dispatch, has
the details. At a recent meeting of the Weldon Spring Board of Aldermen, Twist was reportedly lobbying against a liquor license request by the owners of the Monkey Bar and Restaurant. These Monkey Bar license applicants are some of the same guys who run another St. Louis bar called
the Vault, which recently suffered a suspension of its liquor license after "young women exposed themselves and simulated sex acts at a September taping for the
'Girls Gone Wild' series of videos." The Vault's manager was charged with lewd and indecent conduct and arrested along with two presumably lewd and indecent women, bless 'em.
At the Board of Aldermen meeting, self-righteous citizen Twist went so far as to distribute photocopies of a newspaper article detailing those allegations. Quoth the Twister: "I believe we have a good community here, a good community that must be maintained. I'm afraid that people who would frequent this establishment would be detrimental to this community."
That's debateable, but it's almost certain that those people would be detrimental to business at Twist's own bar,
Twister's, which is in the same strip center as the Monkey Bar, alongside Highway 94.
Virtuous "community values" have never been all that important to me personally, and Tony Twist is lucky I'm one of millions who feel the same way. After all, Twist made a handsome living playing hockey — despite having little use for his stick (or, for that matter, his gloves). Truly clean-living, decent-minded folks might have frowned on his vocation rather than subsidizing it with ticket sales. A community with upstanding values might have provided an equally unfavorable market for Mr. Twist when he retired from that pugilistic career in favor of saloonkeeping.
Except for the dirty money he
stole from Todd McFarlane with his baseless lawsuit, every penny Twist ever made came from people like me — people immune to "community values." Tony, since I'm sure you're reading this, let me tell you something about my type:
01. We did not cringe at the brutal way you played our favorite sport. We considered the (now extinct) good-hands/no-stick hockey player a noble species.
02. We are not temperance-minded. We consider beer one of nature's most generous gifts, and so we're obliged to any man who does the honorable and necessary work of running a drinking hole.
03. It doesn't bother us one fig if a girl should chance to go wild in our proximity. In fact, we kind of like it.
So your bar's gonna have some competition. Big deal; there are plenty of boozers in the Lou to go around. Get a new jukebox, run some drink specials, or give away some hot wings. But don't resort to this phony piety. It insults us and degrades you. Cram it — or maybe relocate Twister's to Salt Lake City, where they appreciate an upstanding citizen. Be warned, though: people who appreciate upstanding citizenry aren't the same people who appreciate ex-goons and alcohol.
Our thanks to our pal John for finding this story.