It’s official.
The nanny state has gone too far.
Last Friday, fans attending the KISS concert at the Molson Canadian Amphitheatre were greeted with this Grade A downer, issued on official-looking Molson Canadian Amphitheatre letterhead:
DUE TO PROVINCIAL LAWS, ALCOHOL SERVICE IS PROHIBITED FOR ANY PATRON WITH THEIR FACE PAINTED.
At a KISS concert! Ladies and gentlemen there’s only one word for that: balderdash. Absolute bosh. Poppycock. Flummery, even.
It’s one thing that I can’t buy hard liquor and beer at the convenience store below my apartment where I buy all my chips and Gatorade and one-hitters and gang-coloured bandanas. It’s bad enough that me and seven buddies can’t tap a box of wine in Trinity-Bellwoods without those babysitter state mama’s boys (i.e. police officers) issuing us a round of citations. And it’s frustrating that I can’t even bring a twelve pack into church anymore, probably.
I can even handle not being able to chain smoke on the bus and, soon, having to know how many calories are coiled inside all the garbage food I poison my disgusting flesh-billow of a body with every single day of the week. If you want to live in a functioning civilization, you have to make certain concessions. Sure. All in the name of progress.
But denying any KISS fan’s right to paint their face like Peter Criss and pay $12 for a lukewarm Molson Canadian is like asking them to rock ‘n’ roll all nite or party every day. It’s an affront to KISSdom. And so, to Freedom.
Face-painted KISS fans represent of the most hard-partying and dedicated fans in all of rock music, splitting the difference between wobbly Juggalos wasted on cough syrup, faces caked in sticky Faygo Red Pop, and sombre, corpse-painted black metal guys. If anyone deserves to pay too much for beer and get rowdy and spurt along to Love Gun, it’s true, black-and-white KISS fans. By what measure are the people who aren’t wearing makeup even real KISS fans? Why do they deserve to drink? Why do they deserve anything?!
The hem-haw rationale issued by the show’s promoter, Live Nation, and the Alcohol and Game Commission of Ontario was that a painted face makes it difficult for beer vendors to determine whether a given patron was of legal age. Isn’t this what our provincially issued IDs are for? Isn’t this what my KISS Army ID is for? And anyway who’s to say that my KISS Army badge isn’t valid government ID? I mean, it’s laminated.
People who check IDs at bars and events usually have Smart Serve Ontario certification, which means they’re trained in spotting stuff like a fake IDs. Even with face paint, you can do stuff like gauge the relative arrangement of someone’s facial features are, or pull classic fake ID-spotting tricks like asking someone what their Zodiac sign is. Anyway if someone is wearing KISS makeup, they should still look more-or-less the same as they do on any piece of ID, save for the difference of their wearing KISS makeup. Here’s an example:
See? Same person. Give me forty beers, now, please.
Even if a bouncer or liquor salesperson or whoever suspects someone might be underage, what ever happened to respecting the effort? Why isn’t “boys will be boys” a provincial mandate? Have these people never answered to a higher authority? Have they never even seen Detroit Rock City?
Maybe this is the push Ontario’s apathetic, slugabed citizenry needs, the spark that will light the fire of full-scale insurrection against coddling statist tyranny. I mean, do we really need provinces? Isn’t it the duty of every true KISS fan to regulate their own face-painting and beer-drinking regimen?
Is this the Ontario our uncles and sister’s husbands and weird third grade teachers fought to protect in harrowing Arena Rock Vs. Disco Wars of the late 1970s? I think not. Far from it.
