Piratz!

Last Friday, Erin and I decided to emerge from our little world of discourse and try our hand at an ethnography. By this I mean we finally managed to make it to Piratz Tavern, an honest-to-God pirate bar located in Silver Spring. The bar is everything that one would expect of a pirate themed establishment, so, in other words, totally campy and utterly fabulous! The walls were decorated with a variety of skulls and crossbones, complete skeletons, swords and other weapons from bygone eras, and a general mishmash of Caribbean-style decorative ornaments. Erin and I were seated in the bar underneath florescent lights covered with historical pirate flags and a giant vulture named Sweetness, as our roguishly garbed server informed us.

The waitstaff were all dressed in true pirate style with leather boots, three cornered hats, billowing shirts, striped pants, and velvet jackets. The women were wearing gowns with appropriately large amounts of cleavage bared and patrons at the bar were allowed to tip by putting dollars...well, I'm sure you can guess where. The drinks (which unfortunately Erin and I are not old enough to partake of) were all fruity concoctions or full of potentially lethal amounts of rum.

Erin and I also had the singular good luck of being at Piratz the same night as a troupe of pirate actors known as The Vagabonds. From what we could gather based on conversations with a couple members (who were very happy to chat after hearing about our research) these people are masters of pirate history, weaponry, and culture. One man is a fight choreographer who lost sight in one eye during a practice duel, and if that's not hard core, I'm not entirely sure what is. Erin and I bonded with one pirate in particular after he teased us for being sober and pronounced our lack of fake IDs as truly against the pirate lifestyle. The Vagabonds were at Piratz Tavern to provide the evening's entertainment which took the form of pirate drinking songs and chanteys, some of which required audience participation, and most of which were well past PG in content.

Now the thing is, neither Erin nor I are "pirate people". I was not the kid who lived for treasure hunts and begged my parents for toy swords at Christmas. As a high schooler, I was not the girl who could quote lines from Pirates of the Caribbean verbatim and had a life size cardboard cut out of Johnny Depp in my bedroom. My favorite ride at Disney Land was so Splash Mountain, and I have felt no compulsion to change my facebook language settings to pirate. In fact, Erin and I have actively resisted becoming pirate people, partly because we like to actively resist things, but mostly because we don't want it to give the appearance we decided to do this project because "pirates are awesome!" or something... Even so, the evening at Piratz Tavern was a lot of fun. It was nice to leave the academic focus of our research behind for the night and let ourselves enjoy the cheesy, cliched, and more than a little ridiculous side of things. Just as the Piratz Taveren website advertises, it was most certainly an "escape from the ordinary"!