The Etas are having a chapter meeting.
Eta Alpha Mu, the faux-ternity founded by my fierce and fabulous friend Raymond, is made of the Greek letters for H, A, and M, short for “Hot Ass Mess.” There’s a common phrase in the dance world–“I can’t, I have rehearsal”–but for us it was “I can’t, I have a chapter meeting.” And the Etas met often at Phi Bar, as the Panther Hollow Inn in Pittsburgh, PA is affectionately known by college students.
Usually once a week, the Etas gathered at the corner of Forbes and Morewood Avenues and walked the five minutes to Phi. Stephen would have a tall margarita; Sara and Tom would share a pitcher of beer; Erin and I would have Skinny White Bitches, and Ray, Krizia, and Kim would have Long Island Iced Teas. At one point, Tom or Steve would feel generous and buy all of us a round of Kamikaze shots (I still don’t know what’s in them, but I know they taste good). Then, we’d sit, laugh, quote the movie Mean Girls, dance though there was no dance floor, and generally partake in ridiculousness.
I mostly went to Phi with the Etas because, well, they all loved a good drink after a long week (or sometimes during the week). We all kind of fell together as friends, knowing the same people in the dance club we were all a part of, and by going to Phi we were able to celebrate our friendship on a weekly basis. Our chapter meetings were a highlight of my senior year and sometimes it made me feel old, like I actually lived through something more than four years at college. But being this “old” was great because it meant now I actually got to go to Phi. I had been walking past it regularly at least twice a week for three and a half years but, at 21, I was finally there, and it felt like an exclusive club.
Don’t get me wrong: Phi is no swanky promised land of alcohol. It’s dark red inside and smells like beer, cigarettes, and computer science majors who somehow at 20-odd years old haven’t yet learned to shower, but it’s a Carnegie Mellon staple. Less than five minutes from campus, it’s the quick and easy place CMU students have been going for years to blow off steam. The whole bar is what writer and bar aficionado Chuck Klosterman would call “dark and womblike.”
Neon blue lights brighten the entrance to the bar, courtesy of a Bud Light sign. There’s a long pathway between the bar and the booths that extends up three small brick stairs to a back seating area with long tables and bridge chairs. Only one person can get up the steps at a time because the steps are fairly narrow and you have to squeeze past the cigarette machine. When the bar is crowded, it’s always interesting to watch Krizia try and get a pack of cigarettes because she’s a short, compact girl who sometimes gets stuck between these massive football players on the stairs who can’t seem to find anywhere else to stand. Knowing Krizia, though, she probably doesn’t mind too much.
Phi is mostly a college bar, Carnegie Mellon specifically, and students are used to living in semi-squalor, so Phi becomes like a home away from home. If you go to CMU, you will always, always run into someone you know, whether you want to or not. Old lovers, new lovers, friends, faux-riends, acquaintances, that guy from your Poetry or Chemistry class—they’re all at Phi at any given moment.
What’s interesting is that you can always tell which people don’t go to CMU. The quickest way is if they’re older, so of course they don’t, or if they’re an attractive male you’ve never seen before, or if they’re a girl with bleach-blonde hair in a skintight tube dress. Phi is not a “dress-up” kind of bar, and CMU folks know that—if you put on anything beyond jeans you’re probably overdressed. Heels are a no-no because the floor is always covered in the beer that some drunk bitch spilled while shouting “Omagah I love this song!!!” when any Taylor Swift song rolls out of the jukebox.
As much as I hate it, a Taylor Swift song is inevitable at Phi. I’d say the last four times I was there at least one was playing and everyone, from the beefiest frat boys to the girliest sorority girls began singing. The bar turned into a mini-choir concert, everyone singing in their own growl, squeak or yelp like a cluster of drunken pet store puppies. I’d roll my eyes and sip my drink, hoping to be hammered by the time the song was over but it never actually worked.
Later on, though, the whole bar would be looking at us like we were nuts. At any given time, the Etas would start dancing in the aisle between the bar and the booths. We were all dancers on campus, so when the mood struck, we busted our moves and didn’t really care who was watching. My friend Ray, a long, lean dancer with the August Wilson Dance Company in Pittsburgh, would put on Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” or “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” and we’d all go crazy, doing walk-offs in the middle of the bar and striking editorial fashion poses like glamorously bent supermodels. Ray and Krizia would have a turn-off in the middle of the bar—Ray would do four pirouettes in a row, but Krizia would come in a close second and then have a smoke, holding her cigarette in the same hand as her Long Island.
One time when we danced in the middle of Phi, a cluster of middle-aged women were catcalling us: “Get ittttttt! Work!” Of course we couldn’t do it when Phi was crowded because people were lined up three-deep at the bar, but when it was a little bit emptier, like on a Thursday night, that aisle was our stage. A performer is a performer is a performer, I guess, and as long as you were buying drinks, the bartenders and the managers didn’t really care. We’re almost like a floor show—depending on the night it will be ballroom-style, jazz a la Bob Fosse, funky hip-hop, or even elegant lyrical. Other people might have known us as the kids who get drunk and dance all up on each other, and that’s fair. But when Raymond was accidentally dipping me into a booth full of awkward engineering exchange students, everyone had a good laugh.
And yes, my Etas say they will come visit me now that I’ve graduated and moved to New York, but it won’t be the same. There won’t be $2 well drinks during happy hour, there won’t be an aisle next to the bar that’s perfect for doing walk-offs, there won’t be turn-offs or a bar full of people we know but don’t feel like talking to anyone but each other. There might be red walls and cigarette smoke and beer on the floor, but the Etas won’t be there to drink it all in with me. But whatever. So we don’t have chapter meetings as often. It’ll take a lot more than that to get rid of Eta Alpha Mu.