Under 21 doesn’t mean out of luck: Los Angeles club scene student-friendly

By Anthony Bromberg
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF
[email protected]

It happens to everyone. You walk down into Westwood with your
friends, laughing, slightly inebriated with the night air.

Thoughtlessly, you approach the local bar and for some reason or
other fall into the back of your group. One by one, your friends
file into the upstanding establishment as voices, music and TV
noise filters out through the open door.

Finally, you make your way up to the bouncer and gingerly pull
out your New Jersey ID claiming you’re 23. Then, POW, he
looks down at you shaking his head from on high. Now you’re
stuck outside, cold and desperately trying to get a hold of
someone, anyone, on your blue-covered Nokia cell phone, to walk
back up to the dorms with you.

It happens to the best of us, but it doesn’t have to be
this way.

Los Angeles has a night-life scene aimed at the all-ages and
18-and-over crowds. Dance clubs like The Palace, Rage and Blue,
among others, have at least some all-ages events or 18-and-over
nights during a regular week.

This ensures that legal drinking age adults aren’t the
only ones who can go out on the town with the surreal Los Angeles
nightscape reflected in their pupils and lust murmuring in their
hearts. Legal voters who aren’t yet legal drinkers still have
the opportunity to get sweaty in a dark room pulsing with the
movements of bodies and flashing lights.

Of course, everyone has their own reasons for venturing out into
the temperate orange night glow of Westwood and beyond. People go
out to clubs to dance and consort with friends away from a school
atmosphere, or to find a fit and willing partner for romantic, or
not so romantic, endeavors.

“I guess a lot of people go to hook up, and the way people
dance, if you’ve gone to just one, you know it’s
sexual,” said Annie Wong, a fourth-year student in a phone
interview. “It depends on which clubs you go to, some are
more like meat markets than others.”

Wong isn’t a frequent club-goer, but has been to both
18-and-up as well as 21-and-up clubs. She sees some differences
between the two as well as between male and female aggressive
interaction.

“At 21-and-over clubs they talk more, rather than just
going for “˜whatever,'” Wong said.
“Sometimes a guy will freak a girl from behind and just
expect her to keep dancing, which we don’t really appreciate.
The most successful ones are when a girl does something subtle to
introduce herself like flip her hair.”

People who want to dance for the sheer joy of the stimulating
muscle and joint movement itself might find a more accommodating
environment at one of Los Angeles’ many gay clubs like Rage
or Tigerheat. Jessica Jung, a fourth-year sociology student,
prefers the atmosphere of Tigerheat if she’s not out to meet
guys.

“For me as a straight female it’s a much more
comfortable environment without the guy coming up and groping me or
saying something lewd,” Jung said. “The last time I
went I was in shorts and a T-shirt and just danced for four
hours.”

Still, according to Jung, the straight club atmosphere
isn’t overly sexually hostile and is less so than the
near-campus fraternity parties.

On top of dancing and sexuality, the key to a good club outing,
according to Jung, is the music.

“The music can make or break the experience,” Jung
said. “I’ve had experiences where you pay a $20 cover
and they just play techno for four hours, and that can be hard to
dance to.”

Dance clubs aren’t the only night-life proprietors who
cater to the younger crowd. Los Angeles is rife with music venues,
both stage and cinema theaters, as well as the other clubs ““
comedy clubs.

The funnier if less physically mobile counterparts of dance
clubs may even be more targeted towardsthe youth crowd.

According to Ezra Weisz, the administrative director of the Bang
Comedy Club and a teacher, clubs like Bang embrace the over 18
audience and anyone who can do the higher level thinking to grasp
comedy as a serious art form. Weisz feels that comedy at clubs
where drinking is involved tends to be sloppier, while the
comedians and improvisers at clubs like Bang want to provide a
solid show to elevate their craft.

“The colleges give us our most loyal and favorite fans,
the ones who are most inspiring for our performers,” Weisz
said. “There’s no way we’d shut that age group
out from adulthood until you can drink.”

The atmosphere of comedy clubs facilitates entertainment, but is
less of a social environment, which leaves those under 21 back
where they started, shaking their booties. Or there’s always
that other option.

“You have to be 21 to drink, technically, but it’s
pretty easy to slide around that most of the time,” Wong
said.

The bouncer can’t shake his head all of the time.