Pearl's Social & Billy Club in Bushwick. (Facebook)

Those pesky hipsters are at it again, with their subversive non-weekday work schedules and socially destructive late night PBR-drinking, according to an article in the Daily News.

Bushwick’s Community Board 4 has taken a stand against Sunday sipping, according to the paper, by requesting that bar and restaurant owners stop selling alcohol by midnight on Sunday night.

“Sunday, that’s the day when people rest," district manager Nadine Whitted told the News. “We have to be fair to everybody. It’s not a hard thing to do.”

The State Liquor Authority can still approve a liquor license even if a bar refuses to comply with the suggested Sunday curfew. However, the agency plans to investigate each individual bar or restaurant applying for a license, according to SLA spokesman William Crowley.

“The hipsters are out of control,” said 38-year old perfect caricature of a Brooklyn resident, Monica Hall, to the Post.

“You go into a new land and think you own it," continued Ms. Hall. "Sleeping on a Sunday night, for people with children and who have nine-to-five jobs, is the difference between getting a good night’s sleep and starting your week off right, versus trying to sleep with noise coming from over grown children."

In response, a number of Bushwick bar owners are doing their best to appease the local residents. Betsy Maher, owner of Pearl's Social and Billy Club on St. Nicholas Ave, has installed a bouncer outsider her bar at night to try and keep noise levels now.

“There’s a lot of resistance between old and new,” Ms. Maher told the News. “It’s making the two sides butt heads even more.”

This issue is emblematic of an ever-growing divide between long-time Bushwick residents and the colonizing hipster crowd, who are more likely to shun traditional work patterns in favor of, you know, not having any work patterns (if you believe Girls is an accurate representation of real life, which, duh, it is).

Clearly those old fogeys with their 9-5 jobs and their mindless subjugation to the corporate hegemony don’t appreciate that when you’ve been slaving away all weekend perfecting your newest round of splatter paintings and hawking reclaimed furniture at the Brooklyn Flea, Sunday night is actually the perfect time to kick back with a few brewskis. Can't we all just get along, bro?

U.S. begs: no more drinking and debating.

Americans are known the world over for being embarrassing drunks. We're constantly being told that other countries have a more mature relationship with alcohol, that their collegiate years are not spent chugging cheap grain alcohol and getting sick in communal bathrooms. But in a surprising turn of events, the U.S. is asking diplomats from other countries to lay off the booze, according to Reuters. At least during United Nations budget debates.

Joseph Torsella, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for management and reform, came to the General Assembly's budget committee with a "modest proposal that the negotiating rooms should in the future be an inebriation-free zone."

Mr. Torsella went on to request that diplomats wait to break out the champagne until the conclusion of a successful session, rather than pre-gaming the budget sessions like freshmen on their way to a frat party.

The call for moderation comes after an incident in December in which the U.S. was unable to rally support for a proposal to freeze U.N. staff pay. According to Foreign Policy,"key negotiating partners, particularly delegates from the Group of 77 developing countries, were not showing up for meetings. When they did arrive, they had often been drinking." (Mr. Torsella also called for changes so that no-show countries couldn't hold up the proceedings.)

While the annual vote of the committee does come in late December—let's be honest, who doesn't overindulge in drink during December?—and we can appreciate anyone wanting a little tipple before tackling budget issues, there have apparently been incidents of "illness." Not to mention that pressing global issues probably shouldn't be resolved by booze-addled brains. We've all seen pissed partygoers immersed heated political arguments. Now imagine that they had actual power.

But apparently getting tossed before starting in on tense international negotiations is nothing new. As a diplomat told Foreign Policy: "By the way, it's not just Africans. The Russians do it... Canada used to bring whisky. The French used to bring bottles of wine."

kvelsey@observer.com

Nevertheless, the event was a rousing success: it turned out that the appetite for atavism was robust among the drinky class in New York.

“Just because we’re older doesn’t mean we don’t like the same things as when we were kids,” explained Tim Donnelly, who helped organize the event. “We can just be drunk while doing it now.”

He restated the problem, “If there were a Chuck E. Cheese for grownups, I would totally go.”

As it turns out, there is; in fact, there are many of them. In the past half-dozen years or so—at an increasing rate—bars with children’s games have been opening in New York, particularly in the garland of yuppie Brooklyn extending from Gowanus to Greenpoint.

At Red Hook’s Brooklyn Crab, there is mini-golf and cornhole, a beanbag-tossing game. In Clinton Hill, there is the Brooklyn Tap room, with foosball and Ping-Pong tables. In Williamsburg, one finds Barcade, with its vintage video-game machines; Full Circle, a skee-ball-themed bar, and Bushwick Country Club, which features a down-at-the-heels putt-putt course out back. In Manhattan there is Susan Sarandon’s SPiN, a boozy table-tennis club, and the West Village’s Fat Cat, the apotheosis of the phenomenon, which features a myriad of games, including Ping-Pong tables for “$5.50/per person/per hour (prorated .09/min) Sun-Thu.”

And they have done very well catering to the new alco-lescent crowds.

But whatever happened to just having a drink and a lively conversation? The idea that intelligent, interesting adults could gather over some glasses of one fortified thing or another and carry on an exchange of sentiment and ideas while getting somewhere between reasonably and blindingly drunk? While such things do still happen in some corners of the city, there is an annoying emergence of these establishments that not only cater to but encourage patrons who prefer to behave like their much younger selves.

“Everyone knows this—it’s not something I think—there’s a very prolonged youthfulness now. It really seems to last forever!” author and conversationalist Fran Lebowitz told The Observer recently. “Their idea of being sociable is not to sit around and talk. Their idea of being sociable is to sit around and play games. To me, this seems childish. Whenever people ask me to play a game, I say, ‘I don’t play games.’ And they say, ‘Why?’ And I say, ‘Because it’s a game ... There’s been a general disappearance of adulthood.”

To Ms. Lebowitz, who will be in conversation onstage with Frank Rich at Town Hall later this month, there is little in life more important than the verbal arts.

“Conversation to me is something that requires lot of time. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I think you’d have to look long and hard to find someone who has wasted more time than me. I mean, I’ve wasted decades of my life—mostly talking! Talking to me is something that fills my life.

“When our current and perhaps endless mayor, when he was only in his like 10th term, whenever he made that smoking law in bars—which actually really shocked me—I actually said to him—although if you were questioning him, he would not recall this—I said, ‘Do you want to know what sitting around in bars and restaurants talking and smoking is called? The history of art, that’s what it’s called.’”

Indeed. It’s hard to imagine many great ideas have been hatched over a microbrew and a foosball table.

Nevertheless, The Observer and a companion decided to take a tour of these atavistic drink shops on a recent Sunday evening, starting with Williamsburg’s Barcade, to witness this Never Never Land of liquor and perpetual children.

A cavernous, characterless room with 1980s arcade games lining the walls, Barcade is a dystopian version of a teen hangout, Blade Runner meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

After securing a drink, our companion left to survey the room. The Observer approached a 20-something couple visiting from London, Amy Chapman and Chris Curd. They were huddled around a Frogger machine, by their account faring “piss poor” at the game.

Ms. Chapman was particularly impressed by the concept of Barcade. “It makes me want to go home and start one myself. It’s such an amazing idea,” she enthused.

“It’s awesome,” Mr. Curd concurred.

Agree to disagree. But did they not have similar diversions in London?

“Not in bars. It’s mostly gambling machines,” responded Mr. Curd

“It’s mostly a thing for kids,” added Ms. Chapman.

Fancy that. We rejoined our companion at the bar. He informed us of his attempt at regaining the gaming prowess of his youth. “I just made it 30 seconds into Contra and just died. I just blew a dollar on Contra,” he said. “Fucking Contra.”

But what of the vibe, the boozy teenageness of the joint?

“There’s something very nonthreatening about this place,” the companion mused. “There’s no one attractive. It’s like, ‘Let’s just go and play some video games.’ I mean, I guess they’re just nerds ... Alright, I’m getting some change.”

In addition to being childish and silly, there was something decidedly unsexy about the superimposition of adolescent accoutrements into the context of a bar. It took away the potential, the edge and the libidinous quality that the best boozing joints give off.

When we reached him by phone, Jason Kosmas, co-owner of the swank bar Employees Only, went even further, pointing out that games of this sort, while ostensibly sociable activities, are actually kind of antisocial.

“You go out with your friends and you spend time with your friends,” he explained. “You know, it’s a wagon train. You go out with your friends and you sort of form a little fortress, and nobody else really comes in.”

As opposed to his establishment, which he said is structured around possibility. “Ultimately, in those places [like his own], people are going to get laid,” he explained. “The word ‘laid’ has different connotations for different people. It might be that they want a great drink, or they might want to see someone famous, or they might want to make a business connection. Something’s gonna happen to them that is out of their ordinary life. Or, most importantly, get laid.”

Imagine as part of this metaphor getting the day’s high score on Galaga. Doesn’t work, right?
Cocktail guru Jim Meehan found that his bar PDT had so much sexual charisma—and such drinkable concoctions—that he had to institute a “No PDA at PDT, hands on the table, tongues inside your mouth” point of etiquette.
“It’s bizarre to me,” he said of the gaming bars. “I work all the time, so going to a bar with my friends to catch up is actually a luxury. I would never go to a place to play lawn darts.”
From Barcade, The Observer and our companion ventured next to the Bushwick Country Club, whose mini-golf course the bartender humbly described as “six holes which you can put a ball into with a club.” It did, however, have a windmill made of entirely of PBR cans. (Go Bushwick!)

There were no golfers present, so we asked the bartender about the proliferation of games in bars.

He responded with consternation that his friends had signed him up for a cornhole league.
Had anyone ever gotten laid by playing in a cornhole league?

“Probably,” he said. “Every team has to have at least one girl on it. I’m sure that someone can get laid from cornhole. You end up with a lot of guys with their shirts off. But those same guys would probably have their shirts off anyway.”

We headed over to Full Circle, a bar so wedded to its skee-ball-centric identity that its name is the term for rolling an expert-level round of the “sport.”

The crowd, if that’s the word, was exclusively male, save the bartender.

(After sinking $10 into the skee-ball alley in about five minutes, we realized another incentive for bar owners to feature games.)

We encountered George McNeese, co-owner of the buzzy Bed-Stuy eatery Do or Dine. He comes to Full Circle about once a week and is even in a skee-ball league with his girlfriend.
He apprised us of the tyranny of small differences within the alco-lescent demimonde.

“If you go to Barcade, it’s going to be filled with people who are more or less looking for a bar scene. You know, it’s going to be filled with hipsters and all sorts of shit that I don’t want to deal with,” said Mr. McNeese, who was wearing oversize clear-framed glasses, a tote bag that looked like a Nintendo controller and a phone cord as a necklace. “It’s gonna be packed, and the drinks are gonna be overpriced. You know, I just want to have a couple beers and play some skee-ball.”

This last reminded us of something Jim Meehan had pointed out. “In a city like New York,” he said, “where there are so many bars and so many people, each bar can fill a specific niche, because they don’t have the collective responsibility. For instance, I just got back from Michigan—there were like two bars in town. If you’re one of two bars, there’s probably more pressure to appeal to a broad audience, whereas if there are like a million bars for 6 million people you can, and especially if you’re small, you can fill a specific niche and be successful.”
Unfortunately, he was right: there is clearly a market for bars catering to nostalgic activity-philes.

Of course, the infantilizing of the bar-going experience is lent a kind of dismaying symmetry by the recent contretemps at the Park Slope beer garden Greenwood Park, where among Yelp reviewers there has been considerable outcry not about grown-ups behaving like kids, but about them actually bringing kids.

“It’s not daycare it’s a BAR,” groused one.

“Too many kids, and I don’t mean 20-somethings, I mean actual children,” bitched another.
And a third noted, “Bars also don’t have proper entertainment for kids.” Erroneously, it turns out. You guessed it, Greenwood Park has games!

As Fran Lebowitz pointed out, “Any environment devolves to the youngest person in the room.” So, why not gather around the bocce courts, young and old alike, and collapse the distinction? In no time, one could look from child to adult, and from adult to child, and from child to adult again, and already it would be impossible to say which was which.
bgallagher@observer.com

Is it self-awareness or self-loathing? (Peter Arkle)

The grand plan was to stay sober for the month of January, and it failed. It collapsed the moment we touched down in the Bahamas and felt the silky warmth outside the Nassau airport. The whole place was wet with the prospect of booze—its bars, its dewy palm trees, its bikini-wearing swimmers, its cerulean wading pools. The plane’s tires hit the tarmac, and from then on, rum was god.

In the boxy cab we removed our loafers, took off our socks, stuffed them in a spare pocket of a hand-me-down attaché case and shoved our heels back into the miniature leather gondolas. The engine growled down hardy roads, handling the this-way-that-way roundabouts with the finesse of an arcade pinball.

It was 13 degrees in New York and we had taken up our father’s offer of a trip to Paradise Island.

The Atlantis Casino Resort revealed itself all at once. The skyline resembled a monstrous coral reef that decided to gasp for air. Inside, were marble citadels festooned with mock-Roman buttresses. Beyond that, an array of maritime myth figures with tide-blown hair stuck to the ceilings. There were more aquariums than elevators, not to mention the hanging gardens, the thrones for photo ops, the fountains—a lost city reassembled, cobbled together from the garage sales of billionaires.

Inside the resort, everyone was drunk. The old men in shirts that flapped in the air conditioning, sneaky 17-year-olds with room keys connected to their fathers’ credit cards, day-tripping cruise ship skippers laid over in the Bahamas for the night, gamblers, dancers, swingers, bachelors—and us, drunk (despite our previous resolution).

It was the rum, that sugar cane spirit, the thing once responsible for the economies of these blissful islands. Maybe there’s a reason why we never drink rum in New York City.

“Señor Frog’s?” the taxi driver said. “Well, sure, but it’s for the teenybopper set. I usually work by the Hilton, right there, and they’re so nice when they’re sober. But then, ugh, later, well, they’re lifting each other up, drunk.”

It was our last night, and we were passing the boutique row in the main drag of the town—Coach, Cartier, United Colors of Benetton. We had been drinking most of the day.

“I have a friend who works there, at Señor Frog’s,” the cab driver said. “I tell him, man, what did you put in those children’s drinks!”

The cab stopped and by the deck of Senor Frog’s the receiving line of stumbling girls in tank tops grabbed at the wooden railings. The spring break aesthetic had been thawed out for winter. “I’m a Vageterian!” read one of the signs on the wall. We walked beside them to the bar, had frozen rum cocktails, and watched as the stragglers went after desperate pairings. The rum moved their feet and behind them cruise ships the size of Central Park began to inch out of the bay beside Paradise Island.

“Stay here?” a girl said into her phone outside. Bahamian men barked, “Cab! Cab!” at us as they pulled up out of waterside alleys, curling lips of tide flouncing beyond the dock. She too swayed tipsily as the DJ dipped hints of keyboard—a new song—into his mix, and it evaporated into the opening melody of Rihanna’s “We Found Love.”

“I don’t even want to be here,” said the girl into the phone.

Upon returning to the Atlantis, we encountered a slurring man in Nantucket Reds and a checkered shirt who was flailing against three black guards trying to contain him.

“A little too much of grandma’s medicine,” our cabbie averred.

Inside, we made our way to a club called Dragon. The dance floor worked its way around the bar in a crescent, with a roped-off section just beyond it, and buckets of ice—waiting for their bottles—lined the marble countertop. Nothing foreign, but nothing comforting; any resemblance to New York made this whole economy of sun and rum further from a thing we could like. An enormous white man who self-identified as a Harvard graduate, living in a penthouse nearby, was nice enough to fill one of the buckets with Patron.

He turned to our brothers, who are identical twins.

“I love twins, but usually of the other gender,” Harvard said. “I love fucking twins. Man, I gamble, and I play better when I’m fucking.”

We did a shot of Patron.

“You have any problems,” he added. “You let me know.”

We did have a problem. Beyond that roped-off section stood a girl with far-away eyes, eyes like an untouched ocean, dancing like the undulations in a lava lamp. She was standing with three men, each wearing a similar pec-hugging shirt.

But she was leaving, out of the club and back toward the stone temple hallways, back toward the hotel suites. Before we could say anything, though, she smiled, took the man’s hand and was gone.

We ended up standing at the bar next to our father.

“You know, I’ve been watching you. You drink too much,” he told us.

nfreeman@observer.com

Jonathan Ames likely knows this as well, as evidenced by the fact that he informed Gothamist yesterday that he'd be buying fans of the show a drink tonight if they show up to an unofficial wake for the show:

"I invite all fans of Bored to Death to come to the Brooklyn Inn tomorrow night, Wednesday, and I'll buy you a drink. John Hodgman will be joining me and perhaps other local New York City actors from the show will be there, and we can all toast Bored to Death and a completely loony and improbable three-year run."

Like the show, it's weird, and sweet, and generally the kind of thing the world could probably use but will nonetheless be denied. Bored To Death, we barely knew thee: The Observer will miss you, and will pour a glass of Orangina out in your memory.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Here, every day's a holiday.

For the last two years, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, hailed by some to be New York's grimiest, sloppiest and most dastardly dive bar -- i.e. New York's best dive bar -- has soldiered forward with its captain, Stefan Lutek, gone. He died at the age of 89 after decades of tending bar at the joint, which he opened in 1965.

The place now may be on its last legs. Corcoran put the listing for its building, 75 St. Marks place, on its website today. Yes, the listing notes the Holiday Lounge's notoriety, but focuses on the important thing here: this building can be your condo.

EV Grieve alerted us to the warning signs, and though there's no definitive plans or anything, whoever buys the place would have little trouble emptying the glasses downstairs. Or, as EV Grieve puts it: "Might as well set up the dumpster out front tomorrow morning."

There's no shortage of poesy penned about the bar's drab elegance. "Even in Manhattan it can exist, quiet amid the chaos, authentic beside a cab-riddled road," reads a story in The New York Times, printed on New Year's Eve 2006. "The dive is un-self-conscious, beautiful in its gloom. Greater than the sum of its parts, it is as spare as a Raymond Carver story, as lean as a haiku. Sentiment condensed, it is a poem, an elegy, perhaps, that hangs in the air as a testament to an anachronistic New York."

Pretty words for a place populated by rotting drunks and whiskey-swilling malcontents (who are, full disclosure, joined by The Observer on certain nights). But there's a literary tradition that could justify the reverence. Regulars included Allen Ginsberg, Leon Trotsky and most prominently, W.H. Auden. Before he passed, Lutek spoke with the New York Press about just how sloppy one of the century's great poets grew when the Holiday Cocktail Lounge was pouring the drinks.

The modernist master W.H. Auden, author of "The Shield of Achilles," was the star drunk. He drank here with Allen Ginsberg, among others, living on cognac, V.S.O.P.—whole bottles in an afternoon as he sat by the window, writing with a stubby pencil, constantly erasing and rewriting. "When he sober, he can't write," Lutak recalls. "When he too drunk he can't write. You could never say when he was drunk, because he drinking all the time."

Who else would you see? Frank Sinatra came by, as his agent lived a few blocks down. Madonna, too, in her early days. But mostly you'll see the regulars, guys with bad gums and stories for days, sitting silently in the corner nursing whiskys as NYU kids or other passersby enjoy, oh, a Budweiser or something.

"He disappeared in the dead of winter," Auden wrote, in verse, upon the death of Yeats. "The day of his death was a dark cold day."

Winter is coming, so if the Holiday Cocktail Bar does close, it will be doubly cold and doubly dark that day. Warm up with a whiskey soon, guys.

A match made in heaven.

Leave the flasks at home, New York moviegoers!

Last August, Gov. Cuomo passed a law that allows movie theaters with restaurants to serve booze as well, making a trip to the cinema that much more appealing. Now, AMC Theaters tells The New York Post that they are considering equipping their eight theaters in Manhattan with these eateries. Just imagine. Patrons buy their beer and their wine, take it back to their seats, repeat steps one and two to their hearts' content, and there you go. A perfect movie-watching experience.

Seeing as people like to drink, lawmakers hope the new policy will bring more city dwellers from the saloons to the screens, The Post report explains.

“Adults aren’t enjoying going to the movies [which cater to] adolescents,” said Cathy Peake, a spokeswoman for Assemblyman Joe Lentol (D--Brooklyn), who sponsored the bill.

No word on when AMC Dine-In Theaters will descend upon Manhattan, but Brooklyn movie houses such as Nitehawk Cinemas and indieScreen already have food outposts, and hope to tap the kegs this fall. Hopefully they'll have everything ready before The Muppets comes out!

Vogue Cafe, in Moscow.

If you go to 5 Baltschug Street in Moscow, Russia, you'll see a 17th Century building with Maybachs and Bentleys lying idly nearby, all waiting for the men they drive around to return from a certain smoke-filled lounge. It's a place where the rich men of that city can enjoy cocktails and bottles, all while ensconced in dark wood and soft leather. It's one of the hottest spots in the city.

It's called GQ Bar, but there's no copyright infringement -- Conde Nast partnered with a Russian hospitality firm and opened the place a few years ago.

Today, the magazine behemoth announced more bars and restaurants branded with one of their publications: a Vogue Cafe in Kiev and a GQ Bar in Istanbul. The plans mark the first Conde-fication of boîtes outside of Moscow, where they've also installed a Vogue Cafe and a Tatler Club.

"Vogue and GQ stand for the best in taste, discernment and pleasurable living," Conde Nast International chairman Jonathan Newhouse said in a statement to WWD. "Nothing could be more natural than to expand these brands into restaurants where our readers and digital users can experience these brands in a new and exciting form.”

But why such a slow roll out? The possibilities here are endless! Take note, Si, because here are some ideas for some new places to get wasted that bear the Conde stamp of approval.

The Bon Appetit Wild Whiskey Tavern and Grilling Bar (Bardstown, Kentucky)

You know who loves drinking cocktails and grilling meat? Bon Appetit editor Adam Rapoport loves drinking cocktails and grilling meat. As long as his Twitter account isn't an imposter, it appears he spent the summer doing those two things exceptionally often. Why not deal with that pesky magazine thing later and open up a place where one can indulge in steak and spirits all the time? The Bon Appetit Wild Whiskey Tavern and Grilling Bar -- in Bardstown, Kentucky, bourbon capital of the world -- will allow him, and his like-minded colleagues, to do just that.

The Teen Vogue Totally Virgin Margarita Bar! ( King of Prussia Mall, Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania)

When you're 15, running around the mall shopping all day can get exhausting. Why not sit down and have a refreshing summery beverage? Everyone loves margaritas -- but don't worry, mom and dad, Conde Nast will make sure these drinks are completely booze-free. Located in the biggest mall in the east coast, The Teen Vogue Totally Virgin Margarita Bar! will sling a warm weather favorite to girls who want to relax, open up a magazine and discover new ways to trick boys with their wiles. Nail polish not included.

Architectural Digest Presents: Simply Kitchen (Westchester, New York)

Some restaurants have the most breathtaking interiors, featuring ceilings of cascading buttresses that burst out from all sides to create spectacular rooms in which to dine. But that's exactly the problem -- the food is too darn distracting. The brains at Conde Nast have the answer: What about an eatery with no food? Architectural Digest Presents: Simply Kitchen is a reprieve from the places that waste gorgeous design on starving patrons. With nothing to eat, you have to focus on how beautiful everything is. Don't you see? Don't you see how fucking beautiful this space is? It's fucking amazing, right? Plus, it works with any diet you might be on.

The Wired Experimental Hologram Food Laboratory (Cupertino, California)

The no-food Architectural Digest restaurant was a hit! Now, in California, those tech geniuses at Wired bring you another place where no actual eating is required. Instead, visitors sit at their silver-and-metal table (come to think of it, the whole place looks like a giant iPod) and after they order, holographic images of the food are beamed down onto their plates. The response on Twitter is ecstatic. Haven't you heard? People don't order their food to actually eat it anymore -- they just take a picture of their extravagant meal with Instagram, and load it onto their Tumblr so everyone can see.

Brides Presents: Bachelorette Pad (Las Vegas, Nevada)

When it comes to pre-wedding bashes, why does it still seem like guys have all the fun? Brides wants to let the ladies know that The Vegas is not just for the grooms-to-be anymore. Bachelorette Pad is a giant space inside the MGM Grand stocked with liquor, food and every kind of male stripper under the sun: firemen, policemen, lion tamers, teachers, lawyers, traders, hot thieves, everything. Whatever fantasy you might have, Brides provides it. But don't blame Conde when you can't remember a thing the next morning

There you go! See you at the grill, Mr. Rapoport. I'll bring the Stoli, you bring the steaks.

Ms. Frankel.

In April of this year, Bethenney Frankel sold her line of Skinnygirl liquor drinks to a large distributor for $120 million. Suddenly, she's no longer just a contestant on The Apprentice, or one of the Real Housewives of New York City -- she's a thriving mogul, a 21st century success story.

But things might not turn out, um, Bethenny Ever After. The New York Post reported today that Whole Foods will yank the Skinnygirl Margarita -- the brand's signature product -- from the sixteen stores that carried it. Turns out the thing could give everyone cancer. Yikes!

The drink -- which Frankel crows on her Web site is "the margarita you can trust" with "all natural ingredients" and "no preservatives" -- actually contains the preservative sodium benzoate, sources said.

Studies have found that the preservative can become carcinogenic if mixed with other substances such as vitamin C.

How could you do that to us, Bethenny, we say as we stomp out an early morning cigarette. We're never drinking Skinnygirl Margaritas again.

Cabs drove through the rain, too.

It rained Saturday night! The Wall Street Journal sent reporters to far-flung locales such as Long Island City and Crown Heights, where places decided to stay open despite the fake hurricane that, it turns out, never actually existed. Some barkeeps and deli owners thought, hey, a hurricane has never hit New York before. Maybe it'll just rain a little. Maybe I can make an extra buck. Maybe things will be OK.

And that's what happened! They might have gotten a little bit wet, but they did great business.

A Slice of New York in Times Square was doing a brisk business, probably thanks to cooped up tourists, but the candy store around the corner, on 44th and 9th Avenue, was not. That should change when a certain group of men and women return to their desks.

So in the end, things turned out to be fine or, for some people, better than fine.

On the Lower East Side Saturday, The Observer walked by a vigorous daytime rager at Epstein's, where Jerry Ferrera—Turtle on Entourage—and guys in lacrosse pinnies danced to the Black Eyed Peas for hours. Good for them. Later in the night, as the drizzling rain switched to bona-fide rain showers, we drank at Iggy's until they closed, prematurely, due to the city warnings.

No matter: there was a secret late-night party held at a beloved closet-sized French diner nearby, where the twenty people present went through bottle after bottle of red wine, the girls dancing on the bar to "Empire State of Mind" and other songs chosen from YouTube. A soccer match beamed from Europe played on the TV and no one watched. Orchard Street was eerily quiet otherwise, the opposite of most Saturdays, and as the night went on the party picked up more wet-haired stragglers, who gamely joined in on the loud impromptu hurricane party.

And it was a good one. The red wine poured as hard as the rain did, dancing kids knocked over tables, the night got later and later. A pack of cigarettes that was full was suddenly empty. And finally the whipping wind and downpouring rain subsided slowly to nothing as morning—and sun—soon came peeking out of the clouds.

We'll take a hurricane next week, too, please.