Sherri Cavan's LIQUOR LICENSE - Standing Patterns of Behavior - Permissible Behavior and Normal Trouble

4. Permissible Behavior and Normal Trouble

If the openness of patrons and their encounters in the public drinking place and the circumscription of those encounters in time and space give a tentative and superficial character to bar sociability, they also permit a latitude of behavior typically greater than that permitted in many other public settings. [72] The public drinking place is often treated as a setting where a variety of self-indulgent and otherwise improper acts can be engaged in, Insofar as one is freed from any expectations of deference within the public drinking place, one is freed of many of the converse expectations of demeanor as well.[73] What goes on in the bar is localized in time and place, and one need not anticipate being held accountable for one's conduct at some later time or in some other setting. As a result, behavior which is either permissible or constitutes no more than normal trouble in the bar encompasses a broad range of activities that are often open to sanction in other, more serious public settings.

A variety of scenes and spectacles can ensue in public drinking places without penalty for those involved. Short of physical violence, little will provoke sanction from either management or other patrons, and even acts of violence, if short and quickly over, may be virtually ignored once they have happened. The following incident, from a bar patronized primarily by young middle-class people, provides an extreme example of the social sang froid of the public drinking place.

A young man and a young woman, had been sitting together chatting and occasionally dancing for about an hour and a half. Suddenly the man hit the girl in the face, knocking her from the bar stool onto the floor. The general hum of conversation that had been going on among the eight or ten people in the bar stopped for about thirty seconds, during which time the man walked out. No one made any attempt to stop him. One patron quite casually went over to the girl to help her up and the bartender held out a damp towel for her to put to her face. The rest of the patrons went back to their conversations as though nothing had happened. The girl got up, said something to the bartender, and then went to the bathroom. She came out, about ten Ininutes later, her face back in order, and sat down at the bar, where she remained for about fifteen minutes longer, No one made any further comment on the scene. After she had left, P.C. asked one of the patrons sitting next to him about it and was told, "They've been living together for months. That happens all the time."

Quarrels of varying intensity between patrons, which sometimes almost routine events in public drinking places, may be casually attended to by other patrons or virtually ignored, But in either case there is typically little sense of impropriety accorded to the behavior of those involved.

A couple in their late forties who had been chatting with another couple at the far end of the bar sud-

denly burst into an argument that was audible throughout the bar. Neither of the bartenders nor any of the other patrons seated around the bar appeared bothered by their disturbance, and the six or seven patrons seated around the piano bar continued singing, without even glancing over at them.

Wives who enter in search of errant husbands may be accorded the tacit right to vent their anger there and then and treat the public drinking place as if it were no different from their own home.

Three men came in and had two rounds when the wife of one of them entered, visibly upset, and began yelling very loudly, "I don't care for all this and you know that. Drinking and running around." She continued haranguing him for five or ten minutes and then left. There were five other patrons in the bar at the time, but no one even glanced over at the disputants.

Sometimes an attempt is made to minimize the offense or embarassment such scenes might provide for the patrons not involved. But typically this is done in a way that does not infringe on the right of those involved to carry on their altercation as they see fit. Thus activities handled in unequivocal terms in most settings may, in the public drinking place, be treated with a tact and finesse that seem unwarranted by their nature.

A man at the far end of the bar said something to the woman he was with and she began yelling, "You have no right to call me that. I'll have your ass thrown out of here. I'll have you strung up." He responded in kind with the same volume, and the quarrel continued between them for about ten minutes. In the beginning none of the other patrons paid any attention to them and the bartender continued chatting with one of the other patrons. But after a while some

of the patrons started glancing down at them and lookina a bit uncomfortable. When this began to happen, the bartender went over and started the juke box, turning the volume up to mask their voices. When new patrons came in the bartender would indicate for them to sit away from the two, who sporadically continued their quarrel for over an hour.
There were thirteen people in the bar, a generally "refined" middle-class establishment. A woman in her forties, apparently very drunk, and her escort were arguing. Her voice began to get louder and louder, and then she demanded another beer. Ralph, the bartender, said to her, very quietly, that he wouldn't serve her. Then she became angry and yelled, "I've been his common law wife for two and a half years and he wants to go across the street for a piece of pussy"
Ralph tried to ignore them, but she kept shrieking angrily at her escort. Finally the bartender went down to them and said to her escort, "Hank, take her out of here." The woman said that she would not go and screamed at Hank, "Why don't you fuck him [Ralph]." Ralph then went and turned the juke box volume up very loud, to cover their voices. He seemed very tense and one of the other women at the bar asked him if he wanted to play poker dice for the joke box with her. She won and he said, "Play anything, just as long as it's loud."
He went down to the woman again to talk to her, but whatever he said was covered by the music from the Juke box. Soon thereafter her escort left, after first trying to pull her with him. Ralph then came down to where the majority of the other patrons were seated and tried to make a joke out of it, saying to one man, "Why don't you take old red-nose down there to some other bar for me. Do a bartender a favor." He repeated this two more times down the bar, changing the destination to a well-known, very elegant down-town bar.
When he went back to the woman she yelled at

him "If you want me to leave, call the police, call the Police!" Ralph came back down the bar, shaking his head, and she finally left about ten minutes later.

The mutual involvement exhibited in displays of affection is equally permissible within the public drinking place. Although dark and secluded booths may provide areas where patrons can neck and pet unnoticed, such activity is not necessarily confined to unobservable regions but may be carried on in full view of all others present. It is not unusual to see couples dancing in close bodily contact or women sitting on the laps of their companions along the bar, nor is there a sense of impropriety associated with couples seated along the bar holding hands, resting their heads on one another's shoulders, hugging or kissing or occasionally fondling one another in even more intimate ways.

A couple in their mid-thirties were sitting along the bar, just to the right of me. They had been talking softly and holding hands when we got there, but soon he was fondling her breasts and kissing her--all quite openly.

An exception to the acceptability of displays of affection in public drinking places is found most notably in homosexual
bars. This is apparently not because it is an affront to the others present, but rather the sex of those involved provides
legal grounds for the revocation of the establishment's license. Thus while the court may rule that regardless of whether they are heterosexual or homosexual in nature, "any public display which manifests sexual desires . . . may be and historically has been suppressed and regulated in a moral society,"[74] in actual practice the legal suppression and regulation of such activity in public drinking places is typically encountered only in homosexual bars. Quite obviously this does not mean that

there are no displays of affection in homosexual bars, but only that, in the interest of protecting the license of the establishment, management and patrons alike may actively attempt to control or conceal such activity if the likelihood of official discovery is great.
Like unnioderated mutual involvement, a variety of social faux-pas may be committed with equanimity in the public drinking place. Patrons may belch, stumble, fall asleep, or fall off bar stools, and such activity is routinely accorded the same status as more socially acceptable activity. In one establishment, the bartender attempted to gently rouse a patron who had fallen asleep with his head and arms on the bar. When the bartender's efforts were unsuccessful, the patron was left to sleep quietly and without further comment on him or his activity. Finally, at closing time, he was aroused and accorded the same "Good night" as the other patrons who had been more actively attuned to the situation at hand. This is not to say that social mishaps may not serve as the basis for remarks. Almost any aspect of the passing scene may provide an item to be commented upon. But when remarks are made about such activities, they characteristically do not carry with them any negative evaluation of either the activity or the situational presence of the actor in question. In an elegant and well-known hotel bar one afternoon, a woman (seated at one of the tables with three companions) had been laughing for an extended period of time in a very shrill and audible manner. A man standing near me siniled and said rather pleasantly, "She sounds like she's having a good time."[75]
Overindulgence and a variety of activities typically char. acterized as effects of overindulgence, such as loss of motor

control, excessive depression or elation, often carry little disapprobation in the public drinking place.[76]

A man in his late fifties, rather disheveled in appearance and quite apparently drunk, had been stumbling from one end of the bar to the other. Eventually he and another man who also appeared somewhat drunk began playing the bowling machine. Their game progressed in a slow and exaggerated manner. with a number of mishaps, such as dropping the ball and falling over the machine. There were others waiting to play, but no one interfered with their game. Finally the second man wandered off and the first man began asking some of the patrons standing around the machine to finish the game with him. When they declined he would offer to buy them a drink if they would play with him, and although no one complied, no one appeared offended by his actions or disturbed by his state.

Collin, one of the patrons seated at the bar, was visibly intoxicated, his body loose and somewhat out of control and his words loud and slurred. Whenever the bartender came down to where he was seated, Collin would engage in an elaborate pantomime of pouring a drink into his glass from a bottle which he had in the pocket of his jacket, and then demanded in a very loud voice that the bartender fill his glass for him. The bartender and the woman seated one stool away from him would play along with him. Occasionally, when he began to fall from his stool toward the woman, she would gently prop him up again. When she noticed me looking over at him she smiled and said, as though no further explanation for his behavior were necessary, "Collin's on vacation."

One of the men who could barely stand continued making the rounds of the women seated at the tables, asking them to dance. Some of the women would refuse him (as they would refuse some of the other men who evinced better motor control), but others would accept and go out on the dance floor with him.

Like overindulgence, other activities which in other settings might be considered demeaning may be treated in public drinking places as nothing more than "good, clean fun." In a crowded night spot, a portly gentleman got up on the stage one evening to dance with the young entertainers. Foregoing the customary movements of the dance, he simply strode around the entertainers on the stage and occasionally fifted his stomach with a heaving movement and smiled at the audience. At the end of his "number" he received a round of applause from the audience. In the same establishment on another occasion, the same indulgent treatment was accorded an attractive matron who got up on the stage and engaged in a mock strip tease before over two hundred patrons. In an, other bar, a patron who began to sing along with the guitar players in a rather thin and quavering voice received such a tremendous ovation from the other patrons that she went on with two encores, each of which was treated with the same apparent appreciation as her first attempt.
Not only may such rolereleases be pleasurable to those who engage in them, but they may, in turn, be pleasurable for others to view. During the course of the study, one public drinking place which features a strip show instigated a policy by which one evening a week was to be "amateur night" when housewives, teachers, nurses, sales clerks and secretaries could be strippers for the evening at least. This amateur night became one of the most popular features of the establishment. Indecorous conduct that might bring forth rather formidable sanctions outside the bar may pass without note inside the bar, as in the following example:

There were about nineteen people in the bar. A couple in their late thirties were dancing in the middle of the room. The woman began to posture in a mock-seductive way in front of the males along the bar, pulling her dress up above her stocking tops and the like, occasionally saying in an unserious tone of voice, "Oooo, aren't we awful!" But no one paid much attention to her.

In the same sense, not only is verbal contact between unacquainted males and females permissible in public drinking places but bodily contact is permissible as well. A woman in a public drinking place who finds a strange man's arm arolad her shoulder has little basis for expressing the kind of moral indignation she could express at the same conduct outside the bar; hence such behavior may be virtually ignored.
The limits on the range of behavior permissible in bars does, to a certain extent, vary from establishment to establishment, and this variation may constitute one dimension of the commonsense differentiation of types of public drinking places. There are some bars in which potential patrons may be refused admittance on the basis of improper dress, be ejected on the basis of using improper language, or, if need be, be turned over to the police if they act in an annoying manner. But there are other bars in which dress, language, or exacerbation may go virtually unnoticed. Knowledge of the actual range of permissible behavior in any given establishment provides the potential patron with information usable not only for determining the courses of action open to him within the establishment, but also as a guide to inform him of what he can expect on the part of others and how he is expected to respond to their course of activity.
Beyond the localization of encounters in time and space, additional support for the wide range of behavior permissible
within the public drinking place is supplied by certain features of the physical milieu. With very few exceptions, the interior

of the public drinking place is at least obscured and is often completely shielded from the view of those outside the premises. The events within are thus exempted from any casual monitoring by nonparticipants. The street windows of bars are customarily painted, heavily curtained, or completely absent, and the door in most circumstances remains closed. For passersby, casual observation of the happenings inside is virtually impossible. Anyone wishing to view the scene within must make his presence known to those who are there by at least partially, and often completely, entering the premises. Since the public drinking place is shielded from casual observation, there is little likelihood that those within or their activity will inadvertently become a matter of public knowledge. Hence, behavior need not be geared to the expectations governi g the proprieties of public places that are more open to view.
Like the shielding of the interior from the street, the customary minimal illumination of the public drinking place also lends support to the range of behavior permissible within the setting by creating an atmosphere of perpetual nighttime within the bar and providing a protective covering of semi-darkness for those who populate its interior. The differences in the proprieties governing daytime and nighttime behavior are effectively abridged and the visibility of one's activity is diminished. At the same time, part of the night atmosphere maintained in the public drinking place may be in deference to a more general expectation governing behavior--that drinking is more appropriate to the evening hours than to daylight and that evening behavior may be, if not more licentious, at least looser than daytime behavior.[77]

Where the public drinking place is contained as a subsetting within a larger setting, there may be variation in the extent to which its physical milieu supports a latitude of behavior greater than that permitted in the encompassing setting. When the bar is structurally separated by walls and doors from the setting within which it is contained--as is generally the case of bars located in transportation terminals and hotels and frequently the case of bars located in restaurants-- the range of behavior permissible in the establishment may be identical with that in public drinking places that are structurally free-standing. However, even when the separation between the encompassing setting and the subsetting is almost complete, the larger setting may impart a special flavor to the pubilic drinking places contained within it. Hotel bars, for example, are often characterized as "notorious pickup bars" (although in fact not all of them are used primarily in this way), presumably because of their location within the encompassing setting. The "moral holiday," as Hayner characterizes hotel behavior,[78] may be automatically applied to the subsetting as well.
In some public drinking places that are only partially or conventionally separated from the encompassing setting, the effective visibility of the behavior of the patrons of the subsetting may be reduced. Where full structural separation is absent, the maintenance of different degrees of illumination in the two settings is one of the prevalent means used to visually shield the bar from its surroundings. When the bar area is made substantially darker than the encompassing setting, not only is the night atmosphere of the public drinking place maintained, but the events that take place there are less visible to those present in the larger setting, although they may still

be audible. Shimilarly, contained bars may be partially separated from a larger setting by partitions that expose no more than the legs and feet of those present.
When the structural separation between the two settings is not complete, the latitude of behavior is often less than in bars that are selfcontained, particularly during the times when the encompassing setting is in use. In such situations, extensive mutual involvement of either an argumentative or an affectionate nature, as well as conduct which could be demeaning or indecorous in the encompassing setting, may be curtailed for a number of reasons.
In the first place, patrons may not care to display the gamut of behavior fitting in the public drinking place before others not similarly engaged.
The definition of the subsetting as a public drinking place may of course imply that whatever is routinely expected within that setting is exempt from invidious comparison with what is fitting and proper in other settings. Even those who are not involved may be expected to treat events occurring in a bar as no less than the orderly and comprehensible behavior associated with such a setting. However, those outside but viewing the events within may not pay the respect to the setting that they should pay. Those who view the public drinking place as questionable, may, when they discover themselVes sharing the encompassing premises, feel justified in displaying disdain for events in the subsetting and for the patrons in it. For these outsiders, the bar (as well as those who patronize it and their activities) may be beyond the boundaries of def. erence. For others whose opinion of the public drinking place as a conventional setting is less critical, their knowledge of the standing patterns of behavior associated with bars may be summary and incomplete. Hence in good faith they may take the behavior which they see as inappropriate to what they believe should take place within the setting. Thus the second curtailing factor affecting bar behavior is the possibility

that those not involved may negatively evaluate the activity permissible to those who are involved, creating a source of possible embarrassment for the latter and restraining their activities accordingly.
Finally, setting deference and embarrassment may flow in the other direction as well. Those in a public drinking place may curtail the activities permissible to them because, although such activities may be appropriate within the subsetting, their nature may be such that they might disrupt the behavior patterns of the larger setting or embarrass those in the larger setting who are attuned to a different set of proprieties.

Biographies

In addition to the broader range of activities which can be treated as proper and fitting in the public drinking place, the localization of bar encounters in time and space may permit patrons to sever themselves from their biographies in a number of ways. This feature is general to public drinking places whether they are structurally self-contained or are a subsetting within some larger conventional setting.[79]
Since the operative rules merely restrict patronage to those who have reached legal drinking age, one need carry with him only those identity papers that establish his date of birth, and even these papers need not be shown unless his age is called into question by the management. Whatever the other chat-

acteristics of the patron's social identity, there is typically no call for them to be publicly proclaimed, If names are exchanged between interactants, they are typically given without benefit of surname. One's work rarely serves as a topic of conversation, and as a general rule, aspects of social position outside the bar carry little significance for those within the bar. Ideological commitment need not be declared, because issues of politics and religion generally are defined as outside the range of acceptable subject matter for bar discourse. Unless one imports his companions with him into the setting, to a great extent one can cut himself off within the bar from whatever rightful past, present, or future he has outside the bar.
At the same time, insofar as one's rightful biography need never be brought out in the bar, and insofar as one can ex. pect that exchanges therein will rarely if ever subject one to encounters outside the bar, the patron is also at liberty to prefabricate an entire life for himself with little likelihood that it will later be exposed as a sham. Thus the patrons of the public drinking place can be people whose biographies are more socially satisfactory, more exciting, or more exotic than they could be in settings where more extensive and verifiable biographies are a requirement for entrance, or settings where encounters carry with them an obligation that present relationships be maintained or at least acknowledged at some future time or in some other place. This is not to say that within the bar no biographies with a factual referent ever exist, but only that within the bar biographies without a factual referent may very easily exist.
In part, the new bif)graphies that can be spun for one's duration within the bar are typically limited only by the ex. tent to which one can provide a coherent, internally consistent presentation of self. Thus the very homely young woman may be unable to claim to be a high-priced model if her physical appearance would itself invalidate the claim, although the

range of other biographical material--literary agent, vocalist, heiress--which she can put forth may be quite extensive. As one bar patron stated,

In a bar you can make all kinds of claims about yourself--just as long as you use enough sense not to say things that whoever you're talking to can see through immediately. I mean if I told you I was a writer you'd probably know right away that it was a lie because my English just isn't very good. But if I told you that I raced sports cars and then started telling you about cars and racing and the like I could probably snow you and you'd never know the difference.

But at the same time, there is a tacit agreement among bar patrons that a certain amount of contradictory biographical material will be ignored, so in fact bar patrons need not put too much effort into attempting to maintain a consistent line during the course of any encounter.

Seven of us (who were unacquainted outside the bar) were sitting around one of the tables for almost two and a half hours. During this time Steve told us he was unemployed, that he was considering going to work for a stock brokerage firm, that he was working in some sort of management trainee program, that he had never been abroad, and that he found you could make out better in Italy than in other European countries. The contradictions apparently bothered no one, and even though he was making himself somewhat objectionable on other grounds--specifically in his advances to one of the other meWs female companion--no one called him down.

Thus while the number of former celebrities and people of note who may populate any given bar at any time may be far out of proportion to the number that actually exist outside the bar, little attention is paid to this discrepancy. Since the creation of biographies in public drinking places

is so inexpensive, as a general rule any biographical claims that are made are typically taken with a grain of salt by those to whom they are presented. When a patron is claiming a biography that is rightfully his, he may find that his statements are held in doubt and credit is not being given where it is due.

Henry said, "I used to be a logger. I don't care if you believe me or not, but it's true."
Every time Fred made a statement about himself either to me or to Gil, who had joined us somewhat later, he would pull out some kind of paper from his wallet in an attempt to document it. He pointed out very carefully that on his driver's license it was stated he was not married, showed a wage receipt as evidence that he did in fact work at a hospital, and he looked for almost five minutes for a seaman's passport. When he found it, he stated very pointedly, "You just can't buy these, you know!"[80]

While the patrons of public drinking places can exist without a valid biography (or without any biography at all) with respect to their lives in the outside world, some who patronize any given establishment regularly may create or have created for them a kind of biographical reputation within the bar. Regular patrons of a bar may find their presence and their activities within the bar being strung together in a kind of narrative, eventually to be read, as a statement attesting to the kind of person they are. Sometimes this biography is localized a only within the bar, but sometimes it contains imputations of more generalized attributes.
Those whose bar biography is localized to the bar itself

form the general category of "bar characters" of which at least one instance may be found in almost every establishment. Their "character" status may be vested in them either by other patrons or by the employees of the establishment, or by both. They themselves may never be made aware of the fact that they have any special reputation within the bar.

The bartender and I had been talking for about half an hour when a couple came in. The woman sat down at the comer booth and the man ordered drinks for the two of them at the bar and carried them to the booth. The bartender nodded to them and said to me, "There's the lovers." When I asked him what he meant, he went on to say that they came in together every Friday after work, sat in the same booth, ordered the same drink, and always left by six o'clock. He went on to say that he and the waiter "kind of think they're carrying on an affair, but of course We've never said anything to them."
One of the patrons pointed an old man out to me and said, "He's the character of this place. He comes in here every night, orders a pitcher of beer, takes it to the same place down there, and drinks the whole thing. . . . No, he never talks to anyone, just takes his pitcher of beer over there and drinks it down."

The apparent scheduled regularity of bar behavior is probably the most frequent basis for according bar character status to a patron. However, this regularity must include more than mere regularity of patronage; the patron's bar behavior must be in some way more broadly predictable. Merely to come in at the same time each day is not sufficient to maintain bar character status. Once inside, there must be no such variation in behavior as talking to the bartender one day and to another patron another day, or playing one song on the juke box one day and another the next time. Thus, while the bar character whose status is predicted on regularity may be indicated by

the statement, "There he is, same time, same place, same drink," the statement carries the implication that everything else he will do in the bar will be similar to everything else he did last time and the time before, and that he can be counted on to enact the same repertoire of behavior in the future.
In establishments where such a bar character is among the clientele, recognized by bartender and patrons alike, he may form the basis of an ongoing joke between the bartender and the patrons. The time just before his arrival may be noted by the bartender or a patron, who may say something like, "Well, just about time for the mechanical man to arrive"; and the bartender may say to him as he leaves, with apparent sincerity, "See you again tomorrow," while he smiles at the patrons still seated at the bar and they grin at one another.[81]
The category of bar characters is not exhausted by the mechanical patron. It may also include those made notable by other types of activities, and sexuality, luck, generosity, pugnacity, wit, and special knowledge may all be used as the basis for defining the bar character. Patrons may come to be labeled "the guy who always makes out with the chicks," "the big spender," "Arnie, who always has a bag of jokes," and the like. However, whether any particular bar character is to be treated as a hero, villain, or fool is to a great extent dependent upon the ethos of the particular establishment. The Don Juan who may be the hero of a pickup bar may be viewed as the fool, or more likely the villain, of the home territory bar where sexual accessibility is held in abeyance.
In contradistinction to the bar character whose bar biography is localized to the establishment itself, patrons may also be invested with a biography that is based on their patronage but that carries with it implications of a character or way of life which exists outside the bar. Thus, for example, a woman

who patronizes the same establishment regularly but arrives each time with a different male escort may eventually become known by others in the establishment as a "loose woman," even though her deportment within the bar is above question.[82]
Similarly, where there is a common set of biographical attributes shared by most of the patrons of an establishment, the same set of attributes may be attributed to others who patronize the bar and to those who work there as well. In one homosexual bar which I patronized on a regular basis during the course of the study, I was introduced to the co-owner one night and informed that his wife was "a gay girl like you." In a skid-row bar where I worked for a while as a barmaid, customers would frequently ask me how long ago my husband ran off, apparently in an attempt to establish the nature of the crisis which could account for my present situation. In establishments where the clientele was generally "respectable," when I would arrive alone I would frequently be asked how long I had been in the city, the apparent implication of the question being that the only reason I was there alone was that I knew no one to accompany me.
In general, the rightful biographies of patrons in public drinking places can be held private, so that they are nobody else's business, or they can be created fictitiously on the spot

out of almost nothing. In either case, one's existence outside the bar may be made discontinuous with his existence inside the bar, and whatever he could be held accountable for by virtue of a verifiable, rightful biography can be ignored in the public drinking place. And while within the bar one can be vested with a reputation of one sort or another, the characteristic feature of these bar-created reputations is that they have no consequences outside the public drinking place; they are either irrelevant to one~s life or discreetly treated as non-existent. Thus the events that take place within the public drinking place may become an item in the patrons diary, although not necessarily an item in his biography. The distinction between biography and diary here rests upon what is taken to constitute a "biographical fact." Goffman writes of biographies:

Anything and everything an individual has done and can actually do is understood to be containable within his biography ... even if we have to hire a biography specialist, a private detective, to fill in the missing facts and connect the discovered ones for
us.[83]

However, although the totality of an individual's life may be containable within his biography, there is clearly a selective process which takes place, transforming some parts of his life into biographical facts and other parts into irrelevancies. The diary, unlike the biography, may contain the biographical facts and the trivia as well. The retrospective construction of biographies may thus include a procedure of resorting, whereby information which was once contained only in the diary becomes information which is contained in both. But insofar as it can be assumed that what takes place within the bar is not

to be treated in the same way as are events of serious life, it can also be assumed that behavior within the setting will be exempt from the resorting procedure. Hence the conduct of patrons within the bar need not be geared toward the anticipation of its possible biographical consequences.

[72] Woodard notes that dalliance and irresponsible enjoyment may well ensue in settings where the importance of continuing interaction is low and when conflicting interests are low. (James Woodard, "rhe Role of Fictions in Cultural Organizations," Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series 11, 6 [June, 1944] pp. 311-344, p. 326.) What takes place in the public drinking place, however, may be "allow-able" only insofar as no one present feels he has the right or is willing to take the responsibility for sanctioning it. in this sense, what is treated here as latitude of behavior may in fact be normal trouble.

[73] Cf. Erving Goffman, "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor," American Anthropologist, 58 (1956), pp. 473-502.

[74] San Francisco Chronicle, January 21, 1960

[75] The rule applicable in other public settings is found in Esquire Magazine, The New Esquire Etiquette (New York: 1. B. Lippincott Co., 1959), p. 285: "In public the best manners are the quietest. Jory not to attract attention to yourself or to your friends. you woulcWt commit the high school offense of loud talk and laughter in public."

[76] The question of poise is in this sense held in abeyance, and hence any embarrassment that might ensue from the loss of poise is out of the question. See Edward Gross and Gregory P. Stone, "Embarrassment and the Analysis of Role Requirements," American Journal of Sociology, 70 (1964)9 pp. 1-15; and Erving Goffman, "Embarrassment and Social Organization," American Journal of Sociology, 62 (1956), pp. 264-271.

[77] As de Grazia notes, "Evening has always beenone of the most faithful friends of free time. . . . Free-time activities may play on the edge of morality. Work has restraints that men react against; living in society involves restraints, too. Like petting, You might say, free-time activities sometimes have to fall on that narrow strip where fun exists and morality maintains a border in the law and the mores broadly conceived in their letter, spirit, application, history or anthropology." Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1964), pp. 108, 404.

[78] Norman H. Hayner, The Hotel (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), pp. 154-176.

[79] Like pleasure cruises and carnivals, vacation resorts also have a time-out aura about them like the public drinking place- Of such resorts in the Catskills, David Boroff writes, "For a minority of guests, the week at the resort is an exercise in role-playing. Released from the small Bronx apartment and engulfed in a more spacious life, the salesman sometimes becomes a sales manager, the small retailer a chain-store magnate, and the stenographer an executive secretary." David Boroff, "The Catskills: Still Having a Wonderful Time," Harper's Magazine (July, 1958), p. 59.

[80] The provision of "concrete evidence," of course, need not be c limited to the establishment of biographies with a factual referent. It may in fact be put out in an attempt to substantiate a "line." Cf. Margaret Chandler, The Social Organization of Workers in a Rooming House Area (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1948), p. 60.

[81] Cf. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre Monograph No. 2, 1958), pp. 112-113, on team collusion.

[82] This possibility may account for the fact that single women, more than their married counterparts and more than males of either marital status, tend to be "bar-drifters," who frequent a variety of bars rather than one place in particular. In San Francisco, of those respond-ents who patronized public drinking places, 43 per cent of the unmarried men stated that they had a regular bar to which they went half the time or more, compared with 37 per cent of the married men, while only 26 per cent of the unmarried women had a regular bar, compared with 35 per cent of the married women. Alternatively, however, it may be that the single woman roams the terrain of public drinking places in the company of unmarried men, who are very likely to take her to their own regular bar, and hence she changes the locale in which she drinks as she changes her escort. (Details on the sample are found in Sherri Cavan, social Interaction in Public Drinking Places [unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1965], footnote 68, Chapter 2.)

[83] Erving Goffman, Stigma (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, rnc., 1963), pp. 62-63. Emphasis added.

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