BY JOEY SWEENEY | In the same way that when you learn that Christmas was crafted to replace a formerly pagan season that had more of the same good vibes and none of the garbage, the pandemic has revealed all kinds of social compulsions we don’t actually need which have heretofore been hiding in plain sight. To wit: Most in-person meetings, working in an office ever, and even the fact that — could it be? — last call is what you make of it. 

At the moment of this writing — October 2020, Philadelphia, some portion of the way through a pandemic and other sets of unknowables — last call is 11pm at the sidewalk bars that most locales have converted themselves into, and back at 2am but at vastly diminished capacity for those bars that have elected to invite customers inside.

I’ll take the sidewalk, and the odd sensation (for me) of leaving a bar before midnight. Turns out, it’s delightful! As we now know, there is much to enjoy at home — there’s food! — and they always let you play your own records there. But the early last call, and why we have it, has also enhanced the experience of, you know, actually being at the bar as well. 

As the last few months have elapsed, corner bars have called up the kind of creativity that we used to have when we were all too young to drink legally. And the ones that have done it right have made that sidewalk a commons. At my local, the regulars have joined up with the owners and built a kind of improvised outpost that calls to mind beloved spots you’d see on travel programs of far flung lands that have never even had the passing fancy to isolate themselves the way Americans, up until now, have done.

And though there clearly remains a hardship for the barkeep with all of this shuffling around and half-steps, as a social construct, there’s something about an early last call that feels very old-world. In England, there’s been a famously strange arrangement as far as when drinking out of the home should cease, and it has lasted for centuries. Many pubs there still favor an 11pm last call to this day, with “all back to mine afterwards” just making good sense: After enough hours in the boozer, it is only right and natural to switch up locations — with a trip to the off-license on the way, of course.

Here in Philly (and presumably in plenty of other locales around the country), decades of burned-in folkways and pure habit have uprooted themselves and readjusted to what the moment demands. At my local, the window (aka the bar) opens at 3:30 in the afternoon. It closes at 11 at night, but really, usually starts breaking down an hour before. And all the life of the bar happens in this earlier abbreviated window. If it rains, I’m told, people just show up earlier and drink with greater purpose on the next permitting day. 

Almost as if by subconscious community agreement. Almost like there is something hard-wired into people that guides them to what they need from gathering. 

That’s one way to look at it. Another is this: The prisoner, in time, learns to love his cell.