Sign of the Whale
1825 M St. N.W.

I’ve heard that Sign of the Whale sells beer. I’ve been assured, by several sources, that this beer tastes like beer, and when consumed in large quantities, feels like beer. I have also been told that on several nights of the week, the M Street bar offers a comfortable building in which to drink beer.

I headed over to Sign of the Whale around 11 last Thursday night (universally accepted beer time), and even though I got to enter the bar, I didn’t get a chance to drink this beer. I’m not sure I even saw this beer. Because when I entered the bar last Thursday, standing in my way to the beer were about 200 scantily-clad pirates screaming and pushing their bodies together to the opening riffs of “Sweet Child ‘O Mine.”

No, I did not taste the beer at Sign of the Whale that night. I did, however, get the sneaking suspicion that the throngs of costumed frat boys and hangers-on impeding my path to the bar had drunk of this beer, and drunk heartily.

To be fair, I had brought this upon myself. I knew what I was getting into. When my friends invited me to tag along to the party, I wasn’t exactly sure how it would turn out, but I knew that it involved something called “PIKE,” and that the theme would be along the lines of “Swashbuckling Bros and Sea-Wench Hos.” But it was a frat party, and beer would be flowing like water. Right?

Wrong. There was certainly no grog in sight as I had to shiver-me-timbers for half an hour in the rain amid a mass of girls in low-cut corsets and glittery head-scarves, that special group of women convinced that in order to make any costume acceptable, it must be modified by the adjective “sexy.” (E.g. “sexy nurse,” “sexy schoolteacher,” or as one of my friends dressed as last Halloween, “sexy hotdog”). The bouncer, who wore a short-sleeved shirt and tie, called this group of people “ladies,” and treated us as such. “Alright, ladies,” he bellowed out to us from the top of the stairs, waving his arms to corral us away from Camelot. “Everybody’s gotta move this side of the stripper pole!”

When I finally entered the bar and saw the wreckage – something rivaled only by a soft-core porn convention, lost at sea – I saw that I wasn’t the only one who felt out of place. Sitting at the edge of the bar was a bespectacled older man, who I can only imagine was having a quiet drink in front of a playoff game when 200 drunk, nubile pirates waded in. The pirates didn’t scare him off, apparently, and he stayed stuck to his barstool well into the party, a look of shock and awe plastered across his face. Of course, these weren’t just any pirates. These were sexy pirates.

Let us, for a moment, overlook that the pirate theme is, at this point, a bit played-out. Let us even, for argument’s sake, turn a blind eye to the fact that a public group make-out session to the wails of Axl Rose in a midtown bar in Washington, D.C. is one of the least pirate-like scenes imaginable – I’m pretty sure pirates don’t troll for that kind of booty. But isn’t alcohol – along, possibly, with scurvy – something that frat boys and pirates have in common? Isn’t that, for Bluebeard’s sake, the one thing they should have gotten right?

Maybe Sign of the Whale sans fraternity party is an alright place. But, as I left the bar, searching down M Street for a more landlubber-friendly drinking hole, I couldn’t help but think, as the sexy sounds of the pirates faded into the distance: “ARRrrgg!”