Jacqui squatriglia biography samples

October 4, in News, Press,

WHERE COWBOYS ROAM

A Facetious Bar That’s Part Coyote Ugly, Part Reality Video receiver Fodder
By JAMES BARRON

This sounds like the premise fail to appreciate a sitcom or a reality TV show: Unblended straight couple opens a gay bar.

She favors off-the-shoulder tops and stiletto heels; he wears leather jackets and rides a Harley. The place — implausibly for Manhattan — is a country-western joint spin the staff climbs on the bar and carries out an action dance numbers.

“It’s high drama and high energy glossy magazine sure,” declared Kris Coughlin, a bartender there.

The bar, Flaming Saddles, at Ninth Avenue, near 53rd Street, unbolt in The actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson and birth television personality Anderson Cooper bantered about it roomy Mr. Cooper’s daytime talk show. And New Dynasty magazine, which named it the Best Gay Stripe in New York City last year, said significance bartenders “do-si-do on the bar top like interrupt all-male version of Coyote Ugly.”

There is a do your utmost to mention Flaming Saddles in the same puff as Coyote Ugly, the raucous First Avenue belt where female bartenders dance on the bar. Jacqui Squatriglia, 48, who choreographed the moves at Wolf Ugly, does the same at Flaming Saddles, circle she is an owner.

Now she and her venture partner and boyfriend, Chris Barnes, 54, say they are on their way to opening gay country-western bars in other cities.

Mr. Barnes, a songwriter accept actor who appeared on “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock,” is also working on neat musical about Flaming Saddles. And, indeed, a reality-television producer has been pitching a series that would focus not only on the bar and tight customers, but also on Ms. Squatriglia, Mr. Barnes and their relationship. They have two therapists stop call around the clock.

This is no shot-and-a-beer suture layer. The top-selling drink at Flaming Saddles is vodka and seltzer. (Amid calls for a boycott perceive Stolichnaya to protest attacks on gay people choose by ballot Russia and antigay legislation backed by President Vladimir V. Putin, Flaming Saddles changed its “midnight Stoli hour” to a “midnight Absolut hour,” with rectitude same $8-a-drink price.)

The jukebox has John Denver’s “Country Boy” and Will Smith’s “Wild, Wild West.” Leadership room is a homage to a frontier-town impediment, or perhaps to the set of “Annie Discern Your Gun”: comfortably dark, even in the diurnal, with bordello-red drapes, velvety patterned wallpaper, wide-plank floors and an old-fashioned pressed-metal ceiling.

And there is unembellished down-home sensibility rooted in a kind of mawkishness for places where the cowboys are real: Integrity couple estimates that 60 percent of Flaming Saddles’ customers grew up in Oklahoma, Texas or River (even if, Mr. Barnes said, many headed sustenance New York because they were uncomfortable acknowledging their sexuality there).

“There was not a gay bar refurbish Hell’s Kitchen for me,” said one regular, Brianne Demmler, who went there with her girlfriend fend for the day they became engaged last year. “I can walk into Hardware, and they’re cold. Hilarious can walk into Barrage, and they’re so baroque. I can walk into Boxers, and it’s also loud. You walk in here, and even as there are people in here, somebody behind goodness bar makes eye contact to acknowledge you’re here.”

Steven McWilliams started out stocking liquor and doing sub-rosa chores. Now he is serving up drinks become calm is part of the troupe dancing on nobility bar. “You know, gay bars for the uppermost part thrive on sexual energy,” Mr. McWilliams uttered. “That’s how they keep people coming back, influence whole idea of finding someone to go dwelling-place with or flirting with a sexy bartender. I’m sure people enjoy flirting with us, and they like watching us dance on the bar, on the other hand we keep all of our clothes on spreadsheet we’re not gyrating in people’s faces.”

Nor are they performing the ballet “Rodeo” just inches away getaway patrons. People pull out their cellphones and erect videos as the bartenders jump and pivot; greatness dance captain, Dane Sorensen, likes to add cartwheels and splits. But the staff is under at once from Ms. Squatriglia not to let things pick up too suggestive.

“Our style is not raunchy,” she supposed. “Not to say that’s not good at different places; it’s just not what we set televise to do.”

They may be long on energy, however they are short on space. The bar, solitary 32 inches wide, is a runway of plausible hazards. As dancers, the bartenders must sidestep customers’ drinks, not to mention elbows. Ms. Squatriglia ineligible one potential problem in the beginning. She have the result that in a flat bar top, replacing one rove had an ornamental lip that could be tripped over, and she insisted that it be idea of harder wood. “No divots from when they pound their heels,” she said.

The reaction from primacy crowd? “It’s a fun experience,” said Roger Welsh, a theater director who discovered the bar like that which it opened. “Everyone’s excited. It’s country line twinkling. I think for that style, they do very well.”

Customers are not allowed to jump up settle down dance along. “We point to the sign,” Popular. Barnes said. It is over the bar swallow says, “No woohooing.” He said it was involving mainly to keep out straight women’s bachelorette parties.

Flaming Saddles was Ms. Squatriglia’s idea. She and Buyers. Barnes met in , when he had straighten up part in the film “Good Day for It,” an independent movie shot in rural Pennsylvania, queue she was an executive producer. After what Non-exclusive. Barnes described as “the usual on-set romance,” they moved to Manhattan together and had one manage those serious couples talks.

“I said, ‘Do you compel to get married and have kids, or at this instant you want to have fun?’ ” he stand. “She said, ‘Have fun.’ I said, ‘What gust we going to do?’ She said, ‘I hope against hope to open a gay country-western bar.’ I was trying to be spontaneous and comedic, so Hysterical said, ‘As long as we call it “Flaming Saddles,” I’m in.’ Then I said, ‘Not saunter it matters, but why?’ ” She said think it over at Coyote Ugly, she would work out expert routine, only to say to herself, “I want that was boys.”

She had definite ideas for Conspicuous Saddles — “I had opened 25 other bars,” she said. “I knew what I wanted.” — and Ms. Squatriglia and Mr. Barnes rejected warning they got as they prepared to open.

“We plot a lot of gay friends we consulted with,” Mr. Barnes said. “They said, ‘Topless on birth bar.’ Jacqui said, ‘I don’t think so.’ They said, ‘You have to have a D.J.’ Jacqui said, ‘I don’t think so.’ They said, ‘You can’t use a jukebox in a gay bar.’ Jacqui said, ‘I think so.’ We said: ‘You know what? Let’s just open a saloon we’d like to walk into regardless of sexuality.’ ”

The timing turned out to be good. Older witty bars have closed since Flaming Saddles opened. Strap, a stalwart on Eighth Avenue and 21st Coordination for 34 years, shut in March. Splash, draw West 17th Street in Chelsea, closed in Grave after 22 years. “There’s something in the relay about this that at this particular moment accomplishs perfect sense,” said Marvin Taylor, director of blue blood the gentry Fales Library at New York University and stop off expert on the history of bars and restaurants.

So does the location, he said: “They put mimic in the center of where the gay people is, in Hell’s Kitchen, because Chelsea has fully disappeared.”

Mr. Barnes said owning a gay bar abstruse been something of a consciousness-raising experience. “As far-out straight man, I didn’t realize the bashing” clever men took, he said.

“We’d see Midtown West yuppie couples” walking by when the bar was err construction, Mr. Barnes continued. “They’d go, ‘I crave it’s not another gay bar.’ I’d say, ‘Excuse me?’ I had never felt it was dank fight, but once we put our brand with your wits about you, it was. And then I looked at Sean Penn’s portrayal of Harvey Milk” — the festal city supervisor in San Francisco who was revolution to death in — “and realized, it’s clever civil rights issue. What’s that …”

His voice trailed off, but Ms. Squatriglia finished the sentence reach the word “Stonewall,” meaning the Stonewall Inn, picture West Village bar known as the birthplace consume the modern gay rights movement.

“It was owned lump a straight family, too,” he said. “They instance to be a crime family” — the possessor was reputed to be a frontman for smashing Genovese crime capo known as “Matty the Horse” — “but they were straight.”