Happy Spring, dykes and divas,

Birds are chirping, my lilac tree is budding out, and Val’s Lesbian Bar will open to the public Wednesday, March 18.

We will have our full cocktail and mocktail menu on display, 14 distinct and delicious drinks, as well as our full food menu, with sandwiches, soups, and cocktail snacks for sale. Dress to find your wife, she’s there somewhere.

Sound Summit and Events

For our newsletter babies, we’ll let you know of an in-depth, top secret meeting of North America’s greatest minds in sound and electronics to upgrade and improve the frustratingly convoluted and difficult sound system we’ve inherited (all love to our forebears, we’re grateful to inherit sound equipment at all!")

Our techs sat down all day walking the space, turning knobs on and off, tracing wires down stairs and through walls, saying words like “crossover”, “amperage”, and “sequencer”, and generally putting their heads together to form a plan that will eventually turn our space into the greatest sound center in Philadelphia (the world?). It was incredible watching them work. We’re still a ways from getting our sound where we want it, so our events schedule is less packed than we’d like — can’t schedule parties while we’re still updating the speakers! — but we’re well on our way to crisp, clear, easy sound. And we do have at least one new event coming up:

Tush Push is a new queer country western line dancing event coming to Val’s April 4. If you’ve been interested in some of the larger line dancing in Philadelphia but felt it was too big/overwhelming/you want to be surrounded by way more gay people, this one’s for you. We will have some special western drinks available as well ;)

Odds and Ends

One of the bigger things we got done between our Valentine’s Day LoveFest and our opening day is getting our pool table upstairs. It was an adventure, with me (Clover) and my best friend and frequent physical-labor-mate riding to a sadly now-demolished veteran’s hall in Roxborough and moving an old Valley-Dynamo pool table with just us, a dolly, a hand truck, and a very sweet construction worker named Mike. Moving a pool table, especially a pub table, is very hard. It weighs somewhere in the ballpark of 700 pounds, and that weight is split into two parts: the cabinet (basically the whole box) and the slate (a slab of literal slate that the felt is put over and that’s what you play on). Each of these weighs about 350 pounds. It was very, very hard to move into a UHaul, and at one point I was fully holding the slate on my back, doubled over like a flat turtle.

When we had to get it into the bar, the bartender next door helped us move it in, along with a random drunk man who was almost not worth the muscle but did, in the end, help. We contracted more friends the next day to move it up the stairs and set it up.

Cannot stress enough that that thin little rectangle weighs 350 pounds and could have fully pinned one of us against the wall and crushed our lungs.

We also have:
-New chandeliers!
-New faucets in our kitchen!
-New pipes!
-New glassware!
-New bar stools!
-New tabletops!

And everything else that makes a bar a bar! It’s been a lot of ordering and a lot of spending money. And there’s still SO MUCH to do. There’s even more going on the back end than we can even tell you, our special back-end access readers. Find me at the bar one day and ask me anything, I’m sure I’ll love to spill. I’ve reached the bottom and back this past week, but I would do it again if it meant opening this bar. We want it here that bad.

Til Wednesday, gays <3<3<3<3

-Val’s Lesbian Crew