Miniature zombies lurching across the bar at BFP East. — Photo by Joel Myers

Has this ever happened to you?  Ok so you’re drinking in a bar and Dawn of the Dead (or whatever zombie flick) has been put up on a projector and is playing across the room with no sound.  And as you go on watching, with no characteristic moaning or normal English to tip you off one way or the other, you start to have to figure out who’s a zombie and who’s a real person just by looking.  Without realizing it you develop a mechanism, a sense, a constant paranoid your-life-totally-depends-on-it internal check.  A sort of zombie radar, or Zombie-dar, if you will. 

Then all of a sudden after a couple of the bar’s $5 Jim Beam and Miller High Life specials (champagne of beers, what what) you suddenly look back to the real world.  To the bar crowd.  To the guy next to you staggering a little bit and sort of looking pale and undead and OMG shit is this guy a zombie about to bite a chunk out of my arm, AAH AAH!

Apparently Zombie-dar takes a few seconds to turn off.

If you made it to Brooklyn Fire Proof East last Friday, this story (which actually happened to me a couple times!) might not sound so ridiculous. Ok quite so ridiculous. It didn’t help that from the get-go there was a face-paint setup in the back and people were getting pretty well-rendered blood streaks and ghoulish dark eyes.  Not to mention all across the bar were these creepy-ass dismembered dolls, and even miniature glow-in-the-dark zombies lurching around under the lamps.

Maybe the highlight of the night came with the zombie acoustic circle early on, where in the back stage area a crew of people took turns playing guitar and singing and then would inexplicably start these giant moaning sessions like totally out of nowhere.  These were excellent moans.  Hearing the crowd suddenly roar up and watching them lurch around as you were trying to have a normal conversation at the bar put a whole new twist on that "aww man it’s suddenly way too loud to hear each other talk at the bar" moment, which under more typical circumstances is just annoying. 

After the acoustic time wrapped up (including easily the most somber cover of MJ’s "Thriller" I’ve ever heard) most of the crowd moved to the smoker-friendly tables outside.  I kicked around, listening alternately to the DJ’s more straight-ahead club music and the Motown stuff jamming out between his sets.  There wasn’t a big contingent of dancers but a few zombied-up dudes were rocking it for the rest of the crowd’s enjoyment.

I was really looking forward to hear the So So Glos, who were on the bill and who are slated to go on tour with Titus Andronicus next month.  But at around 2 I finally checked with the DJ and he said he didn’t think they’d be showing up since it was getting so late.  And with the party having really died (ahem) pretty substantially by that point, I figured it was time to leave the zombie-paranoid good times and check out other happenings in the ‘hood.

One takeaway though, totally non-zombie-related, was how with all these new spots like BFP East, Tandem and Beauty Bar that have sprung up recently, a weekend night in Bushwick is actually starting to be doable.  The key to any good Fri/Sat is having options, and while the geography makes a semi-pub-crawl from say BFP to the Wreck Room to Beauty Bar less like a crawl than a pilgrimage, the dots are finally starting to get filled in.