Danny Coyle’s has almost nothing to recommend it or not recommend it outside of your own specific experience there. It’s basically the tabula rasa of bars, and therefore not a good spot for the unimaginative or for people who majored in psychology, because those people know that there is no such thing as a blank slate.
At Danny Coyle’s it would be easy to fall into a kind of clean dive bar stupor, which is the uncomfortable identity crisis engendered when a place doesn’t give you a theme to hold onto, but this is a choose your own adventure bar so for heaven’s sake choose, even if it means doing something you never meant to do like wearing your hair in a half-ponytail.
A bar is like a party that you don’t have to be invited to, and a choose your own adventure bar is like a party in another dimension that you don’t have to be invited to. So it’s a good place for people who don’t have many friends in this dimension or whose friends don’t throw good parties in this dimension.
One part of the adventure that you don’t get to choose is the gender breakdown, although this being San Francisco it’s a little more flexible than elsewhere. At DC’s men outnumber women about 7-2, making it a good place for women to check out potential mates, which is what people with accents call friends, but what people without accents call something else.
The jukebox doesn’t figure prominently into many choose your own adventure stories, but it should because a jukebox allows a person to choose their own adventure and that adventure is a song. Every song that comes on the jukebox is a song that someone secretly really wanted to hear when they were in public. But at Danny Coyle’s it’s pretty easy to figure out whose secret song it is, because when Talk Dirty to Me starts to play you will undoubtedly hear someone say, “What, you don’t like Poison? Come ON!”
In a choose your own adventure it’s important to go with your gut so if you want to dance, but there’s no one else dancing and then all of a sudden someone is dancing and it kind of makes you never want to dance again, you need to figure out which of these instincts is stronger and then do that before the end of chapter 5.
