It’s been a big urban spring for Podunk. I wrote recently about cruising around Seattle, a bona fide urban American city. Just last week, I popped into Boise, a usually friendly urbural sort of place. It was, coincidentally, my birthday. A few friends and I set out to explore some of the obvious goodness Boise had to offer fun loving young women of fine reputation.

Because I am on a wicked quest for sponsorship, I can’t name names, but let’s just say one fairly new establishment earned the Too Big For Your Britches Jackwagon Award of 2015. In Boise. Go figure. Perfectly behaved, Pippi, Asskickingboots, and I entered the BBQ joint (yep, as in Bar-Bee-Cue) and found a roomful of hipsters playing trivia. Sensing that pseudo-Jeopardy would run its course sooner or later and hearing the bar made a mean cocktail, we accepted a Standing Room Only status, even though it was quite clearly my birthday. That is until an elfin Jackwagon headwaiter informed us that company policy forbid them to serve drinks to standing people.

This is where urban deviates quite significantly from rural experience. If the rural West quit serving beverages to customers standing in bars, the whole economy would double collapse in a way that would make 2007 seem like a blue light special. Ever the diplomat, I offered my driver’s license as proof of my actual birthday to the elfin Jackwagon. He shook his wee head, not even bothering to offer me a pinata filled with hard candy.

Pippi noted that this was not just a case of severe urban-rural divide, or bad manners, but pointed to a distinct hipster elitism. “How did he know I wasn’t a hipster?” I wondered aloud, with the secret knowledge that my fashion statements sometimes skip a generation and creep into what’s-old-is-new-again.

Pippi has good manners and didn’t answer, her birthday gift to me.