Music
Toronto venue denies beer to KISS fans wearing face paint
by Mark Teo
July 29, 2013
Photo: Riley Taylor
Toronto venues have already received a bad—if complicated—rep for cell phone bans, occurring most recently at TURF at the request of Zooey Deschanel’s She and Him. Now they’ve gone and banned drink sales for anyone wearing face paint at KISS’s recent show at Toronto’s Molson Amphitheatre. What’s next? A ban on fun?
Here’s a photo of a disclaimer posted at the show:
Photo: Imgur
At face value, this type of sign seems patently ridiculous—KISS fans have long painted their faces like Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, or Ace Frehley. But, as Canada.com‘s Marc Weisblott points out, it’s possible that cat-faced makeup could potentially obscure someone’s face to the point where it’d be difficult to align it to a piece of I.D. Meaning, of course, that it’d be way more difficult to determine if patrons were 19+, which is the legal drinking age in Ontario.
The punchline in all of this? The photo first appeared on Reddit with the caption “My mom just texted me this… ‘Only in Canada’.”
Weisblott also says that it’s up to a venue—and ultimately, Livenation, who put on the show—to decide if they want to refuse alcohol service on those grounds. At the same time, we can’t blame KISS fans who are calling this treatment discriminatory—we’ve never heard of face paint being an issue at sports games. (UPDATE: Linda Julia Paolucci, or Twitter user @lindiglo, claims that she’s worked Jays games and says it’s policy not to serve face-painted people there, too.) The Molson Amphitheatre should count themselves lucky; were this The Gathering, they’d have a mutiny on their hands.
You can check photos of KISS’s remarkably dry show right here.
