Inappropriate? Or just a joke?
A West Allis bar draws flak for its name: Walk Her Inn Drag Her Out.
For the record, Kristian Plumeri says he’s not aware of a man ever really dragging a woman from his tavern by her hair, even though that’s the image on two signs out front.
It’s a cartoon, he said, not a suggestion to commit violence.
It doesn’t help that the bar is actually called Walk Her Inn Drag Her Out, but for many years everyone understood that to be a joke and a play on words. It’s located at the corner of 74th and Walker streets in West Allis.
The #MeToo movement has changed everything since last year. Women have risen up like never before against sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood, in government, in media, in sports, in the military.
And now at a 14-stool bar tucked in a residential neighborhood.
A woman named Paress Huebner learned of the bar’s signage and recently she turned to social media to complain.
“WHAT. Like seriously, WHAT. I am shocked that this is happening in this day and age, and in our very close neighbor of West Allis. I want to believe we as a people are far more WOKE to let this stand,” she posted on Facebook and encouraged others to share.
Plumeri and his wife, Diane, learned of her campaign from the three TV news crews that showed up at the bar on an otherwise quiet Wednesday. On at least one station, they were the lead story that night.
The bar had this name when they bought it nine years ago, they tried to explain. They mean no offense, they said, though I believe many women, and some men, would indeed be offended.
News of the tavern and its controversial name quickly spread all over the country and beyond. Plumeri said
“My wife and I are 100% on board with each other staying the way it is. The sign will be staying. The picture will be staying.”
Kristian Plumeri, bar owner
the reaction he’s seen and heard has been at least 90% in his support.
“My wife and I are 100% on board with each other staying the way it is,” he said. “The sign will be staying. The picture will be staying.”
For years the bar was called Walk-Her-Inn (the hyphens come and go), and the lighted caveman sign outside still says that. The dragging half of the name was added later, maybe 30 years ago, Plumeri said. City records still show it operating as Walk Her Inn.
If I owned a bar, it wouldn’t have this name or show a cartoon caveman dragging a cartoon cavewoman. But I respect this couple’s right to selfexpression.
West Allis Mayor Dan Devine said he never visited the bar. “The city has no role in governing sign content and must remain ‘content neutral,’ “he told me.
Predictably, business is way up at the tavern since the dust-up began. Plumeri said he had to do a rush order for more Walk Her Inn Drag Her Out T-shirts that he’s sending to people across the country who asked for them. He said he has begun donating $5 per shirt to battered women shelters and charities.
Customers and supporters far and wide have pushed back against Huebner on social media. “This PC BS needs to end!!!” Candie Selke posted. “Very little offends me, and this bar isn’t one of them,” Ben Carpenter wrote. “Loony snowflakes have no sense of humor or common sense,” Surley Garcia opined.
Some of the namecalling was awful, Huebner told me. It came in social media comments, phone calls, texts and even from people contacting her employer, a real estate company, and demanding that she be fired.
The Riverwest woman took down the Facebook post within one day, in part because it was angrier than she wanted to sound. But she is amazed at how quickly and how far it spread. One person speaking out can get noticed.
“It got big because other people agreed,” she said.
And it got big because other people disagreed and the news media love a good fight.
“I never said it’s not hurting anybody, because it might be,” Plumeri told me as we walked outside the bar to look at the signs. He had suggested to his wife a few years ago that changing the name might bring in more female customers and make them more comfortable.
But he believes a name change now would look like he had caved, the pun some commenters are using. And it just might anger his customers and send them elsewhere to drink.
Plumeri called domestic violence a serious issue that requires our attention.
“A cartoon,” he insists, “doesn’t deserve this attention.”
Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl