Profile - Jennifer Dames

The Earl is a place where egos remain in check and no one tries to pull their "I'm with the band" routine if they know they don't belong on the guest list. That's because the Earl's Jennifer Dames has been mistress of the concert hall door virtually as long as the bar has been there, and runs a tight shift over her domain.

"One of the regulars once told me that I had such a reputation for being such a hard ass. Well, yeah — nobody could do this and not be a hard ass. Everybody would get in for free and there would be fights. I've pulled men out of there by their coats."

Despite the number of times you've been to the Earl, chances are, if you're not friends with Jennifer already, you probably won't become her friend anytime soon. "I work on crossword puzzles, which says, 'Don't talk to me.' I write it on the board: 'Don't talk to me.' Everything says, 'Look, we don't need to talk here.'"

Don't take offense, it's just her working style. "I try to be a robot at work. Ideally, my job would be at an assembly line where it would be too loud for anybody to talk to me and I could just do my job by myself and go home."

Jennifer does count a few patrons as her close friends, among them Chan Marshall — that's Cat Power to you. After running into each other at numerous places in the same week several years ago, the two decided it would be a good idea to start talking and form a friendship.

Now a nondrinker, Jennifer has found a new vice with those crossword puzzles. "I was buying the New York Times every day to do the puzzles. I realized I was spending $10 a week to do crossword puzzles and throw the rest of the paper out, so I bought a book of puzzles."

Though her current favorite local band is the Whigs, Jennifer has an amazing ability to ignore all the others that she doesn't like. "I'll hear the first couple of songs, but then if I don't like it, I just reject it. For pretty much every band, I want to hear what they sound like, but then if I don't like it, I just tune it out."

--Photo by Andisheh Nouraee