On Sunday, the Chili’s Grill & Bar in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania will be hosting a Cinco De Mayo party, which promises to politely rage from the hours of 4 PM until 9 PM. “Celebrate Cinco De Mayo at Chili’s in Wyomissing!” its Facebook event page says, and there may never have been a more misused exclamation point than the one at the end of that sentence.
That particular Chili’s promises that it will commemorate the Mexican Army’s unexpected victory at the Battle of Puebla with $3 Coronas, $4 margaritas, and a DJ who will be in charge of making the guests forget that they’re getting day drunk at a chain restaurant down the street from a credit union and the Patient First urgent care. What Chili’s doesn’t mention is that their afternoon DJ is Jon Gosselin.
Videos by VICE
If you’ve forgotten about Jon Gosselin, he’s the dude who was briefly famous a decade ago (!!!) mostly for having viable sperm. He and his then-wife, Kate, were the title parents on the TLC reality show Jon & Kate Plus 8, which also featured their eight children. After an ultra-contentious divorce, Kate lopped his name off the TV show (it became simply Kate Plus 8), he got custody of at least a dozen Ed Hardy t-shirts, and clung to relevance via several issues of US Weekly.
Gosselin has since installed solar panels, allegedly pulled a gun on a photographer, saw more twentysomethings than an Urban Outfitters fitting room, moved into an internet-less cabin in the woods, deleted his Twitter, worked as the maitre’d at a Pennsylvania restaurant, moved out of the woods, reactivated Twitter, and put in a few shifts as a cook at TGI Fridays, a job he quit after someone sold a picture of him to TMZ. But Gosselin’s real passion has become DJ-ing. “[Fame] isn’t going away, so I figure I’m just going to take advantage of it,” he said in 2015.
Taking advantage of that fame is why he’ll be setting up his MacBook at Chili’s on Sunday afternoon and watching people spill $4 margaritas on the carpet while they shout some of the words to “Old Town Road.”
What can Chili’s guests expect from 42-year-old DJ Gosselin? “I play to the crowd,” he once told People. “I’ll go back to the 50s and play some James Brown then into the 80s: Prince and stuff like that,” he says. “Then into the 90s, and then Taylor Swift or whatever. I just move around.”
Gosselin posted about this Sunday’s event on his Instagram, writing “Come celebrate Cinco De Mayo with me at Chili’s!!!,” out exclamation-point-ing the restaurant itself. “Is this for real?” one person responded.
It is. It is definitely real.
And if it gets too out-of-control, Patient First is open until 10 PM.
