As I’m sure you’re well-aware if you’re reading this, Fyre Festival became the most celebrated case of schadenfreude in recent memory when organizers scammed a bunch of rich people into buying exorbitantly expensive tickets for what promised to be the event of a lifetime—including a private island full of luxury cabins, yacht parties, and beachside hangs with models—but actually presented attendees with depressing cheese sandwiches, soggy FEMA tents, and the unique experience of one poor dude offering to suck dick for Evian water. The internet mob went wild over live-tweeted reports of influencers—and people with thousands of dollars to blow on seeing Blink-182 in the Bahamas—having a really, really bad time.
After the competing Netflix and Hulu documentaries dropped online, the public lost its shit over Fyre all over again. The oral-sex-offerer turned into a meme, and in what is perhaps a good grift of its own, the Fyre-related memes have spun into real-life monetization—like the New Jersey pizza chain that sold an intentionally shitty $25 slice of pizza and called it the “Festival Pyzza.”
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Just as you can now expect almost anything that fails to be called “the Fyre Festival of its genre,” you can also count on virtually any cultural phenomenon to be manifested as a pop-up bar (see: Seinfeld, Fleetwood Mac, Stranger Things, The Big Lebowski). So yes, of course a Fyre Festival pop-up bar is coming… or so it seems.
The Chicago arcade bar Replay Lincoln Park announced the bar earlier this week in true Fyre fashion: with a blank orange rectangle. People got the reference pretty quickly, judging by the comments.
Yes, it was posted on April Fool’s Day. But according to Eater, a spokesperson for the bar was “adamant” that the bar’s “next pop-up will be based on the doomed Fyre Festival.” (The space is currently decked out in full-on Game of Thrones swag, giant dragon included.) And as Replay posted on Facebook the next day, “Have you noticed that it’s not April Fool’s Day anymore and we haven’t deleted the announcement?”
As reported by RedEye, the bar will be Fyre-themed from May 3 to 13, which means it’ll allegedly be chock full of palm trees, relief tents, cabanas, “gourmet cheese sandwiches,” a drink called the “Andy’s Bahamian Blow Job Shot,” and, we can only guess, plenty of Evian. Major Lazer and Ja Rule will, alas, only be on the playlist, but there will apparently be a Blink-182 cover band, so you can still get trashed to a soundtrack of loud teenage pop punk.
Tickets to the pop-up’s opening night are on sale now, and unlike the thousands of dollars people spent on Fyre (and they still had to buy their own damn drinks, smh), these are going for $22, which is said to include a fishbowl cocktail.
This all sounds like it has potential to be kind of a good time. But hey, so did Fyre.
