06/22/2026
I wrote this as a guest essay for the New York Times.
They did not write back 🤣
Shooters gonna shoot.
————
They are screaming.
They are crying.
They are filming.
They are laughing.
Without context: mass hysteria.
With context: complete and unfiltered joy.
Women come.
They eat.
They sing.
They wear pink sunglasses.
That is the simple version.
The truer version is harder to explain.
It is not elegant.
It is not controlled.
It is chaos.
Beautiful, joyful chaos.
When a room grants permission to leave whatever you’ve been carrying at the door for a few hours, something happens.
They do not just relax.
They return.
To the woman they have always been, but have not been able to be.
Yes, they are coming to brunch in an old trolley station turned Italian restaurant in the middle of small-town Ohio.
But it’s not about the brunch.
It has never been about the brunch.
The thing that has sold it out nearly 100 times in a row is not the food.
The thing that has women flying in from across the country, 40 states and counting, is not the entertainment.
All of that is just the vessel.
The real product is collective joy.
The entertainment is fun.
The inflatable microphone and pink sunglasses are fun.
That alone is probably worth the ticket.
But collective joy?
That is why every single weekend, ladies spend hundreds of dollars on airfare, Airbnb’s, and rental cars to come to the heart of Ohio for a brunch.
And in Ohio, collective joy is messy.
Spilled drinks.
Running mascara.
Grandmas standing on chairs.
Doctors standing on booths.
Strangers grabbing strangers and refusing to let go.
It’s one voice chanting three syllables while The Chicks vibrate the speakers.
Then another voice joins.
Then thirty.
Until the whole room is screaming with raw, ridiculous, primitive emotion:
“F**k you, Earl.”
It is so absurd.
But it is sooooo moving.
Because collective joy has become harder to find.
Even when we are together, half of us are somewhere else.
But in this room, for a few hours, everyone is in the same place.
Our small-town restaurant accidentally tapped into something much bigger than a meal.
It created a place where women could let go together.
A little mecca for healing.
And the more I watch it happen, the more I think this is what people are actually hungry for.
Starving for.
And then, as quickly as it started, it is over.
The staff wipes the footprints from chairs and flips the room for dinner service.
The women leave.
Sweaty.
Lighter.
Remembering.
She is still in there.
She just got busy.
🤟🏼
——
📸 Tayler Courtney
Note: We don’t do the sparklers anymore due to it being a fire hazard, and not knowing we needed a fireworks license to use them 😬 but it’s suchhhh a dope picture that I had to use it 😂
