Read the start of Philly EDGE Correspondent Martin Kerrigan's story on local bouncers here.
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IDs mandatory
Bouncers’ stories

From walls made of muscle to well-dressed secret agent types, bouncers give the first impression of the club behind them. To enter almost any nightlife venue, you’ll have to appease these bar sentries with a valid ID and some appropriate behavior. Yet often little is known about these characters apart from a roving gaze and their readiness to toss your sorry ass to the curb if you step out of line.
The common myth of doormen being 37 year-old male bodybuilding freaks who listen to speed metal in their parents’ basement couldn’t be further from the truth, according to this sampling of Southeastern PA’s bouncer population.
Few bar goers realize that most bouncers have normal -sometimes fantastic- jobs elsewhere.
Chrome bouncer Heather Baptiste also works as a career advisor at Philadelphia’s Welfare to Work program. Vincent Visco, who could be The Rock’s stunt double, is a loan officer at Chase Bank when away from his post as head doorman at 90 Main in New Hope. Two bouncers from the topless club Oakford Inn have wildly different day jobs: Tom Samuels works as a paving contractor, while his coworker, who prefers to be known only as Z Barr, is, we’re not kidding here, a professional wrestler. Top them off with Eric Gregg, a former MLB umpire, who works the door at Chickie’s and Pete’s on Roosevelt Blvd. and you have an interesting collection of professionals by day, who are enforcing club policies by night.
Since losing his umpire job in a 1999 strike, Gregg has played himself, a doctor, a cop and a pimp in over a dozen episodes of the daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless while authoring the book Working the Plate:The Eric Gregg Story.
One behaviorist referred to doormen as "tradesmen of hand-to-hand combat and social dominance." Both of these come into play, but according to Gregg, it’s how you handle the latter to avoid the former.
“It’s all about how you talk to (people),” he said, while behind him hung a framed picture of he and former L.A. Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda screaming at one another face to face. “Nobody really wants to get in a fight. They just want someone to break it up.”

For the rest of the story, check out the Oct. 19, 2005 print version of Philly EDGE, available today at more than 1,000 locations in Bucks, Montgomery, Mercer and Burlington Counties.