Vanilla Ice to Perform at Independence Day Event in Texas Despite COVID-19
Written by SOURCE on July 2, 2020
People are going to risk their lives and the lives of those around them by seeing Vanilla Ice perform on Friday in Austin, Texas.
Ice, thanks to a legal loophole spotted by the Austin Chronicle on Wednesday, is set to do the usual ’90s throwback thing at Emerald Point Bar & Grill on July 3. While Gov. Greg Abbott did indeed announce an executive order earlier this month in which all bars were ordered closed due to COVID-19, the Ice event—billed as the “Independence Day Throwback Beach Party”—isn’t affected due to the venue’s categorization as a restaurant.
Bars remain closed, of course, but restaurants are allowed to move ahead as long as they agree to reduce capacity by 50 percent.
In a peculiar IG caption earlier this week shared in anticipation of the event, Ice lamented the fact that we aren’t currently in the 1990s.
“We didn’t have coronavirus, or cell phones, or computers,” he said. “We had 5.0’s, Blockbuster, Beavis and Butt-Head, Wayne’s World, Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan.” Ice also declared that Mortal Kombat “is still better than” Fortnite.
Tickets for the Ice event range in price from $25 to $300. According to a promoter, the capacity has been set to 2,500. And though it should go without saying, there is no amount of nostalgia for a decade without COVID-19 that will somehow magically provide protection from the virus in present-day reality.
Texas has set multiple recent records for COVID-19 numbers. As of Thursday, the total case count was nearing 170,000.
