Ashley Coleman slicked a lemon slice over the edge of a fresh stack of singles in the early part of her shift on a recent Wednesday night at Tavern on Camac. While arranging the money in the drawer, she asked her bar back, Amede Bennett, to grab a beer for a customer.
“No hands!” Coleman called. “Don’t open beer with your hands. You’re going to hurt yourself. These rules are for you.”
Coleman and Bennett started working together two years ago at Tavern. Once — because they both have light skin and green eyes, Bennett said — a patron asked if they were siblings.
“We told him yes and it’s been a joke ever since,” Bennett said.
Now, to anyone who wonders, Coleman, 31, introduces Bennett, 23, as her kid brother.
“We flow very well together,” Bennett said, noting Coleman is one of the most skilled bartenders he’s ever worked with. She asks three questions to make anyone a signature cocktail: Favorite article of clothing? Favorite childhood TV show? Favorite color?
“Wednesday’s probably one of my most looked-forward-to shifts,” Bennett said. “I rarely have a bad Wednesday with Ashley. We’re always joking around.”
Coleman has an easy rapport with her customers. When one man aired some disappointment that the night would not be as eventful as he hoped, Coleman poured him a drink and said, “Oh, it’s early. Shenanigans will come. Don’t worry.”
Coleman flits like a hummingbird between her various commitments in the region’s LGBT scene. She also bartends at Cibo in Philadelphia and The Cub Room in New Hope. On Thursdays, she takes meetings for her company, bASH. Events. Usually liquor reps like Thursday meetings, Coleman said. On Sundays, her only days off, she does laundry.
Coleman calls herself a “community-first event planner.” She founded bASH. in 2012 with two boxes of decorations. Now she has two staffers to whom she’s grateful for “working for peanuts.”
“We give all the money away to different nonprofits,” she said, noting she likes to support queer kids at The Attic Youth Center and Haven Youth Group in the Lehigh Valley, near where she grew up in Emmaus.
Coleman went to Haven activities as a teen and joked she had her “first little lesbian dramas” there. In recent memory, Coleman organized a Gay Prom at Haven, following the success of the inaugural event in 2013 at Tabu in the Gayborhood.
“I’m a small business,” she said. “I’m a black-owned business. I’m a gay-owned business. I just love getting to do all these things for my communities.”
bASH. has six events on the docket for October, including one to benefit COLOURS and another around OutFest for Mo’ Betta, who won Mr. Philadelphia Drag King 2016.
Coleman’s philanthropy traces back to her sophomore year of high school in 2001. She started a project called “Celestial Products” because she was obsessed with the Earth-saving anime character Sailor Moon. Over two years, she raised $100,000, most of which went to causes related to those affected by the September 11th terrorist attacks.
In addition to charity, a passion for education drives Coleman.
After a decade-long journey involving colleges in Boston, Hawaii and California, she finally graduated from Temple University in 2014 with degrees in history and education. She said she knew she wanted to teach high school even before she attended. Coleman worked briefly for a charter school in Philadelphia, but decided an educational nonprofit might fit her better.
She rarely says no to a new project. She’d also like to start a summer camp for LGBT adults and tossed off an idea for a show called “The Queer Housewives of Philadelphia.”
“Being in Philadelphia, I finally got to settle into myself,” Coleman said. “Here is where I became part of the community.”
She makes friends fast, said Christen Landtroop, a recent transplant from Dallas.
“My friend asked me what I was doing tonight,” Landtroop said last Wednesday. “I said, ‘I’m going to see my therapist.’ She said, ‘I didn’t know you were in therapy.’ And I said, ‘Well she’s a bartender, but I think she’s my friend.’”
Landtroop and Coleman met earlier this month at Tavern and bonded over a love of education. Landtroop worked as a teacher in Texas. But she wanted a change before her 30th birthday in July. Now the woman with a double nose ring and Xena Warrior Princess hair finds herself at home in South Philly.
Coleman says getting people into conversations makes her love her job. But she returns the favor with her own stories. She would be the first to tell someone that her path to Philadelphia, where she arrived in 2010, is interesting — here, she raises her eyebrows.
A few years after her funding dried up at Berklee College of Music, Coleman transferred to Chaminade University of Honolulu, which started as a teaching college for indigenous women. She had a moment of crisis when she found out the university only certified teachers through middle school, not high school.
“It was a real dilemma,” Coleman said. “Should I be in the place I want to be in or do the thing I want to do? I got on a conference call with five of my best girlfriends, who lived all over the country at the time. One said, ‘Why don’t we go back to Philadelphia and figure out our lives?’”
They hung out at Sisters, the lesbian bar that closed in 2013, and made a pact to move to the city together in three years.
Life had some more twists planned for Coleman. She moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., with one girlfriend then to Los Angeles with another. There, she found herself in an abusive relationship.
“One night, she was kicking me in the back of the head,” Coleman said. “I was crouched down. My nose started dripping blood. I realized it was internal bleeding. She left and I knew she went to get her gun. I literally ran out the door with just my purse and my shoes. A friend picked me up on the corner of Crenshaw and Pico.
“I called my friends a year later and said, ‘It’s time we move back to Philadelphia.’ Now it’s amazing to have this circle of strong women here. Most of us are queer. Some of us are straight. We have, like, one of those.”
Coleman said a person’s confidence really takes a hit after experiencing domestic violence. But she began to bounce back in Philadelphia, in part with help from friends and family.
This month, when her maternal grandparents visited, they spent a night at a gay bar for the first time. Coleman affectionately called her grandparents “tiny little Germans” and marveled at their enjoyment with the piano player at Tavern. On her mother’s 50th birthday this year, they went to Philadelphia’s Pride celebration.
Coleman said she learned resilience from her single mother. Her father died when she was 3.
“You never know when the carpet’s going to get ripped out from under you,” Coleman said. “It’s a lot about flexibility.”