Temple Night Club Is Operated by Its Youngest and First Female Manager

 A typical workday for Alexis Antelmi starts at 9 p.m. on a Friday, when she gets to Temple Night Club at 1136 Broadway to manage the staff and make sure the night runs smoothly. It's a job Antelmi has been doing since July, but four years in the entertainment, festival and music industry brought her to this position. At 28, she's the youngest manager Temple has ever had, and the first female manager since it opened in 2017.

Antelmi moved from New York to Colorado in 2014, when she was just twenty, working gigs at festivals and music events around the state. Through that work, she met Kristin Karas, director of operations for DanceSafe, a nonprofit that distributes drug-testing kits and educates concert-goers about harm reduction at live music events. Antelmi wanted to become more involved with DanceSafe, and organized a group to create the organization's Denver chapter in 2016.

Karas introduced Antelmi to the Zen Compound, the entertainment complex that created Temple Night Club and the connected Mirus Gallery, which started in San Francisco in 2007. And when Antelmi heard about its upcoming club, she had only one question: "How do I get involved?"

That's a question she asks anytime something piques her interest. "I tried to attach myself to whatever I could to get involved with the space," she says. "And lo and behold, one of our members that was in Denver DanceSafe that helped me...get our nonprofit license was starting the startup team, so he’s like, 'Come help.'"
She started as a busser, washing dishes and helping out wherever she could around the club. After a brief hiatus, she began working in the box office, where she began helping Temple restructure its point-of-sale system. "I realized there were a lot of challenges this place saw because there wasn’t exactly a POS that was robust enough to fit what this company’s needs were," she recalls. "And the general manager at the time was like, 'Well, fix it."'

Antelmi took apart and reprogrammed the back end of Temple's POS system to make it more efficient and organized, making it as straightforward as possible for both employees and customers. "And then I just kept getting more and more involved within the management stuff," she says. But just as she was gaining momentum, COVID struck, and entertainment venues were out of business for more than a year.

As Temple started to open back up, Antelmi was asked to come back as an assistant general manager. And when the general manager had a baby this year, she stepped into the role in July.

Antelmi helped to bring her new POS system to Temple's San Francisco location, which also picked up her new, restructured payroll. She and her staff also created company manuals for every staff position. There will be another club in the Zen Foundation opening in Los Angeles, and Antelmi will be part of the operations team that helps with the opening.

Assistant General Manager Adam Perkowski, who has been working at Temple since it opened, has nothing but compliments for Antelmi. "She's great. She knows all of the things that she's capable of doing," Perkowski says. "She knows the capacity of most of her employees and what they can handle."

Although Antelmi's primary focus is on the management side of the business now, harm reduction is still a passion for her, and she works to ensure that Temple is as safe a place as possible — especially for women. She says that being a female manager makes her a lot more approachable to women who need assistance, and she's always keeping an eye out for women who might be in uncomfortable situations. The bartenders are trained to know what it means when someone orders an "angel shot" (a method of alerting bartenders to unsafe behavior from another guest), and they also distribute stickers that people can put over cups to avoid being drugged.

"I feel that having such a fluid staff — they/them, she/he, whatever sexuality you choose to have in this environment — creates this sense of community that [patrons] can rely on us, they can come to us," Antelmi says. "With my staff, I try to make sure that that’s a big thing that they see. If they see a women who's uncomfortable, say something. A large portion [of our staff] is women."

In the future, Antelmi hopes to partner with a rideshare system so that people at Temple can use a discount code to get a ride home. "These things that keep people safe at the end of night [are] really important," she says.

With Temple being an ally to LGBTQ+ bars and clubs, the Club Q shooting prompted Antelmi — as well as other club owners and managers — to take extra security precautions. The addition of patdowns, she says, caught someone who was trying to bring a gun into Temple just a few days after the Club Q shooting. Temple also added a third layer of security at its checkpoints and increased its security guards from eighteen every night to 25.

Antelmi says she's happy to be an example of where hard work can get you, and that gender, age and whether you have a degree don't have to stand in the way of going after what you want.

"I don't look like a general manager," Antelmi jokes. "I have tons of tattoos; I have colored hair. It doesn't really matter what you look like; it's a matter of doing the job correctly and appropriately, and make it better than what it was."