Recently, "Ross Is Not Cool" mania swept New York and the nation as publications from the Post to E! Online to Vanity Fair amplified the photograph, originally posted by NYC blog EV Grieve, of the former Friends star's vandalized front door. Most outlets jumped on the conclusion that the graffiti was sprayed by an activist representing the collective will of an aggrieved neighborhood, and while that theory had its holes (aggrieved neighborhoods rarely display a sense of humor), it was certainly conceivable. It was also wrong.
The man who instantaneously nozzled his way into the collective consciousness, who we'll call Drew, wasn't acting out of a sense of civic outrage, or personal animosity. The truth is, for the past few months, Drew has been marking territory with the tagger name "Cool." When he wrote "Ross Is Not Cool," he was simply stating for the record that "Ross" was not him. It was the equivalent of spray-painting "Ross is not Jim Joe"*. Drew was also, in the words of a friend, "really drunk", and some motivation was also probably drawn from that.
CREDIT: Dave's own Instagram
"Everybody assumed I gave a fuck. 'Oh, no, Ross is destroying a townhouse from 1852!' I don't care, the new place looks fine. There were thousands of people arguing about it online. People were like 'I hate David Schwimmer's toupee!' That's just hurtful. Guy's got to live somewhere."
Not that Drew doesn't have the credentials to call out Downtown interlopers: as a CBGB doorman, he kicked out more mistakenly entitled famous people than Phoebe had celebrity guest-star boyfriends. And he does admit that he kind of enjoyed the attention.