Few things can ruin a party more quickly than botched seating. Whether it’s two-top awkwardness toward your third wheel, the inexplicable arrangement that places the waitress you met at that convention between you and your ex-wife, or the fact the hemorrhoids just don’t mesh with stainless steel, the act (sitting) that has been the rage for centuries can turn into a flux of painstaking switcher-roos and confusion quicker than you can say “Ouch, that’s my keys!” And never, not ever, has this case study been on a more prominent stage than when the universe was informed of the debauchery that took place with one Mr. Sylvester Stallone during the Golden Globes.

As the story goes:

According to multiple sources, things got testy after Stallone, 70, and his wife Jennifer Flavin walked up to their table during the show’s opening number to find only one available open seat.

Oh fuck, somebody from that catering company better get a shovel, find a nice plot of sand somewhere in the outskirts of Vegas, and make like this horse:

That’s serious stuff, man!

To make matters worse, the other guests at this particular table—namely, Casey Affleck and Matt Damon—reportedly did very little to accommodate the Stallones. Suddenly, to them, the couple was nothing more than two of your uncle’s friends looking for a minute of your time to talk about an investment—a perfect example of how powerful not wanting to make room or sacrifice a seat at a shindig can be.

The bold gesture left Ol’ Sylvester and his wife exposed like buns in a pair of ass-less chaps, with little choice for resolve. Their only option to rise above this gigantic cluster of fuck and forthright damnation, as it goes, was to make an unceremonious dash to the green room—which is sort of an extension of the feeding, where actors get to say more super-duper important things—where all they probably had for nourishment was room-temp Dasani. Yuk!

And the entire time, no one in the normal world did anything to stop such a travesty.

Nothing.

Crickets…

Which raises questions. Do catering companies have a beef with Sly?  Was this conspiracy based solely on an homage to Brian Dennehy’s character in Rambo?

What the fuck?

And, as if it couldn’t get any worse: the now noticeable seat-shunning meant that, at no point during the broadcast, would Camera B cut to the Stallones as the program came back from commercial. There would be no unexpected close-ups. No head-nods of approval. No smirks. No Memes. No turkey gravy, turkey soup, etc., etc.,…all of it, gone.  No chilled Dasani, nothing!

Of course, to say the aftermath segued to some heavy fussing is downplaying the extreme nature of this mistake. (My God, gang! That is not how you treat Hollywood royalty. Not Rocky.) It was nuclear. Assistants were certainly fired. Plastic body parts were wrinkled in continuous irk. Hairpieces moistened. This was society trapped inside a Ford Pinto and Rambo was carrying the hammer while his wife used her lipstick to mark an X on the bumper…

How that hotel didn’t explode in a symbolic bomb of self worth and good cheese gas is beyond me.

Never mind the three Miss Golden Globes—Stallone’s daughters, that is—spent the show hopelessly looking into the audience, as they ushered the winners off the stage like the collective flock were guests of the Havercamps from Caddyshack, only to see an empty seat next to that one guy’s little brother…

(Quick break: Do the actors/presenters not know where in the hell they’re going? Is it that confusing to exit the stage, like it’s got a maze of mirrors and trap doors? This way, Ryan, you’re over here. Stage right. No, don’t you do that…the restroom is right around the corner. Here, have some Juicy Fruit.)

All I can picture is this:

Anyways, I digress.

So yeah, this was something unseen in the history of Hollywood business. Strike that, in the history of all business—including monkey business. Had it not been for such wonderful fashions and gala hoopla to start this grand night of goddamn champions of filming and the arts and ego-sapped speeches, the incident could have wrecked the year before it really even began.

Yeah, you heard me.

Look, I get it: 2016 was a bad year—I’ve read your Facebook feed—but holy shit, 2017!! This careless treading in such egocentric waters of the celebrity psyche ails me to no end. This was an embarrassed man and his wife, left to feel like mortals at the DMV, shunned as if this masterful artist’s body of work meant nothing to anyone, at all.

How could this happen? I mean, why not club a baby seal while you’re at it, there Globe organizers? Christ.

And don’t tell me there weren’t seats; I went to a Starbucks once, that was pretty damn close in proximity to the Beverly Hills Hilton, and one of the first things I said while examining the facade and plant life was: I bet that place has a lot of chairs…chairs upon chairs, stacked like bedding for the princesses and their peas. And I wasn’t even thinking  about the fold-outs that probably exist in the deepest depths of the establishment, where the employees play cards and speak of the crazy regular who sleeps with the entire fleet of bellhops.

Yeah, there were plenty of seats. No doubt.

Of course, the spectacle was downplayed in a PR twist that only a confused grandpa could love and believe.

There weren’t enough seats and so there was confusion, but it wasn’t personal against him, says the source, adding that an additional chair was brought to the table and seats facing the stage were eventually freed up.

As opposed to the ones that face the shitter?

Like me, Sylvester knew there were seats. But the effort to put a Band-Aid on this proverbial brain hemorrhage was too little too late. The damage to his hair, alone, was most likely catastrophic, like a baseball glove left out in the rain for days upon days. (Soggy is soggy, friends.) And, to boot, Sly wasn’t open for simple remedies concocted by the mortals…this catering thing.

At that point, Stallone had little interest in returning to his table to sit with Affleck and the rest of the Manchester group, several sources tell PEOPLE.

And good for him! For America, really. During a time when it’s important to look to celebrities for everything from advice on how to comb your hair to the deepest concerns of humanity, you have to applaud one of them who looked embarrassment in the eye and said, “Fuck no, I don’t want your charity, your pity, your extra seat. I, mind you, played Judge Dread and Demolition Man and Cliffhanger.”

And that, my friends is the kind of panache and Hollywood moxie that deserves a standing-O. It’s the kind of story that reshapes America from this day forth, and so on…

So move over apple pie, baseball, hot dogs; make room—another seat, if you will—for Sylvester Stallone.