The Days of Tequila and Lillies

On Friday night after my show, Thom and our friend Joey (bartender at Vickery) and I made a desperate attempt to catch Hello Lover playing at Club Dada. One of my other friends/Vickery bartenders is in the band..

We ran across the park to the car and flew down 75 to Deep Ellum.. and then, anti-climatically, we parked and walked around looking for the club. We wandered past some sleeping street festival, past salsa clubs and dingy pizza place, past bums, through a landscape that should have probably belonged only to movies. We asked a whole cast of characters where it was, Joey even asked the same cop twice, but to no avail. Fortunately the cop was amused.

We fianally came through a crowd of mohawks and bondage pants and could see it on the other side. But we were five minutes too late, we'd missed the set. Sean was packing up when we got there. We did a couple of shots with him and my boss, who was also there.. i had a coke and Captain as well.. and somewhere between that and our fruitless search for the hottest chick in the bar, I lost track of at least some aspects of sobriety.

Record Hop went on, and the sound assaulted the tiny room with deafening fury. We stood up at the front and side of the stage, not really interacting with each other because the sound made communication rediculous. Everyone was alone with the music. I took a couple of snapshots with my camera.. my foot next to Thom's on the concrete floor, the singer blurring across the screen, a random crowd shot. Lost in the deafness of music, I made a note in my phone- "I hope I remember these snapshots- the last suck of a straw, the half hour of deafness.. the.. oblivion."

I can't remember the last time I could feel the poetry of my own life so intensely.. see the beauty in little pieces of things I see and do and the intricacies of the situations. To be sucking in air like it is something that you can't just get out of thin air. Maybe not since the days of running through a hardee's parking lot in the rain with a girl named Merry. Which is a story I must write soon..

Thom asked if everyone who works at Vickery is a starving artist. Maybe not precisely, but close. Working in a bar is really not a bad gig at all. It has its advantages.. and it offers eternal youth.

The Filmore Pub

I've always had this kind of fantasy about what it would be like to hang out at the local pub. And by pub I mean pub in the sense that pubs exist in my fantasies of England and Ireland. I am trying to think of a movie that has a pub in it that is just like the pub in my fantasy... I am drawing a blank right now though. I guess sort of a combination of the pubs in Green Street Houligans, Dear Frankie, and The Quiet Man.

But I have never really lived anywhere where there was a pub that satified my expectations. Callahan's in Carbondale called itself a pub I think, but it lacked something that was neccesary for true pub-ness in my opinion. I think I may have found the pub of my fantasies in Plano, TX.. The Filmore Pub on 15th.

Its' qualifications include.. a laid-back atmosphere, a good selection of drinks, a good selection of food.. (they even have stuff that isn't fried) .. it is in an old looking part of town so it has that right kind of atmosphere when you go stand outside to smoke.. and the interior looks like what a pub looks like in my imagination. It isn't overwhelmed with too loud music, or covered in sports bullshit. The only thing missing is people with Irish accents, but you can't win em all.

My friend/ex-boss jessica can be credited with turning me on to The Filmore.. she's also just the kind of person i imagined would hang oout in a pub. We went there tonight, with a couple other friends, and I only had one alcoholic drink and didn't totally give healthy eating the finger, and I still had a good time!

So now I am thinking about how cool it will be to say things like, "I'm just goin' down to the pub.." or answering the phone: "We're at the pub.." I imagine myself saying these things with an Irish accent of course. I can't say them outloud though.. because of the poor quality of my fake Irish accent.

But I've found my pub. All is right with the world.