She came in with a more or less country band, one of those that get thrown together by using people of varying skills and no rehearsals..

She was better than a ‘pretty good’ singer… lovely, confident voice…great fun to work with.  She liked cutting up a little bit, enjoying the moment and always sang with a smile.

Beautiful girl…

It was hard to tell how serious she was about her music because she sometimes had to be cued as to when to come back into the song after the instrumental break. 

If she missed the cue she would just laugh and somehow get things back on track with a little help from the band.

Cameras liked her a lot. 

Very photogenic…

She moved away…
 When I heard she was leaving I gave this to her.  I thought it was a pretty good “Lip and Eye” as I called those kind of renderings…

He was a dancer.

Well, he wasn’t really a dancer.  He didn’t dance professionally or anything like that.  He was just a guy who had learned how to dance along the lines of the Western Swing dancing made popular in the roadhouses of the southwest.

Disco music was “in” when he learned and Saturday Night Fever had been a recent hit.  The Bar also booked some country flavored bands that suited the style nicely.

Men who go to saloons would do well to take up dancing.  It gains them many points and gives them a higher profile on the women’s radar.  He quickly found this out.  He had learned some basic moves and was a strong leader on the dance floor.  Women would ask him to dance because swing dancing, when done properly, was great fun.

He likened it to a trapeze act in which he was the ‘catcher’ and the lady was the ‘flyer’ as he led them through his series of moves.

His partners varied.  Some were good and interacted well.  Some were not and did not.

Some women took the words ‘swing dancing’ too literally and would grip his hand as if they were swinging on a rope over a creek.  Some never quite got the trick of how to hold his right hand properly and he would have to break stride to catch them and keep them from falling.  On one or two occasions he wasn’t quick enough and the poor dears would skid across the dance floor on their backs.  Thankfully, the only injuries suffered were to dignity and ego.

“Hang on and pay attention” he would tell them and off they would go, he and his partner of the moment.  He gained a reputation for his ability to dance and women would seek him out because they knew they would look good dancing with him.  His moves were much easier to follow than the elaborate moves shown in John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever movie and some of the women really jelled with his style.

She was not a dancer…

He had seen her sitting alone at a table looking a little sad on a Tuesday night.  She was a dark haired, pretty girl, with a nice figure and pretty legs.
There was a jazz band playing but no one was dancing so he asked her to dance in hope of cheering her up.
She initially declined, saying she didn’t dance well but he coaxed her up.  “Just hang on and pay attention, Honey.” he said.

Like so many before he led her through the basic moves he used and she quickly caught on.  He liked dancing with her because she was an ideal height and weight for him.  She learned quickly and didn’t make an issue over natural mistakes that happen when learning a New Thing.  But best of all it turned out that she was absolutely fearless on the dance floor.  Her trust in his ability to keep her from falling was almost childlike and they spent more and more time on the dance floor learning communication to such a degree that their connection was almost magical.  They incorporated some of the more strenuous moves from the old jitterbug days…in short they became a dance team.  She lived for their dancing sometimes wearing skirts that would flare out like disks when he spun her.

Dancing is a sensual exercise and on the dance floor they were like two lovers in one of the musicals made in the thirties.  Dancers who  convey this kind of intensity are more interesting to watch.

She got so she was quite demanding and he had to work hard to exhaust her so she would settle down and let him tend to his duties at The Bar.  Once the dance floor filled up they would no longer dance because there wasn’t enough room and they wouldn’t communicate again until closing time.
They grew very close and had love for each other but never joined as a couple.

Inevitably, as it always must happen, she left the carousel that was The Bar.  She left the state, actually and eventually got married and had children.

Every year she would call him on his birthday which was in April and he would call her on her birthday which was in January.  Always they would express their special love for each other and his final words at the end of their birthday calls were “Save The Last Dance For Me” after a song popular in the early and mid sixties.

One year he called and instead of getting her or her husband on the phone, he got their answering machine.  Thinking they were out celebrating the birthday he identified himself and said “Save The Last Dance For Me.” as he usually would.
About twenty minutes later her husband called back and gently told him that she had died a couple of months earlier…  “She just didn’t want to live anymore.” her husband said…

… she was almost thirty…

He still thinks of her almost every day.  Sometimes he thinks he sees her out of the corner of his eye, walking next to him…for some reason she is always barefoot in a summer dress… she is always happy…
and of course he always is reminded of her when he hears the song

Save The Last Dance For Me

_______________________________________________

Paper Dolls by Vann~

Kate Moss…

Popular fashion model of the seventies and eighties.

Thin girl, but one who had a yearning beauty that earned her a lot of money.

This is one of two that I did…side by side on the same piece of 20 x 30 illustration board.  One was a scrub because I had botched something and thought it ruined.  So I did an indetical copy on the available space.  Water color is tricky and treacherous but I somehow pulled it off and ended up with two looking so close to identical that you needed to look closeley to tell them apart.  Great hair for me.  Hair was always a problem for me.

A sharp knife broke up the set.  A guy bought one of them and , (gasp) had it framed.  A friend of mine saw  framed painting on his wall.  “That’s a Vann” his friend said…

Good feeling… someone bought a painting…  Even better to be reckognised…

The Mating Dance is a series of observations of human nature in pursuit of  (more or less) romantiic endeavor   They are not in any particular order.  That would imply rationality .

This sampling is unconnected synapses.  Brief  little spots in time.

                                             None of these are about the one person.  

  Which is why I call it…

                                          Snapshots

                  None of these items are attributable to or about you…

                  … I don’t think
___________________________________

Save The Last Dance For Me

_______________

She was a lean, tight bodied, high breasted beauty…dark hair in a pixie-ish cut.  A Latina, or partly so, with high cheekbones and a generous mouth…

_________________________

Her makeup looked like she spread it on a wall and ran her face into it

________________________________

She was a young thing, barely twenty one.  She favored tight t-shirts which did little to hide or diminish her dark nipples, faintly visible, through the thin cloth.  A tall girl, slender… usually wore jeans but sometimes wore almost diaphanous dresses because she knew they showed off her legs to an advantage…

              Don’t get too close to that candle little moth…  (The Write Down Book)

__________________

She was a pretty girl but she somehow managed to look as if she was mis-cast in a high school play

________________

She moved like a denim clad sidewinder…

___________________

A light pout on her mouth
Uncurled but thick eyelashes

_____________________

If she comes up to you with her hands behind her back and wiggles her shoulders it tends to arch her back slightly to enhance the thrust of her breasts.  This is usually accompanied by a fluttering of her eyelashes, a sure sign she either wants something or has a bridge to sell

_________________________

She was a cross between colt and puppy
All wiggles and struts.

_______________

Some women can do wonders of cuteness with a cap or a hat.
When it works it is as effective as Odysseus’ Sirens
When it doesn’t it is about as exciting as a stump

___________________

Women can do amazing thing with a button or two at their bodice

Making the man think he’s seeing more than he is.

___________________

Want a hint?
Don’t eat bar popcorn or bar nuts and breathe on people if you can help it….
I know it tastes good but if you have to talk closely to someone (or maybe kiss them) equalize things somehow.  Take a mint or make sure you intended has eaten some also.

_______________

I like to come and check out the stock.

_____________________________

A woman’s eyes take a special glint when they know they’re wearing what looks good on them…

___________________________

Some do a better job of being female than others.

_________________________________________

They scan, weigh and judge, dismiss their target in the flicker of an eye.  If you interest them they’ll look again

_____________________

The Warner brothers twins, porky and pig

_____________________________

Gender Check!

Yikes Dykes

___________________________

‘I’m so cute I can’t stand it’

___________________________

It’s not that she was perfect.  She wasn’t.  It’s just that there was so little of her that warranted correction.

______________________

Sometimes a wig works… sometimes it doesn’t…

____________________________

When women have a breast augmentation and they get older the NewBoob skin doesn’t’ age the same way as the rest of them does and they end up looking like their bodies were put together out of kits and the parts got mixed up.

_____________________________________

Tarted up a bit… 

A sweetness of pink lips and a dollop of eye shadow…

Very effective…

______________

“You’ll do.”  she said

 _____________________

For Meeee…???

__________________

                                                                                The Doorman

door•man    (dôrmn, -mn, dr-)
n.
A man employed to attend the entrance of a hotel, apartment house, or other building.

bouncer
bounc•er    (bounsr)
n.
Slang. A person employed to expel disorderly persons from a public place, especially a bar.

__________________

 The law in California requires that individuals purchasing alcoholic beverages must be twenty one.  The law states that it is up to the vendor to make sure that the persons served are indeed twenty one years or older.  If a minor is found in possession of alcohol in a licensed establishment the law will presume that the vendor was aware of this and deliberately served a minor.  This can result in heavy fines and temporary or permanent suspension of the saloon’s liquor license.
 Of course, if it can be proved that the minor made the transaction using a bogus identification then the saloonkeeper is off the hook but litigation is expensive and bad for morale and the resultant press bad for business.
It is up to the doorman to collect cover charge and most importantly, check the I.D. of all patrons to make sure some adventurous youth does not slip under the tent and partake of the debauchery and dissolution that the young are absolutely convinced exist in saloons.  The state licensing board, the venerable ABC, takes a dim view of saloons corrupting the morals of youth.  Such corruption, they say, should be done in the home…

And so it was.

 Now during the day or on nights where no bands were working it was fairly easy and reasonable for a bartender or waitress to tend to the task of checking I.D.’s if the age of the person was in question. 
It was an altogether different matter on band nights.  The flow of incoming patrons was such that even a full crew of bartenders and waitresses could not keep up which meant you needed an individual to check the documentation of potential patrons…a doorman.  And on busy nights it was good to have the stabilizing effect of a ‘bouncer’, an individual of whom it was presumed could and would defuse potentially violent situations and eject any belligerents with dispatch, discretion and ease.  The Bar was no different and did the time honored thing of hiring a person known as a doorman.

All for the princely sum of twenty five dollars.
A shift. 
Eight p.m. to two a.m.

 Alcohol and machismo are a bad combination.  Actually, alcohol and any emotion are a bad idea but in spite of everyone realizing this, saloons and liquor stores existed still exist. 
We are all aware of the Great Experiment known as Prohibition, where the Temperance people actually changed our Constitution to ban sale of alcohol except in certain applications.
This had the effect of creating a tremendous morphing from ethnic petty gangsterism to organized crime and much bloodshed and stuff from which TV and Movies could draw from endlessly.  They then reversed themselves and changed the Constitution again this time  to allow alcohol sales but it was strictly regulated and only sold by package stores or Saloons.

When people drink they bring on mood swings.  Some get silly.  Some get maudlin.  Some get belligerent.

And for the belligerent ones we needed the services of a capable doorman/bouncer.

Truth be told, most of our door guys were lightweights and non combative.  Take the money, check the I.D.  The rare idiot who decided to throw a punch was usually swarmed by his mates or other patrons and evicted before the punch was thrown thanks to the stiff legged macho posturing that usually preceded any actual combat.   You really did not want to have a pugnacious doorman if you could help it due to the liability factor in our litigious society.  You didn’t want The Bar getting sued because your doorman felt like getting into a dick-swinging match with someone who, when full of beer, felt they invincible.
 
The Crew, both bartenders and waitresses, had a fine ear tuned to anticipate most potential problems and cutting the customer off was usually effective although if this was not done soon enough the customer would resent such treatment and get vocal or sometimes violent about it.
 
I didn’t drive and had affected a carrying a walking stick due to an unfortunate occurrence with a local unleashed dog.  As time went on this stick became legend.  It was 36” long made of ebony and had a custom made absolutely solid round brass head on it.  The whole thing weighed exactly one kilo (2.5 pounds) and had a sobering effect on some miscreants although I never ever used it in anger.  Many Urban Legends sprang up about myself and that walking stick which I referred to as ‘The Bat’ and because of these tales  it had a small measure of crowd control just by being seen.

Once in a while there would be no doorman present and I would be called upon to deal with an inebriate.
The absolute first thing I would do was to hand off my walking stick to a trusted squire.  I had no desire to have it taken from me and used in a negative fashion upon my person.
I would approach the drunk empty handed, palms open.
Then I would give him three options:

1.      “You can stay but you cannot drink anymore because right now you are officially cut off.”
2.      “You can go home.”
3.      “You can go to jail.”  (whichwas conveniently located about three blocks away)
This usually brought protests of maligned innocence and protests about being singled out.  (Who/why me?”)
So you listen to their defense (so they can feel like they’ve been heard) and you make your offer again.

1. “You can stay but you cannot drink anymore because right now you are officially cut off.”
2. “You can go home.”
3. “You can go to jail.” 

We always hoped they would just go home by cab or by friend.  It usually didn’t work for them to try to stop drinking.  Too often they would try to sneak ‘just one more’ either by direct request or by having a friend buy another drink and slipping it to our Problem Child.

I was not a fighting man.   If a negotiated end could not be reached and there was any sign of further belligerence phase two would come into play.  I would signal the doorman.  And if, as I mentioned, I did not have an assigned doorman on hand, a quick signal would have the bartender on the phone and the Police at the doorway in short order.  They would take the individual aside and, in most cases end up taking the miscreant away. 

Sometimes you would see a guy take the measure of a cop.   I once saw a cop draw his baton and just hold it, hands down, across his lower body.  The drunk, a guy who had the look of a Vietnam vet, was watching the cop who is a little shorter than he.
The cop remained standing relaxed, with his baton held in both hands horizontally looking at the drunk calmly.  It was evident the cop was holding his baton in the prescribed manner outlined in a training manual.
Doing it by the book.

No words were exchanged
You can see the vet’s brain ticking… “I can take this guy.  Easy.”
The cop finally said “You ain’t gonna win this one, pal.”
The vet looks at the cop…his eyes flick to the baton and back to the cop’s eyes a few times and he leaves with the officer and gets taken away.
 Now, the local police had no desire to be Security for saloons.  Cops don’t like bars (except their own) because it is they who have to deal with the stupidity and temporary insanity that alcohol can inflict on an average person.  “On the other hand, “as one criminal defense lawyer said, “in a cop bar all the drunks have guns.”
Saloons can produce drunk drivers, wife beaters and sometimes homegrown murderers which add to the workload of law enforcement.
  Sometimes you just had to make the call.  A guy might be too scary.  Too big or had a look that you knew was dangerous.  Or as the country song went, the beer and whiskey would make them feel ten feet tall and bulletproof.  But usually it would be because the guy just would refuse to leave. 
Still, no one liked to call the police. 

Should your saloon attract too much Police Business you could face all kinds of social problems.  Like more frequent “walk throughs” where officers would make themselves obvious to all by walking through the establishment, checking I.D.’s etc   This sets off many customers who get nervously distracted by the presence of police in a saloon.  If the police feel your saloon has attracted too much attention they can order that the saloon hire a Rent-A-Cop to bolster the doorman duties.  This happened to The Bar once and the extra expense made us be a little more selective in our doorman hiring process.  The rent-a-cop we had to hire (for a month) was not particularly intimidating but the message was clear.  Find an effective doorman at our price or be forced to hire a rent-a-cop at a much more expensive rate.
 
The Bar had quite an array of door crew over the years as one might imagine.  Once I even hired a really pretty girl as a ‘doorman’.  She actually was effective at collecting cover because she was so cute that guys didn’t want to appear cheap in her eyes and would pay up without the usual hustle looking for a discount.  Sadly, she didn’t last because she got bored with the job and wanted to party more than make the small amount of money we paid for the job
In the early days most of them were ‘regular guys’ and unremarkable as personalities     There were some that were more memorable but space is limited so I’ll just touch on a few.

T.O. had attracted some football players patronage and one of the men on the team thought being a doorman would give him easy access to the local women. He was a nice guy, and an OK doorman, big enough that your regular machismo guys looked elsewhere for their posturing.  Having a local football ‘star’ was a perk too.  This guy had a short tenure because one night he refused to let a young lady in because she had no I.D.  She didn’t take kindly to refusal and something in his manner set her off and she connected with a kick to the groin that laid the football guy low and ended his brief career as a bouncer.
 

We had one guy I hired but always felt uneasy about.  There was something about him that just didn’t seem right.  He was a good looking guy, about 5’7” and a good, wiry build.  He had your classic New York arrogance and accent which I told myself was maybe why I felt uneasy about him.  New York people can sometimes be abrasive when they mix with California types.
He claimed to be a Vietnam vet, a LURP no less, another thing which tended to make me stifle my suspicions.  The LURP were ‘long range reconnaissance patrols’ inserted behind enemy lines for weeks at a time whose mission was to avoid contact and gather information.  These guys were a special class of fighting unit and were respected by their peers and feared by the enemy.
He also claimed to be a Medal Of Honor recipient.
I took all this in and figured maybe that was why I had the uneasy feeling about because some Vietnam vets were edgy due to the effects of the war and sometimes set off cautionary vibes.
Initially he was a pretty good doorman as far as the job went, stayed on top of checking I.D.’s which was the most important part and never really got put to the test as far as having to deal with a violent customer because, as noted, we seldom had fights at The Bar..
He, like all the doormen, also got to meet and greet all the ladies who came in and no doubt sampled the wares offered by some of these ladies.  Some of ladies liked his dark good looks.
He had ambitions.  He wanted a title.  He felt being ‘just a doorman’ was a low esteem kind of a thing in the eyes of the ladies.  He wanted to be called something that had ‘manager’ attached to it.  Something a bit more glamorous.
 
And he wanted more money.

 Well, we made no effort to invent a cosmetic ‘title’ for him just to satisfy his ego.  It was a door gig.  It paid 25.00 and you got to pay employee prices for drinks.  That was it.
He borrowed money from me from time to time, a practice I did not encourage because my income was nothing to shout about.

Two things started to happen.
 
The door take was starting to be ‘off’.  The door money was a cash thing and as the evening went on it was understood that the doorman had the discretion to knock a buck off the cover when it was getting late.  Still, the amount we netted didn’t seem right but there was no way we could prove it.

The second thing was he started telling me “war stories” about having to fight or otherwise deal with pugnacious customers in some quick but violent manner.
Now, when grown men fight there is certain cruel coarseness and brutality to it.  Knuckles get skinned, shirts get torn, lips get split.  He would tell me of his latest fight and never show any evidence of having done more strenuous than moving a barstool.  And there were never any witnesses.
I finally told him I didn’t believe him.  I told him that he couldn’t possibly be having that kind of activity and not show any kind of stress to body, clothes or demeanor.  He didn’t like that too much but, outside of giving me a hard look he didn’t say anything.  I just told him, “We sell rope here.  You can take all the rope you need.  You either pull or hang.”  The very next night he again claimed to have dealt with some thug and showed me a bruise on his cheekbone as proof.  At the time I thought he had somehow dealt it to himself and I still feel that way looking back on it.

Things got a very dicey very fast.  I got a tip that he was selling bindles of cocaine which T.O. (and anyone with half a brain) did not want happening in his business so we decided he had to go.
He saved us the trouble by quitting.  He borrowed money from one of his girlfriends and came by and paid me most of what he owed me.  He had no sooner paid me when he took his girlfriend and off they went, riding into the sunset.
None too soon for him because not three hours later the local cops came by looking for him.  They would not say why they wanted him but they were definitely Looking for him.
After he had been gone for a month or so I did something I wish I had done earlier.  I went to the library and looked in a certain reference book.  It was up to date and a recent printing.  It listed the citation texts of the Medal Of Honor recipients from all the American wars including the Vietnam War.
He wasn’t on the list.  It is very possible that the closest he ever got to Vietnam was sitting home watching the news.

Another notable I shall dub “Moose” (although that was not his name.)  He was a big guy, a bodybuilder, about 5’10 with a nose like an axe blade and a bona fide New Jersey accent.  This accent cannot be faked, folks.  You either have it or you don’t.  He definitely had it.
He came in one night and was instantly smitten by one of my waitresses.  Classic love/lust at first sight!  I was sitting at her station when he came into view.  I had seen that look before on many a male. She was one of those women that men lust after, a blonde beauty, generously endowed.  You could see the love hit him as clearly as if he had been whalloped between the eyes with a board. It was like something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon.   I mentally wished him luck because I knew the girl pretty well and knew she wasn’t really looking for a permanent hookup at the time. 
He applied for the job of doorman/bouncer to T.O.  T.O. liked what he saw and since we did need the position adequately filled put him on the job.  Moose was happy because this put him close to his Chosen One and made him a little money too.  We were happy because it is easier, at the rate we paid, if someone asked for and wanted the job.
He was actually a great guy with a good, if East Coast cynical, sense of humor.  He didn’t drink much (a plus) and didn’t indulge in drugs outside of a little pot now and then.  He was proud of his body and was prone to wearing muscle shirts to show off his excellent musculature which tended to discourage any ideas the hostile minds might have about engaging him.  The girls liked to look at him but he didn’t fool around because, after all, his sweetie was working most nights he was.

But he was from New Jersey.  
Everything they say about New Yorkers applies double to guys from New Jersey.  A bit more arrogant.  A slightly larger chip on the shoulder.  That was our Moose.

We put him on the door and he was excellent at it.  He’d done doorman/bouncer duty Back East and had all the moves down pat.  He was perfect at the job.  The only thing I didn’t like about it was the “or else” tone he took with some of the males. I thought he was just a bit too challenging attitude wise but soon accepted it as part of what made him the Moose.
In any case he had the job and pursued his waitress/inamorata with diligence and a whirlwind courtship doing his best to sweep her off her feet.

There were three incidents involving belligerent customers that stick out in my mind.
Once there were two guys near the side door on a no band night that was getting a little heated.  You could see them circling like dogs, taking each other’s measure.  Moose saw it and got between them.
“Ain’t no fightin’ in here!” he said with that patented New Jersey “or else” tone.
“I wasn’t gonna fight him” one of the guys said.
“What… were you just tryin’ to shake his hand?” being an excellent example of dealing with a Problem with humor.  Everybody cracked up, including the belligerents, effectively defusing the situation.

The second incident was an example of what a being bouncer was about.
 As you went out the front door we had a pretty good sized pyracantha bush.  I trimmed it often when I got bored and had it cut in a nice more or less square shape.  It was about three and a half feet high and was a hedge-like rectangle about four by ten feet in surface area on top.  Pyracanthas, for those who don’t know, are also called “firethorn” bushes because they are a prickly, thorny bush.  They also have a red berry that ferments and seasonally you can see birds partaking of the berries and getting loaded.  Pretty apropos for a saloon I’d say but let’s get back to the story…
Three guys came in.
Moose was at the door.  It was early and, while he was charging cover, he let them in without taking the fee as was allowed at the doorman’s discretion, for people that just wanted to have a drink or two.  The idea was that they would leave before the band started.  I didn’t quite hear what exchange they had but I distinctly remember hearing Moose’s “or else’ tone gets added to the mix.
The three guys had a drink, maybe two, certainly no more than that and were talking among themselves, looking toward Moose.  I knew one of the guys and didn’t think much would come of it so I didn’t give it much thought.

Moose was talking to his new girlfriend and I was standing by the foyer entrance when the trio started walking out.  Next thing you know words were exchanged.  The girlfriend tried to calm Moose down but he shoved her out of the way and the three guys jumped him, one in particular throwing a haymaker punch that might as well have hit a wall for all the effect it had. 
Three on one!  Suddenly one lost his grip and in short order the fight just two on one and the donnybrook was over.  The three men were not knocked out but definitely out of commission.  Moose looked over the three and said “I want the bum that sucker punched me.”  He identified the miscreant and dealt him a terrible blow to the face.  The three gathered themselves up painfully and left, never to return that I knew of.
I asked Moose if he was OK and he said, “Oh yeah.  Ya just shove them into the pyracantha bushes dere.  Takes alla the fight out of ‘em” And he laughed.

The third incident was a really strange one.
It was nearly closing time on, I think, a Wednesday.  There was myself, T.O. and Moose and a bartender in attendance.
Some guy none of us had seen before came in and asked for a drink.  Moose and I saw that he’d already had a few but T.O. either didn’t see it or didn’t think the guy was all that drunk.  T.O. said “New customer!  Get him a drink.”
And so he was served.
It became quickly evident that, not only was he very drunk, but he had some anger management issues.  He got into some kind of back and forth with Moose and the drunk stood up to fight.  Moose did not want to fight the guy because he knew there would be No Contest and the guy would get needlessly injured.  Moose quickly spun the man around and grabbed him in a bear hug from behind.  The guy was immobilized.  Moose held him for about thirty seconds and said “I don’t wanna fight with you.  I just want you to calm down and I’ll let you go and we can all be friends, alright?”
The guy agreed.  What else could he do?  So Moose let go of him.  Of course, the idiot took a swing at Moose.
Moose grabbed the guy by one arm and, to my amazement, threw him like a Frisbee good ten or fifteen feet.  The guy saw the error of his ways and the “new customer” left while he could and was never seen again.
Moose?  Well, Moose and his girlfriend had some incompatibilities and split up.  Without her to keep his attention he tired of the bar scene and moved out of town and out of The Bar’s sphere of influence.

We went through a few more guys in the ensuing months but none of them made legendary status until finally we found the perfect one for our purposes.  He was a very articulate, benevolent acting, long haired guy whose mellow demeanor covered a very capable troubleshooting ability.  He loved the job for the social aspect and was honest to a fault.  Not much of a drinker but he did like his pot which tended to keep him mellow and philosophical.
He loved The Bar and stayed on the job for years, lo even unto its demise…

“I like trumpet players but if all I hired was trumpet players my show would fold”
                                                                             Jackie Gleason

T.O. had a soft spot for country music.  There’s nothing wrong with that except it was difficult to get a house at The Bar with a country offering.
There were exceptions of course.  Back In The Saddle, a seven piece ensemble that delivered smooth Western Swing and Chuck Wagon and The Wheels whose brand of Western Swing was a bit more irreverent but every bit as much fun.  Shagbark Hickory was another of the groups that did well carrying a pedal steel it the mix.  Tom Rigney’s ‘Sundogs’ did consistently well with their brand of Cajun Zydeco music.

 
But what brought in the girls was rock and roll.

 
Uncle Rainbow, any of Mark Ford’s bands (and there were several) Daddy-O and such like.  You really couldn’t go wrong with bands like that.  Stu Blank rocked the old upright piano so hard he broke strings on it!  There was Merlin, featuring a guy named Carlos playing a harp of all things
There was System 9, one of those “wedding bands” that made up for lack of original tunes by delivering accurate covers of just about any rock or pop song you could think of.
The bands on that list were, at a local level anyway, truly great bands.  But those bands were not available at all times so you had to try other local groups hoping to find a new, emerging group that might catch the public eye.  That was always a risky business because there are just so many low draw nights a saloon can take and still survive over the long run.
Some bands did better than others of course but it was a gamble when you ran a new group since few new bands really drew all that well on their first few appearances at The Bar.

 
 Still, the idea was to draw women and to do that the band you book had better make the girls dance.
However, T.O. was not a dancer.  Music did not move him like it moved the ladies and their lusting beaux.  There is nothing wrong with that, either, so long as you realize who you are trying to please and hire what your patrons like.
There were some bands he did not like.  He did not like them “because what they played was not music.”  He had the normal human failing of thinking that if he liked or disliked a certain type of music, why, he was providing the world with an example of excellent musical taste.  We all feel that way to a degree.  For most of us we are thankfully limited to controlling just our own CD and TV fare.  When running a saloon however you have to try to figure out what brings in customers and your own brand of music may not be it.

 
One of the music forms T.O. hated was Fusion, that admixture of rock and jazz.  Another band type he disliked was any band that played “metal” or “alternative” rock.
There was one such band we shall call “Razed Cain” (although that was not the band’s name) that we shall use as an extreme example of Saloonkeeping Gone Wrong.

 
 Here is where the Jackie Gleason quote mentioned at the start of this writing comes in.
You cannot hire bands as if you were buying CD’s for your stereo.  Your saloon is not your living room.  Sometimes you have to hire what you don’t like if it brings you money.

 
I didn’t particularly care for the music of Razed Cain either.  They played too damn loud and their vocals were unremarkable (to me).  But their front man and lead guitarist was a darkly handsome, obnoxiously arrogant, young man who played a style of guitar that did not interest me but the girls just loved.  They would flock to see that band and dance to their music.
The leader of Razed Cain offered us a deal.  He wanted us to charge a seven dollar cover for one of his shows.  This was an unheard of high price for The Day.  The normal cover fee was 3.00, sometimes 4.00.  Along with this high cover charge the band would just work for the door.   I had to ask T.O. since Razed Cain was one of his least favorite groups.  He OK’d the deal figuring he’d be getting a band for free and Razed Cain would be cutting their own throat.

 Razed Cain absolutely packed the place that night!

T.O. sat by the side door darkly, drinking beer after beer after beer…

Finally he could stand it no more.

He made his way through the crowd and got up on the stage.
The crowd grew quiet.  Many of the patrons had no idea who he  was.  The musicians, however, knew T.O. by reputation had an inkling of what was to come and those of us that were crew knew what was going to happen and could only watch helplessly…

He was brief.  I’ll give him that.

He proceeded to tell the patrons (in a packed venue, mind you) what he thought of Razed Cain and their music.  He also made a point  to tell the patrons that they had terrible taste in music to even listen to this kind of thing to begin with….
He finally finished his rant and got off the stage glowering pugnaciously at any and all as he went to his seat and had the duty bartender call him a cab.
Razed Cain tried to pick it up from where they were interrupted but never quite got off the runway for the rest of the evening.
Some patrons assured me they would never return as they left.  I think most of those did return because of habit but some hardcore Razed Cain fans probably never returned.

 
 The event described was probably the most extreme example of hosting at its worse.  These incidents didn’t happen often but an inebriated owner publicly unhappy with the band du jour was a Loose Cannon in its most draconian form.  Over the years there were a few more such incidents but none were quite as provocative.

 
On another tack there is always a problem of a creeping rise in volume in a live music club.  It happens.  You try to stay on top of it.  Some bands are just difficult to deal with for that kind of thing.

Actually the crowds seem to like loud bands.  Where it got to be a problem was with Crew.   At a certain volume level the bartenders and waitresses could not hear each other well enough to get the orders right.
I would approach the sound man and tell him/her to get the band in hand and sometimes that worked.
Sometimes it did not.
So I would go to the head of the band, between songs, and give them the word.  That usually worked.  I wasn’t all soft and sweet with them but I wasn’t rude either.  I had played in club bands and I knew how it was from the musician’s standpoint.  They truly cannot hear how they sound to the patrons.  On one of the nights Razed Cain was playing I asked him twice to turn down and he wouldn’t.  Finally I went to him looking overjoyed and I said “You did it!  You finally did it!”
“Did what?
“Your playing is so loud we can’t hear the singer at all!  Thank you!”
That worked.

 
T.O., if in his cups, sometimes thought it was better to just get in there and “help”  the sound tech and sometimes actually tamper with the mix because, of course sound tech was an overrated skill that anyone could do.  Alcohol never seemed to improve anyone’s attempts at controlling a soundboard but he felt he was capable of ‘fixing it’ after he’d had a few.  One night he did this so “well” that the  sax player in the band had to be restrained from packing up his instrument and quitting the gig.

 
Or he would stand in front of the band waving his arms down as if he were Johnny Carson telling and audience to quiet down.  Letting the world know he thought the band was too loud.  It probably was.  But there are more effective, less public ways to get your point across.
Having played in bands I told him it’s too hard for a band to turn down in the middle of a song while they were playing.  They had to do this between songs.  He would look at me as if I were daft and pantomime a guitarist reaching behind himself and turning down an amp.  “That’s all they got to do…”

 
T.O. certainly was not like that every night.  However it must be said that it is a problem when that obnoxious drunk in the corner is the owner and not someone you can cut off or send home.  Not everyone knew he was the owner which meant that some customers saw it as a Saloon that could not maintain order.

 
Even with bands he liked he could be a problem if he had too much to drink.   Alcohol’s consumption past a certain limit seldom brings out the best in anyone.

 
It got so I had to avoid booking bands I would have liked to have booked again.   Some I felt, if given a fairly regular opportunity, might build a following at The Bar but if T.O. didn’t like certain bands he discouraged me from hiring them.  So the bands booked themselves elsewhere and their fans followed them.
Away from The Bar…

 
There is no way of knowing whether the bands I would like to have hired and could not would have fared better over time.  Sometimes even a popular band would lose its edge and attendance will drop because people got bored with what was perceived as a same-o same-o lack of fresh material.
I can’t even say that the kind of embarrassing scenes I described here had that much of an affect on the overall business since, after all, it was just a drunk getting out of hand and who has not seen a drunk get out of hand in a saloon?  There have been stories, tales actually, of bars that have brawls every weekend that still manage to stay open and apparently thrive although no local bar could make that claim.  The Bar was not noted for having much in the way of fights.  In that respect we did well.

 
Gleason’s adage still applied
“I like trumpet players but if all I hired was trumpet players my show would fold”
Hiring bands to suit your own taste will, in the long run, cripple your establishment because what you, as a saloonkeeper, like often has no connect to what the partying public likes.

 
As time went on it seemed like no matter what kind of band we hired the crowds were on a decline.  The sure fire bands that always seemed to draw were getting very scarce.  The video cassette, the rented movie and ordered in pizza was making a dent in the business.  People found ways to stay home and have fun and avoid the risk of an alcohol related ticket.  When they did go out they drank less because of the real fear of harsh fines if caught driving even a little over the legal limit.  And finally,  the clientele started to age.  Some got married and became parents.  Partying on weekends was curtailed because it was hard to budget and famly  responsibility crowded the saloon life out.

… and the younger folks migrated elsewhere looking for the newest Hot Spot.

The nightclub business was losing its sparkle…

                                                            Hiring Crew

                                                  Job Focus:
                                                The perfect customer space:
                                                             A clean table
                                                             A clean Ashtray
                                                             One drink
                                                             One dry napkin
                                                             No dead glasses

                                                               
                                          My Crew Rules were simple:

No drugs or drunkenness on the Job.
Wear What You Want…you know what Looks Good on you…
Gawd HELP you if you show up with chipped nail polish.
“Check your dip.”

Wearing what you want.  Most of the women preferred this.  They did not care for uniforms because uniforms are not always flattering.  They felt this could affect their tips. 

The Nail Polish rule  Customers see your hands.  A bad manicure looked shabby.  Most girls, even those with short nails, used polish because wiping out dirty ashtrays made keeping nails clean difficult at times.
 (I kept a bottle of polish remover in the office for those who did come in with chipped polish)  I also kept a box of sewing thread and safety pins on hand.  You learn that safety pins are a needed item sometimes.  “Wardrobe malfunctions” are not confined to Super Bowls.

The ‘Check Your Dip’ rule
This was in reference to what a customer should or should not be able to see when a waitress bent to serve drinks.
You can’t fight nature.  A woman’s nipples have a mind of their own and will appear boldly for any number of reasons and can do wonders poking through even several layers of cloth but I drew the line at customers getting a Full View as a girl bent over placing drinks on the tables. Their clothing and their cleavage, their “dip” should never allow the customer to know the color of their areoles.

The drugs were always An Issue.  This was the period of high cocaine usage among the Young and Invincible in saloons across the country.  Saloons, after all, are not churches.  Still, T.O. had a sudden death, instant termintation rule about dealing drugs at The Bar.  It was not worth risking his license for Stupidity In Action.

Personal usage, of course, happened but was never officially condoned.  When it or drinking became too evident or distracting… ‘Off with her head’ so to speak and she’d be gone.

“No Dangling”  This was in reference to smoking tobacco. 

There are people reading this today who really have no idea what the air in a Saloon was like in those days.   People smoked.  A lot.  I did.  Some (but not all) of my crew did.  But what I forbade them to do was to ever (and I mean EVER ) be seen with a cigarette dangling from their lips.  I would cross the room and yank it out of their mouths   To me it made the girls look hard and tough and I Just Would Not Have It.  Tell them it made them look tough didn’t seem to faze them.  Tell them it  made them look old (not ‘older’… just old ) worked better.

                                                                ~/~
I hadn’t been on the new job very long when I found that managing a crew of women had its quirks.
  First and foremost was the fact, already stated, that waitressing, at least cocktail waitressing, was a transient occupation.

You may find ‘lifers’ in your diners and restaurant chains but not in a saloon.  Sooner or later the girl wants out.  To get married.  To finish school.  To just find a different job in a different bar hoping maybe the next saloon might pay more or give them a shot at bartending.  Whatever the reason the problem remained that there was a turnover that had to be reckoned with.  

Many times I would find that some of the women were unstable and needed weeding out. Some emotionally so and some due to drug use.  Some just never caught on to the trade.  Firing someone is never a pleasant task but I kept it private and short.
I initially learned to dread the onset of menses as much as if not more so than any married man could. I finally came up with something of a solution that I probably couldn’t get away with it in today’s politically correct world.  During my ‘You’re hired” speech I would tell them to let me know when “the moon was on them” so I would know not to kill them because of the mood change.  The honesty of this worked out pretty well, actually.

 Another thing I did was to read a good, easy to understand book on ailments common to women and they soon found that I understood these things more than most men did.  The women already on crew told the New Hires what to expect from me and I had a generally loyal, happy crew. 

Some managers like to manage thru fear and intimidation.  I didn’t care for that because waitressing had its own stresses without them needing to be afraid of me.  My management “style” such as it was was simple.  I was a guy in the unique position of hiring the very women I worked with.  My ‘style’ was this:

Love them.  Love them all.  Pet them when they did well and keep it short and private when they did not do well.  What happens is their dignity remains intact.  Give your crew some love, respect and praise and they will kill for you.

Still, I found it prudent to have an on-call list of temps… girls who, on short notice, could and would get in there with a tray and cover a shift so I was constantly looking for attractive females to sign on as temps or potential New Hires.

T.O. didn’t have much respect for the trade of waitressing.  He often said he would like it if I could replace the entire crew every six weeks or so for varietey’s sake.  He was the only one who felt that way.   There was no ‘waitress tree’ where all you needed to do was walk over and pick one…

 Whether to hire an experienced girl or not was always a changing decision.  I liked the ones I called my ‘War Horses”.  There are some women who are so good at waitressing that they can cover bigger floor single-handedley than two lesser girls put together could. 
I called them ‘Warhorses’ after the special horses favored by the plains Indians, horses that would go into the thick of a fight with heart and not shy or spook.  It was one of the highest complements I could bestow.  The difficulty was keeping a Warhorse on crew because they anticipated bigger tips and disliked sharing a floor with other women.  They would get frustrated thinking there was more money to be made down the road…

 On the other hand there is an endearing quality about a fresher girl, one new to the trade.  They were usually younger and hadn’t had time to gain the cynicism that many of the more experienced girls had.
 The down side of that of course was that it takes a while, at least a month, for the new girl to get the hang of the call order and until a girl learned a proper call order and other skills of the trade some bartenders were almost cruel in their impatience with them.  This also meant customer service was slower.  We didn’t have a good training regimen for New Hires which was bad but on the good side the survivors were keepers.
 Some New Hires couldn’t take it and would quit.  Some bucked up and took hold and became keepers.

Some got thrown back.

 When I took over the crew T.O. had already cut back on live music from six nights to three.  He had jazz on Tuesday nights and rock and roll on Friday and Saturday nights.

One reasonably qualified girl could handle Tuesday’s jazz crowd but weekends needed more crew because those bands tended to draw better.

 On weekends I would book three girls.  I called the shift turns “Legs”.  The “First Leg” would come on at six and work until eight at which time the “Second Leg” would come on duty giving the other a break of maybe a half hour.  Sometimes the First Leg wanted to keep working particularly if she had a couple of hot spots of good tippers.

 As lead girl, the First Leg, got to make the call which side of the room she was to work for this very reason, to keep her good tippers in her section.
 When required, the Third Leg would come on no later than nine and so it would go.  If, as it sometimes happened, the night lost part of its crowd I would allow the girls decide to send one of their number home.  I did this to avoid claims of bias.  It worked pretty well.   Most of the time.

 Sometimes I would have to pull rank and make the woman on duty let the next girl come on line.  The starting girl obviously wanted to make as much money as possible and would be reluctant to allow the next girl up.  But there comes a point where customer service suffered and something needed to be done.

 I had to be careful to not show too much favoritism although this was not always possible because my crew was seldom equally skilled.  Like any other skilled trade some were just better at it than others.  I developed personal biases, too, because I was human.  I’d be lying if I said otherwise but I tried to keep a balance.  If I had a favorite I was careful not to let her act like an Overseer.

 In one area I had a brilliant stroke.  That was division of the floor in sections.  I made copies of a hand drawn layout of the tables in the building and gave two copies to each of the girls currently on crew at the time and asked them to draw what they thought were fair boundary lines for a two girl floor and a three girl floor.
 I took these maps and used them as a basis for the “Official” floor diagram which all of them agreed was a fair, acceptable compromise.
 This of course made for “turf” and sparked some infighting if a girl happened to do a little pirating in another’s section.

 Great fun was had by all…

                            The Mississippi Two Step

When I saw too much infighting starting to happen I would go to each one of them and say “We got a Mississippi Two step going on here and it Will Stop.  If it does not stop I will get a bucket of water and hold your heads under ’till the bubbles stop.”

That usually worked.

No one ever asked me what a Mississippi Two step was.  They already knew what The Problem was.  When I said a Mississippi Two Step was afoot they knew I was aware of The Problem  and, amazingly, it would cease. 

Usually. 

Sometimes a firing was needed but in the long run they felt better served working with what they had rather than breaking in a New Hire.

 The position of being waitress manager made me look at women customers a little differently particularly if my on call backup name list was getting thin.  That pretty customer might be my next New Hire.

When looking for a New Hire I learned how to scan a woman like other women look at them.  That One First Look-Over that is a mental flash picture…a rapid scan.  A quick glance that takes in her clothes, how they fit, how she moves, what she thinks of her body and herself which is reflected in how they groom themselves.  I learned this by listening to the women discuss how they discussed other women among themselves.

Most guys seem to focus just on The Face or The Boobs.  It’s a rare man that learns to do this all encompassing quick scan.  It’s a skill that cannot be taught.

…a woman doing this very same scan is merely sizing up the competition…

I additionally learned to ‘look at their edges’ and see if they might have a Daemon or have a Dark Cloud over them…  “Looking at their edges” was one of the unexplainable feelings I had.  I wouldn’t call it psychic because I have a dim view of such terms but at the same time I felt my knack of ‘looking at their edges’ was more accurate than any other method for spotting a woman who had problems lurking beneath the surface and sometimes the feeling was so strong I would not use the girl or if I did, I used her only sparingly. They sometimes came on board with social or chemical problems of the day and this always complicated matters.  And if you complicated matters too much you were Gone.

 Most “interviews” I conducted were pretty brief.  Talk to the girl, check out her grooming.  Always had her show me her hands because this spoke volumes sometimes.  You could tell a lot about a person by how they react to “let me see your hands”.  I liked a well kept hand and I knew customers always saw a girls hands.  They didn’t need to have long nails but they did need to look clean.

If I had any doubts about her willingness to work or even show up  I would ask if I could think it over and ask her to come back in a day or two (always specifying the day).  If they didn’t show for the second interview I saved myself a lot of wasted time.

Some went like this one…

I was standing near the pinball game.  A guy and a girl are playing.  I look over at her.  Blonde.  Blue eye shadow.  Short, nice figure wearing jeans.  Pretty girl.
It’s quiet.  It’s a Sunday night.  Not many people in attendance.  My back is to the pinball machine and I’m looking over the main room.
Suddenly I feel like I’m being watched and look down to see the blonde standing next to me, looking up at me.
“Who does the hiring here?”
“I do most of it.” I said.
She looks out into the main bar.  “It doesn’t look like it but could you use another waitress?”
“You any good at it?
“Yeah!” she said with a defiant yet almost bored emphasis.  I got the distinct impression it was the same way Bill Hickok would have answered someone if the asked him if he could shoot a pistol well.
‘Warhorse!’  I knew instantly that she was Very Good at what she did.  I also knew she might be overqualified.  But it so happened that I had the Tuesday jazz night open as was second leg on weekends.
I told her as much.  Not a whole lot of money but it would be a start.  Pays minimum wage.
“Can I try it?”
I looked at her a little closer.  Looked at her ‘edges” and saw a murky soup a-stirring… Looked into her eyes for the first time.  Had a blueness to them that was more than just the color.  There was sadness but also there was just an edge of defiance…
“Lemme see your hands!” I said.
She held them horizontally and spread her fingers.  Beautifully kept, red painted nails, one small ring on her right hand.
I took her hands and turned them over, looked at her palms a little and turned them over again.
I looked at her and said “I gotta be honest with you… I think you’re trouble on the hoof but I need somebody.  You want to see how the place feels come in at 8 on Tuesday.  Give it a try.”  Tuesday night was Jazz Night.  If she didn’t show it wouldn’t be a disaster but it would be nice to have someone on the job.  I needed women to work the quiet gigs as well as the busy ones…

She asked what she should wear and I said “…anything you wanted to but no jeans.  And check your dip before you get here.”  She looked at me quizzically.  “Bend in front of a mirror before you leave.  The customer must never see the color of your nipples.”

Tuesday night came and she arrived in wearing a strapped green dress; one of those ‘bare shoulders’ things that allowed good cleavage and displayed the tops of her breasts nicely.  The dress had a cleverly wrought skirt section that opened as she moved and exposed her legs as they were brought forward in her walk.  She had beautiful legs.
And she worked the floor like the pro I knew she was.
I thought she would choose not to stay on because she was a class A Warhorse and those seldom stayed long but stay on she did.
…and brought a freight train of baggage and became a Featured Player in many scenes at The Bar ‘disaster movies’ as she lived her somewhat chaotic life.

That’s how it was… I loved then all…

Never a dull moment…

 From CIA World Fact Book:
                                                                        Tonga

The archipelago of “The Friendly Islands” was united into a Polynesian kingdom in 1845. It became a constitutional monarchy in 1875 and a British protectorate in 1900. Tonga acquired its independence in 1970 and became a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. It remains the only monarchy in the Pacific.  It’s king is named Taufa’ahau

It is in the Oceania, archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean, about two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand

Tonga, a small, open, South Pacific island economy, has a narrow export base in agricultural goods. Squash, coconuts, bananas, and vanilla beans are the main crops, and agricultural exports make up two-thirds of total exports. The country must import a high proportion of its food, mainly from New Zealand. Tourism is the second largest source of hard currency earnings following remittances. The country remains dependent on external aid and remittances from Tongan communities overseas to offset its trade deficit. The government is emphasizing the development of the private sector, especially the encouragement of investment, and is committing increased funds for health and education. Tonga has a reasonably sound basic infrastructure and well-developed social services. High unemployment among the young, a continuing upturn in inflation, pressures for democratic reform, and rising civil service expenditures are major issues facing the government.

 The “High unemployment among the young” mentioned above tends to make many Tongans go elsewhere in the world leaving the balmy South Pacific for the hostile colder climes of the US and Europe.
 They are a robust, healthy people and, like any ethnic group, tend to cluster in communities for linguistic and cultural comfort.
 They are good, hard, workers and usually can be found it heavy labor jobs such as construction and gardening.
 In Tongan culture, fighting among the males is looked at differently than European based cultures.  A good fight is considered just that and grudges are seldom carried as baggage.  If it is possible to deem it so, they are good natured fighters and while they don’t deliberately look for a fight they tend to be fearless and definitely will not turn away from a bout particularly when it’s another Tongan making the challenge.  Even so, they are generally good humored, friendly people.

Some of them, male and female, are quite large.

 T.O. had a friend who was in the demolition/deconstruction business who used Tongan men almost exclusively on his work crews.  Because he hired so many of them and paid them well and fairly the Tongan community held T.O.’s friend in high esteem. This was reinforced by the man’s frequent trips to the island kingdom.
 T.O.’s friend talked him into going with him on one of these jaunts and T.O. was charmed by what he saw.
 Polynesian cultures are mesmerizing to outsiders because of their apparently languid lifestyle, easy laughter and haunting music.
 T.O.’s friend was treated like a visiting prince because the islanders knew and appreciated that he hired many of their sons.  T.O. saw that the Tongans seemed to revere their monarch and most of all they loved to party.
 And drink…
 Prodigiously…
 T.O. later said they drank as if it was their national pastime.

 When T.O. got back to the states he Had A Plan.

 He was put in contact with one of the local Tongan men who had a band.
 T.O. declared that rather than try to attract a fickle, unappreciative, middle class American audience he declared he would book this guy’s band on weekends and bring in this untapped goldmine of island guzzlers and make a mint.
 I had my doubts and expressed them.
 “You tried that with the Hawaiians, and while it was finally starting to pay off it still didn’t do what you had hoped.” This was in reference to a previous deviation from standard saloon fare,  It involved the local Hawaiian community and, while pleasant, did not really do as well as he had hoped.   (See ‘Aloha Way’ in another section)

…and these guys ain’t Hawaiians.”
 “Meaning what?” T.O. said.
 “Look.  I just read a long article in The Chronicle about the Tongan culture and one of the things the article mentioned was that the men enjoy fighting and thought it of no consequence.”
 T.O. responded “I know these people. All we need to do is put flowers on the table and they’ll be as mild and friendly as lambs.”
 “T.O., you’re not serious!   Flowers on the tables are going to make people into pacifists? “
 “Sure!  And I’ll get a picture of their king and put it up.  They won’t disrespect a bar that has a picture of their king hanging in there.”
 “T.O., these are human beings that were raised in a different culture.  This does not make them simpletons and, while they may like flowers and their king, you know damn well Tongans have a reputation for liking to fight and now you want to bring them in here in large numbers?”
 “I think you’re a racist to be making comments like that.”
 “’S’cuse me?  Racist?  Not hardly.  You and I both know that That Other Place has had several brawls requiring multiple police cars involving Tongans.”
 “They didn’t handle them right.  They didn’t put flowers on the tables.”
 “T.O., you can’t “handle” an ethnic group.  You just can’t do it.  People are just too independent. And jars of flowers ain’t gonna mean a thing”

 But T.O. would not be swayed.  He dismissed my objections as words from one who did not know what he was talking about.  After all, he, T.O., had been to the islands and therefore he knew all there was to know about Tongans.  Their pugnaciousness is a myth…racist gossip.
 “You realize, of course, that you’re going to lose your American clientele.”
 “So what?  The way these Tongan’s drink it won’t matter.”

And so the die was cast…

 T.O. was very excited about the band.  It was a Tongan band and they played Reggae music which didn’t particularly excite me because I thought Reggae was largely like Delta Blues in that it was repetitious and boring.  Neither Blues bands or Reggae bands seemed to work well at The Bar.  Besides, reggae is Jamaican in origin.  These guys were Tongans.

 T.O. said he was particularly impressed with the guy who ran the band, a guy named Lopeti.  He was a bit older, maybe in his late forties.  T.O. was impressed because even though he was not particularly good looking, he always had women around him which meant he must be some kind of stud or at least someone with Tongan Mojo.
 T.O. pulled out all the stops.  Brought in extra chairs, ordered extra beer, insisted on having three waitresses and three bartenders in anticipation of the grand opening of his path to riches.

 Friday night came.

 At eight o’clock there were five people in the place beside the crew, mostly members of the Dice Players watching to see what came of this New Idea of T.O.’s.

Nine o’clock came and the band wandered in and started to set up.  I got his first look at the legendary Lopeti.

This is the charismatic Tongan?  He was a short, dumpy, plain looking guy with all the charm of a potato.

 At nine-thirty the band started playing.  More like warming up because there were no customers of Island descent present.

 Ten o’clock.  Several of the guys from the Dice Playing group left.  They didn’t like Reggae either.
  Ten thirty.  The band took a break.

 At ten forty five some cars drove slowly through the parking lot.

   And then it happened.

 Around 11:00 they came from nowhere and they came like the Mongol hordes sweeping across Asia.
 All the women seemed to be gum-chewers with stock in Wrigley’s…  All the men seemed to be six and a half feet tall.  Some of the women were seemingly six feet tall themselves and most of the ladies had the bunned hairstyle often seen in island people.  All were in good humor.  They had come to party.

 They were demanding as children.  They ran shams on the bartenders and waitresses ordering rounds and pointing across the room saying “Get you money from he.  He be buyin dese’a.”

 They did not tip.

 It was pandemonium.  They drifted in and out of the club going to their cars.
 The waitresses on duty required all of my persuasiveness to stay the night but they assured me they would not work another night like that.

 One of my ex-waitresses was tending bar that first night…    She was a nice looking girl with long, thick blonde hair.  She was standing by the side door around 12:30, taking a break…  The night was warm so the side door was open to let in air.  There was a heavy chain at upper thigh level to discourage people sneaking in at the side door.
Suddenly, my bartender found herself grabbed by the hair from behind at the side door and dragged over the door chain and out into the parking lot by one of the mumu wearing Amazons.  It was only through the intervention of several of the Tongan men that kept the bartender from getting beaten by this giantess.

 I learned a new thing about Tongan women.  One of the men told me that some Tongan women did not like ‘blonde girlies’ because some of their men were fascinated by American blondes and the island women felt threatened by them.
 ‘Great!  Most of my crew is blonde!’ thought I…

 There were only two fights that night and both were short ones outside in the parking lot.

 At two o’clock they poured out of the place as if it was on fire.

 And left evidence of a sort that T.O. hadn’t figured on.

 He hadn’t taken into consideration that most of the Tongans worked for wages that were something less than what Americans were paid.  They were blue collar people.  They worked in construction and heavy labor jobs which sometimes paid well but they were often paid at the same scale as the illegal Latin populace, which is to say not nearly the wage American workers tend to expect.  They had the same cost of living expenses other people had which was high in CA and that meant they didn’t have a whole lot of leisure money.

 Still, they loved to laugh and loved to party so what they would do was follow their homey band wherever it was booked and load up on beer and booze at their favorite liquor store.  Then they would either smuggle it into the bar or drink it in their many trips to their cars in the parking lot.  This way they could avoid paying the relatively high bar prices.

 After the last stragglers had left I had our lobby dustpan out and was gathering some of the debris. 

I was sweeping up beer cans (obviously from outside since The Bar only sold bottled beer), miniature liquor bottles such as dispensed on airlines and small half pints of cheap but powerful alcohol, things like Ever Clear and fortified wine.
 A lot of them.  Not just a few, but a lot of them.  Enough to fill two very large plastic garbage cans.
 This was something that took some planning and forethought.  This was a modus operandi.

 Needless to say, since they ‘brought their own,’ the register hadn’t done much business, certainly not enough to warrant paying a band but the band needed paying anyway.

 And it was only Friday.

 Saturday was still to come… I needed to get a new crew since my Friday girls were in shock.

Saturday dawned and it was, of course, a new day.

 I got on the phone and lined up two more victims for cocktail duty.  The hair-pulled bartender opted out, not wanting a repeat of being hauled around by her hair, so it fell to T.O. to staff the bar.

 T.O. tried to put a good face on it, claiming it was just a fluke.  Now that the Tongan community knew for sure the band would be here on weekends word would spread and they would flock in earlier and spend more money.
 The crew and I had our doubts but there wasn’t much we could do about it since it wasn’t our names on the business license.

 So with a crew that felt much like the Texans at the Alamo we awaited sundown’s fast approach.
 
 It became immediately obvious that the Friday event was more portent than fluke.
 Once again the early hours of the night consisted of an almost empty bar. 

        A few people, “regulars,” stopped by but it was evident that the former ambiance of the bar was gone and it its place was an anticipation that was closer to dread than optimism.   These wandering souls did not tarry.  They went to The Other Place looking for a Tongan free setting which was more to their liking.

 Once again the hours between eight and eleven were situations where the band and the staff outnumbered the patrons two to one.

 And, once again, at eleven, in they came.  More than on Friday and a bit more aggressive.  More of the round robin attempts to not pay for drinks.  The doorman was pressured to let in large, intimidating, young males with questionable I.D.’s.  Theree were a few more fights than the night before but somehow they were kept outside.

 I discovered that I had a problem that I had no solution for when one of my cocktail waitresses came outside for a break.  Visibly shaking due to fear and adrenaline and close to tears, she told me “If it was anyone else but you I’d drop this tray and run.”
        Needless to say she said she could not work another night like this. 

        I was officially out of crew.

 We got through it somehow with the same end result…smuggled empty beer cans and liquor bottles of all sizes emptied in the bar and even more in the parking lot.  Crummy tips and a register tape that read like there had only been about a third of the patrons that actually had shown up.  Truth be told, the register may have made it almost worth while but the smuggled empties were a mockery and quite frankly a danger to the license.  It is illegal in California to bring in your own alcohol in a Saloon.

 The next morning I tracked T.O. down and told him that we had an emergency.  There was no waitress crew.  “I ain’t about to feed women into that grinder.  You can’t pay them enough.  If you want waitresses we need to make the Tongans provide their own.”
 T.O. called Lopeti the bandleader for a meeting.  I made my case about the waitress situation and asked Lopeti if the Tongan community might be able to provide two women to work weekends.  I told him that there was no other option.
       Well, I found that I had asked the right guy.

 The next Friday went a little better.  The bartending crew had learned to ask for money up front before they dispensed drinks and the two Tongan women who came in to cocktail wasted no time in putting the boisterous revelers in their place in no uncertain terms.  They “Straightened them out like a piece of wire!” in a manner of speaking.  One of the girls was petite and very pretty.  She brooked no nonsense from her countrymen and was so brusque with one man who towered over her he asked her “Hey!  What kinda Tongan are you?”

 By now the bartending crew knew to expect that the Saturday crowd would be descending like avenging hordes at eleven p.m. and they were not disappointed.

      Having Tongan waitresses meant that things were not so chaotic on the floor but a new ring in the circus cropped up.

        There was a major brawl in the parking lot that involved about twenty men of varying ages.  The doorman and I were taken totally by surprise.  We could discern no cause for the donnybrook but it didn’t matter.  The fight started with little of the posturing and argument that usually preceded a ‘regular’ bar fight involving common drunks.  The fighting just exploded.  A patrol car happened to be passing by and shortly there appeared several police cars and the combatants were soon aligned kneeling in the parking lot.
  One of the officers questioned the wisdom of catering to the group but didn’t make much of a point about it.  Police departments have no love for Saloons.  After dark a large part of their business involves alcohol related problems.  We were reminded that if a Saloon had too many trouble calls the City would apply pressure via license suspensions. 
      There was no recrimination to The Bar by the police this time since a complaint had not been issued from the bar.
        I.D.’s were checked and several of the combatants were taken away on outstanding warrants.

 Inside the bar the revelry continued with seemingly no concern for the hapless men being ferried to jail.

      Oddly one of the eight balls turned up missing from the pool tables.  It was later found, chipped and scratched, having been hurled across the main drag (a four lane highway) during that particular parking lot brawl.  Definitely an omen.  Whoever threw it should probably have pitched for the Dodgers but that would be a digression from our current tale and we’ll not go there.

        It was the same net result as the previous Friday portended,  The register picked up some because of the Tongan waitresses keeping the customers honest but the tips were stingy and a vast amount of smuggled empties in the bar and in the parking lot still underscored money spent elsewhere.  Had the Tongans bought all of their booze and beer from The Bar T.O. would have been vindicated because the empties represented a goodly amount of money The Bar did not take in.

 T.O. would not admit that he had made an error in judgment.  He insisted things would get better.  When I grumbled about the problems of dealing with the increasingly obstreptuous crowd he claimed, once again, that I was acting like a racist bigot.

      He was still impressed that Lopeti, not a handsome man by any stretch of the imagination, was always seen with an entourage of between five to ten women around him at all times.  A studly tribute to his magnetism was how fast he had brought in the two women to waitress.  Obviously a concession to a better culture than that which they had emigrated to.

 Meanwhile the rest of the business at The Bar suffered also.  Tiffany’s daytime crowd thinned out.  Lunches were still pretty good but her afternoon crowd dropped noticeably.  The Dice Cuppers and some of the hardcore regulars and loafers being the only dependable customers but they did not linger as long as they used to.  Everyone sensed a difference in the mood of the place.

 The nighttime business, which had been on a decline anyway, went flat.

         T.O. blamed it on disloyalty and castigated the regular customers for not supporting his place of business.
 
 The weekend pattern went on for seven or eight weeks with little change.  There were more fights but they were small and brief and, thankfully, outside.

         Lo, It came to pass that the Tongans decided to have a Sunday afternoon party.
         Their version of a luau. 
         I disremember the occasion.  It might have been a birthday or it may have just been a party for the heck of having a party.
 T.O. was ecstatic.  The Tongan gold mine was about to deliver!  A nice Sunday afternoon party… flowers on the tables… it would be great. 
        No waitresses could be lined up since American girls refused to work a Tongan house so I was to be pressed into service bussing tables for empties figuring rightly that the Tongans would not mind going to the bar.  It was, after all, their party.
 No band was hired since the party was funded by the Tongans themselves and as earlier pointed out; they are not a wealthy community.  Besides, the band members wanted to be part of the party too.

 Sunday dawned and preparations were made.  A barbecue rotisserie was rented and a whole pig bought and roasted.  About four o’clock about 75 to 100 people showed up.  They seemed to be in good spirits and even I thought it might be a better than usual gather of the Tongans.  I didn’t have to worry about my waitresses getting traumatized and the overall mood was congenial.  Most of them were out on the patio area enjoying the camaraderie of good food and drink on a beautiful summer day.  The patio area was an addition created by redwood fencing and Astroturf and was outside on the side of the building.  There were several picnic tables arrayed there and it was quite comfortable on a nice day.

 One guy stood up…
 He wasn’t particularly young nor was he old… probably in his late thirties…

 “I feel like fighting.  Who wants to fight wid me?”

 “I will!” laughed a younger man who stood and in very short order, swung at the older guy.  Next thing you know it was pandemonium as no one wanted to be left out of the social exercise of pummeling your fellow man.  Soon all the males joined in with joy and enthusiasm.

         I was across the room at the bar with several other people just staying out of the way.  The fight started to move inside I saw some of the men going for the pool cues.  For some reason I became indignant at this.  Without hesitation I passed my walking stick to the off-duty Doorman (who had no interest in getting involved) and strode across the room.  I yanked the cue sticks from unresisting hands “Gimmie that!” I snarled as I gathered them all up and took them away from the brawl and headed back the bar.
 As I stalked back to the bar, arms full of pool cues, I saw the Doorman and the bartenders looking at me saucer eyed  as if I’d walked out of  hell itself by some miracle because no one had laid a hand on me and no one even tried to hang onto a cue. 
 The police weren’t called.  You might say the fight was allowed to run itself out but it was more like it was over rather quickly.  The Bar was declared closed for the day and the victors and vanquished, looking sheepish, slunk away.  The women looked to be on the verge of tears, embarrassed that what had started as a lovely party had come to such a ruin.
 The place needed closing.  It was a shambles.  It looked like a mini-tornado had run through one side of the building.
        The gate to the patio and some of the redwood fencing got broken in the melee as well as two of the redwood picnic tables and several of the accompanying benches.

 That Sunday marked the final curtain for the Tongan experiment.

        It was only a day or two later when I brought T.O. a newspaper, one of the little local rags.  Someone had called me on the phone and told me to pick one up.  There was an article in the Police Blotter portion I needed to see.  I looked and in it was an article that said Lopeti, our Lopeti, he of the Reggae band and the entourage of females, had been taken down in a drug bust.   It seemed that he had been under surveillance for months because of his connection with the distribution and sale of large amounts of cocaine.
 Cocaine, the drug of choice in that era.  It didn’t take rocket science to connect Lopeti’s “success” with women to his treating them to his stash.

But no Lopeti meant no Reggae band.  No Reggae band meant no Tongans.  Weekends now resembled the rest of the week.  We had become a neighborhood bar.

 And the slow, painful, process of trying to regain the interest and patronage of the old customers and attract the new commenced…

We started the cycle of booking  rock and roll bands on weekends again. 

 But The Bar never really recovered.

 In fact, its demise was coming…

The Mating Dance

The “Butterknife Girl”
She who squeegees her body against you as she talks to you…
She pays particular attention to pressing her breasts against you…
Making sure you know she’s there…

The Mating Dance

So a girl asked me how guys could be so dumb when it came to relating to women.  She was quite beautiful but the object of her attention seemed to ignore her.

I said “It’s the Stegosaurus Syndrome.”
“What’s that…?”
“You’ve seen pictures of a Stegosaurus.  Big dinosaur… had big plates along its spine and a spiked tail.    It had a small brain and allegedly had a swelling in its spine to help run its ten ton body.  Guys are like that.  Nut sized brain and the rest of their brains in their ass.”
 
The Mating Dance…

 There was this little feathermerchant of a guy… skinny, mussed hair, jeans and tee shirt type came in one night and went from one girl to the next and said “Wanna f___k”?  He didn’t ask it exactly lewdly… it was more like you would ask someone if they’d like a cup of coffee.  He was making an offer…

 I heard about this and was about to go tell the guy to settle down when, to everyone’s surprise, the little guy left with a smiling girl in tow…
 “I guess it’s true.” Dan said.
 ‘What’s that?” asked Self
 “If you go to bat often enough you’re bound to get a hit.”

The Mating Dance

 So she came up to him as he sat at his barstool and ran her hand along his inner thigh… she, a petite, pretty little blonde with short hair…
 “Got a girlfriend?”
 Startled by her boldness, he blurted “Uh… no…”
 “What a waste!” she said, giving him a gentle but firm grope in the crotch.
 He didn’t see her for the rest of the night…
           He never saw her again, actually… He still thinks of her to this day…

The Mating Dance

 “I’m the girl your mommy warned you about…”

The Mating Dance

 It’s closing time and she comes up to him and says “I’m not wearing a bra.”
 He ponders this for a second and gently reaches inside the scoop neckline of her peasant blouse and caresses a bare. fully aroused, breast.
 “You’re right.  You’re not wearing a bra…”

The Mating Dance

There are some perfumes that combine with skin in such a way that they are a pheromonic version of a lethal weapon because they short circuit all reason.
Not all brands do the same thing on all bodies nor do they affect all nostrils the same.

There is an art to wearing perfume be ye male or female.  I had been given a sample of cologne called Chaz that I used until the company discontinued it.  One of the crew had received it when she’d bought some makeup and potions.  It took me a while to learn how to apply it without it being too much.  Definitely less is more.

I got it figured out and the complements rolled in even going so far as some women making a point of nuzzling my beard when they first came in.

Women’s perfumes were another matter.  Some just ‘smell nice’ but some, some, when combined with the chemistry of certain sweat glands, had a euphorically derailing effect on some men rendering them helpless…

The Mating Dance

“She doesn’t know it yet but she’s about to meet the love of her life.”
Apparently she still doesn’t.
She eventually got him eighty sixed out of the bar.

The Mating Dance

“What’s your name, little girl, what’s your name?”

The Mating Dance

Not pretty enough?  Have a few more.  By closing time she (or he as it may apply) will look gorgeous!

The Mating Dance

 She was a lovely woman.
 Dark eyed with inhumanly long eyelashes and a brilliant smile, full soft looking lips…
 She may once had a truly lovely figure but she has gotten a little heavy.  Far from being obese, however, she seems to be very aware of her breasts and knows the effect full bosoms have on men.
 She doesn’t flirt as much as she expects to be admired and desired.  When she tries to flirt. she simpers, probably because she may not really want a romantic liaison.
 With some just being wanted is gratification in itself…

The Mating Dance

“I see you waggin’ yer tail…”

The Mating Dance

“How Can I Love You If You Won’t Lay Down?”
    Chuck Wagon and The Wheels

                                                                1990
                                                           A singular year…
                                                           A singular event…
                                                           A lasting effect…

         George Bush (the elder) is president, Dan Quayle vice…
         Gas is 1.22  a gallon.
         First class postage was a quarter.
         The first Gulf War will kick off in August
         Dances With Wolves will take best picture that year.

               And California passed a new law lowering the blood-alcohol limit.

 “…California laws lowering the legal definition of DUI impairment to 0.08% BAC and requiring the immediate license suspension of persons violating that law have proven to be effective in reducing the incidence of alcohol-involved accidents, according to a recent California Department of Motor Vehicles’ Research and Development Branch publication. In 1990, the 0.08% blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit and administrative license suspension laws were implemented in California and were expected to have a large potential for reducing the incidence of drunk driving. At the time, California was only the fourth state to introduce such a low BAC limit…”

Turn up the lights, the party’s over.  Well, not over…just severely wet blanketed.

The new law was immediately and vigorously enforced and the effects were brutal to the drinking populace.
What used to get you an overnight in jail and a hefty fine now got you jail, license restriction, heavy fines, legal fees and Traffic School.
Overnight, it got inconvenient and very expensive to get pulled over for a DUI.
Some, of course, kept on keeping on, gambling on getting caught.  Some of them never got caught.  The ones who got caught were very often the ones who said “They’ll never catch me.”    But some did get caught and the horror stories abounded… 
“Designated drivers” was tried out.  This particular duty posting was educational when it came to seeing other people getting drunk while the D/D cannot.  But it worked.  Except in cases where the D/D got bored and had “just a couple”…

Since two beers just about put you at the edge and the hard liquor offerings being even more potent, the end result was that people couldn’t risk getting inebriated. 

So they spent less when they went out.
This meant less money to be made in the Saloon business…

     True, there is a morality at work here.   Carrie Nation’s WCTU is still with us in spirit.

The idea is to keep the drunk driver off the road and as such it is a good idea.  Drinking and driving is responsible for a lot of annual agony for a lot of people
Sure enough, toward that end, the new BAC limit worked and the numbers showed it. 

But it really didn’t keep drunk drivers off the road.  But there were less of them. 

 However, the problem with drunk drivers is that they really think they can drive drunk. 

 Science hasn’t found a cure for that yet.  Ya can’t fix stupidity.

Some ‘drunks’ can drive, obviously because not all drunk drivers (using the new .08 rule) get into accidents, get busted or get arrested.   Some people, it could be said, were not all-over-the-road drunk if they tested to be .09.  Technically, legally,  ’drunk’ but still very functional.

Unfortunately  there are some seriously disfunctional drunks who drive regardless of fines, suspensions or probation.  The only thing that will keep those guys off the road is death or jail.

We could try prohibition again but that didn’t work the first time around and there was ample doubt it will survive another trial.

After all that is said and done the fact remains that saloons are a business and this new law had a real impact on everyone who worked in the industry.  And it seemed to affect the media, too.

Suddenly the fun and friendly drunk was no longer an entertaining thing to have as a character on TV.  Writers put fewer of them in scripts. 

In the latter part of the twentieth century you had “show biz” people like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin rightly calling themselves ‘saloon singers’.  They both made fortunes doing it.  The glass in one hand, cigarette in the other always in a tuxedo or expensive suit.  The image was promoted as something to ascribe to, to mimic, to join.  But few people had the opportunity to see Frank and Dean in a caberet.  Even fewer had a cabaret to go to that warranted a tuxedo so the Sinatra/Martin Vegas swinger look was largely fantasy.

 “Cheers” the sitcom based on a saloon, closed in 1993.  True, it went into syndication but it closed its doors.

It was almost as if your parents had come home, caught you being bad and really put The Clamp on drinkage as punishment.

One of the regular Liar’s Dice players was a defense attorney who let it be known that handling DUI’s was his specialty and enjoyed the position of drinking heartily and playing dice with those destined to be his clients.   The Bar became his office in some ways.

No matter what kind of morality is at stake here, the fact remains that the legal limit being tied to .08 BAC had a definite impact on the income of saloons like The Bar. 

One part of the industry fought back and is still fighting as of this writing.

 The brewers. 

 The beer guys.
Gone are the tuxedoes.  Now it’s jeans, a turned around baseball cap to cover the bald spot, am untucked tee shirt to cover the bulge and navel lint and a Budweiser.  The brand may vary but the message in the commercials is the same.  The guy who drinks this stuff and dresses that way is the guy who gets the babes.

Beer advertisers have divided the world into two camps. 

One group is the football loving beer drinkers and the people who drive Detroit’s gas guzzling  T-Rex’s, the pickup trucks and SUV’s. 

The other group is ‘Everybody Else.’

And it is the first group who control the sports industry and sports channels.  Because it is those people who control the Remote.
The beauty of this to the breweries is that the beer drinker might be at the event itself but far more of them are usually at home watching the game on TV.  All drinking beer.

Some “sports bars” draw business based on sports but it now took a close race between teams to make the customer risk driving home from a bar after sitting for three and a half hours drinking beer with the New Law in effect.
But the guy drinking at home doesn’t have to worry about that.
A saloon does worry about it.  They have to because the guy at home is not spending money in the saloons including The Bar.

 A second salvo to the industry was the record/play visual media… the rise of the VCR. and it’s offspring the DVD.
 The effect this New Toy had on the business took longer to impact.  In fact it just kinda slid in there on the sneak… 
 We let it in because, hey, you could record shows to watch at another time.  You could record a favorite show, go out and party and watch the favorite show later.  Helluva deal!
 It seemed like an innocent thing that blossomed into a meteoric success. 

But the new machine had a more compelling trick.
 Now you could actually rent a recent movie, order a pizza delivery and watch the movie from home!
 This meant you didn’t have to get dressed, drive, spend money on a dinner… pay cover charge and pay more money for alchohol per drink that you could have at home much, much cheaper.  

  You didn’t have to risk rejection or otherwise complicating your life or risk embarrassing yourself.  No traffic problems, parking hassles and best of all, no cops…no DUI hassles.
And if you had a squeeze, a lover, why, watching a movie at home  put you near a bed.  Very handy if the Carnal Urge came upon you.  There was the plus of your being able to pause the movie  while you indulged in joyful fornication or made a trip to the fridge or to the john…
 So what Satchel Paige called “the social ramble” was curtailed. 

True, sitting on the couch at home couldn’t match the fun and excitement of The Bar on a good band night… the pheremonic smells in the air, the noise and the lights, the extremely flattering glow of dim lights and candles on the tables that do wonders to a girl’s makeup… the loud bands, their sound deafening yet at the same time comforting.  The dancing… feeling and being felt…

People still went out, to taste that, to remember that, but as they got older they went out less.  They got married.   Stayed home more.  Whoever said two could live as cheaply as one was a damn liar and one of the first budget cuts made in a household funding  is usually Entertainment.
            Things changed in the Saloon business…
            You still had your crop of new drinkers but they were more cautious and post-college carousing suddenly lost its appeal in light of the promised pillorying that a DUI would bring.  And to catch the new batch you had to find a way to adapt to them without alienating your “regulars”, a daunting task and a largely impossible one because musical tastes change and the new guy’s music is seldom appreciated by ‘the regulars’  And your ‘regulars’ are getting older.  

   How did that happen?

          A saloon’s life is short.  They peak fast.
 You only have a little time to be The New Kid On The Block and suddenly, it seems, you start pining for ‘the good old days’.

 A dry season is upon the Serengeti of Saloondom

  And the new law guaranteed that a Saloon, be it New Kid or Fogeybar, was going to have a smaller, more cautious herd to feed on.

There is almost a ballet, a juggling act, to watching a good bartender work.
The good ones work best under a little pressure, or so it seemed… hundreds of memorized recipes and no time to write down the requests shouted over the din of a deliriously loud band.
Their hands a blur  lining up the proper glasses, add the ice, mix, pouring the alcohol, sometimes holding multiple bottles in each hand.  The blender screams like a chainsaw that lost a link and magically, the drinks come out right.

If a waitress was on duty she would be helping by adding the final touches, the olive, the onion, the fruit wedge, stir sticks and straws.  Four hands instead of two in a flurry of alchemy, making the drink what it needed to be.  Seldom are two alike and each must have the exact finishing garnish to be correct.

Periodically, a waitress on a busy night will come up with a tray of dirty glasses and empty beer bottles to offload even as she shouts her next order.  Then off she goes with a delivery of what can be to ten items, more if they carried a couple of long necked bottles of beer in the hand not holding the tray.

 “Comin’ Through…!”

From its opening until it finally shut down The Bar had the best looking cocktail crew in the area for an easy fifty miles.  The faces and forms would come and go because cocktailing is a draining occupation and there was quite a turnover.  The Bar had basic requirements and the scheduling followed a formula.  During lunchtime and “Happy Hour” one waitress usually sufficed.  Two, sometimes three, very pretty girls working on band nights.  

 But day or night, “Very Pretty” was the standard…
_____________________________________

She was a piece of work. 
The pretty legs, the nice figure, the sensuous walk and the paint… she had really lovely, soft, hands (Vargas hands) and knew how to wear rings… small and simple rather than garish and showy, to show her perfect manicure.  She moved with a practiced sexuality when she wanted to, stirring lustful thoughts…knowing this but not really caring because she wasn’t looking for a man.  However having the ability to raise lustful thoughts usually meant larger tips. 

It’s a balancing act.  Make the men like her but at the same time she manages to let the women know that she’s not out to Steal The Boyfriend.

Were all of the cocktail waitresses like the one described above? 
Hail, No!
But all of them had some of those qualities, some more than others but the only quality they all had was the “when she put her mind to it she was a Helluva waitress”. 
You hoped.

They were a kaleidoscope of beauty… tall, short, girl next door types, striking model types, some were gamine and cute, others were heartstoppingly beautiful, beautiful enough to be actresses.  Some were slender, some were not, some were tall, some were not, but all had their admirers.  Few were older than twenty five.  Most had problems, in that respect it was just a matter of degree… seemed that way sometimes…

Some of them were going to school…working their way through college.  Some were just ‘going’ stopping at The Bar to see if it was any different than the last one they worked at. and usually finding that the set may change but the script does not.

Some, the new girls saw it as a way to make money for doing almost nothing…

 “Comin’ Through…!”

Consider the left arm of a waitress…

What does a trayload of drinks weigh?  Ten pounds?  Twelve…?
Held at an Egyptian Dancers angle or at a frightening, arm straight overhead height as they glide miraculously through a crowded room …never spilling a drop.

We won’t try to describe how precarious it is to tote a tray full of empty long-necked beer bottles through the same crowd on the return trip.  A crowd steadily getting more inebriated, a crowd mostly concerned with its own pleasure.    Empties are less stable than full bottles.  What keeps them from falling off the tray?  What keeps the drinks from spilling?

It’s a secret that ancient slaves figured out thousands of years ago and passed on to all servants bound or free and the secret is…  

                                  “They won’t spill if you don’t look at them”
 …and they don’t!
  A miracle of physics, of balance, based on blind faith that not looking at something keeps it steady.

        Ah, yes… for a large part of the run of The Bar I hired the waitresses…

 Stay tuned… I have stories and fables…

 “Comin’ Through…!”