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Underage Backstage at Barrymore’s Bar

Barrymore’s Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska is unique. It is located in the backstage area of what used to be the Stuart Theatre. You enter the bar through an alley. The bar entrance was the performer’s stage door when the theatre opened in 1929.

Barrymore’s was always dark and musky and smelling of sawdust and rope. The Stuart theatre is still a performance space with seats and a stage and on the other side of the fire curtain remains Barrymore’s — still backstage — and still thriving with life and ambition and still giving off a strange ambience of being someplace you don’t belong but were always meant to be in the end.

Barrymore’s is where the radio people I used to work with would hang out before, during and after work because the station was on the eighth floor of the same building. If I joined them during the day I always had a pop while those around me would slowly make their way into the slosh. One day my friends and I were hanging out downtown after school and we decided to go into Barrymore’s.

Barrymore’s was an upper class bar. It wasn’t like the bar troughs clotted along downtown where University of Nebraska-Lincoln students would head for the cheapest buzz they could find. The five of us sat down together at a tiny round table. The waitress came over and smiled and asked what we were drinking as she placed a cocktail napkin before each of us. She said drinking in such a way we knew she mean alcohol and not pop or water.

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Older Fatter Uglier and Younger Slimmer Prettier

Is it just me or are the new, hilarious, television commercials for the new Apple MacBooks some kind of weird semiotic take on the caricatures of Bill Gates at Microsoft and Steve Jobs at Apple?
Windows machines are older, fatter and uglier than the younger, slimmer, prettier MacBook?
Or are the commercials a more direct shiv up the backs of Windows users who may not be as cool as their Mac brethren?
Or is this a more specific personal poke in the eye with a sharp barb from the Apple Boot Camp through the dawning Windows Vista?
The series of commercials are funny and they tell a succinct story — but the dark undertow beneath the raging rapids of laughter might tell us more about the real semiotic embedded in the subliminal Apple corps advertising.

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The Purity of Evil

There was a Spanish fellow I knew a few years ago in the Bronx — we’ll call him Georges — and he was a gang banger. He had a wife and many children with several women. He wore a bald head by choice and he was as wide as he was tall but muscles packed his small frame. He used to hang out in the building where we lived and he was always around and if the guards would ask him to leave, he’d just meander back — and that is the true definition of Evil — always there, always percolating, forever readying an attack in the guise of friendship and faked normalcy. Every time I saw Georges my stomach would twist.

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Trading Modems for Crack

A decade or so ago I was publishing  and am still publishing — GO INSIDE Magazine and one of my regular writers — we’ll call him “Alvin” — was incredibly dynamic and productive. He wrote well. He wrote five stories a week. He was awake and online at 4:00am and 8:00am and throughout the rest of the day. He’d call and leave long and intricate Voice Mail messages throughout the day.

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Tony Puts Us All in a Coma

Last Sunday’s episode of The Sopranos was the worst in recent memory because it was uncharacteristically static and boring.
There is nothing worse to watch in any sort of drama than a person talking on and on — especially talking to someone who does not respond — because that kind of monologue drains all the energy and tension from the show. 

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Bitches and Hoes

When did so many young women — especially those from the middle and upper middle-classes — begin to find pleasure in being called “Bitches and Hoes” instead of slapping the person referring to them in that degrading manner?
Was it the growing popularity of the Hip-Hop movement that numbed young minds of both genders to the debased and insulting intent of “Bitches and Hoes?”

Was it the incomprehensible and insidious rise of non-melodic Gangsta Rap — with its graphic spoken lyric telling tales of treacherous living in the urban core — that somehow made “Bitches and Hoes” acceptable to most high school and many college age males and females?
The only purpose of “Bitches and Hoes” is to make females sub-human so they can be treated less well.

The fact that awful phrase persists in current modern culture is disgusting and its intra-gender propagation as a term of endearment makes the sane wonder how it is possible “Bitches and Hoes” can be perceived by some as both a compliment and a condemnation in the same thought.

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Worst Valentine’s Day Ever

What was the worst Valentine’s Day you were forced to experience? I’ll go first: THE WORST I was in Fifth Grade and the class project for February was to create a “Valentine’s Day Train” where we each would create our own “coal car” out of colored construction paper so everyone in the class could put valentines in our hopper.

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