Bar Flying
When I’m here in Milwaukee, I often take a run through the park next to my hotel after work, clean up and catch a quick bite at the hotel’s cafe. There’s the usual collection of road warriors in attendance - the table full of travelling co-workers extending their work day with an intricate exercise in alcoholic team-building, and several loners like me not quite ready to lock themselves in their rooms for the evening, pursuing our loner activities and bantering with Jill, the bartender. One guy is reading a novel by the light of the candle on his table, I have my computer open answering email and IM-ing with Mrs. Perils and wracking my brain for blogging material.
And then there’s a guy at the bar, chubby and pretty far into his cups. He’s chatting up another man and woman at the bar, and has Jill chasing around for a large snifter and whatever whole fruits she can find. He’s intent on performing some amazing magic tricks for the other two and Jill, pleasant soul that she is, is humoring him.
I’m not sure what all the mechanics of the tricks were - I didn’t want to get too far into this guy’s penumbra, and he made at least one trip to the men’s room in the interim - but I looked up at one point to see a rumpled napkin moving across the bar seemingly under its own power. The source of its locomotion is revealed to be a whole lime underneath it, but I have no idea how it received or executed its marching orders.
A few minutes later, the woman has ordered a fresh beer in a long-necked bottle, and is proceeding to roll it between her hands like a Boy Scout starting a fire with a stick. After a couple minutes of this, she rests it on the bar and her male companion taps the mouth of the bottle with a beer glass, and beer foam starts gushing out of the bottle. Back atcha, I guess.
Sometime during the course of the ensuing conversation, the woman mentions her husband in passing, and her companion, who has been leaning closer with his arm resting on the back of her chair, soon finds it necessary to turn in for the night.
Such are the entertainments on the road in Milwaukee.
