To tell the roof story I need to give you a few facts. I own a nice bar that I removed from a condemned building at three in the morning during an intense rainstorm several years ago. I currently keep said bar in my dining room:



The above is a very old picture, there is much more art on the walls now and those flowers have been dead for several years, but it basically still looks like this.

I used to live in Kirksville and when I did I had (in one of my houses anyway) a back deck with a roof over it. We turned that back deck into a tiki bar:



In the fall we would have a move-the-bar party where we would move the bar into the garage for the winter and there it would be the site of many garage parties:



In the above shot we have Jean’s boy-for-the-night, Jean, TJ, Erica, and Beth.

If you’ll notice the outdoor bar is on a deck with a railing. The night of the roof party the distilled remnants of a much larger party climbed up on that railing, across the overhang, and onto the roof proper where we sang many songs and generally encouraged the neighbors to hate us.

Jason thought he would take a picture of all of us:



But unfortunately it was clear that his arms were not long enough so BJ had to take one instead:



I wanted a shot that conveyed the slope of the roof and so I wandered close to the edge for this fine shot:



From left to right we have Beth, Jeanie, Jason, BJ, and Karen.

There is much more to the story as that night none of us went to sleep.

Soon after the cop arrived we walked up to the Dukum Inn. Jeanie was the bar manager and had the keys – we had stayed up all night in part because the opening bartender Will had forgotten to get the keys from her and would have no way to open up for the second shift drinkers. Second shift is the factory shift that puts drinkers in bars when they get off from work at dawn. So we thought it best to shoot pool, tease Will, and have a bloody Mary or two with the dawn drinkers since we were obviously on a roll.