I spent yesterday prepping for my trip today to Wisconsin and checking in at my booth. I’ve been open a little over a week and have made $120 dollars so far. That’s an ok start if I think about it as a hobby rather than a money making proposition. I’m getting to the point where I am running out of surface area so I think I’ll just leave it for a week and hope it thins out.

I told Angela that she should write about last night because it was her epic bar tour. She went out to the Ritz Carlton after work for cocktails in honor of her friend Betty who passed away this week. She’s written some remembrances of Betty on her blog. Her passing was more difficult for those who knew and loved her both because it was sudden and because of her desire to not be a burden. Betty did not allow visitors at the hospital and there is to be no funeral, just a glass of wine and a toast. Her son plays for the San Francisco Philharmonic so donations are being made there in her name in lieu of flowers and her ashes are going back with him to be spread in the ocean.

After the wake Angela went to Schlafly Bottle Works for a Webster Alumni event, our friend Nicole coordinates those events, and the stragglers from that bar scene went up the street to Jackson’s’ to hear The Rhythm Rockers. I met them there. We also ran into Angela’s brother-in-law Tim. He’s a friend of the bar’s owner, thus our glasses mystically became bottomless.

As per usual we danced our asses off. The Rhythm Rockers do mostly Stevie Wonder, KC and The Sunshine Band, Parliament Funckadelic covers – you get the idea, low rent James Brown. It was a very odd crowd of a few post college fraternity/sorority types, several middle-aged truck drivers, a massage therapist I know, many wealthy county golfer construction types, and the women who prey on them – believe me I do not mean that the other way around. Well, let’s say it’s mutual.

At one point a women with large blond I-love-Bon-Jovi hair in a black and white checkered tube dress, evocative of the nearby White Castle or Steak N’ Shake, got up on the low rise stage with a tambourine and was “playing it” using her left ass cheek in a sort of crouched position facing the audience, which caused the dress to ride simultaneous up and down in both asset revealing directions. The women I was dancing with, two sisters one of whom works for Nicole, covered my eyes to protect my modesty. Many noted psychologists would have proclaimed that moment a self-esteem slama jama of stripper style pseudo salubriousness. It was undiluted transgression.

On the opposite side of the dance floor were these post flapper New York chic girls with bare shoulders and pressed hair that reminded me of the hawk people feather wigs on Buck Rodgers in the twenty first century. The thing is, Jackson’s is the first borderline bar I’ve been to in some time with that extreme a mix of people. It’s not a large place; think of a shotgun New York apartment with all the walls knocked out and a bar that runs the length. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the entire bar was dancing from entrance to bathrooms, and there must have been two hundred people there in groups of four and five.

There are several bars in this district that literally runs along the railroad tracks that parallel Arsenal and Manchester through the center of the city. That’s the magic of the modern liminal zone: the track’s sides have gone dodecahedron in surface area so it’s impossible to say what side of the tracks you are on, just that you are next to the tracks. There’s no sure aesthetic hierarchy and everybody’s dancing with everybody else.

Ah well, off to the land of squeaky cheese curds and deep fried perch. I get ten hours in car today heading vaugly Green Bay. I’ll buy a lotto in Sun Prairie so wish me luck.