I went to see a production of a musical written by two of my friends, Mark LaPierre and Jodi Eichelberger. I’d seen it nine years ago in Portland, but this was it’s NYC debut and very exciting. It was as wonderful and witty as I remembered. Very clever lyrics and an accapela score that’s witty and engaging as well as being hauntingly beautiful.
Unfortunately, it was in the wrong festival. See, it was in the Bad Musical Festival. The other two pieces on the program took bad to mean, “Deliberately awful,” and succeeded at that goal. I mean, the actors worked their tails off, but there’s not much you can do when your show is a musical version of “a guy walks into a bar…”
Grimm Late Night on the other hand took bad to mean “naughty” which it is. It was the second show of the evening and when it began the audience clearly didn’t know what to think. They’d just seen a show that was trying to be bad and seemed a little lost at something that was funny because it was well-crafted. And then, they got it and loved the show from there on out.
Afterwards, we went out for dinner at a restaurant that seemed to be trying to emulate the other two plays. The drink specials listed a cosmopolitan as one of their “special” drinks. I mocked that, until I realized that it probably was special since they didn’t know how to make a Sidecar, a Tom Collins or a Gin and Tonic. The first two I tried to order, but the bartender didn’t know what they were. I ordered the G&T which was actively bad. How the heck do you screw up a gin and tonic?
“I ordered the G&T which was actively bad. How the heck do you screw up a gin and tonic?”
That’s just evil. Evil, I tell you!
It really was. Evil.
Yikes. I’ve done the same thing — asked for a Tom Collins and (twenty minutes later) been told the bartender doesn’t know how — but when I rolled my eyes and asked for a G&T at least I did end up getting a serviceable one. I mean, I learned how to make them without measuring (you count off seconds of pour) so somebody who’s got a jigger to hand has no excuse.
I would blame bartender-ignorance on the recent craze for vodka in everything, leaving gin out in the cold, but there are such things as V&T and Vodka Collins. So that’s no excuse. (Although it does explain the dearth of competent gin fizzes out there.)
Yeah. I think the tonic syrup was running out of the machine and that I got something that was more of a gin and soda. But the gin was also not good. Bleach.
Maybe the bartender was from a different planet? According to Adams, et. al., most intelligent species have developed a drink called by some name that sounds remarkably like “gin and tonic”, but may range from ordinary tap water, slightly above room temperature, to concoctions that are entirely gaseous in Earth’s atmospheric conditions…
There is a parallel wisdom (Strazynski, et. al.) that most intelligent species have developed a dish similar to what we Earthlings call “Swedish Meatballs”, though the dish is called different things on different worlds.
That said, it sucks that they couldn’t bother to hire competent bar staff.
I think that’s a likely possibility.
When we traveled in Estonia in ’94 (a WONDERFUL trip otherwise), I was baffled by the mystery meat we were regularly served: thin, oily, and almost tasteless. I eventually decided to title it “chicken-fried grease.” The country’s first McDonald’s was just set to open in the old city of Tallinn. (We did discover a gen-you-wine Irish bar — part of a destination resort owned by an actual Irishman, and still under construction — deep in the heart of the country, so I ordered Old Bushmill’s to celebrate.) Undoubtedly, things have improved considerably since then.