Along for the ride
Cover
I was on vacation when the proposed itinerary for the first-ever Honolulu Weekly Bar Crawl showed up in my inbox. Managing Editor Adrienne LaFrance and Calendar Editor Margot Seeto had hatched this scheme a few weeks prior. The idea was to pile into a cab and take an eclectic, somewhat random tour of Honolulu’s bar scene for our annual bar issue. “Enough with the pretense of sipping cocktails,” they shouted, fists raised. “Let’s have a bar issue about getting good and drunk!”
I had my doubts. We write a lot and we drink a lot and we write about drinking a lot, but I was nervous about writing a lot while actually drinking a lot. I was also nervous about throwing up. And then there was Mitchell Kuga, intern and music writer, who they wanted to bring along for his good company and also for a bit of gender balance.
“What about Mitchell,” I asked. “What if he dies? Who will write the film blurbs?”
“He’ll be fine,” Margot said. “And if something does happen, we’ll still have two interns left.”
In truth, I wasn’t worried about Mitchell. My problem was that adding a participant who was still in college a few months ago would skew the average liver mileage of our contingent even lower. No one else in the proposed crew was within a decade of my age. Eventually, I confessed this.
“I can’t be puking all over everyone. I’m supposed to be the boss of you.”
“Oh don’t worry,” someone much younger than I am said. “We can only hit so many bars in one evening. You can totally handle it.”
A couple of weeks later, as I was in the throes of relaxation, I was surprised to see the following message appear. This is what they came up with:
Tenative Honolulu Weekly Bar Crawl 2009
Kaimuki
12th Avenue Grill, 9th Avenue Rock House, Big City Diner, Hot Picks
UH/Waikiki
Anna’s, Manoa Garden, Pane and Vino, Lewers Lounge, Irish Rose, In Between, Royal Hawaiian
Downtown
39 (note: it will be Prohibition night), Dragon Upstairs, Manifest, Mercury, Du Vin (wine seems like an odd end-of-crawl choice, but we’re intrigued by their late-night food menu.)
The idea, it appeared, was expectation-busting (neither retro nor swanky nor contemporary nor a mix of the three) and manageable (a natural geographic procession). I could see it. Best of all, through the miracle of in-kind advertising, they’d secured a limo to shuttle us safely and in high style.
I was, however, a bit disturbed by one of the logistical guidelines (“We think we should try to stay no longer than 30 minutes to one hour at each establishment”) and, of course, by this line: “We narrowed down a list that was waaay too long to a shorter list.”
“Nice work,” I wrote back. “I would only note that we’re looking at 8 hours and 16 drinks. At a minimum. Hope everyone’s ready for that.”
“Great! This will be awesome,” came the reply. “You can totally handle it.”
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