Two old ladies walk into a bar. No, it’s not a joke; it was last weekend. With Doodles still at camp (a representative letter: “Send me more books. I ate a hot dog and a hamburger today. I’m having fun”), and Adam continuing to do this thing he calls “work,” Pie and I snuck off to New York for a few days to see my parents and to visit with T Rex and Pad, who were on vacation there from San Francisco.
On Sunday night, though, my college roommate, Jax, and I went out to tear up the town. And by “tear up the town,” I mean we had dinner and then a drink. Jax and I were a force to reckon with once upon a time, but not so much anymore. Now she had to get back to Westchester to her two kids, and I fall asleep before the Late Show goes on. But we headed to Bathtub Gin for a drink before she went home. Bathtub Gin is one of these swanky bars that you can’t tell is there. No name, no sign, no nothing. It’s behind a coffee stand, and you have to enter the coffee stand and then go through the back door of the stand to enter the bar. Oh so chic. As we walked in, Jax was most impressed with me. “Oh my God!” she screeched in a high-pitched New York-accented voice. (She really does talk like that. I think if they ever did a “Real Housewives of Westchester,” she’d be a righteous contender.) “How DID you find this place?” I think I broke her heart just a smidgen when I looked around, leaned in, and whispered conspiratorially, “Google.”
We were clearly the oldest by a decade or two. We were definitely the only one bemoaning kids’ soccer schedules. But what upset Jax the most is when I pointed out that pretty much everyone in the bar had been born around 1990.
“NOOOO!” she yelled.
“Even our bartender,” I said.
“NOOOOOOOO!” she yelled a little louder.
So we asked. “Hey bartender, what year were you born?”
He told us to guess. “1987” was my opening bid.
“Close,” he said.
“1988?” Jax tried?
“Closer.”
Our lovely bartender was born in 1989. The same year I graduated college. Jax howled for a good five minutes, but we had a nice chat with our young man, and before you know it, I was handing over a phone number. True, it was Adam’s number–our young man had a good friend who wanted to work at Adam’s company–but hey, I was out at a bar in New York, passing out phone numbers.
Yeah, I’ve still got it. If I can only remember where I put it.
