A friend opened a tiki bar this week. I asked a few people to come but everyone had plans. Truthfully, I was glad, I couldn’t remember the last time I had a drink in a bar alone; my regular bar went out of business during lockdown, and, well, times are weird.
I like going to movies solo, but a drink alone is different. It’s simple, easy to picture, the semidarkness, the clamorous clangs, but it’s also tangled on a few levels, and you miss the point if you whip out your iPhone as soon as the martini drops.
To enjoy a drink alone in a bar is to exhibit a type of vulnerability, I think. You’re communicating to everybody else, if only the bartender, that you desire their presence. You’re not at home. You put on a coat. You wanted atmosphere, noise that’s not prerecorded, the sentimental gesture that is pretzels in a bowl, couples huddling in a booth. You want company, but not necessarily conversation. Maybe there’s a game on TV, some drunk narrating the play-by-play, it doesn’t matter, it’s not a piece of history, just a moment, maybe less.
The tiki bar was outdoors. It was an hour after sunset. Decor was pleasantly kitschy, fat Santas everywhere, retro island Christmas. I ordered a mai tai. Half an hour later, the friend arrived, the owner, and fixed me a “macadamia nut chi chi,” he said, which was a blended drink with pineapple juice, macadamia liqueur, vodka, coconut cream. It was delicious in its way, way too sweet for me. The friend drifted away to other guests. At one end of the bar, two guys in denim jackets gazed in silence, waiting for the girl near them to say something else. Next to me, a woman with an up-do, much more talkative, was trying to film us for TikTok, she wanted us to answer questions for a quiz show she called How Normcore Are You, but no one wanted to play and she left to smoke. Quickly others took her place. People ordered drinks, started conversations – worlds merging, promises pledged, back and forth, back and forth.
I sensed I was about to leave and took out my notebook. Wondering if this wasn’t something beautiful here in the temporariness, the brief hazy sense of timelessness. I wrote down “a drink in a bar is a song.” Reading it back, it’s not the profoundest thing, but also not so wrong, I don’t think.
From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement” newsletter, with three (plus) things I love and you might, too, this week about ideas for the holidays, music for desert winters, and super easy fried chicken.
Maybe the most impressive thing she’s done is shared her mother’s chicken recipe with the world. I’ve made it more times than I can count. Simple, effective, always delicious, just make sure you follow the notes.
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What the what? “Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly email published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful. “The Sunday Supplement” is a recommendation bulletin for paying subscribers.
Rosecrans’s new book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.