So it’s happening this weekend – thanks to another bad lease deal, the 4Ps will suffer the same fate as Dan Brown’s Lounge, and be turfed out in favor of some other big-ticket joint, and another piece of my past will go missing. And make no mistake, this is a big piece. Not least because it was everything. It was where we celebrated when good things happened. It was where we mourned when bad things happened. It was where we took guests from out of town to show them a good time. It was where we went to get away from it all and get lost in the smoke and the jukebox and the beer and the song and the potato soup.
It was, in short, the place I’d always wanted my whole life. If you really reach, you could have made a case for the Overcup or the Villager at Vanderbilt, and some interesting things happened at Sign of the Whale in the boom era, but make no mistake: for four and a half years, Ireland’s Four Provinces was The Bar. The place where the action is. The place where We hung out, the place where We belonged, the place where there was a We.
And the more I think of it, the more I know I don’t actually want to go back one last time. I did that last year, and we closed the joint again, and a great night was had by all – but I don’t know if I could bear it knowing it would be the last time. I’d much rather remember how it was, and hope against hope that maybe that really is the afterlife: the snowy night outside, with my best girl and my best friends inside, at a table full of food and Guinness, and more friends coming through the door, and it’s 11 PM and the McTeggarts are just starting the third set with “On The One Road”…for eternity.
NB: this is day one of NaBloPoMo, in which I attempt to blog something every day for a month. Hell, I’m not going through NaNoWriMo again without a MacBook Air.