I say part i because it never really happened. In fact, I don’t know how it came to be that I was only cognizant of the night before Thanksgiving as “National Throw Back Drinks With Your Old Friends Before Enduring Your Relatives Night.” Now, something of the sort did transpire (famously) in 1994, but my memory being what it is, I tend to remember it more being Christmas than Thanksgiving.
But my mind being sort of retrojective anyway, I can fill in the gaps myself. I know there was a hockey game at least once, with drinks in the hotel bar across the street after with players. I know there probably would have been a movie at some point, preferably something laugh-your-ass-off-ish a la The Naked Gun or similar. Then something to drink, which in the mid-90s would have probably meant the Garages, a decade before it turned up in the New York Times.
Now? If the deed were being done, I’d almost surely insist on Dram, the whiskey bar in Mountain View that actually has a huge selection of bourbons broken down by Kentucky county (along with bacon infusions). I’d also need my designated driver for sure, because it’s not like fifteen years ago where a mid-20s metabolism polished off the alcohol of two bottles of Jack Daniels Amber Lager almost as fast as I could drink it. Or maybe the XYZ bar in the Aloft hotel in Homewood. Or hell, maybe the very nice cocktail options at Little Savannah. That thing with allspice syrup and a stout reduction was amazing.
The evening’s entertainment otherwise? Almost certainly Bottletree, which appears to be ground zero for the kind of entertainment we would have killed for when I was a permanent resident of the 205. A couple of beers and the spectacle of Open Mic Night would probably be in order.
And of course, in spirit if nothing else, there ought to be a table at a certain pub in Cleveland Park the night before Thanksgiving, with the Wolfe Tones and McTeggarts and 40 Thieves and (of course) Springsteen and Petty and ABBA on the jukebox, before we get scattered to Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Virginia and New York and Chicago and California and Alabama and God only knows where else.
But right now, I guess I’m just grateful that my foot won’t touch an airplane gangplank again in 2011.