We walk into a dilemma

We try to be honest with you, and honestly, we didn’t feel like spending money at a bar this week. Maybe we didn’t think we ought to spend money on drinks this week. Either way, this is a good time to talk about the economics of going out to drink.

Money isn’t a comfortable topic -- it reminds me of the different approaches panhandlers take when drawing signs. The traditional sign read, “Will work for food.” Some take another route; I’ve frequently seen, “Why lie? I want a beer” on a panhandler's chunk of cardboard. I assume the writer wants people to think, “At least they’re being honest,” but it also raises the issue of where alcohol falls on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

More than once, people in bars have mentioned that it’s a whole lot cheaper to buy alcohol at BevMo! and drink it at home rather than going out to a bar. It’s even more the case for us this week; Safeway included an unrequested box of wine with our first home delivery order. Libations are obviously marked up substantially when you go out.

So people are paying for something else -- the social experience. That’s why we go to bars. Sure, it’s fun if there are games to play or the decor’s creative or the music’s more than decent. Mindy and I go to talk to people and write about it. If there aren’t people to talk to, we don’t usually have much to write about, and walking into a bar is just entertainment. Entertainment has its own place in the budget.

There are ways to economize when you go to a bar. You can go during happy hour. But happy hours are designed to bring in business during non-peak times, when people are at work or pregfer to stay home. Mindy’s working and commute times make the usual happy hour hours less than optimal.

Another thing that can make the bar experience better than drinking at home is getting a well prepared drink mixed by a good bartender. Obviously, a creative cocktail prepared by an experienced mixologist is going to cost a lot more than beer in a dive bar. (I know, I know. We’ve said many times here, we don’t even like beer.) Bars vary a lot, too, from the scary to the homy to the ritzy, and prices vary greatly between these choices. This part of West Seattle veers toward upscale.

Then there’s the issue of tipping. Some people try to save a bit on their tab by skipping out a tip. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that people in the service industry don’t look kindly on the practice. Most bartenders we’ve met consider the tip to be a standard part of a transaction. Don’t tell a bartender that the person who didn’t tip couldn’t afford it. “If they can’t afford to tip, they can’t afford to go out for drinks!”

We almost always give bartenders our card because it has the information about the blog. People are free to leave comments on the blog. In other words, we try to tip decently, and we prefer to tip generously.

During 2016, we were firmly committed to visiting a bar, a church, and a movie theater every week. We didn’t want to have to say, “We went to a bar in every state except Kansas (finding a bar in Kansas was surprisingly difficult). This year, though, if we miss a week, it doesn’t seem like a big deal.

But if it matters to you, dear reader, there’s something you can do. When we have a week like this, a week when our budget or our schedule prevents us from visiting a new bar, you can buy our book, Cheers and Amen. Then you can have the fun of reading about a lot of different bars all over the country.

As a bonus, your book purchase earns us a drink. (We recommend buying three copies: one for yourself, one for your pastor, and one for your bartender. It's also available in a Kindle version, if you're traveling light and prefer e-reading.) Check it out via the links in the sidebar or at the bottom of the post, or contact us if you'd like an autographed copy.

Or, if you’d rather, use the money you would have spent on our book to go out for drinks. We understand. Really.

We write instead of drink

Drinking Writers
“Why do writers drink so much?” Dr. Lawrence Samuels asked in a January article in Psychology Today. I can only answer for myself, but it would be very difficult to write a blog about bars without drinking in those bars -- so I need to have at least one drink every week.

Yeah, it’s quite a pace to keep up.

Samuels lists a number of writers who had drinking problems, from the father of American alcoholic writers, Edgar Allen Poe, to Zelda’s true love F. Scott Fitzgerald; from my favorite mystery writer, Raymond Chandler to the Queen of Snark, Dorothy Parker; from lowercase poet E.E. Cummings to depressing playwright Eugene O'Neill; and so many more. Not that I, Dean Anderson, should be compared to these great writers, but my name *is* right there in the same paragraph. I think you can draw your own conclusion.

“Hey,” you might be saying, “Those people wrote whole books, not just short blog posts.”

First of all, imaginary outspoken reader, may I correct you? Some of those writers were playwrights. Others were poets. They weren’t necessarily writing “books.” In addition, I’m pleased to share the good news that we finally have a book, not just a bunch of blogs.

Cheers and Amen, the book about our year-long attempt to visit a bar and a church in every state, will be available on Amazon well before Independence Day. In preparation, we'll be reading, selling, and signing copies at two bars in Sonoma County, Dukes in Healdsburg (Monday, June 18 at 7:00 pm) and Final Edition in Santa Rosa (Tuesday, June 19 at 7:00 pm). 

Sadly, though, working on the book’s finishing touches kept us from going to a bar this week. Dr. Samuels, does your research have any explanation for this? Writing kept us from drinking this week. We’re willing to make sacrifices for you.

Not to worry, we’ll be going to a new bar next week (in a state other than California!), and we expect to visit new bars all month. You might be a little torn, though. We know you’ll want to get started reading Cheers and Amen.

Bars we'll never walk into again

Church and State, Washington, DC

Afternoones, Staten Island, NY

Donny Dirk's Zombie Den, Minneapolis, MN

The Tank Room, Kansas City, MO

Hank Dietle's Tavern, Rockville, MD

While working on the book about our year of traveling to a bar in every state, one of the great moments of serendipity was finding a bar named “Church and State” a few blocks from the church where we were staying in Washington, D.C.

The bar was at the top of a dark staircase, and the decor was reminiscent of an old church building with pews, pastor’s office, and stained glass. The drinks, on the other hand, were all-American, focussed on ingredients from the Western Hemisphere. We really enjoyed chatting with various staff members, including the lobbyist-by-day bartender.

That evening confirmed our goal of visiting a church and a bar in every state, and we were encouraged to think we could accomplish that goal. So we were sad this week when we found that the bar is closing at the end of the month.

When we looked back at the bars we visited in 2016, we discovered that three others -- Donny Dirk’s Zombie Den in Minneapolis, The Tank Room in Kansas City (Missouri), and Afternoones in Staten Island (New York) have closed. Another, Hank Dietle’s Tavern in Rockville (Maryland), suffered a devastating fire this winter, but volunteers and donors -- and even the governor of Maryland -- are working to rebuild. It was (probably) the oldest bar in Maryland, with (possibly) the first liquor license issued after Prohibition, and we're glad to think we could walk in again someday.

Walk into bars with us!

Cheers and Amen
You may have noticed that our posts have been more random lately. That’s partly because we’re still figuring out how to visit a new bar every week in spite of incompatible schedules and limited geographical range, but there’s another reason that’s much more fun.

We’ve been working on Cheers and Amen, the book about our year-long 50-state quest to visit a bar and a church in every state, and we’ve finally got something to show for all our (mostly Dean’s) hard work. Not only that, but you can help determine what the finished book will look like and what kind of extras it needs. We need your thoughts, so we’ve got a special offer for you.

Here’s the deal: the work in progress paperback (we're calling it the first edition because it sounds better) is now available at Amazon. We don’t anticipate changing the main content, but what sidebars and/or end matter (all the tourist traps we visited, where we watched movies in each state, alternative sleeping arrangements, etc.) do you want to see? What do you think of the cover? Would you like photos inside?

Until Easter (April 1, no joke!), Cheers and Amen is available for just $5.99. Click here, buy it, read it, and let us know what you think. What’s missing? What do you suggest?

Leave a comment here or on Facebook, or email us: deanandmindygotochurch at gmail dot com . We want to incorporate your suggestions, so let us know what you think we need to include. We want your ideas whether or not you buy the first edition!

Thank you so much for your help. Writing (and editing) the book has been fun, but way slower than we'd anticipated. We're happy to finally have something to share with you, and we can't wait to hear what you think.

-- Mindy

PS There are so many stories that didn’t fit into the book. We’re working on ways to share those with you as well. In the meantime, we’ll be walking into another bar -- possibly one that's not in California's Central Valley -- next week.