I first “met” Rosie Schaap,
author of Drinking with Men, in a most unusual and literary way. Damiano and I
had just finished up our “Poetry & Translation Song & Dance Routine,”
as we call it, for this past spring’s group of University of Washington Rome
Center students. One of them came up to me and said, “I really liked your poem
that was on that podcast.” “What podcast?!?” I hadn’t known.
So when I got home, the first
thing I did was google it, and this is what I found. Have a
listen if you want to hear a smart and interesting discussion of poems more or
less related to drinking and bars. I was delighted to be in such august company
(Shakespeare, Gary Snyder, Heather McHugh) and to hear Curtis Fox’s very interesting
take on Mr. Shakes’s “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” I was also
delighted to hear how deeply and completely Ms. Schaap “got” my poem.
I then did what any grateful
poet in the 21st century would do: I found her email address and wrote her
a thank-you message. And I told her I was going to be giving a reading in
Brooklyn in June. And, on the appointed Sunday, there she was, in the audience
at the Lunar Walk Reading at the Two Moon Café.
In the meantime, I’d gotten
hold of a copy of her terrific memoir, Drinking with Men, which I began to
devour. How could anyone not love a book that mentions, in the very
Introduction, one of the great classics of urban single life: Live Alone and
Like It by Marjorie Hillis. This is a book that I own and tongue-in-cheekily cherish,
a manual for the single career gal living the 1930s city life, which instructs
on such useful topics as Necessary Kitchen Equipment. You might think she’s
going to tout that then-newish invention, the electric toaster, but no, she’s
more concerned that every single woman have a proper set of martini-mixing
equipment for entertaining purposes. Gal after my own heart.
And Rosie’s is a book after
my own heart. There are so many, many memoirs out there, as you know, and some
of them make me want to cry – with boredom. I have discovered, in my recent
years of memoir reading, that the ones I really like use as their foundation
something like an objective correlative (yes, I’m a poet). They focus on a very
specific theme or image, and present the life viewed through that particular
lens. Peter Trachtenberg’s Seven Tattoos was maybe the first one that I read of
this sub-genre: a lyrical yet fiercely intelligent meditation with each chapter focused, quite like a poem, on one of the author’s (then) seven
tattoos.
Drinking with Men is a smart
and beautifully written memoir organized around the search for the perfect bar.
Journeying from the bar car on Metro North, where our protagonist whips out her
tarot cards to do readings in exchange for beers, to various bars and pubs in
Ireland, Montreal, Massachusetts, and New York (of course), we are given
significant glimpses into a lyrical, wide-ranging, and ever-exploring psyche. Though
I felt a real kinship at many points with this “narrator,” you don’t need to
have an Irish soul – real or imagined – to be moved by the various poetic and
personal journeys that she takes us on.
At a couple of points (for
example, while I was on the bus to and from New York for the visit during which
I would Meet the Author in Person, at her Bar), I just had to stop reading in
public because I get very pink and misty when I start to cry. You’ll laugh,
you’ll cry, you’ll learn some wonderful things – about martinis, metaphors, and
making a life on your own terms.
A coda: When I visited Rosie
at the wonderful little neighborhood joint where she tends bar of a Tuesday
evening, I got to be an honorary “regular.” This was a real thrill, as, on that
podcast, she’d so brilliantly situated my “Bar Napkin Sonnet #11” within the problematic
context of “regularhood” and being a woman. Not to mention it was so much
fun to meet the real regulars.
I knew that Rosie would
“pull” a good Guinness, and she did, but I also got to experience some things
at her bar that, well, we just don’t have so readily in Italy. For one, and I
hope I’m writing it correctly, an Oliver Twist martini – yes, with olives and a twist. A real treat. Then, and the
Italian readers of this blog should probably go elsewhere right now, a most
amazing concoction: a grilled cheese sandwich with kielbasa, and grape jelly on
top. Salty, sweet, smoky: it was perfect. Thank you, Rosie, and thank you,
Regulars.
Rosie Schaap writes the “Drink”
column for the New York Times, and is the author of Drinking with Men, a memoir that will make for great late-summer
reading.
Cheers!