Your Guide to Holiday Weekend Drinking
Besides the ass-busting effort required to mount a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, is there any particular reason why turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie are only served in November? That’s my favorite kind of question: The kind that answers itself, freeing me up to spend more time on the things that matter, which, this weekend, will be drinking.
Yes, A Christmas Carol is playing at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre again, capping off another spectacular season of all the stuff the KC Rep does while prepping the next year’s production of A Christmas Carol. I don’t know who’s involved this year, so let’s just say Robert Gibby Brand. Also, Friday is a big shopping day – unless you’re celebrating National Buy Nothing Day, which, while a laudable blow against rampant consumerism, is pretty much ignored by everyone except for hippies. All that traditional stuff and more happens this Thanksgiving weekend, and what I’m saying is that you should instead ignore all of it and go run up some bar tabs around town.
At 10 p.m. on Friday, hit the Karaoke Ball at the Brick (1727 McGee). David Wayne Reed joins Alicia Solo of the Beautiful Bodies for an amateur singing competition with prizes. The bar will feature holiday drink specials including pumpkin beer and Wild Turkey — these may unnecessarily remind you that it’s a special special time of year that you should be spending with family and loved ones and being thankful for the religious freedom we gained when our puritan ancestors launched their helicopters against the British. But try to ignore all that until you get a good buzz going and then maybe belt out “The Final Countdown.”
When anyone asks me the question, “If you could live your life as somebody else, who would you be?” the answer that immediately springs into my head is “A really hot chick.” But the one time I actually said it out loud, I totally came to regret it. So now I usually say I’d like to be Frank Sinatra, because what an unbelievably awesome life he led. Although I’d like to skip the final succession of heart attacks, please, if that’s OK.
Were you aware of the Copa Room at 3421 Broadway? It’s a shrine to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. So if you want to drink and you simultaneously need to entertain elderly relatives who came into town for Thanksgiving, the bar serves up signature cocktails with a Rat Pack theme, and hosts live music Wednesday through Saturday.
No matter which radio station you listen to, all the music getting airplay these days has something in common: the songs eventually come to an end. The “weedla-weedla” guitar solos and similar forms of musical self-indulgence from decades past are increasingly rare. There’s nothing I like more than a good jam band, unless you’re talking about cherry pie, the undisputed king of pies. But anyway. The 75th Street Brewery (520 West 75th Street) hosts Brew Jam every Sunday night at 8. It’s billed as the longest-running acoustic jam in Kansas City, and we’ll give the band the benefit of the doubt and assume that they play only one song each night. And if they’re taking requests, I wouldn’t say no to a three-hour version of Elvis Presley’s timeless classic “Viva Viagra.”
And since the show takes place at a brewery, there will be beer, which is the whole point. — Chris Packham
