#the corner pub

[kenneturner]

Mean Gene Kelton @ The Corner Pub

Mean Gene Kelton @ The Corner Pub

When asked to pick their lucky number, most people would not choose the number eight unless you are Chinese, of course. In the math world, it’s not even considered a “prime” number or a “perfect” number. But, on the night of the triple-eights (888), there was plenty of magic at Conroe’s The Corner Pub. Some might say it was even spiritual, as in a new beginning. Mean Gene Kelton showcased his…

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[thewaterloser]

Some favourite people outside the adorable Corner Pub in kitchener.

[thewaterloser]

Incredible expose by my friend Bryn Ossington

[gregchambers-blog]

I'm at The Corner Pub!

http://4sq.com/10jiKcp March 30, 2013 at 11:40AM

[boozeepoque-blog]

Booze Époque Tiki Night! 1/11/13 - The Corner Pub, Boston!

**UPDATE TIME HAS BEEN CHANGED FROM 5:00 to 7:00**

Booze Époque joins forces with The Corner Pub on Friday, January 11, for some after work tropical Tiki times. Don't let the winter doldrums bring you down, we'll cure all your ills with pineapple and cocktail umbrellas.  The menu will include a selection of classic Tiki drinks as well as some signature Booze Époque creations.  The Corner Pubs is steps away from both South Station and Chinatown at 162 Lincoln Street between Beach and Utica. See you there! Aloha!

Facebook invite: https://www.facebook.com/events/198306866960486/

[boozeepoque-blog]

Booze Époque present Drinking in a Winter Wonderland! 12/28/12 - The Corner Pub, Boston!

The weather outside may be frightful but we promise to keep you wonderfully warm with our winter libations. Booze Époque steps out on the town! Join us at The Corner Pub (who have graciously welcomed us) where we'll share our boozey magick with you.

Zip over after work for a selection of seasonal beverages that are certain to fill you with holiday cheer.  Amazing Emma H. from Boston's Baddest Burger & Sandwich Co. provides the food pairings. Come eat, drink, and be merry in this cozy space. Open to the public, bring friends! Friday, December 28, 5:00 - 11:00 p.m. The Corner Pub 162 Lincoln St (between Beach St & Utica Pl - two blocks from South Station and Chinatown)  Boston, MA 21+, no cover, good times. (Stay tuned for menu updates)

[kats-alter-ego]

I Read A Story About Cockroaches To A Room Full of People

And somehow no one booed me off the stage. I had an amazing time onstage (and off) at Write Club Atlanta's event yesterday, and if you're one of my ATL readers, quit screwing around and check out their stuff. There's something for everyone!

As promised, here's the text of what I read aloud to the audience last night. I promise it'll have you checking the liner of your fridge the moment you get home from work tonight.

I sat in the middle of a bedroom in my tenth or eleventh house and looked up at my mother. I was supposed to be cleaning the baseboards, which, lacking regular maintenance, tend to collect layer upon layer of dust and body oil and drink spills and memories. All those things had melted together over time, forming a sap-like coat of goo that seemed impervious to Pine-Sol.

My mother was on one of the chairs from the kitchen table. She’d lodged it into the doorway of my new bedroom and was standing on it now, rising up on the ball of her left foot and wedging her right foot onto the door’s brass knob for a little extra height. She was scraping cockroach eggs off the door frame.

This is an important lesson: Cockroach eggs look like black pepper flakes, or like the periods at the ends of sentences. If you are looking at one of them, you are looking at a thousand.

There were cockroach eggs on every surface of that house. The first night the house was ours, the legend goes, my mother walked into the kitchen to get some water to drink, and the kitchen counter, normally light blue, was black. Then, it was moving. It was alive with them.

She demanded the landlord hire exterminators immediately. He did it, but the man warned my mother about the eggs and showed her how to find them. This would become our project for the next few days.

Cockroach eggs line all the places humans fingers never touch. They like door frames, and the rubber lining that keeps cold air from seeping out of your refrigerator. They like the thin cylinders of your bathroom faucets and, yes, baseboards.

My mother was 27 years old. She was not yet tired. Cockroaches were not undefeatable. She perched herself between the chair and the door knob, gritted her teeth, and, with Brillo pad and butter knife, scraped every last pepper-flake egg off the door frame. She would do this on all the door frames in the house.

We’d come here from the summer home of some family member or other, and before that, her sister’s house in Ohio. In Pennsylvania, the recession was on and the economy had sunk and people weren’t fixing up their homes anymore, which meant they didn’t need my dad to hang siding on their exterior walls.

Houston was a growth market, they’d heard. People were still doing OK there. Something about oil money. So they scraped together what they could and moved us into the only place we could afford.

It was a little ranch with a huge yard in the middle of a bad neighborhood. Across the street lived a family of teenage gangbangers, and drug dealers’ cars rolled slowly down the block, rims glistening. Kids played with guns. The people who could speak English used it to insult each other across poorly kept hedges, and the people who spoke Spanish did the same.

But inside, in the dark shag-carpeted interior of my tenth or eleventh home, it was clean, ordered, controlled, cared-for. It had the effect of freeing us from the filth of the world we came from. We are not like them, my mother said of the other impoverished families on the block. We are better, because we are clean.

Our cleanliness was an achievement. A battle hard-fought and won by my mother and her army of child helpers.

When you move into a new house, she always said, it’s a chance for a fresh start. You don’t want to have your fresh start in someone else’s dirt, she said. So we scrubbed. That also was an important lesson.

That little house had a foyer. I remember thinking it was so fancy, an entryway in a house! It was lined with white ceramic tiles, each of which was carefully cleaned by a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old armed with Comet and hot water and Lysol 4-in-1 and a torn-up old towel.

Through the entryway and a little to the right was a den, a square hollow sunken room with two rows of steps leading down to a fireplace in the center. I would tumble into it many times when cutting a corner through the foyer, running from an angry little sister. As we moved in, the steps were vacuumed, the fireplace cleaned with brushes and rags, and the grate cleared with an old toothbrush.

In the living room, we cleaned the undersides of all the furniture that we’d moved in from our last house. We had this old gray couch with bright rainbow-stripes of embroidery on it, one of those inexplicable designs of the 80s that lasted forever and screamed cheap. It had pet hair stuck under it, from the dog we’d left behind in our previous life.

The baseboards throughout the house were scrubbed clear of their glue. The fans were freed from months or years of dust. And the cockroach eggs were scraped.

As a child, I wondered about the heartbreak of the mommy-roaches having to lose all their babies to a merciless black-hearted killer like my mother. What would it be like to put all that work into finding a safe place for your progeny, just to have all your hopes for a future dashed by a wire scrubber-yielding brunette and her children?

The roaches would have found their way here from violent coastal Texas weather, the searing sun and treacherous flash floods. This house was a nice house, with lots of dark space on the inside and lots of candy-toting people moving around, dropping things, inadvertently feeding them. There were leaky faucets, and an attic that went largely ignored.

It was a great place to raise a family.

Now, I wonder about the heartbreak of that woman, my mother, the age I am now, scraping bug-eggs off the interior structural elements of a two-bedroom house she shared with her parents in the ghetto. I think I understand the cockroaches better.

She scraped the black dots off the door frame while I sat there, legs folded in front of me, watching her from the center of what would become the bedroom I shared with my little sister.

She spotted me and stopped working. Stepping down from the chair, she set down her weapons and wiped her hands on her shorts. She walked over to the window and I joined her, though I had to stand on my tiptoes to see outside.

We looked out through the window, at the menacing Cadillac peddling its wares, at the hardened angry kids in the yard across the street.

We lived in the corner lot, and our yard had this tree, full and mature, with thick branches that were perfect for climbing. It would shed sweet pecans in the fall.

She opened her mouth to impart some wisdom on her eldest:

“Let’s go kill some roaches.”