Just Wrought

Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.

Tag: St. Andrews Bar and Grill

  • “The Ending Gate”: Chapter 12 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    “The Ending Gate”: Chapter 12 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    In what I can only describe as an attempt to kick my own butt with a leap of faith, I started publically reading chapters from The Starting Gate at The St. Andrews Bar and Grill in Green Lake long before I had finished the book.  Now it’s a year later, a strong first draft is finished, and there are only two chapters left to present. Will you consider joining me as I read “The Ending Gate”, the twelfth chapter? This chapter tells the story of what happened to me and my brother when our home away from home burned out of existence, and threw us forward, for better or worse, into the rest of our lives.

    Here’s a little taste:

    Back in 1985, neither my brother nor I had any strong theories on how the fire happened, but one fact quickly dawned on both of us, and I have to assume nearly everyone in town. The Starting Gate stood there, condemned and vacant, but also packed with thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor, some, if not most, of it salvageable. This fact must have dawned on John too, because within days of the fire, photocopies of this posting went up all around the property:


    ANYONE FOUND HERE AT NIGHT
    WILL BE FOUND HERE IN THE MORNING.

    Here are the details:

    When: Monday, February 9, at 8pm

    Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

    Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

    How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

    Why: Why not?

    Posted at 4:55 PM in The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: bars, memoir, Paul Mullin, St. Andrews Bar and Grill, The Ending Gate, The Starting Gate, working

  • “I was the One at Home”: Chapter 10 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    “I was the One at Home”: Chapter 10 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    I finished a solid first draft of The Starting Gate about a month ago. Then I spent another two weeks putting a polish on it, rewrote the ending on some excellent advice from a good friend, and sent it under his cover to a literary agent in New York. The reply was surprisingly prompt, but, not surprisingly, discouraging. Apparently the book’s “candor and soul, art and wit” are “admirable”, but alas, the work is too “quiet and thoughtful… insufficiently sensational” to attract a publisher. If I were famous enough, maybe; but since I am not, no dice.

    Since I honestly don’t know what to do next, I am going to do what I’ve already promised myself to do: read the next chapter, as scheduled, at The St. Andrew’s Bar And Grill next Monday night. So would you please consider joining me as I read “I was the One at Home”, the tenth chapter of my book The Starting Gate? It’s about the night in the house on Sweet Air Road when it was just me, my step-dad, and his massive left hemisphere stroke.

    Here’s a quickie excerpt:

    …. He reaches out his hand, grasping for things on the table that aren’t there. “Do you want me to get you something write with?” I ask. He nods vigorously. I get him a ballpoint and a small pad with some advertisement on the banner. He begins scrawling, but it looks funny. I turn the pad around to read it.

    “Call your mother.”

    “Dad, mom’s in Towson.” Towson is 10 miles away. “I should call 911. Let me call 911.”

    He shakes his head more furiously than before. He taps fiercely on that pad with his fat forefinger. (The same meaty hand that slaps our faces, heavy and fast.) So I call my mom at the real estate office, where she’s manning the phones in the hopes of picking up a loose lead. Mom needs loose leads. She’s not exactly a born sales woman. But there’s another reason she volunteers to work essentially unpaid for three or four hours nearly every evening. It gets her out of the house at the time when my Dad’s most likely to be drunk.

    Mom answers the phone at the real estate office. I tell her the situation and ask her to let me call 911. “I’m pretty sure he’s having a stroke, Mom.”

    “Oh Paul, how can you know that?”

    “He’s not talking, Mom.”

    “Well let me talk to him.”

    “Mom, I can’t let you talk to him. HE CAN’T TALK.”

    And here are the details:

    When: Monday, December 1, at 8pm

    Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

    Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

    How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

    Why: Why not?

    Posted at 4:55 PM in The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: bars, memoir, Paul Mullin, St. Andrews Bar and Grill, The Ending Gate, The Starting Gate, working

  • “Bars: A User’s Guide”: Chapter 9 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    “Bars: A User’s Guide”: Chapter 9 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    Next Monday I’ll be reading the ninth chapter of my book The Starting Gate at St. Andrews Bar And Grill in Green Lake. This chapter is titled “Bars: A User’s Guide”, and offers a brief review of the rules everyone should know when availing themselves of that venerated technology, the public house. As reward for close attention paid, I will offer a bonus virtual visit to the Zig Zag in the time of the incomparable Murray Stenson, the most perfect cocktail experience anyone could hope for.

    Here’s a quickie excerpt:

    Just as there are certain poems that can only be best understood once you have learned more basic poems, Murray will strike the uninitiated as a rather average bartender, friendly, unimposing, as eager to pull you a draft as he is to stir you a handcrafted cocktail. In fact, Murray has a joke he loves to tell:

    A few years back a bunch of guys, maybe five, came into the Zig Zag after a Seahawks game. The first four all ordered different fancy cocktails. The fifth guy asks for a Jack and Coke. His friends erupt in outrage. “You can’t do that here. Don’t you know what this place is? This is that place for fancy cocktails. The Zig Zag. And that’s Murray.

    “Oh, okay, okay,” the guy says, throwing up his hands in surrender. “In that case, I’ll take a Crown and Coke.”

    Murray tells that story, I’m sure, to deflate a little of the pomposity that has blown up around the cocktail scene over the last decade or so, but also to let you know unequivocally that, if you order a Jack and Coke, he’ll happily make you the best goddamned Jack and Coke you’ve ever had.

    And here are the details:

    When: Monday, November 3, at 8pm
    Where:     The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103
    Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know
    How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.
    Why: Why not?

    Posted at 4:55 PM in The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: bars, memoir, Paul Mullin, St. Andrews Bar and Grill, The Ending Gate, The Starting Gate, working