My Favorite Holiday

It's October now, the days are getting shorter, the weather cooling off, and the halcyon days we Texans live for are right around the corner....ah the two weeks in Fall and Spring when the weather is absolutely perfect. Cerulean skies, dry air and a crisp temperature. Perfect weather for lounging at a picnic table, laughing, talking with old and dear friends, and of course, drinking beer in the back yard of the Lone Star Bar!

Along with the mild temperatures fall brings, it also brings my favorite holiday. Halloween. What a marvelous holiday! Situated between Labor Day, depressing because it marks the official end of Summer, and Christmas, depressing to most, as it involves the time you have to spend with people, related to you by DNA, but with whom you have little or nothing in common, or worse yet, can't stand to be around. If I could lay down and go to sleep on the day before Thanksgiving and wake up on New Year's eve, I would. But, I have issues, and that's a rant for another day on another blog.

Halloween is the best holiday for a number of reasons...first, the weather is usually great, heheh (trust me, in Texas that's a big deal), second, you can get out of your skin for a few hours and be somebody else. You can disguise yourself so completely that even your best friends don't know who you are, or you can get acquainted with your inner clown. You can be Marilyn Monroe for a night or Marilyn Manson. Click here for a great website full of cool Halloween history

I love Halloween because it's amusing to watch the closeted transexuals come out for the night....you know those "manly men" who wear old, worn jeans, flannel and cowboy boots 364 days of the year, but on Halloween out comes Roxanne! The queen in all her glory! Yes boys and girls, the manly man wears a dress, and loves every minute of it! They toddle around on borrowed high heels, smeared with mascara and lipstick and they think we think it's a costume....riiiiiight.

The Lone Star Bar has a great Halloween Party every year on the day, no matter what day it falls (no Saturday night parties for us unless if FALLS on Saturday), and this year is no exception. There will be a band and the obligatory costume contest, and in spite of the fact that this place is out in the boonies, it's usually a pretty well attended event.

I'll be there with bells on, and you may get your palm read by a gypsy woman, but only if you cross her palm with silver....

I Love This Bar.....

The Lone Star Bar is a charming little dive located in the Hill Country northwest of Austin, Texas. The bar is your typical, little Texas beer bar with the ubiquitous pool tables in the back room, the coldest beer in the area, and the best juke box for 20 miles. Although the inside of the bar is pretty much like the inside of any small Texas beer joint, the punch that the Lone Star Bar packs is a marvelous beer garden found through an inconspicuous back door that transforms a mere back yard into an earthly paradise.

The beer garden has an old oak tree, with the perfect canopy of branches, with picnic tables strewn about, and it's the most heavenly place to drink beer in the whole world, even on the hottest of days. But aside from that wonderful oak tree, the Lone Star Bar has the most amazing cast of local characters, running the gammut of types, from rough handed construction workers to race car owners to secretaries, with a smattering of motorcycle enthusiasts and all and sundry in between. It's a small-town neighborhood bar where everybody knows everybody else and it's my CHEERS. I've spent many an hour drinking beer under that canopy of cool branches, laughing and talking with old friends and new.

Being located in the Austin area is a boon as well, because the LSB is close enough to the city to get the good bands. It's quite a drive to the bar, but well worth it for the entertainment value alone. If the music doesn't entertain you, the barflys will...there's also a thriving local music scene as well. There are some very talented and dedicated local (neighborhood) musicians who have a little jam session going on weekends. Sometimes it just breaks out. People show up, they have instruments with them and before you know it, there's a jam session going on!

Many years ago, when I first started going there there was a musician who played there regularly (Lee Person) who had a wireless guitar. In the middle of a song, he would hop off the stage and walk right out the front door and across the highway, playing all the while. The whole room followed, like mice following the Pied Piper, and he would finish the song on the other side of the highway, with most of the audience dancing in the road....of course, that road has since become way more busy and he'd get run over if he did that these days. More's the pity...it was a blast!

I've been going there for a long time, but being a small town and all, the bar has been a bar forever. It existed in some form or other back when this little town had but a 2 lane road, and it was mostly vacation property. Boy, have times changed. I'm on my second owner now! The first owners, who are good friends still, are a large part of the story of the Lone Star Bar. You could say they created what we have now, and the present owner just keeps it going. The Lone Star Bar has what you could call an "aura." It really does. It catches you....draws you in, and before you know it, you've become a regular. Over the years, we've managed to build a large, boisterous and highly dysfunctional "family" of regulars. It's one of those rare places where you can be entirely yourself and they still talk to you anyway!