Tag: Sean Murphy

It is election time on our island. We should be grateful that there are good and honest people running and that our island elections will not be influenced by money and Russians.

When I was a kid back in Nova Scotia, I loved elections.

My father ran the south end of Halifax for the Liberals.

His campaigns were less than totally scrupulous, but they were a lot of fun.

Dad began campaigns with the appointment of electoral workers.

He hand-picked each one.

In each precinct dad would pick one house where the voting was held. Mrs Kelly was paid a hundred bucks and the voting booth was set up in her parlour.

Mrs Kelly’s parents lived with her, and she had two kids of voting age who lived with her, and her husband voted the way she told him to. For a hundred bucks dad got six votes.

Then dad picked Mrs O’Neil as the head polling clerk. Mrs O’Neil’s parents lived with her too, and so did her two kids, and Mr O’Neil always voted her way.

She got a hundred bucks. Six more votes.

Mrs McGillicuddy was picked as the assistant polling clerk. Mrs Reardon was picked as the polling registrar, and Mrs O’Malley was assistant polling registrar. They each had big Irish families.

A hundred bucks apiece. Eighteen more votes.

Dad began his campaigns with five, good, Irish Catholic women in each precinct and was up 30 votes per precinct before the polls opened.

There were 50 precincts in the south end.

Dad owned 1,500 votes out of the gate.

My friends and I got jobs delivering flyers.

We were paid a huge five bucks a day – enough for a hockey stick and a bag of candy the size of your head.

My friends’ parents didn’t have to buy hockey sticks, and dad scored another twenty votes.

On election day our house was set up with phone lines and people manning the phones and people working the voter lists. Everyone was drinking beer and eating beer nuts. Dad’s poker pal owned the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and he sent over buckets of fried chicken. There was beer nuts and fried chicken everywhere.

I ate better than Christmas.

All over the yard and up and down the street there were taxi cabs.

The cab drivers were precinct captains. Their job was to get out the vote and drive voters to the polls.

Back then hardly anyone had a car, but nobody walked to vote. The phone workers sent the cabs to pick them up.

When the cabs picked up the voters there was a little paper bag in the back seat.

In the paper bag there was a mickey of rum and a pair of nylons.

My earliest election memory is sitting in my pajamas with dad’s buddies in the basement filling up little bottles of rum from big bottles of rum.

Dad liked it when I filled the bottles because I didn’t drink the rum.

The most exciting part of election day were the ringers.

They called them ringers because they were dead ringers for voters who were dead.

When Mrs Reardon, the voting registrar, went around to register the voters in each house, she registered Mrs Martin’s dear departed father, Jack.

Jack Martin was a good Liberal. He was such a good Liberal that he was still voting 10 years after he had died.

One of the cab drivers would go into the poll and say he was Jack Martin, get his ballot and vote. Most of the drivers voted five or six times.

I suspect our Island elections will be less fun than my dad’s.

I miss my dad. He has been gone for some time now. I take comfort from knowing he may still be voting back home.

Remember dad’s election advice next election day.

“Vote early, and vote often,” and drop by the Doctor’s Office for a big post-election whoop-up.

I was young and foolish.

It was an evening of bad decisions.

The first bad decision was to drink tequila.

Salt-tequila-lemon, salt-tequila-lemon, salt-tequila-lemon.

As is often the case with tequila, we lost count.

The bar headlined a piano player.

The piano-player’s beautiful fiancée was sitting at the bar.

The tequila had convinced me that I was in love with the beautiful fiancée.

I asked her to marry me.

She declined.

She explained that she really was in love with the piano player and was going to marry him.

My heart was breaking.

Piano guy approached.  When she stood to introduce me, it was apparent she was taller than me – another blow.

I told piano guy that I was desperately in love with his fiancée and that I was certain that eventually I would win her over.

My friend Val was my wingman. Val had also consumed a great deal of tequila but he was a helluva wingman. He coaxed me toward a bar around the corner.

He said we should go there and drink more tequila.

I told the new love of my life that I would return.

We stepped out into the dark night. The bright flash of an electric street car blasted white in a huge mirror perched high up on a telephone pole.

It was a sign.

The mirror was one of those enormous bus mirrors that they put way up on telephone poles so that bus drivers can see around the corner.

I needed that mirror. If I could rip that mirror off that pole and bring it to my new true love I would steal her heart.

Piano guy who.

A tequila minute later I was three stories in the air with my feet planted on the pole’s pegs and my two hands wrenching on the upper corners of the mirror. I was heaving all my weight back and forth to work the gigantic mirror free of the pole.

Wingman Val had secret desires to be a fireman. Some fool had already taught him the fireman’s carry.

That’s the one where the fireman has you on his back and is gripping your wrist and foot in one hand leaving the other hand free to scale ladders and telephone poles.

Val was climbing up the pole to get me.

“Don’t worry Murph, I’ll save you. I’ll bring you down with my fireman carry.”

The image of Val fireman-carrying me 30 feet down the pole pierced my tequila madness.

“No, no, no, no.

It’s OK Val.

I can climb down.

I am climbing down right now.

I don’t need the dam mirror. She’s not worth it. I can live without her.

To hell with her and her dam piano player.”

We made it down the pole.

There is an urban legend that trace elements related to mescaline from the mescal cactus create a unique tequila insanity that converts drinking fools into merry pranksters.

Scientists rebut this. They are adamant that tequila drinkers lose their minds because tequila is too often gulped rapidly from shot glasses. It is not the drink; it is the speed of drinking.

The same scientists claim that there is nothing in absinthe that makes you see green fairies and that there is nothing in Tequila Margaritas that makes you see green flashes at sunset.

Madness.

I wonder what they are drinking.

Tequila is the Bistro team’s go to beverage in a hurricane.

After those exceptional young people finished boarding everything, waiting out the storm and putting everything back together again, all that was missing was two bottles of tequila.

The Bistro team is the best culinary team anywhere, and they are used to eating and drinking the world’s best stuff. They could purloin whatever they want during a storm. Those two missing bottles of tequila are powerful evidence that tequila is the preferred beverage for hurricanes.

It also goes well with all those limes that are flying by.

I am in the business of making people happy, of creating memorable evenings for people celebrating special days in their lives. It is the only thing that is going to get me into heaven.

Some evenings are memorable for different reasons.

Grumpy Lady walked in on a very busy night. She had been grumpy all her life.

I led her to the only table that was available. She spat that it was totally unacceptable.

“Try not to think of it as a bad table,“ I said, “Try to think of it as the ONLY table, a table with two perfectly good chairs.”

She grumped. I attended to other guests.

The Bistro has a ghost, Jimmy, a very friendly ghost, the ghost of one of the best sautee guys ever. We love Jimmy for many reasons. One of them is his sense of humor.

Grumpy Lady was seated at Jimmy’s table, the table where he used to sit and drink my sherry. Above that table was Jimmy’s sherry glass.

That glass had not moved in years.

The waiter came to me.“Jimmy just dumped his sherry glass on Grumpy Lady’s head.”

“Of course he did.”

I returned to the now grumpier lady. “This is the perfect table. The odds against anything else falling on you at this table are astronomical. This is the safest table in the house.”

I brought her a glass of good Scotch.

Another table had opened. I took her arm and guided her towards the new table. I stopped by the door.

“Ma’m, you will have a great evening here tonight but to do that you must get along with me. Failing that, I suggest you leave now.”

She squeezed my arm, “I am certain we will have a lovely time.”

She and her husband were seated. I brought her another scotch.

A half hour later the waiter came to me again.

“Grumpy Lady’s husband just passed out on his fish.”

Sure enough, he was face down and out, on some of the world’s best tuna.

He had mistaken the large molded flower of wasabi on his tuna for broccoli.

He had swallowed the whole damn thing.

To be fair, it would have knocked out anyone.

He was revived and tidied and went back to his tuna.

Ten minutes later the waiter returned. “Wasabi Guy passed out on his fish again.”

It was time for plan B.

Plan B is a rehearsed protocol for removing unconscious patrons from the restaurant. We move them to an area just outside the entrance where paramedics have room to perform their magic. Plan B is also premised on the theory that patrons dying in your restaurant is bad for business.

Four strong waiters picked up Wasabi Guy in his chair and moved him over the heads of the other patrons and out the door.

The man was revived by the paramedics and taken away in an ambulance.

The last time I saw Grumpy Lady she was sitting in the parking lot in her hubby’s chair drinking my scotch. Plan B is always stressful. I took a moment to call my wife. While talking to her, I was standing in the dining room next to Mike.

Mike had witnessed my ultimatum to Grumpy Lady and had just watched Wasabi Guy floated over his head. Mike was enjoying the show.

As I was talking to my wife, an inebriated lady seated near Mike dropped her cell phone, reached to pick it up and fell face first to the floor.

I said to my wife, “Good Lord, they just keep dropping.”

Mike looked wide-eyed at me, then at the lady on the floor and then at me again.

I leaned down to him, stone faced, “Please tell me you did not eat the shrimp.”

He laughed so hard I thought he was going to drop too.

Bartenders are listeners.