THE NIGHT EDIE DANCED THE CAN-CAN AT THE CHATEAU! Two angry young louts out on the piss in ‘73 – the stoner punk, Steve Farrell and the clueless cornflake, myself - were in for a culture shock at the Dudley Chateau. Parents had instilled us WHS boomers with expectations of a university education and a professional career. The Greatest Generation had bootstrapped themselves up and handed us the dream. A chicken in every pot became two-or-more cars in every garage became black African hash in every corncob pipe. In the milieu where Time Magazine said God is Dead and Watson and Crick’s double helix sealed our fates, Steve and I rode our goodly genes without lifting a finger, save curling Rum-and-Cokes to the lips. John Adams said, “Our grandfathers were soldiers, so our fathers could be farmers, so we could be artists.” But to be ‘a creative’ and eschew the factory floor and the office cubicle requires moxie, which we two neer-do-wells, jaunting up the sawdust-strewn steps after smoking a blizzy, had precious little. Edie, a smallish woman of perhaps sixty-five, had a reserved seat in perpetuity at the bustling end of the bar near the kitchen. Over the ten years I hung out at the ‘Teau, she seemed to be at her perch virtually every night. Her deal with the ownership – She kept an eagle eye out for trouble and helped kick out recalcitrant drunks at midnight in exchange for her eternal space. She was laconic, almost shy, even when three sheets to the wind, which was often. But come last call at 11:45 pm, Edie morphed into a tough old boot, a Shakespearian harpy. Her grating, piercing cackle to “drink up, it’s time to get out of here!” would make Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan shudder. Edie never got a cent for her toil and trouble. There was a long-running debate whether she got drinks on the house, or if she provided sentry duty out of altruism for Cochituate Village. She was a Chateau ‘company woman’ who had the psychic landscape of the place to a T. Edie could smell out every bad actor who came in from the cold, but no one knew the content of her stoic ponderings as she stared into her glass, night, after year, after decade. In the end we are all penny-ante players; we are small beer. To say Edie had no life casts disparagement on anyone who ever stepped foot in the place. Life in the US was never a frenetic, fast-lane romp as of Sal Paradise in Kerouac’s “On the Road”. American exceptionalism in the American Century was an ironic veneer. This nation cakewalks in slo-mo, like in “Rip Van Winkle”, “The Jumping Frog of Calavaras Country” or the traveling salesmen riding the rails to River City, Iowa, in ‘The Music Man’. Most folks sack down in the shank of the evening and rise with the chickens a la ‘Bonanza’ patriarch, Ben Cartwright, and his boys, Hoss and Little Joe. Watching Edie dance on the table at the Dudley Chateau might be the best we are going to get. I sojourned to the Chateau a few months back. There were a smattering of smart phones but there was no singularity of man and machine, no future shock. Nothing has really changed since ’73. Edie would not feel out of place. NEXT: HERBIE AND EDIE NEARLY GET INTO FISTICUFFS WITH STEVE!
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 12:42:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015