Popination Nation
A series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Well80
A Pub I Found During my Trip to Mount Olympus (as my stepkid called it)
“Give the dry Fool drink, then is the Fool not dry.”
~Feste, 12th Night, Shakespeare
So last summer, I spent a little over 6 weeks in the Pacific Northwest, specifically sleeping on the couch of my old friend from Acting school, in order to play a dream role in a Shakespeare play. Said friend co-directed and also acted in the show, and when she lamented via socials that she still needed to cast Feste (in Twelfth Night), I sighed and said, “Too bad I can’t do it,” To which my partner said, “Why can’t you?” Which made me say: … um. Um?
The theatre company is in Olympia, Washington, that’s why. He repeated the question, and then my friend reminded me that we shared a tiny 1-bedroom apartment way back in our Colorado Shakespeare Fest days, so. It’s a role I’ve wanted since I was a teenager. We made it happen. It was quite an adventure, and I was in a very interesting and not exactly stable emotional state withal.
See, just before I went out there (end of last June, in fact), I gave up the Birdhouse, that wee Boulder studio that was such a sanctuary for me through the divorce, but that had become something of a very expensive closet during the plague (you’ve read about the Birdhouse here before). I moved all my stuff in to my partner’s place, this time officially. And then, only like 3 weeks or so later, I stuffed most of my clothing into a huge suitcase and went across the country, literally right into rehearsals the moment I landed. We had about 3 weeks of rehearsal and then 12 performances in a beautiful park on the water, getting eaten by mosquitoes every single day I ventured into those theatrical woods (I mean they should at least help set up and break down the sets if they insist on being there).
So to say the least, I was a bit… I dunno what a good term is. Liminal? Uprooted twice over? Or, as I said to my friends and colleagues one night post-show over excellent Seattle whisky, “I’m fine. I’m FINE.”
The first week out there was a sort of crashing wave of homesickness and disciplined work, back and forth. I had gotten a new job at a content-mill-type pop culture website and was struggling both with that work, and with attempting to wrest all these complicated lines into my half-century-old brain. Amid the frustrations and hard work, I reminded myself of how Bilbo Baggins ran off on his adventure, late, without a hat or walking stick or pocket-handkerchief, and ended up with an incredible experience as well as riches without measure. I reminded myself that I did not go there to be comfortable; I didn’t uproot and go there to do routine comfy things with my favorite person in the world. I went there to have new and strange experiences, meet new and strange people, and to work hard on a special role, a dream role, that I never would have been cast in back home. And I did. And it was a wild ride, and a wonderful.
Olympia was not at all what I imagined the capital of Washington State to be like: I had visited Seattle once in the ‘90s when I was courting UW for grad school, and that really felt like what I imagined. Olympia, though, impressed me with how relatively small and rough around the edges it was. It was charming, rough, and very very artistic.
And HOT! My friend on whose couch I would be living for a month and a half lived only about a ten minute walk from downtown, but boy was it often too hot to walk down there. And it was a wet heat, too, so intense that the ill-equipped infrastructure of the city ended up shutting down. More than once, we’d try and go to a restaurant or bar and they’d be unable to open on account of dangerous levels of kitchen heat. Which is pretty wild, coming from Colorado where we often get weeks of 100-degree-plus days in July.
Having said that, I did take some walks around the neighborhood, and found some really bizarre and beautiful things: a liquor store with a secret cigar club and shooting range in back; some of the most exquisite oysters I’ve ever put in my mouth; a high-end coffee roaster that made me feel right at home, and of course, I found two craft breweries very close by. I ended up becoming a real true regular at one of them.
That place ended up being such a comfort to me in my removed state, and I went there for solace and cold ones so often that they ended up knowing me by name and knowing my “usual.” That Cheers-like comfort space for me in Olympia was called:
WELL 80
…is called so because the beer brewed there (it is a brewery as well as a pub) is all made with Artesian water from a local Artesian well nearby. The well number? 80. Cute, eh? Well it’s not only cute, it makes for some delicious beer. My regular pint there at Well80 was an IPA (or maybe an APA? I don’t remember) called Handsome Paul. I first ordered it because I missed my partner very much, and as he is also a handsome Paul, I figured I couldn’t resist trying a beer of that name. Turns out it was a yummy bitter elixir that was far from the trendy citrusy/hazy IPAs that I can’t stand. It was flavorful but very drinkable—just the thing to refresh the gullet after a hot walk of about 5 or so blocks.
The place itself is one of those hip, brushed-steel caverns, with a big open space full of picnic-table-y settings and bench seats, a long steel bar, and then more bigger tables in the back near where the big brewing vats are. It was always lovely and cool in there, and was a perfect walk for me, being just in between my friend’s place and the much busier downtown. I would very often go there and do a bunch of my writing work at the bar with my Handsome Pauls before getting picked up to go to the show. Yes, beer and work. Yes, beer before being a brilliant Shakespearean actor. [1] Let me explain:
Popination and pub work
Working on writing is always best for me at a pub. At home, I have IC Brewhouse (and before that, Slattery’s). So often, especially when I’m teaching online only and specially-especially since my partner began working from home on account of the Plague, I need to go elsewhere to get writing work done in particular. As a teenager, it was coffee shops (often The Trident). As an adult, it’s the bustle of a bar in the afternoon. It’s like having a white noise machine: total stillness drives me batty; too loud and busy and I can’t work either. No, it’s that sweet spot of a “local” at about 2 or 3 in the afternoon that works best. Hey, I’m not the first excellent writer to work whilst imbibing. And I’m certainly not the first excellent actor to “think while I drink.” [2] It’s all in the balance, though—too little and I’m too tightly wound, my voice shallow, my breath not up to the snuff of one of Shakespeare’s greatest Fools. Too much, and the opposite happens: I’m too sloppy in the brain to conquer the complex language, and my singing voice goes flat. But, as you’ve read about here before, I come from a rich tradition of acting and drinking, and it has normally been, when done mindfully and correctly, good medicine.
I was used, therefore, to working in a pub in the afternoon. And I was going to be in an unfamiliar city for almost two months. Where was I to go in Olympia? I wasn’t expecting to be there long enough to find a regular place—I was only going to be there for about 7 weeks, but without any pub work at all, I knew my writing would suffer. How relieved was I, then, to find Well80! And how comfortable and comforting a place it was to post up in out of the heavy heat, to write my social media dispatches of my trip, get fully off book, or work on those mind-numbing content farm articles. But mostly, I’d edit my memoir, write drafts of blog ideas, and chat with the staff, who got to know me quickly.
We would also end up as a whole cast over there for an after-show pint or excellent local bourbon to blow off steam and come down off of our performance high. Once, an audience member and her two young Goths came out with us. The baby bats were thrilled to meet a Goth Elder: one of the lovely artistic things asked me if I were Goth, and when I mentioned I was, they exclaimed, “I KNEW it! I knew you were like me!” and for the rest of our evening, their headphones were off their ears, their face alight with smiles, and I couldn't stop thinking about when I was just like them at their age, looking like that, obsessed with clowning and court jesters, how much I would have loved to meet me.
Home away from home
I got to know the Well80 staff pretty well, especially Donnie and Jess (not pictured, glorious ink and all). Since my writing time was (as it is at home too) at an afternoon time that’s after lunch but before happy hour, bars tend to be mostly deserted. So, I work and sip and chat with the bartender/s, who are usually happy to have a relatively relaxing social moment. Another thing that working on writing at bars helps with: there’s no Writer’s Block at a bar, since there’s always something to see, or sip, or things to chat about if a pause moment happens.
I miss these guys, and that place! Being in a cast is an odd experience, emotionally—you go into an immensely intimate and intense process with people you’ve likely never met before, work deeper and harder than non-theatre people can imagine. And then after a couple months, poof! you never see those people again. Going to Well80 was kind of like that for me on this trip, too, almost as much as being in the cast was. I’m grateful I found it, and I find as I sit back and recollect my summer of Shakespeare there, that Well80 is just as much a part of my experience as anything I did on that grassy stage.
To close, I leave you with some delightfully cheeky dialogue between Feste the jester and Count Orsino, after Feste has sung him a love song to feed his heart. The Count holds out some money for Feste, and says,
ORSINO: Here’s for thy pains.
FESTE: No pains, sir. I take pleasure in singing, sir.
ORSINO: Here’s for thy pleasure, then.
FESTE: Truly, and pleasure will be paid, one time or another.
[1] Does this sound bold? You don’t have to take my word for it: I was nominated for a Best Actor award for my performance as Feste, by the Regional Broadway Theatre awards for the Pacific Northwest region. And I don’t even live there…
[2] This is the legendary Toshiro Mifune, growling such in his epic performance as scruffy samurai Yojimbo.
I love this essay, and how the pub was as memorable as the play you were in./