Popination Train Station
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: The Depot.
So if you’ve read any of my work in personal essay meanderings before this, you’ll have heard me talk a lot about Boulder. I have popinated to several places there, and have written about some of the times during which I lived there. Suffice to say that I grew up there, and, until very recently, I still lived there part time, with a short locked-in span during the stay-at-home phase of the plague. As it is, my parents still live there, in the house, er, trailer, of my childhood, and so these days of my living full time in Denver has me going to Boulder once a month for Blue Dime Cabaret shows, and to visit said parents. Luckily, they both enjoy a nice happy hour as much as I do, so the other day when I went up to Boulder to practice driving before my next lesson and see my Mom’s little photography studio, we planned a Popination to a place I hadn’t yet written about.
Driving practice? Lessons? Yep, my life in Boulder as a penniless academic has meant that I have somehow made it to age 50 without ever having a driver’s license. Yes, it’s weird. Yes, there are a lot of reasons (besides just Boulder being what it is) why I didn’t, and why I am now. I won’t bore you with those, though—just know that one of the many activities I had planned on this visit with my mom was to practice driving a bit, practice parking a lot, in their car that’s more practical than my partner’s sassy Beamer. So I endured the bus and light rail as I had done so often in the past, marveled at how much the city of Denver has attempted to clean up the crunchiness of Union Station, and went and saw Mom’s sweet little studio. She’s quite the accomplished amateur photographer, having had her work picked for exhibition in several local galleries and things like wine bars that feature art. My home page image (one of my favorites of hers that I actually have in a beautiful frame) here on my Substack is one of her works that has been selected for inclusion at a gallery show over in Longmont, coming up next week.
So I practiced some parking outside Mom’s studio (did some well and some not well at all), then drove us over to the famous and fabulous Munsen’s Farm, where they had all the spooky scarecrows (you saw one of those last week) in the pumpkin patch, and also so many extra apples that they were giving them away instead of selling them. I took three for the boys at home, and they were delicious with sharp cheddar. But before returning home to Denver, I turned over the wheel to Mom and we went down to have Happy Hour at:
The Depot
The Depot was once an actual train depot in Boulder’s earliest days in the Wild West era, and I still first remember it as a defunct one that was down the street from where I grew up, whose grounds I was always told to not trespass, because dangerous rusty nails or something. It stood on a dirt lot that was the site of local powwows. No, I didn’t do any research—that’s a rule for all the Popinations and will continue to be. But having grown up in Boulder, so near the Depot when it was a depot, this is background I just happen to know.
It went unused for a long time, and then what happened was, somebody literally picked it up and moved it down the street. As a whole. Brick. Building. And then they expanded onto the smallish brick original building to make a modern, very pretty pub with a posh aesthetic that yet pays homage to its earlier iteration as a train depot.
As a pub, it’s a bit overpriced pub grub but very good withal. We had chips and guac with a delicious side of queso to snack on, and it was all very tasty and house-made. It has a respectably long list of taps, including my (other) very favorite Boulder IPA: Avery. It was pretty dead when we went there, but my impression is that it gets much more active during game days, specifically CU games.
A depot is a hub where you change places
A train station is somewhere to catch a connection from one place to another—a change of place, a stop where you transition to somewhere else. Unless it’s a terminal (terminal = ending), a depot (perhaps even a metaphorical one?) is a node of travel from one place to the next.
I hadn’t gone to the Depot very much when I was still living in Boulder, as it’s not close enough to downtown to be super convenient, nor was it close enough to my little solo apartment to make it a place where I felt like becoming a regular. It is located snuggled centrally into an almost courtyard-like area between some of those apartment complexes that have ‘luxury’ on the signage, but if you ask anyone who actually lives in them and pays the high rent out their posterior, they’ll complain of thin walls, crappy amenities, and a largely absent maintenance staff.
What it is near, though, is the old ‘70s strip-mall-like row of weird businesses, one of which was the dance studio where I first took lessons in burlesque, back in 2016. As such, we’d pop over there every once in a while after classes or rehearsals, and it was therefore the place where I first began to set boundaries with the (startling number of) narcissists in my life.
I don’t want to name this troupe or the head of the troupe, who was the titular narcissist, but I will tell you that her name is one of the better stage names I’ve heard, and that the troupe was a scam almost in the vein of an MLM type organization, or even …Well I’ll redact a bunch of what I’d put down earlier about them, mainly because I have no good clear evidence that would hold up in any fact-check without more investigative reporting, which I’m not equipped for. So we’ll leave it at that. But! That’s not why I was setting boundaries at The Depot with them.
Diva isn’t just a cup
I had had a terrible experience organizing this group’s Fringe Fest week of work; I’d been hired on to be the main organizer of the 5-day string of performances, and the level of diva bitch that was involved across the board, let alone in that First Lady of vanity, made me resign my position in its leadership, and even just as a string dancer, after this. A hundred and fifty bucks was not in any way enough to make all that nonsense worth it.
So I went over to the Depot, on its luxurious patio, and quit. The Lead Beeyotch begged me to stay, then when I wouldn’t budge, continued to not take my ‘no’ as an answer by telling me to let her know when my break from them was over. Yeah, no, that’s… no that’s not what I… sigh.
At the time I was still legally married to the narcissist that wouldn’t let me go, either, both mentally and financially abusing me with gaslighting and threats, flat-out refusing to either fill out or file divorce paperwork, and not making any effort to come up with the $230 to put the papers through once he did. At the time of my quitting the burlesque troupe, at least I had finally moved out into a wee studio apartment on my own. And that was the first step towards my freedom.
Quitting the toxic troupe was another big step forward in my travel towards not letting malignant narcissists use me and my talents as a doormat and tool of their own, respectively. A node in the movement toward taking my own power back.
Later, the Leading Lady of Diabolical Divas asked me to have a drink with her at the Depot, since she had a proposal for me. We met at a happy hour, again outside on the glorious patio,* and there she begged me to come back for one more show. She wanted me to perform one act, but mostly she wanted me to choreograph a group piece for the beginners who were graduating from the course regimen she has them on, into becoming professional performers. She told me how good I was at choreography, how no one else could do the job the way I could, and of course she’d pay me the going rate. Just, please, you’re so good at what you do, it would be such a great honor having you back. Just for this one show.
*My mom and I didn’t sit on the patio when we went last week, because it was a little bit too chilly, and also there’s a lot (like, a LOT) of construction going on all around that complex. It wouldn't have been very comfortable.
If any of you have ever been in a relationship of any kind with a narcissist, especially if you are brilliant and awkward and a former Gifted & Talented kid, you will absolutely understand why I agreed. I’ve gotten a lot better about staying strong against people like this since then, but the fact that I did go back and do a brilliant job, and then really literally seriously never worked with them again, says something about my process in learning how to set boundaries, how to turn the gaslight up for myself.
The Depot was a stop on my journey into taking over my own life, not letting myself get tied to the railroad tracks. It’s been a long, strange trip, even just since 2017, and it’s been exhilarating, if exhausting, to look back at where I’ve been, in these unhinged essays and in my memoir. But there you go. And who knows where the next depot will transport me into. I mean, I am learning to drive.
All aboard…