“I don’t take pleasure in things I’m not good at. I’m good at sitting in a bar”

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:59:00 +0000

At 42, Rosie Schaap has already led a number of lives, all over this country and across the Atlantic, as an erudite high-school dropout and touring Deadhead, a fortuneteller, an aspiring Irishwoman (she's Jewish), an esoteric librarian, a grad student, a community activist, a teacher, a bartender, a writer. But no matter where she was living, or how unmoored she might have been feeling, Schaap always managed to anchor herself — on a bar stool, among the men at the local pub. You might say she has a rather Irish or English approach to the bar, viewing it as a kind of community center where neighbors can convene and bring their families — Americans still see it as a den of debauchery, especially when a single woman enters its doors. Schaap is something of an expert, though, having clocked an estimated 13,000 hours in pubs, bars and taverns, she admits outright in her funny, smart-as-hell, moving memoir "Drinking With Men," not one of them wasted. Because it has been inside of these establishments that she has found camaraderie, witty banter and intellectual discourse, great jokes and moving stories, and even occasional romance — forging not just fleeting pub friendships but bonds with patrons and proprietors that endure to this day. Schaap, whom I've known for several years, through mutual close friends as well as through the ethereal Facebook universe (and ongoing Lexulous matches — she is a Scrabble master, be warned), came over to my apartment in Brooklyn to invent a new cocktail for Salon, the Gerry Mandarin, to inaugurate both her memoir and our president's second term, and to talk about the allure of the corner pub, the feminist act of walking into a very male space, and how she fell in and out — and ultimately made peace — with Jack Daniel's.

Salon.com > drinks

“I don’t take pleasure in things I’m not good at. I’m good at sitting in a bar”