The Break n Egg Diner: The Review

Cream GravySoooo.... I know I promised that the Diner Review was dead but... I lied.  What are you going to do.  Due to my disabling, heinous, life threatening (well very inconveniencing) Celiac disease my dining career, or at least my diner , dining in diners, career.  Over.  Or at least side tracked.  I mean I can eat there but... I cannot eat...
Pancakes
Biscuits
Toast
A Slinger
Chili Mac
Basically anything I really liked to eat other than meat and potatoes.  So, I eat a lot of breakfasts at home.  I eat a lot of lunches at home.  I eat at home... a lot.

But my family has been on a church hunt.  A new place to gather on Sunday and our daughter was in town from college and we went to church in Clayton.  As you might or might not know, my family hates me.  Not just my wife but my children as well and because they hate me they decided to take me to First Watch.  I dislike First Watch.  I would just as soon eat at Dennys but everyone likes First Watch.  It seems painfully generic to me and the cheerful, well groomed young people they hire they make me tired.

The good news is that at 11 on a Sunday morning they had at least a 30 minute wait.  My wife explained to me that "you always wait at First Watch".  Not this guy.  I remembered a place I had gone with Mogerman some time ago also in Clayton and right on Forsythe called the "Break n Egg Diner"  There was a table for 6 open and unguessed.  We appeared to be at the end of the mornign rush and there were several unbussed tables (unlike First Watch where breakfast Nazis clear your table before you could sop up what was left of that runny egg) and it was pretty clear there were two waitresses and one guy in the kitchen. Perfect.  The place was packed.

We got our table after a short and much apologized about wait.  While our waitress was helping other people we were able to peruse the menu and we were ready to order.  They have the whole variety of breakfast products specializing in Omlettes.  I have personally, in a past life, sampled their biscuits and gravy which were very solid and well represented the genre though otherwise unremarkable.    Our wiatress could not have been more pleasant and kept water and tea filled up.  I would have to give her the dining review highest rating of CHARMING.

Everyone got bacon and eggs.  I had ordered crisp bacon and hashbrowns with my eggs.  They give you a plate full of foodMy scrambled eggs were a little over done (it is hard to screw up scrambled eggs and they were fine) and my wife's eggs were too runny.  My daughter in laws french toast looked good and the hash browns (shredded as God intended) were still not really brown enough though the portions were plenty.

Break n Egg is just what it should be.  Not a destination diner but a clearly reliable place where you can grab a little solid, rib sticking food when needed.  I did not originally think it would last (with the former chili mac diner still open as something right around the corner on Central) but the Break n Egg is clean, the food is hot, the service is respectful and it serves a need when you just CANT go to First Watch.  6 1/2 Slingers on the Ten Scale

We Are Coming To The End: The Book Of Drugs/Mike Doughty

Soooo... I love it when I can get a bunch of thoughts swimming and swirling in my head all at once.  I am up in beautiful Michigan (and if you have never done Michigan in summer I feel sad for you).  It is "vacation" which means I am away from work which means I think about work at a low hum in my head all day long which after the first day becomes a drum beat.  My client problems, how I can clean up my paperwork, how I can do what I do better, my client problems, research I need to do, how to do more pro bono, my client problems... on and on.  I also have the specter of vacation.  We go to this town called Arcadia and we have a house and there is a Lutheran Family Camp there and between the house and camp we have a constant parade of friends and family which is...nice and that vacation is thumping along like a bass line with the buzz of the work thing and then... we go to "Program" at the camp.  They bring in these speakers each week and they talk for an hour and a half each morning about God, life, the Bible, ministry, beauty, truth, how to live your life and that is this nice melodic keyboard... against the work... against the vacation and then if I am reading something good, if I happened to bring a good book to read and not just a throw away Jonathan Grisham book.  This week I am reading Mike Doughty's "The Book of Drugs" and it is great for someone like me (an asshole) who really likes indie music and stories about damaged people and redemption and that is like a fine guitar line going through all the rest... and it 70 and sunny with a breeze and I am laying on a couch typing and thinking about the death of this blog and the start of my new project and work, and family and vacation and god and art and nature and how absurdly kind God has been to me and my family and...well, I just love it when I get a bunch of thoughts swimming and swirling in my head.


Soooo... this Mike Doughty book.  He was the singer, songwriter, guitarist front man of a band called "Soul Coughing".  They were an indie rock band of some acclaim back in the day.  All of my music snob friends recommended them to me and I bought all three albums.  Hated them.  It was not music I could pigeon hole and had sampling and "beats" and for God's sake he was WHITE!. 

He describes his drug life as he grows up and becomes a musician and has some success and tours and eventually, as they all do, discovers heroin. Sadly it did not kill him or he might have been huge.  Seriously, it is a really good book.  He is clearly and fairly unrepentantly a huge ass.  He speaks of his band mates in ways my friends don't speak of their first ex wife.  They seriously sound like awful people who were getting noticed on his back and taking credit for making something of him.  The sound like pricks.  But nearly everyone in the book sounds like a prick. He clearly was going through life as the worst kind of smug, talented, insecure tool and the most striking thing about the parade displayed in the book is that it is a parade.  No one stays.  He is too much.

Before I read this book I had already become a fan of his solo work.  Brilliant, edgy singer songwriter with good guitar chops a great sense of melody.  I strongly recommend it.  Anyway, it is a very good read and a story really of the grace of God, bravery, luck and redemption and ultimately, and very unlikely, a source of hope.  And it is well written.  Buy it.

So that having been said, The Diner Review is in it's death throes. I would like someone to edit it, throw out the shit (of which there is a great deal) keep the diner reviews and keep the better (more readable) pieces and edit the shit out of them and then I would like to let it stand.  If edited it is not the worst body of work.  I am willing to pay for this service and if interested please email me at mab@mabeckerlaw.com.  I will not pay a lot but for someone who has a reasonable facility with grammar and the language (sadly I do not) it should not be that big a project and it is worth a couple hundred to me at least.  If you have an unemployed college graduate at home it might be perfect.

I will be rolling out my new project in the next few weeks if not sooner.  I am going to try and keep it smaller in scope and it is much more of a focused effort.  I might need to do two new blogs.  One for all the background noise in my head and one for this new jag.  It will be no surprise to most of my compatriots and I have touched on here as of late.  It is my hope that my next post in these pages will be my last.  On to more swimming and swirling.

American Music Showcase: Grand Center

Sooooo... those of us old people in the county who have not been paying attention  might want to start.   There are things happening in mid town at Grand Center.  I do not think you can give Father Biondi all the kudos for this but it certainly would not be happening without the revitalized, re-beautified, re secured SLU Campus.

The anchor of course is still The Fox.  One of the greatest landmarks in St. Louis and we can likely never be grateful enough for the rehabilitation of that building, great shows, beautiful facility, nice mix of entertainment there.  There is of course Powell Symphony Hall which I believe I was taken to once in grade school but other than that can voice no familiarity.  Jazz at the Bistro has soldiered bravely down there for years but with the addition of Kota, the new Dooleys and the City Diner there is some momentum being gathered.  Additionally on the southeastern portion of the area, there is Plush, Field House, Triumph, The Moto-Museum, Hotel Ignacio and Vitos.  It is still dead to the north but heading west you have KETC, and the new home of KWMU and now KDHX is moving in next to the park.  Directly south is the anchor of SLU.  It is starting to look solid.

So we did not have anything to do on Saturday night other than a forced invitation to go get drunk on a porch in Glendale which my wife was not enamored with.  I had read in the paper and then heard on KWMU about the American Music Showcase.  6 band in 5 venues.  Strauss Park kicked it off with the Thin Dimes.  Strauss Park is the little triangle across from the FOX bordered by Jazz St. Louis nd that big ass Baptist Church.  We were able to buy our wrist bands for 10 bucks each.  There were about 40-50 people in the park around 7:30 and we were able to grab a table at Jazz at the Bistro and have a little diner while the Thin Dimes did a nice country set with electric and acoustic and a nice female vocalist. It was a little loud.  Some people rode up on bikes and some people came with dogs and there was a nice mix of people.  The food was also good at the Bistro.  Urban Chestnut had a little stand giving away some samples with your admission and selling a few local brews.

We moved from there to a place I had never noticed before, the Hotel Ignacio.  I do not know what the rooms look like but they appear to be affiliated with (connected to? owned by?) the Trimph Grill/Moto Museum people.  We grabbed a cocktail at the hotel bar and found a cushy lobby chair to share and had the most pleasant surprise of the night with Beth Bombara.  She has a sweet voice and a nice little combo with a bass player and another guy who plays lap steel and then occasionally picks up the trombone to play a little as well and together.... a sweet sound.  I bought one of her Eps and will definitely go see her play again.  High point of the night.  Support local music, blah, blah, blah.

The Thin Dimes in the park at twighlight.

From there we walked up to Vitos and passed on the band playing outdoors there... no seating, before ending the night at Dooleys to see the Bottoms Up Blues Gang.  Everybody loves these guys.  I did not.  Dooleys basement seemed like it had potential to be a nice venue but... we had a drink and bailed. Still, it was an awesome night.

Soo... Grand Center, big potential.  Go out and check it out.  You also should check out the Thin Dimes and Beth Bombara.  Good music that makes you smile... it don't get much better.

This was a strong message from Dooley's bathroom.

Jason Isbell: Southeastern BUY THIS

So.... These pages have once again been blank for too long. During this time your writer has not been idle attending two national Lutheran events and deciding whether or not to leave the one true church as well as going to Michigan a couple of times and maintaining a failing law practice and staying married blah, blah, blah... We still do not know. What this space will become but since I found something really excellent I wanted to share.

Jason Isbell formerly of the band The Drive By Truckers went solo a number of years ago. That band is much admired having reestablished the three guitar Allman Brother/Lynard Skynard brand of Southern (read American) rock music. Isbells singing is in the vain of Ryan Adams as far as tunefulness and mournfulness and that is quite a bit of fullness.  He really has a great voice.

Isbell eventually left the band (or they kicked him out) after descending into alcoholism and having a very public break up with his wife, the bands bass player Shonna Tucker. It was ugly, akin to the Richard and Linda Thompson break up where they would almost attack each other on stage. Isbell released a number of CDs with his band The 400 Unit but everything release had kind of a cursory feel to it.  Happily he tried out and found a new love, (singer songwriter Amanda Shires) but now has now come out with a solo CD that is easily, on the basis of songwriting alone, the best CD thus far in 2013. Hitting the high spots...

Stockholm could be a Ryan Adams song with his voice and as far as the harmonies. Just a really pretty song.

Elephant is simply a powerful, elemental song about a friend slow death from cancer. It is wrenching.  It is heartfelt. Isbell states. That inspiration was no specific person but when he was on his long binge, he frequented a bar over period of time and people just...disappeared as cancer took them.  So he made up a character and chronicled his relationship with her as she declined...
"She said Andy your better than your past.
Winked at me and drained her glass.
Sitting cross legged on a bar stool
Like no one sits anymore.
***
"I'd play her classic country songs,
She'd get high and sing along".
***
"I've buried her 1000 times.
Given up my place in line.
I don't give a damn about that now".
***
"One things very clear to me,
No one dies. With dignity.
You just try and ignore, the Elephant some how".

The Elephant becomes more and more of an issue and it is good to have it called out and in some cases acknowledged and even stared down. This is a little bit too heavy a song but it is awesomely constructed and presented on this CD. There are no wasted words in this song.  

But he alleviates the heaviness with his song about a night out on the. Road and almost dying in a Super 8 Motel with my favorite line being:
"It wasn't quite morning and I wasn't quite breathing".
I have felt like that.  Even in a. Fun song he looks pretty hard at the choices he was making.

Songs She Sang In The Shower is just a great song about being an asshole and going through relationships. It starts with being in a bar and our narrator saying to another patron, 
"There are two kinds. Of men and your not either one". 
It was the kind of thing I would have said in college if clever enough.  He thinks he is funny as he gets a black eye and his girlfriend on the way home, asks if he has "considered living alone", and leaves him.  Then he laments being the type of asshole that drives women away and he does so by being haunted by the songs the vicarious women sang in the shower. Great vehicle.  

Different Days is my favorite song on the CD talking at first to a stripper about how as a younger man he might have tried to help her out:
"But those were different days". 
Amen. 

He goes through a couple of vignettes reflecting how we all grow up, grow old and change. For me this is the stellar question in my. Life. How to age gracefully or more gracefully and how to reconcile the way I know I am supposed to be living my life with the mistakes I have made. In the past and he gives us great insight and perhaps even a little compassion. We get better and smarter if we are lucky and pay attention and although he never gets to redemption...

"Jesus lose the sinner but the highway loves the sin". 

Amen again.

This is just a brilliantly written and performed CD. I can recommend it without hesitation. Ad will stake my limited reputation on your. Enjoyment of it... But you got to listen to it.

Soooo.... What Happens Now?

Soooo... We have come to a crossroads.  The Diner Review has been silent for a while and has not had much of interest to say in... Some time. My excuses are many and could not be less interesting or more trite. The Diner Review was conceived by me several years ago because I wanted to blog and I had a passion for breakfast. Biscuits and gravy. Bacon.  Sausage... And of course hash browns. Hash browns have been, ubiquitous. I did not realize it when I started these pages but my love affair, nay, my obsession with the potato was not apparent to me prior to taking on this small project.

Tom Waits of curse understood with his classic "Nighthawks At The Diner".  This is really the summation of everything I tried to convey.
"Nighthawks at the diner, Emma's 49erThere's a rendezvous of strangers around the coffee urn tonightAll the gypsy hacks, the insomniacsNow the paper's been read"

There is of course something about a diner. For is a holy currency but you sometimes need a small, greasy and perhaps even dirty church to appreciate that currency. Sometimes with a priestess who is 65, wears support hose, has a mole the size of Lesetho and the teeth of a British cabby. Sometimes the patrons look like a freak show. Sometimes they were sublime. Always people Ina diner or people. And when you are there at breakfast they are normally very real. They also, unless they come in with a friend are looking for a little solace. A little silence. At the beginning of their day or at the end of their night.

"Now the waitress said

Eggs and sausage and a side of toast

Coffee and a roll, hash browns over easy
Chile in a bowl with burgers and fries, what kind of pie?"

Unless you were a regular.  Then you get to chat with your waitress. Chat with the gal cooking. Because you got to know them and during the course of the Diner Review I reached retreat must troubling status twice.  I was nice. They knew me.  But it was bad because I was no longer necessarily alone in my head, with my newspaper, preparing for the day. The Courtesy was my original home track. The "new" Courtesy on Hampton, not the original on Kingshighway. I was slightly embarrassed by that but it was so damn convenient. Hash browns with cheese and onions, two sausage patties, white roast. Bacon, when it was good" and the cook would always tell me when it was "good" because there would be days when it was not. I would drive from Webster and hit the Curtesy and then head back to Clayton but...

"In a graveyard charade, a late shift masqueradeAnd it's two for a quarter, dime for a danceWith Woolworth Rhinestone diamond earringsAnd a sideway's glance and now the register rings"

I got a new job.  Downtown. The Courtesy held on on for a while but right across the street from my new job. Big Ed's Chili Mac Diner. They adopted me. They had good iced tea and it was so close to work. The place was operated by two sisters and they still man the place with one cooking and one serving. Their younger sister comes in later. I settled on a simple sausage sandwich with American cheese. Sometimes with a side of potatoes. They did not have hash browns but I forgave them. Breakfasts potatoes are odious but I learned to eat theirs occasionally. It was a good run. 7 years later I headed back out to Cayton. But I would drive all the way downtown for the pleasure of my home course, the casual conversation with the girls as FOX News (Fair and Balanced) played in the background and for their pork sausage which I loved. It was 1/2 hour travel time each day down and back and it was fine, until the incident.

I've been 86ed from your schemeNow I'm in a melodramatic nocturnal sceneNow I'm a refugee from a disconcerted affairNow I lead pipe morning falls

Being diagnosed with Celiac changed everything. I needed to learn how to eat again. I needed to go see a dietician. Bread was out so the sandwich was done. American cheese is out because the dietician said "it's not even food!"  I tried to go and just eat sausage and eggs but as I became educated I realized that they cooked French toast on the same griddle they fried my sausage and eggs on and I learned the words "cross contamination". And at that point, with my knowledge of diners, their employees and their exacting standards, I realized that my days as diner reviewer were over.  

Bt they were good days. I saw a lot of them come and go. I ate some great food. I saw some great people and I read a shit load of newspapers. It was sad when places closed but a lot of the classics are still here. But what do we do now with this space?  It was never devoted solely to diners. Different restaurants made it in. My aberrant political whining really kicked in during Obamas first run. There were of course the KUBE scribbling a each year. Erata sections of mind numbing blather. Some chronicling of Becker events. A little of something, a lot of nothing.

So what do we do now?  The St. Louis Celiac Review seems like the saddest idea that I could conjur up. Do I abandon the Diner Review? Do I start up a new one?  With a new name? With a new purpose?  I don't know. I know that there has been very little of brilliance or interest here. Sme of you have been nice enough to read my error plagued and poorly constructed prose and it always served a cathartic purpose when I was. Able to squeeze out a few words that pleased me or that unlocked my feelings or allowed them to be...unburdened. So... let's see if I can muster some time and creativity to do something more interesting. Maybe in July.

Had some time to killJust come in to join the crowd'Coz I had some time to kill

Nashville Part 1

Soooo... Spring.  It is nice.  Sure we have some cold rain but the nice days get mixed in and it is...sweeeeeet.  It also marks the end of my wife’s busy season.  She has been working 60 hours a week since Christmas and as a result we try and schedule a long weekend to mark the end to get to know one another again in some other context other than grabbing a meal together or saying good morning to one another before we go running off in 7 directions. Last year we went to Lexington to go to Keenland and visit some friends and drink some bourbon and eat some food.  It was a very sweet trip and we ate a lot of good food and chilled at a bed and breakfast and decided it needed to be a tradition.

This year I had been thinking about perhaps doing Oxford Mississippi which I have heard is a pretty awesome town.  Lots of good food and a little different southern college culture but we heard that Elizabeth Cook was playing the Grand old Opry then Nashville became the destination.  Nashville is a 4-1/2 to 5 hour drive and once you hit 57 and head south it starts becoming a pretty drive.  It was one of those Thursdays that was just...rain.  it was nothing but rain and it was slow going.  Lots of accidents and cops and even as we got south where Illinois gets pretty... we could see nothing.  So we could not take a break to check out southern Illinois Shawnee Zipline.  That will be another trip.  The thing about the trip is that you have time... time to talk... time for Sandy to sleep and time to listen to a little music.  Even in shitty weather.

Sandy had made reservations and she did her investigation and her research and determined that we needed to stay downtown.  I didn't really know why but I trusted her even though I questioned why we wouldn't stay at the Opry Land Hotel since we were going to the Opry but she said no, so we stayed at the Hampton Inn which is two blocks off music row.  It was a high rise Hampton Inn and it was OK, like most Hampton Inns are OK, but this one cost 260 bucks a night.  Still, we got in around 5 and crashed for a few minutes and then went to explore.

We headed down to Music Row which is a bunch of bars and shops. It seemed like all of them had music and it was loud.  Some of it was twangy, some of it was poppy.  So we ate some bad BBQ at the BBQ place with the pig and we looked in shop windows and I saw the Hatch Show Print Store where they have created some of the best music art in history.  We looked in the windows of 5 places and finally went in what I knew would be my favorite which was Roberts Western Wear.  Roberts, back in the day was the home of BR-549, a seminal alt country, cross over band that cut an awesome “Live At Roberts” CD that was vaguely life changing at the time.

Roberts is cool.  Most of these bars are set up like classic New York shotgun bars.  Doors in front, bar running almost the length of the room.  All the way back.  The stage is directly to your left as you walk in and you can see the back of the band through the window and it is PERFECT.  

All of these places are cool in their own way.  Almost all of the bands play cover songs and they run the gamut but at Roberts seems to trend to Hank and Johnny and George Jones and it is just sweet and it is nice for me because my wife loves that kind of music and we have a good time together and listen and drink and watch people. We got a wobbly table in back (all tables in all bars in Nashville wobble... it has something to do with physics) and shared it with another couple who might have actually been older then us.  There is scribbling all over the place and when I looked up I saw a sticker for my favorite record label.  

Sweet.  The bands were sweeter and we had a few drinks in cheap plastic cups and heard a few sets.  In Nashville there is never any cover. The bands play for tips and occasionally someone will walk around with the tip jar.  It seems like a suspicious model but, it is what it is.  We went out and explored another place that was playing loud pop covers and it was cavernous and band sucked so we decided it was about time to head home but...

The thing about Music Row is that there a lot of bars and on the side street to our hotel there was “The Swinging Door” so we went in there for a nightcap and heard some more fine country music.  None of the bars has a jukebox because almost all of them have bands, all day long.  That is the nature of the bar business down there and it is more than a little cool and fun. We enjoyed the swinging door but we had one more stop before bed.  A friend of ours from St. Louis has a brother who was a singer songwriter in Nashville and he was not a bar owner.  He opened a place called “The Listening Room” and he did it at least partially with a Kickstarter campaign.  If you don't know what that is look it up.  Anyway, the place is a beautiful huge room with a giant stage that is actually set up for... music.  They had three singer songwriters sitting on the stage and they just kept trading off songs one after the other.  Apparently they all lived in a place called “The Ryman Loft” and were subsidized to come there and write songs and sing songs.  What an industry.  A few songs... a few drinks and then off to the Hampton. Quite a Thursday.

Now we have kind of a vacation routine or perhaps a vacation rut that calls for me to get up, leave the room, get newspaper, go to breakfast and leave my wife to sleep.  A couple of problems with that as we get older but the biggest one that has recently presented itself is that I can no longer eat my normal breakfast of biscuits and gravy and in fact no toast or anything with wheat or that might have been with wheat.  As the writer of the St. Louis Diner Review I have...obligations though and with a little work I found The Hermitage.  Just a little out of downtown... slightly seedy and perfect.  I had eggs and sausage and they were awesome but they could have done a lot better for me... if I had let them.  I will still make a strong recommendation for it if you hit downtown.

I then went and grabbed my lovely wife and we headed off for what the Hobbits refer to as 2nd breakfast.  We tried to go to “The Pancake Pantry” on Belmont near Vanderbilt but it was packed so we settled for some foo foo place across the street that was a bakery which was likely not the perfect place for a gluten intolerant boy.  But we muddled through.  i think I ate some ham and an egg.  Then we were off to Vanderbilt to visit a girl we knew who was going there and it turned out she is actually a campus tour guide and we got the “tour”.  It was getting a little cool after having been in the 70’s last night but we took a nice forced march around the campus and... wow... what a beautiful campus.  We saw everything from their football and baseball fields to their library, to sorority row.  It was really beautiful.  They also had a cool thing in their commons which projected EVERY google search that was being entered at the school at that moment and in laser script put all these hundreds of searches on the floor where you could walk over them, and read them, as you walked over them and it was.. cool.

We left there and headed back downtown to walk around some in the daylight.  We went straight to where I wanted to go which was Hatch Show Print.  It was gorgeously full of posters all over the wall of music, events.  The place was packed with people looking at the poster art for sale and what is displayed on the wall and we shopped for a while and discussed whether we could by a large print to put in the family room before buying nothing and leaving.  We needed a nap but not before we went back to Roberts.  But it was a big night coming up which now required... a nap!

We got up for happy hour and drove to East Nashville where evidently all the cool kids live and play.  We headed to a place recommended on no less than GOOGLE as the best street tacos in Nashville.  It is questionable whether they were actually gluten free but the place had a long lines and was more than worth the wait.  We split 4-5 of them with carnitas, chicken and some unidentifiable meats.

Tasty, spicy and once again worth the trip.  This was really our first vacation where we totally relied on the iPhone and Google maps to get around.  No directions, just dictating where you wanted to go into Siri!  It worked... reasonably well.  We are after all old people and it becomes kind of difficult to even accomplish the most basic of tasks.  Especially when drinking.

From there we went well filled to the 5 spot.  Tim Carroll, husband of the beautiful Elizabeth Cook.  He does happy hour every Friday at 5 at the 5 Spot in East Nashville.  The ceiling at the 5 Spot looked a lot like this:

http://www.the5spotlive.com/blog/

We came in and order some drinks and were thrilled to find out that in East Nashville they

serve drinks in glasses.  That is a treat.  The 5 Spot is a really quality dive bar and we were the ONLY ones there.  Literally.  The bartender.  The band, and us.  And they do it every week.  We had two drinks and they played 5 songs and it was awesome.  He simply is a great guitar player, has a very solid voice and writes some seriously bad ass songs.  He does get annoyed with me requesting songs he cant remember but... I can live it.  But we had to go because it was time to go to THE GRAND OLE OPRY!

Now I cannot pretend that I had any real desire to go to the Grand Ole Opry but, I had never been, and Elizabeth Cook was playing and it did seem like it might be kind of a bucket list item.  We got there and parked about a mile away.  It is in OPRYLAND which includes a mall and a hotel and it is all kind of new and kind of cement and charmless.  But the Opry... the Opry is pretty cool.  it is really not a huge venue with a floor and a balcony seating and it looks like most people use the stage.  There were fewer bathrooms than at a Blues game.  We found our seats on the balcony at 8:05 and the show had already started and... it was kind of cool.  The way it is formatted is there is a different host every half hour and during that time three acts play... two songs each.  And it was... fun and interesting and sooooo country.  And there was an announcer who did commercials and each section had it’s own sponsor and it was sooo country.  But is was fun and Elizabeth Cook excellent and Tim Carroll made it over from the 5 Spot and we saw... (End of Part 1)

Soooo... evidently our winner is a non St. Louisian!  Evidently he is, at best, a postential significant other of the daughter a Principal of the Moneta group.  Evidently.  Congratulations to Mr. Perkins.  You chose brilliantly and boxed the rest of us out before even the final tip off.  I am not sure that has happened before.  Kudos from KUBE Management.  I am not sure, we fully publicsized this in the past but you MUST of course be in attendance at the party at The Depot on Monday in order to kollekt.  I don’t know your parents Charles but KUBE takes it’s obligations to teach all kontestants important life lessons and one of those is LIFES NOT FAIR!  The good news is that if Charles cannot make the final game party that the money will not go to the other Kontestants but will instead go to the Kukla-Becker Kraps and General Gambling Slush Fund.  See the lesson above.

It looks like a Winstroer is in the money.  Obviously we are all saddened by this.  On the other hand, at least it wasn’t Steven.  He paid late and under protest and durress and only when he was informed that he was likely in the money and would be shoved out if he didn’t pay.  

Shapiro who also might be in the money and is a prenial KUBE Kontestant... also late pay.

Henry Buemer faught a game fight but with his father making him chose Missouri he was doomed not to win but when you consider his winner went out in early, this is a pretty impressive selektion.  Henry is, I believe a first grader so when Perkins is thumping his chest he should remember that he beat a 7 year old who chose Missouri to go all the way and has a crush on my 20 year old daughter.

What can you say about the games?  Wichita State really was something and the Valley (still the conference that SLU should be in) represented powerfully.  Louisville could have folded but instead they defended and won the game of attrition.  Michigan similarly won with defense rather than through offensive brilliance and the final game looks to this guy to be a low scoring, bodies crunching in the paint, battle!  I can’t wait.

The party at The Depot this year is likely to be a star studded event.  Bill Klinton and Stephen Kolbert are both staying in town at Kukla’s request (Major Political Donor) and the entire Billiken basketball team will also be there as well as Brad Pitt and the late Charlie Spoonhour.  The menu looks like:

Kukla all day smoked pulled pork on sandwich or gluten free corn tortilla!

Kukla all day smoked and falling apart ribs!

Bauman’s Chicken wings (only 20 so come early)!

Chick Fil-Et Nuggets (not gluten free) hopefully brought by Kowert.

Krave Kase of White Kastles brought by Becker the Wrecker or his brother!

Some Beer

Some Gluten Free Beer

Some Bourbon being konsumed by me in the Korner.

AND MORE!

The event should not be missed!  Kukla’s Home Address is:

1030 Barberry Ln

Saint Louis, MO 63122-5100

Kuklas Social Security Number is:

394-46-9877

Kukla’s Bank Routing Number is:

32-55690-11

Kukla’s First Pet’s Name was:

“Bonkers”

I am only giving you all this information because hacking his bank account and stealing the money by way of bank, mail and wire fraud is the only way any of you will ever share in any of the riches of KUBE.  We stack up mountains of many every year in our kontinuing skam and I would proud to be part of it, but Don never shares with his partners.  At this point I am just pleased he has not, “settled all of the families business”.

I will see you Monday.  Congratulations Perkins!  Please send us a picture of yourself laying in a pile of money for us to post on web site next year.