Miami Sound in Vegas
AARP's Vegas@50 has been pretty exciting so far. Going into the event, I really had no idea what to expect. I knew it would attract a ton of people and the schedule would be packed, but wow! Day one kicked off with an opening session with our CEO A. Barry Rand delivering a great speech on health care reform. Magic Johnson became an official member of AARP and received his membership card. And the evening highlight was a concert with Gloria Estefan.
We were incredibly tired from the full day of activities and coverage, but I'd have to say the concert was my favorite part of the day. Brian and I were the only photographers allowed to shoot and so we had the best seats in the house. And just prior to the concert we got word that celebrity blogger and TV personality
Perez Hilton would be showing up.
Near the end of the concert, our PR director grabbed me and practically threw me on stage because Perez and his mom were dancing with Gloria. It made for some awesome photography.
And the best part was getting my picture taken with Gloria after the concert. I mean, how could you not enjoy a night like that? Below are a few more photos from the concert. Enjoy...
Labels: AARP, concerts, Entertainment, Music, Nightlife
Quick Hello From Vegas...
As some of you know, I'm in Vegas this week shooting photos of the AARP member event. The whole conference is being held in the Sands Convention Center. I'm staying at the luxurious Wynn Hotel & Casino. Oh my god!
Anyway, just thought I'd post two photos of what I'm seeing so far. Enjoy...
Labels: AARP, Citylife, Skyscrapers, Urban
A Little Slice of Home
I'm sitting in the terminal at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and figured I'd post a little note about something I hold close to my heart. Food!
As you can see in the photo above, I love food. Specifically, I love my egg sandwich with a side of bacon. The image above was taken one morning just after I finished cooking. I couldn't help but notice the great contrast of colors on the plate and figured I should share this culinary delight with everyone.
It's not a weekend without my egg sandwich and College Gameday on ESPN.
Labels: Food, Random
75 Bars DC: Off the Record
The next stop on our tour of the top 75 bars in DC took us to a little hotel bar inside of the historic
Hay-Adams Hotel. Now I'll admit, when Dan mentioned to me we'd visit Off the Record in the venerable hotel next to the White House, I was somewhat confused. Of course I had heard of the Hay-Adams. Every Washingtonian who spends more than five minutes in this city has heard of the amazing Hay-Adams. But there was a bar inside? And it's one of the top 75?
Ah, how could I be so unlettered about the existence of this place. How could I, a true resident of this great capital not know of this revered watering hole right next to our most famous residency. Such is the case of my night wandering into Off the Record.
As we walked toward the majestic hotel along 16th, one can't help but feel like you're about to step foot inside one of the great hotels of our nation. The Italian Renaissance-style facade commands attention as do the large flags flying high above the grand entrance. The dark wood and marbled floors are oozing with distinctive luxury.
Dan asks the bellman at the door if he could direct us to the bar. Rather than just verbalize directions, the obviously French bellman walks us into the hotel and down a set of stairs. He points to a set of doors where a buzz of activity gives way to a small and yet opulent hotel bar. Apparently Off the Record isn't such a secret after all. This place was hopping!
Dan and I grab two seats at the octagon-shaped bar and browse their drink selections. At first glance, Off the Record is exactly the type of bar I would expect this close to the White House. It's the type of bar I figured I'd find more of in this city of lawyers, lobbyists and politicians. It's dressed in dark woods, red-velvet covered couches, high-back leather chairs and ornate trim. Most of the clientele were wearing suits and business attire and to be honest, most looked like they were brokering back-room policy deals. I could have been sitting next to one or two (or maybe 12) members of Congress.
I order my usual Crown and Coke and Dan orders a what's called the Tennessee Rose. I'll let him give you the juicy details on his drink over at
75barsDC.com. He drank about 6 of them, so I'm guessing it was pretty darn good. As for my stand-by Canadian whiskey drink, I absolutely loved it! As I've said before, it's not a hard drink to make, but clearly the Off the Record bartender still cares to put his heart into even the simplest of adult beverages.
That's where the night started to get fun. Dan and I struck up a conversation with a couple from San Francisco. Actually, they asked what my tattoo meant and somehow we started talking about nightlife, bottle service and cocaine. Why do I always find the tourists who want a quick fix??? Maybe I just give off the impression that I know "where they can find some." Whatever the case or their vices, they were a neat couple who said they visit DC about 4 times a year and absolutely adore our city. They said they read about the Hay-Adams once in a magazine and have been staying there the past 4 years. At some point in the conversation, a young lady comes over to Dan and asks if he's Doug Van Sant. Dan laughs and points in my direction as the man she was looking for.
Turns out, the young lady was Ardina Kievits, assistant restaurant manager for the hotel and was directed by the hotel manager to come down, find us and offer to buy us a drink. I know... crazy right? The hotel manager had noticed
my tweet about 75 Bars DC and us being at Off the Record, and wanted to thank us for stopping by. My first reaction is, how the hell did he find my
Twitter account? Then it dawns on me that you can search keywords that display when someone tweets about a particular venue. I've gotten personalized responses before from places like Wolfgang Puck's bistro in LA and the Tabard Inn here in DC.
So we tell the bar manager about the project and I proceed to order a raspberry rickey. The drink was quite tasty and designed perfectly for those seeking a lighter, more refreshing cocktail. That's when I began to talk to bartender John Boswell about 75 Bars DC and the history of drinking establishments in the District. Remember I mentioned the bartender who made my simple Crown and Coke with heart...well there is a reason for his attention to detail.
Bartender John Boswell is regarded in many circles as the best bartender in Washington, DC and has been bestowed that award 4 times by Washingtonian Magazine. John told stories of hotel bars and local watering holes that hold more history than the Smithsonian. He gave me a list of places we need to visit and the long-time bartenders we should talk to. Clearly John has seen his share of celebrities and politicians come through the Off the Record doors, but it's his affable personality that makes even the average patron feel famous.
To sum up my experience at Off the Record, I'd have to say I walked away feeling connected. I felt connected to the city I call home and to the people who share our great structures, monuments and grand thoroughfares. I left Off the Record feeling like I spent the previous two-hours engaged in an activity so many DC residents had prior to that evening. I felt like I was truly...home.
Labels: 75 Bars, Bars, Clubs, Entertainment, Music, Nightlife
75 Bars DC: Old Ebbitt Grill
Every city has a staple. Whether it's a monument, an iconic sign or building or general tourist attraction, they exist in most of our major cities. And like these staples of tourism lure, most cities have an iconic restaurant or bar that lives through the decades. Greensboro had the famous Rhino club. Tampa had the historic Tiny Tap Tavern.
Heinhold's First and Last Chance has been serving as a local watering hole on the Oakland waterfront prior to the great quake of 1906. These bars and restaurants are no longer destinations in their respective cities, they are institutions.
DC is not without it's share of iconic buildings and historic bars. One could argue it's "the" city of iconic structures. But there is one restaurant and bar that's been serving residents and tourists of our nations capital longer than any other...Old Ebbitt Grill.
This
historic institution was founded in 1856 by William E. Ebbitt and has lived in various forms throughout the downtown DC area. When I moved to DC three years ago, I was told by locals this was "the spot to go to see old school DC." Like previous places I've lived, I embraced the history of DC and wanted to embrace her local institutions of imbibery. I had been several times for dinner, but never did I go to Old Ebbitt just for drinks. So Dan brings forth the 75 Bars idea and off we went. Our first bar in this adventure would be the oldest in DC.
First impressions of Old Ebbitt as someone walking in off the street is chaos. This place is incredibly popular. I'm not sure how many of the people crowding by the door waiting for tables were from DC or visiting tourists, but you can't deny Old Ebbitt is certainly not hurting for business. My gut would immediately tell me to leave by walking into a dining room that crowded and loud. But as DC residents, Dan and I both knew there was another bar to the left of the entrance, so we excused ourselves through the crowds to this less inhabited part of the restaurant. Let me point out, less inhabited doesn't imply no crowds. Anytime between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. at Old Ebbitt is pretty chaotic because you get the happy hour crowd. The back bar was more inviting to us to order a drink, but it was by no means quiet.
I noted to Dan that every one of the people gathering for drinks had yet to go home. Clearly we were surrounded by DC enjoying their happiest of what had become many hours. This is important to know because the main dining room bar is next to impossible to get a drink at and you'll more than likely be sharing bar space with a plumber from Iowa. (not that there's anything wrong with that)
According to our rules, I ordered two drinks. My first was my drink of choice, a Crown and Coke. My second was based on the house speciality, a Crown and Coke. Why the same drink you ask? I'll tell ya...
Dan figured he'd go for the house speciality with his first drink. He asked our first bartender to recommend something. The bartender looks at Dan with a confused look and says, give me somewhere to start. Clearly the question "what do you recommend?" doesn't get asked very often. So I ask the second bartender about their menu of drinks and which does he suggest. This time I get a more clear picture of what Old Ebbitt specializes in as he tells me to avoid that drink list. According to the bartender, the drink list changes for each season, so right now these drinks are full of creme and designed to appeal to a cold tourist looking for a warm and comforting beverage. What does Old Ebbitt do well though? Whiskey, Bourbon and Vodka.
Like most of DC, fancy schmancy cocktails are saved for the ultra lounges and trendy house music bars of K Street and Chinatown. This venue is a drinkers bar with an emphasis on the quality of the liquor and less on the number of different alcoholic shots you can throw into a glass. Old Ebbitt is designed and built as a bar for the hard-working lawyer, lobbyist and politician of old-school DC.
On top of our drinks, Dan and I both had an appetizer. I enjoyed a cup of the creamy clam chowder, which hit the spot on a cool rainy evening. And about those Crown and Cokes, they were pretty darn good. I can usually tell a big difference in the venue based on how much ice and how flat the coke is. Old Ebbitt hit the mark on delivering me my favorite drink with a well poured hand.
My only complaint with this bar is the mixture of tourism and local flavor. Any time you take a bar or restaurant that's become a fixture in a scene and infuse it with hundreds of tourists each day, you lose some of the local connection and flavor. Old Ebbitt is beautiful and makes good drinks, but I can't see myself going there on a random night because I don't get the sense I would be remembered. A good bar that's billed as a local institution should bring you a sense of home and welcome you in like you've just sat down for a drink in your own living room. With thousands of tourists coming and going each night, I doubt Old Ebbitt will ever exude that type of charm.
Labels: 75 Bars, Clubs, Entertainment, Music, Nightlife
75barsdc.com
The title of the blog pretty much says it all. Two weeks ago Mr. Dan Kelly calls me up with an idea. He had been out the night before at the Pour House on Capitol Hill and got into a conversation with a young lady about the
Washingtonian Magazine top 100 area restaurants. The young lady tells Dan it's her goal to try each and every restaurant on the list.
So Mr. Dan, being the adventurous individual he is, thinks...hmmmm, Washingtonian Magazine did a
top 75 bars list as well...
The following is an excerpt from
his blog:
So the idea hit me. Why don't I check out all of these "Best Bars" and tell people about the experience. I can visit 75 bars and have drinks, not a problem, but how to make this more interesting? That's easy I have to complete this before March 1st 2010 when the next Best Bars issue comes out. Now this is getting interesting. So 15 bars a month... 30 days in a month... 1 bar every 2 days. PHEW! My liver is going to get a workout on this one.Dan then enlisted my help with this project because as he says, you need a partner in crime on something like this. Besides, Dan and I have been moving and shaking up the nightlife scenes from DC to NC to all-over the state of Florida. When it comes to bars and clubs, we've built up some credibility with our various newspaper columns and marketing concepts.
So we developed the "rules" for 75 Bars DC. (I can hear some of you laughing right now as we talk about rules and drinking.)
1. We both must be at the bar.
2. We must have at least 2 drinks at each bar.
3. One of the drinks must be a "specialty" of the bar. Wine at a wine bar, Martini at a martini bar... you get the picture.
As Dan says, we have to have some guidelines that make this project somewhat official. And our goal is to provide you with an "off the street" perspective of these bars. In other words, we don't want to act like or write like we're a long time restaurant critic who goes through a cerebral review process. We simply want to give you an idea of what to expect at these places if you were to wander in off the street yourself.
And so the next step was for Mr. Dan to register the domain
75barsdc.com. This was important because we need something to help with our marketing of this little project. I'll continue to post here on my blog, but we needed a domain to direct our friends and bar patrons that we meet along the way to. And so there you have it.
75barsdc.com is now official. The project has begun.
Labels: 75 Bars, Clubs, Entertainment, Music, Nightlife
Photo Archive: Hurricane Charlie
Since I've been sick much of the weekend, I decided to take some time today to go through my old photo archives and see what could be posted and what could be discarded. Needless to say, my 2006 folder left very little worth keeping that wasn't already on my site. But I did find this folder called Punta Gorda that caught my eye. The folder contained photos that were taken by myself in the small Florida gulf coast town of Punta Gorda. The images you see here were taken about two weeks after Hurricane Charlie had ripped through the town and literally flattened it. I was living in Tampa at the time and was on my way home from Miami. I knew there had been devastating destruction and wanted to see it first hand.
Now you have to understand something about me...I grew up in Delaware and had been through many hurricanes. I remember a time vacationing with my family in St. Michaels, Maryland and sitting in a hot tub outside as a hurricane swept through the area. I figured I knew hurricanes and knew what to expect. When I moved to Tampa, everyone in my office talked about our amazing hurricane coverage and how engaged the entire newsroom would become. When Hurricane Charlie turned north, crossing Cuba and heading into the Gulf of Mexico, it began. Our newsroom went into 24-hour operation mode. We had daily updates, path projections and wind speeds. Charlie was heading right at Tampa. I lived in St. Pete, two blocks from Tampa Bay, so my neighborhood was under a forced evacuation. I put everything in my house up on the second floor, raised the furniture on blocks and boarded up the windows. I packed my bag and went into the office for what became 48 hours of basically living in the newsroom.
Again, I figured I knew what to expect. I've been there, done that! But I remember the ominous statement from our anchor around 8 a.m. the day Charlie was supposed to make landfall. The hurricane was still heading directly at Tampa and the anchor says "it looks like our worst fears could come true here in the Tampa Bay region." I remember I needed to go take a nap since I had been up all night but suddenly felt uneasy. It was that moment I realized this wasn't a joke. And it certainly wasn't the same type of hurricane I had been through in Delaware or Maryland.
Hurricane Charlie was a category 5 monster. It wasn't very large around and was moving quickly, but it packed winds in excess of 155 mph and a destructive storm surge. The idea of a hurricane of that force hitting Tampa would be apocalyptic for a city of it's size. It was, quite literally, our worst fears.
I remember waking up from my nap about 4 hours later and coming down to our newsroom. I remember thinking the wind outside would surely have woken me up, but it had not. I remember seeing our anchors looking at a hurricane path that looked different than the one we had been watching up until then. Instead of it taking Charlie up into Tampa Bay, it had now shifted in-land towards Orlando. Hurricane Charlie had turned right about 100 miles south of Tampa, right smack into Punta Gorda.
I went through 4 hurricanes that year. I packed up and evacuated more times than I had moved in the last 6 years. I spent most of August and September with plywood on my windows because we got sick of taking down the wood only to have another Cat 5 storm heading our way. After Charlie, Ivan, Jean and Francis all made landfall in Florida. To many residents of the sunshine state, it was the summer of hell.
Hurricane Jean struck my home in St. Pete and left me with a flooded house, no power or water and basically homeless for 2 weeks. I survived. Most of us did. We even joked about it that winter. Soon we wore t-shirts parodying the Master Card commercials with slogans like "Surviving hurricanes in paradise, priceless!"
Not long after I left Tampa for Oakland, CA, Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. We all remember that one! It was one of the most publicized, tragic and costly natural disasters in American history. But I took away a different feeling on Katrina than most did. I, like most of my former colleagues in Tampa, remembered what it was like. I remembered what I saw in Punta Gorda. The rest of the country had forgotten about these Florida cities that were completely flattened. Heck, most still claim Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. It didn't. Ground zero for Katrina was Biloxi, Mississippi. There was nothing left of that town. Most neighborhoods had been reduced to foundations. Some foundations were even gone. New Orleans was a disaster. Biloxi was simply...gone. Wiped off the map in one day.
I remember all of the anger directed at our President, FEMA and the DHS after Katrina. And yet I recall directing my anger at the Mayor of New Orleans, the governor of the state and their local population. You see, having gone through 4 disastrous hurricanes back to back, I knew the details of evacuations, first responders and hurricane preparedness. We listened to it for 24-hours a day for almost two months the previous year. Bush, FEMA, DHS... they followed standard protocol. They did the same thing with Katrina they had done with Charlie, Jean, Ivan and Francis. You didn't see the same problems in Florida the previous year that you saw with Katrina. Hell, you didn't see the same problems in Mississippi that you saw in Louisiana.
The fact is this, the city of New Orleans was failed by it's leadership. It was failed by the very people the residents elected to protect and manage that city. Look at these photos. The people of Punta Gorda lost everything. But the majority of them survived and went on to rebuild. And they did so because of the leadership in their city, in their county and in their state capital.
I'll never forget that day driving through Punta Gorda. It changed my whole perception on hurricanes and the power of nature. It made me realize - when my house was hit, flooded and lost all utilities for a few weeks - that I was lucky to still have a roof and be alive. I never complained again about evacuations and all the mind-numbing talk about hurricane preparedness.
Some will still disagree with me about this post. I've wanted to write something like this for about 4 years now. I sat there in that Oakland newsroom and let my personal experiences stay silent while all of inexperienced Californians raged on about who was right and who was wrong. Armchair quarterbacks were on every channel. But in my silence, I never forgot Punta Gorda, FL. Or Pensacola, FL. Or Gulf Shores, AL. Or Port Saint Lucie, FL. Or Biloxi...
Labels: Archives, Photography, weather
AARP's Vegas@50 has been pretty exciting so far. Going into the event, I really had no idea what to expect. I knew it would attract a ton of people and the schedule would be packed, but wow! Day one kicked off with an opening session with our CEO A. Barry Rand delivering a great speech on health care reform. Magic Johnson became an official member of AARP and received his membership card. And the evening highlight was a concert with Gloria Estefan.
