So, tonight we’re turning Speak of the Devil into a fashion runway.
An actual fashion runway.
Our friends Erik Anderson, Johá Harris and Jevon Terance—three guys who know considerably more about fashion than any of us ever will—are taking over the joint, dressing up our staff and sending them out to model in front of a room full of people.
Our bartenders.
Our servers.
The people who normally spend their evenings shaking cocktails, hauling ice, washing glassware, and occasionally trying to figure out who the hell ordered the last Paper Plane.
They’re going to be MODELS.
Which raises a fairly important question.
WHO THE HELL IS GOING TO MAKE THE DRINKS?
We have absolutely no idea.
Well, that’s not entirely true. We have some ideas. We’re working on it. It’ll be fine.
Probably.
But while contemplating the logistics of temporarily transforming our entire staff into fashion models, it occurred to us that this is hardly the first time we’ve committed ourselves to something without fully considering what the hell we were getting into. That tendency is exactly what the Department of Crazy Ideas is about.
In fact, it’s become something of a tradition around here.
Which brings us to the Department of Crazy Ideas.
Some businesses probably vet ideas properly.
Someone schedules a meeting. There is coffee. A person opens a laptop and says something like customer acquisition strategy. Another person has prepared a spreadsheet. Eventually somebody asks the responsible adult in the room whether any of this makes financial sense.
We are clearly not one of those businesses.
Around here, most things seem to begin with somebody leaning against the bar and saying:
“You know what would be fun?”
These are dangerous words.
They should probably set off an alarm.
Because over the last almost nine years, “You know what would be fun?” has led to a lot of strange behavior at 201 West Fifth Street.
For instance, we once turned Speak of the Devil into Chalmun’s Cantina from Star Wars: Mos Eisley.
Because apparently running a cocktail bar in downtown Lorain, Ohio wasn’t enough. We also needed to operate a drinking establishment on the planet Tatooine.
Another time we became Rick’s Café Américain from Casablanca (complete with dress code), which at least kept us on Earth, although several thousand miles and eighty-some years away.
There was an Old School New Jack Swing House Party.
There were Disco Nights.
There were Emo Nights.
And, Jesus Christ, we had somehow completely forgotten about this until we started writing this thing:
SOUL TRAIN SATURDAYS.
Soul.
Train.
Saturdays.
We have questions for our younger selves.
There were poetry performances and comedy shows and trivia nights and karaoke nights. Eventually, karaoke stopped being one of our crazy ideas and became something we just do, which is apparently how this disease progresses.
Same with Tiki Week.
Tiki Week started as one of those ideas that probably sounded perfectly reasonable after a couple of drinks and has now become an actual Speak of the Devil tradition.
Of course, even that wasn’t enough tiki stupidity for us.
At one point Jack entered a Jägermeister cocktail competition and launched what can only be described as a doomed personal crusade to prove that tiki didn’t technically need rum.
It could use Jägermeister.
We went out there.
We fought the good fight.
We made fools of ourselves.
History will decide whether we were visionaries.
History will probably decide we were idiots.
Speaking of questionable cocktail decisions, we have created so many one-night drinks, weekend drinks, event drinks, experiments, accidents, and scraps of paper with ideas on them that we couldn’t possibly reconstruct them all now.
Some cocktails existed here for about 48 hours and then disappeared forever.
Which brings us to one of the great enigmas of Speak of the Devil:
Does anybody remember the Tiny Tim from Christmas 2019?
Because we do. Sort of.
We remember the name.
We remember making it.
We do not remember what the hell was in it.
If you somehow have the specs for the Tiny Tim, please get in touch with us ASAP!
Then there were the wars.
Not one.
Not two.
But three Godzilla vs. King Kong bar battles with our friends at LBM.
These competitions produced drinks of staggering restraint and elegance, like the Skull Island—reposado tequila, soursop, Midori, banana liqueur, lemon, and coconut cream—served in a giant dry ice-laden skull glass with a Little King’s Cream Ale turned upside down in it.
Read that sentence again.
Somebody thought that drink up.
Other people listened.
And instead of anyone saying, No, absolutely not, everyone apparently said:
“We’re gonna need a bigger skull.”
This is the fundamental problem with Speak of the Devil.
There is very little adult supervision.
Which may also explain the 1970s Throwback Night, when we decided to make a cocktail with Tang.
Yes.
Tang.
The powdered orange beverage of astronauts, suburban childhood, and kitchen cabinets everywhere circa 1974.
The cocktail was called The Command Pilot, and because merely putting Tang into a cocktail wasn’t enough devotion to the bit, our friends from Smash Kitchen joined in with a TV Dinner (complete in a 3-compartment tray ) featuring Salisbury steak, garlic mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach and cauliflower.
For one glorious evening, downtown Lorain became a wood-paneled rec room where somebody’s dad was probably adjusting the rabbit ears on the Zenith.
We’ve also opened the doors at 7:00 in the damn morning on Saturdays to become a coffee shop with our friends from My Best Friend’s Coffee.
Twice.
Seven.
A.M.
For perspective, some nights we aren’t entirely convinced a bar ought to acknowledge that 7:00 a.m. exists.
We’ve had Cigar Nights.
We’ve had Booze Schools.
We’ve held The People’s Choice Old Fashioned Competition, because apparently just drinking a traditional Old Fashioned wasn’t enough and we needed democracy to become involved.
We hosted a book club in the bar, Books & Brews, which felt vaguely ridiculous, but people kept showing up and discussing actual literature while sipping drinks. Turns out it wasn’t ridiculous at all.
Then there was Absinthe & Art.
We figured around sixteen people would come.
Seventeen.
Twenty if things got crazy.
Things got crazy.
People just kept coming.
And coming.
And coming.
Until the entire place turned into an overflowing green-fairy psychiatric hospital full of people drawing pictures on mini canvases, and we looked around, wondering what terrible mistake we’d made while also thinking: We absolutely have to do something like this again.
That pretty much sums up the operating philosophy.
There was the Ramen Room, born when our longtime partners in crime at Black Vulture Ramen and a heated patio somehow became a tiny winter restaurant hiding behind a cocktail bar.
There are the Paradise Alley Chronicles, because at some point simply owning a bar wasn’t enough and we apparently decided the building needed its own mythology.
They’re still on our website.
We stand by this decision.
Mostly.
We’ve hosted Jason Lawhead and Friends and turned the room twice in one night for two separate comedy shows, which remains an impressive piece of human Tetris for a bar about the size of some people’s garages.
We’ve had two weddings here.
Actual weddings.
People looked at this strange little room full of bottles and weird artwork and said, essentially:
Yes. This is where we would like to make one of the most important promises of our lives.
Which remains one of the coolest things anyone has ever trusted us with.
Not all of the insanity happened inside the bar.
Once, Kurt somehow wound up playing the bartender in Lorain County Musical Theater’s production of Anything Goes.
Typecasting is real.
Perhaps our finest contribution to American civic life, however, came when the United States announced the creation of the Space Force.
Most people read the news.
Maybe discussed it.
We turned Speak of the Devil into the nation’s first unofficial SPACE FORCE RECRUITMENT CENTER.
We recruited exactly zero astronauts.
Or Guardians.
Or whatever the hell we were supposed to be recruiting.
National security somehow survived.
Oh, and we once had a Prize Wheel.
Seriously.
A Prize Wheel.
An actual spin-the-wheel-and-see-what-the-hell-happens Prize Wheel sitting in a cocktail bar in downtown Lorain because, at some point, somebody apparently looked at Wednesday night and thought:
You know what this needs?
Game-show technology.
And nobody stopped them.
That’s really the recurring theme here.
There was a physical wheel. People spun it. Prizes were involved. We voluntarily did this on more than one Wednesday.
We’re not going to attempt to explain Prize Wheel Wednesday any further because, frankly, we think the existence of the phrase “Prize Wheel Wednesday” is all the historical record requires.
And through all of this, there have been the cocktails.
Hundreds of them.
Maybe thousands by now.
Some carefully researched. Some historically important.
Some painstakingly developed over weeks.
And some probably created because somebody held up a bottle at 4:38 on a Friday afternoon and said: “What if we put this with banana?”
That’s the thing about the Department of Crazy Ideas.
There isn’t actually a department.
There is no committee.
There is certainly no budget.
There are just people.
Staff. Friends. Musicians. Cooks. Artists. Writers. Coffee people. Ramen people. Customers. Regulars. Fellow bar owners. Somebody sitting at bar 4 who says something ridiculous that gets very quiet for a second before somebody else says:
“Wait.”
And then you can hear the machinery starting.
Because occasionally the crazy idea works.
Sometimes sixteen expected people become a packed house. Sometimes a wild idea works. And sometimes, against all odds, it reminds us why we keep doing this.
Sometimes the goofy theme night becomes an annual tradition.
Another time the temporary Ramen Room thing becomes regular ramen brunches.
Then crazy karaoke sticks.
Somehow Tiki Week reaches year nine.
Your bartender ends up in a musical.
You serve a drink containing Tang.
Sometimes two people get married in your bar.
And sometimes you pour reposado, soursop, Midori, banana liqueur, lemon, and coconut cream into an enormous skull, jam an upside-down Little Kings into it, slide this absolute monstrosity across the bar, and think:
Yeah…This is why we opened this place.
There are more, of course.
There have to be.
That’s actually the somewhat frightening part of writing this. We know we’re forgetting things. Entire nights have apparently disappeared into the fog. Somewhere there are photographs of things we’ve done that would probably make us question whether we operate a business or a circus.
So consider this less a history than an incomplete incident report.
Almost nine years of bad ideas (anyone remember Dive Bar Night?), good ideas, ideas that should never have worked, ideas that worked far better than they had any right to, and ideas that probably seemed completely reasonable at the time.
Which brings us back to tonight.
When three of Lorain’s most talented fashion guys descend upon this little bar, dress up our crew, and try to make us look like people who have absolutely no business wearing the clothes we’re about to wear.
We’re pretty damn excited about it.
We’re also slightly terrified.
Because, somewhere along the way, somebody actually said, “You know what would be fun? We should have a fashion show in the bar. AND THE STAFF SHOULD BE THE MODELS!”
And instead of immediately calling for help, we all agreed.
So here we are.
Wednesday night. A fashion runway. A room full of people. Three exceptionally talented designers. A bunch of bartenders pretending they know how to walk in a straight line while looking fabulous.
And somebody, somewhere, is going to need a goddamn Martini.
We’ll figure it out.
We always do.
And if history has taught us anything, it’s that sometime in the next few weeks, someone will be sitting at the bar, someone else will be polishing a glass, and there’ll be a little pause before somebody says those six dangerous words:
“You know what would be fun?”
God help us.