If I drink 2 beers these days, I wake up with a hangover. I don’t normally drink that often, but lately I’ve been hopping out to a lot of social things, and they tend to go hand-in-hand with booze. Last night, I made some tea, put it in a thermos and threw it in my bag before biking to a bluegrass jam in a friends’ artist loft thinking, “I drank last night, I felt like shit all day, these are friends I’m already comfortable around sober, this Throat Coat tea is all I need.”

I know. Bluegrass and… tea. No bluegrass song has ever been written about freaking THROAT COAT TEA. I was sitting here, burning my lips off on minuscule sips of garbage while my friends were drinking wine, hard apple cider and radlers. To be fair, a radler only has 2.5% or something- but it’s still more conducive to a bluegrass jam than a tea you’re only supposed to drink when you’re sick. (I’m not sick)

5 or 6 tunes in, Anna gets up to go get another drink from the fridge, and says innocently “Can I get anyone a cider?” I look down at my sad little thermos, and before I can stop myself, the words come out “Sure, that’d be great!!” And fuck if that cider in my hand didn’t make me feel just a little bit cooler, a little bit… bluegrassier.

After a few more tunes, Amy offers me a radler and I say “Nope! I’m good! Can’t do that!” But then as I get up to go to the bathroom, somehow I come back with a bag of honey dijon kettle chips in my left hand, a radler in my right. “I owe you drinks next time!” I say.

So now we’re just plowing through this bag of chips and drinking 2.5% radlers and LAUGHING our ASSES off. We’re all classically trained musicians who have wandered into various other creative paths- and at one point, Jenn asks Amy if her bluegrass sheet music is Urtext. HAHAHAHA!! “What would that even look like??” someone says- “some scrawlings on the sole of a shoe?!? BAHAHAHAHA!! We all cackle even louder, as I imagine what a whole book of urtext bluegrass music would look like- a dirty kleenex, a chunk of wood with nails sticking out, a stinky cast, all scrawled with a tune and spiral-bound.

I’m not saying we needed the booze to have that much fun, but… I’m not saying we didn’t, either.