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On Halloween, beware the vampires

So there we were, on our traditional Halloween pub crawl/local pilgrimage (that invariably climaxes at the Caribou Club with a sprawling colorful mosh-pit of fellow locals, aged 2,000 B.C. to 4,500 A.D.) and my partner, a comely be-spangled, strong-winged raven says, “Why don’t we go by Hooch? I’ve never had a drink there,” and next thing you know we are sitting at the bar, ordering a tonic soda for me and a cosmo for her.

Since I was the guy in the tuxedo with a lampshade on his head, I laid down $20, and expansively announced, “I’ve got this round.” The bartender looked dismissively at the bill, and said “Actually, you don’t — it’s more than $20.”

I gotta say, both the beautiful raven and the guy with the lampshade on his head — locals enjoying a local holiday during offseason where there are no lavish tourists to pay $16 for a regular bar drink and $5 for a soda — were both kinda shocked. If the cocktail had some dramatic or ridiculous name, glowed in the dark, involved balloons and dry ice, maybe. But it was just a cosmo, and we had just paid for it and the entire bottle of vodka that made it (and would make 24 more).



So, just saying, if you head to Hooch, be prepared for sticker shock. They don’t differentiate between locals in offseason and tourists in high season. (On the plus side, though, it made the Caribou Club party later feel like a bargain.)

Kevin Patrick Ward




Snowmass