Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1518
The Palace Theater & Saloon is just the Palace Theater these days but it's still going strong.
Hello! Good morning! Last day in Fairbanks. Just a quick one this morning, as we are running around packing, last lunch with my sister, trying to get her car washed, etc.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
Last night was touch and go with Jane. We really packed too much stuff in these last few days, and she had been running on too little sleep. WE got naps, between the Riverboat cruise and our evening’s activities last night. But Jane will not nap anymore. She is past toddler napping and in that period where she has not yet re-discovered the joys of napping, and thinks they are for toddlers.
So man, she was a wreck. Refusing to take a shower, refusing to eat, refusing to go anywhere.
And we had this show I really wanted to go to — the last activity we had before we left, the last time I would get to see some of these friends for probably years.
For a minute there, I almost gave up, started watching Youtube. “This is fine,” I thought. “I like Youtube, I will just sit here and watch it.”
But Emma and I rallied and we just carried Jane to the car, no shoes, didn’t give her any more choices.
When we got to the theater, she was absolutely intolerable, booping and poking and trying to claw at my friend Dana.
But once the show started, she was absolutely mesmerized, laughing and clapping along.
The Palace Theater show is a vaudeville show in an old timey saloon in Pioneer Park that has been going on for, like, 50 years in Fairbanks. I haven’t been in more than twenty years. I know this because it used to be the Palace Saloon back then, and it had a bar. The bar is gone. I don’t know why. They said it was 23 years ago. I wonder if something happened.
Often, in the winters, the Fairbanks LGBT population would take over the Palace and do drag shows and it would be their bar for the winter. I guess that doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t know where the drag shows went. This vaudeville act still very much had some drag flavor to it, and Jane loved it, but not like the winter drag shows. Memory is hazy. Because it was a bar. And most of my time in Fairbanks, I was under 21, so I wasn’t exactly completely up on the bar scene. In my years living here when I was over 21, I went there a bunch — my friend Dave, who came with us last night, used to be in the shows. But overall, the existence is a bit of a mystery.
But man, Jane loved that show.
And so it was I got to see some of my friends one last time: Frank and Dana and Dave and Dave and Shaulane and Rochelle and Jamie and April. It was great.
And now we are packing up, going to the cookie jar and heading out.
There may or may not be a tuesday edition depending on how this red-eye goes.
And, blissfully, we only have a normal-ass 90-minute layover in Seattle on the way home. Hallelujah.
Goodbye, Alaska. Love you bunches, even if you scarred me. We do not have a perfect relationship but you are not all bad.
—
Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.