Visiting Ginny’s Little Longhorn

Ladies and gentlemen, let us discuss a truth.

There are times in life, when a person needs a beer after work.

It’s not my usual practice to drink very much. Sure the occasional glass of wine with pasta, or a ‘rita on the rocks with a fine mexican meal, or a Negra modelo with queso, but alcohol, on the whole, doesn’t find a daily involvement in my life. Although, by the previous sentence, if I ate a diet of “fine mexican meals”, pasta, or queso exclusively, it might just, but I digress.

With Lauren working until later in the evening, and me having too many hours to kill until she got home, the prospects for the early evening were go home (crickets) and surf websites or write code ( something I’d done enough of yesterday, thankyouverymuch ), watch DVDs, and I’d missed my yoga class. The weight of continued wranglings with my new LDAP infrastructure were heavy upon these shoulders and as 80’s era McDonalds used to say: I deserved a break today.

So I decided that it was a good opportunity to find a beer and a jukebox. I had received a ‘calendar reminder’ that Rosie Flores was playing the Little Longhorn saloon on Burnet, so I decided to go, have some bar food and a beer or two, and catch Rosie’s show. I arrived in the early evening and had a Shiner, some Fritos, and watched the Simpsons and Seinfeld power-hour ( some things about Austin’s TV programming never change ) and waited for the show to get on the road. Game 7 of the NLCS was on so the time flew by until the arrival of Rosie and her band. Local area musician Dale Watson even stopped by while I was waiting, i was hoping he’d hang around and do a bit of playing with the band that night, but, he left - alas!

The show was phenomenal. Rosie sings a honky-tonk, rockabilly style, with some espanol overtones mixed in - it’s just great! She came in, thin and leopard-print-panted, and pulled out a baby-blue, hollow-body Epiphone whose paint would not have seemed out of place on a ‘57 Chevrolet. With the music underway I sent Lauren a rapid fire series of text messages instructing her on how to navigate to the saloon.

Lauren arrived for the inter-set gap and we grabbed a small table. The 2nd set opened up with a trio of Elvis covers which included a bi-lingual love me tender, rendered both in English and in Espanol. Those 50’s crooners’ songs really translate well to Spanish ( See: “Llorando” from the Mulholland Drive soundtrack).

Rosie’s got a great stage presence, working with the crowd as she rocks away, fingers working bar cords up and down the neighbourhood between the 5th fret and the 10th. She’s got a great smile, a great spark, and the show was tons of fun. She tells stories about the old days of country music, before Hollywood Nashville got too big for its britches. She had a great song about LA’s legendary Palomino Club ( which closed in 1995, not to be confused with any burlesque houses in Las Vegas ).

Lauren and I ducked out about halfway through the second set after dropping some green in the tip bucket to grab some breakfast food over at Kerbey Lane before we headed home. Rosie thanked us for coming out in-between the verses and all was right as we wandered out into the rapidly winterizing Austin night.