HillBilly Ranch Bar Boston

as you get old you forget. as you get older, you are forgotten - anon I know that I didn't come up with that quote, because I haven't really forget everything yet and the other day I was reminiscing about Lost Boston with a few old-timers at the bar of Jacob Wirth's. "Remember when they didn't let women drink at the bar here?" William hailed from Savin Hill. He was a double eagle same as my older brother. They had worked together on several senate campaigns for Ted Kennedy. "Yes, I used to bring my feminist friends here for a joke. They hated that the bartender would serve them at the bar. I thought it was a good laugh." I was a long-hair college student on the other side of the barricades from my older brother and William, who was fourteen years older than me. "Maybe the bartender didn't think it was that funny." William had been a Marine. "No, he loved telling those hairy girls to take a seat in the dining room." I couldn't remember his name, but we agreed that a woman's place wasn't at the bar of Jacob Wirth's. "You dirty hippie and I mean that in the best of all possible terms." My brother showed up later and our collective memories toured the city of our past. We extolled the prune rolls at Warmuths, the grilled hot dogs at WT Grants, the strippers at the Two O'Clock Lounge, and relived my brother's bachelor party in the Combat Zone. It was a blank in my mind. "I vaguely recall stumbling out of the Naked I into the Hillbilly Ranch. I think I wanted to hear MAMA TRIED." "We lost you for about an hour." "Probably ended up with the drag queens at the Other Side." William laughed with his beer belly juggling like defrosted jello. The beer at Jacob Wirth's was better than good. "No, I'd remember that. At least I think I would, but something sticks in my mind about getting up on the stage of the Hillbilly Ranch and singing a song." I had seen Sleepy La Beef, John Lincoln Wright, the Bayou Boys, and other southern b-bands of the 70s at the Park Square dive. "That was a tough bar owned by Frankie Segalini. You were lucky that you weren't rolled in that place. it was filled with Navy peckerwoods and crackers. They didn't like us Irish." "You returned to the Naked I intact." My older brother had a head for long ago. He was a lawyer. "And we made it to the church in time." The three of us clinked glasses to those times gone by. We thought that they would never end and they don't at Jacob Wirths' or in your heads