No no, there's only one "t" in Chasity

Perhaps nowhere do I feel more out of place than at a club. I'm not a club kind of guy. I take paying just for the convenience of spending more money inside someones establishment as a personal affront to my intelligence (I can just see the owner in his office, peering over his pile of money through a double-sided mirror as the crowd shuffles in: "Holy shit! The moron just paid to get in! Muahahaha."). I don't like overpriced drinks, I don't like high-maintenance women (or men), while I see the merit in some dance and techno music I generally don't enjoy listening to it, and I don't like spending time in a place where the women are in no way attracted to guys like me and the men make me feel physically inadequate - yes, I'm happily committed, but I still like to feel good about myself.

As I'm on the edge or sounding like a bigot I should pause here to balance the above paragraph with a few more facts: I have no problem with dancing. I like dancing. I like Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga. In fact, I even enjoy Ke$ha - Yeah, I spell her name with the proper "$". Though, I like Ke$ha for same reason I like Jersey Shore. She's a train wreck, and I enjoy ridiculous idiots who take themselves seriously and seemingly don't understand that 90% of their fan base is laughing at them not with them - at least, God, I hope that's the case. Plus, it's cathartic and American to look down on people who are richer, more successful and most likely less intelligent than you are. Well, so much for my redeeming second paragraph...


The point is, with my aforementioned loathing towards the club culture, what event could possibly get me to a place called Prime Lounge - Why do all clubs have names like this? Why can't there be a super chic, super posh, super elite club named Karen's Place? - in downtown Louisville, Kentucky on a Wednesday night? Chasity's Birthday Party, that's what.


Chasity is a young woman born-and-bred in Southern Indiana, and a co-worker of mine. (Yes, Chasity. As many people had done before me, I referred to her as Chastity for the first three months I knew her -  Chastity having, you know, precedence as a name for human beings and all.) It was Chasity's birthday last Wednesday and this is how she invited me to her party (insert Indiana twang here):

Oh, you know Wednesday is my birthday, my favorite holiday of the year. Oh, I don't fuck around on my birthday. I treat it like its prom - though I never went to prom, I didn't stay in school long enough. I get up real early and hang around in my pajamas, then I get my nails done. Then I get my hair bleached and go buy a new outfit. Did I tell you about my cake? Its a big prescription pill bottle. You better be coming to my party, its at Prime Lounge. I'll be there at 10:00. They have $5 bottles of wine on Wednesday nights. Last year I made everyone give me a birthday card with their favorite "Chasity memory" in it. That's how my boyfriend found out I used to be a lesbian. This year I want everyone to bring me a mix CD with songs that, when they hear them they think of Chasity.

How the hell do I not go to that?

The funny thing is, I wasn't sure how I felt about Chasity at first. She got hired where we work the same day as me so we had an initial common ground, but even while she is exactly the type of person I had begun preparing myself to share a community with the minute "Yeah, I'll move to Louisville. Why the fuck not" came out of my mouth, I wasn't sure how to handle her. Her naivete rubbed me the wrong way, she was my age but we might as well of lived on different planets, she was quite literally addicted to Mountain Dew.

But meeting people like Chasity is all part of the beauty of traveling around the country. I've now had the privilege of living on both coasts, the biggest city in the Midwest, and now the crossroads of the Midwest and South, and I'm without a doubt the better for it. In his books and on his TV show, Anthony Bourdain repeatedly reflects that, despite all his travels over the last decade, the more he sees the less he feels he really knows. He couldn't be more right. It's an old adage, but it's stuck around for a reason.


Chasity has since become one of my closest co-workers. We don't spend time together outside of work - visiting a different planet just for some company is a long way to travel - but I certainly enjoy our conversations. Part of this is because - like Ke$ha - Chasity is, in a word, ridiculous. She's the only woman I've ever known that can say something so perverted and obscene that I can't even muster up a response - instead closing my eyes, shaking my head, laughing and walking away

She's still addicted to Mountain Dew, enjoying her first 20oz of the day with her coffee around 7am. Though to her credit, as her Doctor has explained the Dew is basically destroying her body the way alcohol kills an alcoholic's, she's tried numerous times to quit - but the headaches and stress usually knock her off the wagon within a few days. Even when she's off the Dew however, she takes enough of those energy pills one finds at gas station counters to land someone like myself in the hospital with an anxiety attack.

I won't get into details, but I don't think she'd have any problem with me saying that her home life with her live-in, aspiring rapper boyfriend tends to get a little messy at best, and her kids sound like a handful. Though, I don't know what she expected when she named one of them Maliki after the sinister kid from Children of the Corn (seriously).

So, this is what got me, hater-of-all-things-club, to Prime Lounge in Louisville, Kentucky on a Wednesday night. And there I was, sipping on a $5 bottle of Chardonnay like it was a 40oz while Chasity, looking good all dolled up in her new birthday outfit, 4-inch heels,  freshly painted nails, and newly bleached, purple-tipped faux-hawk drank her birthday Patron out of a glass, like any classy, cosmopolitan woman would do on her favorite holiday.

Who's the white trash now?

New happy louisville

It's been awhile since my last post, not because I didn't have much to say - I always have something to say - but because I didn't have much to say that pertained to Louisville-area happy hour and bar specials that wasn't already posted on my examiner page. When I came upon this realization last week, it lead to a mini-dilemma.

Why, exactly, do I need a blog and a website dedicated to happy hour specials?

The answer, quite simply, is that I don't - and neither does Louisville. I admittedly started happy louisville because I was "sick of googling 'louisville happy hour' and not getting any worthwhile results." Louisville is the 4th US and 6th overall city I've lived in in my quarter of a century here on Earth, and never as a recent transplant to any of them had I found a reliable website that simply gave a brief overview of a bar and/or restaurant and their happy hour/daily special info. After all, isn't that all one really needs? So, I thought happy louisville would be a good place to keep track of all the happy hours I came across, write some semi-entertaining tidbits about each bar/restaurant and, hopefully, help out fellow google searchers like myself.

The problem is that I already do that on Examiner. I thought that happy louisville could supplement my examiner reviews with more honest, first-person accounts and anecdotes from a "restaurant insider." The truth is, why the hell would anyone read a review about a bar, get all the info they need, then go to another site to read another - slightly different - review about the same bar, by the same person? No one, that's who. Especially when you can skip both and just follow it all on twitter.

So, that was a very long winded way of saying, welcome to the new happy louisville. A place for "rants, reviews, realizations and observations of Louisville food, drink and culture from the perspective of an east coast transplant." When the mood strikes - or something about a place conjures up words and thoughts too inappropriate and unprofessional for Examiner - I'll still write about food and drink,  which should be often, as half of my life is eating and drinking, but just not in such a "review" format. There's more than enough of those sites to go around, anyways (like mine).

You can still find happy hour stuff in the twitter feed over there to the right, but I'll be using this space for - hopefully entertaining - perspectives on Louisville life, Kentucky culture and life in general from someone who, five years ago, told himself and his born-in-Ashland, KY girlfriend, "I will never live in Kentucky" and now lives here, and does so happily.

O'Shea's Happy Hour

I tend to stay clear of pubs. Yes, it's partially because I'm from Boston, whose Irish history gets overplayed for tourists and therefore completely unauthentic pubs - as almost every American "Irish" pub is - can be found on every street in the city. Yes, its partially because I worked at quite possibly the most famous pub in America if not the world (trust me, they come from far and wide) and possibly the most unauthentic of the unauthentics (though it wasn't always that way).

Mostly, however, I stay clear of pubs because I simply don't enjoy being at one. They're almost always overpriced, most have a very "chainy" feel to them, they're a dime a dozen, and I just prefer dives. True pubs exist (and are great) but unfortunately the "Murray's" "O'Hanrahan's" and " Fitzy's" of our fine country tend to serve nachos brought to you buy cheap-looking women in short skirts who dance on the bar from time to time.

O'Shea's is, luckily, not quite that extreme and judging from the pictures on its walls is at least a fun place to be on St. Patrick's Day. Right down the street from Flanagan's (which it owns and I actually prefer) Molly Malone's (which it doesn't own and I admittedly don't care for) and that other one Donegan's (which just sort of exists), it actually took me awhile to finally go in any of the pubs on Baxter as their close proximity to one another too closely resembled the almost unbearable Faneuil Hall bars in Boston (think 4th Street Live). In fact, I probably mumbled something critical about "pub-alley" every time my girlfriend and I drove down Baxter for the first month I was in Louisville.

O'Shea's sticks out though, because of one thing: its patio. I love its patio. It's street level and practically on the sidewalk, its wide open, it's big, it has trees (and therefore shade, though the sun barely gets in to the patio area in the afternoon anyways), an outside bar, table service, and now a great happy hour. As far as a place to get a Guiness and sit outside goes, O'Shea's wins. At least on "pub alley."

What's more? They're going to start playing two movies on a projector screen on the patio every Monday night. The only time I've watched movies in a bar before was at one of my all-time favorites in Allston, MA  and it was usually very dark inside, very empty, I was on a large couch, and drinking $2 Brubaker. However, a movie outside, on a projector screen, on a summer Monday is an admittedly cool idea should it actually work, and if Monday's can keep the crowd minimal enough to actually hear the movie it's probably worth checking out.

My Examiner article is here

Specials are here:

• Happy Hour: $2 Bud Light pints, $3.50 well drinks, $10 bottles of Twisted brand wine, 1/2 off appetizers. Mon - Thur 5-8pm, Fridays 5-9pm starting July 16th CANCELED

•  Monday: "Sunset Cinema" on the patio. A large projection screen will show two films every Monday night, starting July 19th at sunset.
• Tuesday: $10 bottles of Twisted brand wines, after 6pm
• Wednesday: $3 Bells Oberon pints after 9pm, featured unique and/or specialty beer on tap at 7pm
• Thursday: Four kinds of Pinnacle Vodka punch bowls for $29.99 after 9pm

O'Shea's Traditional Irish Pub


956 Baxter Ave


(502) 589-7373