Want to help me turn a bar into a book club?

Announcing the Alone Together Reading Party

Hi all,

It’s your old writing friend J here. Remember when there was this pandemic thing happening and I used to send you cocktail recipes and short essays about the beauty and exasperation of being a stay-at-home dad? Barely? Yeah, same. It’s been a minute. Or maybe a year? Funny how those two measures of time can sometimes feel identical when reflecting back on them…

Anyway, I’m dropping a quick line to announce a cool event I’m hosting here in Chicago next Tuesday, July 9th. It’s called the Alone Together Reading Party and is an opportunity for people who like reading and cocktails to come enjoy both of them at Guild Row, a beautiful co-working/community space (located between Avondale and Roscoe Village) that recently made me a part of their creative cohort.

In Bar (the mobile cocktail business I started a little over a year ago) will be mixing up three custom cocktails (two spirited and one spirit-free); guests are encouraged to grab a drink, relax with a book they’ve been itching to read, and, if they’re so inclined, chat it up afterwards with like-minded people. In the picture below (note the lovely reading model), you’ll find the basic format for the evening:

This is my first big event at Guild Row, the first time I’ll be selling my drink creations directly to consumers instead of via a ticketed event (I just ordered my own little smartphone-POS-card-swipey-thingy!), and since I can never focus on just one thing, I’m attempting to smush together two of my biggest passions: cocktails and literature. Will it work? Will it be amazing? Will the drinks taste delicious?

Only one way to find out… come through!

Admission is free, but please RSVP here so I can get an idea of how many people to prepare for. And if you’re unavailable or live out of town, please help me spread the word by 1) forwarding this email to some friends in Chicago, 2) following In Bar on Instagram & sharing one of the posts about the event, or 3) just talking to someone about it in the old fashioned way, by like, going up to them and actually speaking words at their face, then waiting to see what happens.

Hope to see you on Tuesday. If you make it out, definitely come say hi to me and let me know you were an Ideas Over Drinks subscriber. I’m still thinking about resurrecting this punch bowl of a newsletter, when I finally finish the most recent revision of my novel (that’s a whole other rabbit hole I’d love to chat about, but we’d probably have to do it over whiskey)…

Thanks so much for reading, all, and enjoy the rest of your week!

J.