A Creative Interlude in Bartending

Weaving a tapestry of the unexpected.

At night I tend bar. A few years ago, as I was staying with friends up on the Inwood Hill in Manhattan, I realized bartending was still something I wanted to do.

The moment of clarity came as I was typing up my notes from a sustainability forum at the United Nations. I was frustrated with the dearth of paid work in the environmental field after having just finished a round of advocacy with a network of organizations focused on centering women’s rights in sustainable development initiatives. Lots of great advocacy, but not a lot of money to support the work. Go figure.

This was the precursor to becoming a bartender.

As I was preparing to return home from the forum, I knew I needed to find work that could bring fast money, and bartending seemed like it would do the trick. After many years of believing it to be a silly and unrealistic goal, I realized it wasn’t those things at all and I still wanted to make it happen. I needed to make it happen. So I did.

I reached out to a bar manager and scheduled an interview by email while traveling on a Greyhound bus from Penn Station to Detroit.

The next week I started working at a restaurant within walking distance of my apartment, serving food and picking up as many bar shifts as they would give me. Since it was primarily a beer tap room, it was only a matter of months before I started thinking about how I wanted to evolve…