DIRTY THIRTY PUB CRAWL

My daughter spends her thirtieth birthday sitting with me during five hours of facial surgery, driving me home while I hide my mummified face lest I scare small children and random animals.  I feel like I owe her a better birthday experience than this, so I make a plan to take her and some gal pals on a Boston pub crawl.

When I make this plan pre-surgical experience, I believe I will have a small round bandaid on my face.  Instead, I have gauze taped to my cheek and upper lip and left nostril.  I look like I just rolled out of post-op.  I don't care -- I promised my daughter a Boston pub crawl, and, by God, she's going to get one!  Besides, I'm the designated driver.  I cannot back out.

My daughter and her friends are nurses, so no one flinches at the sight of my swollen, bruised, bandaged face, but I'm taking my show on the road.  I figure this get-up is nothing Boston hasn't seen before, and I'll never see these people again.  Besides, I can hide at the bars, right?  And, hey, my daughter is sporting a shiny, pearly crown that shouts "30" from its peak.  If she's wearing the crown, no one will even notice my face.

We start out at our favorite Seaport spot, The Whiskey Priest, but our pal the barmaid isn't working.  Word gets to her anyway that we are there for the Dirty Thirty crawl, and, after we order a huge plate of nachos, a round of green tea shots arrives, courtesy via proxy from our best barmaid.  Life is good.  It takes me three swigs to down my shot because of the gauze mask I am wearing, but, by god, if the young'uns can do it, so can I.

It's about a mile walk from Seaport to Faneuil Hall, and our intent is to go to Dick's Last Resort and be professionally insulted while we drink, but we spot the Granary Tavern on our way there.  Never having been there, we try to get an outside table, but we're not eating again (or so we think) yet.  Once we determine that the upstairs bar is too full, the maitre'd tells us there's a second bar downstairs.

We head down the stairs into this amazing, intimate bar that is in the bowels of the old building, and the walls are huge slabs of granite boulders.  It's like we're outside but inside, and it reminds me of the indoor/outdoor restaurant my friends and I discovered in Montreal last summer.  We start ordering up drinks (I am sipping mostly tonic water as the DD ... mostly), and then a plate of the most amazing, incredible, full-loaded pulled pork nachos arrives, courtesy of the bartender, who also buys my daughter's drinks.

Holy crap, this city is amazing, and the bartenders are the absolute bomb!

Eventually we move on to Faneuil Hall.  Instead of heading right over to Dick's Last Resort, one of the gals wants to try Sissy K's, but, being a dance bar, there's already a line, so we head over to The Black Rose.  This bar is more of a tourist trap than a local bar, but we head upstairs, anyway.  We are told we cannot take a table unless we order food, so we go for a giant Caesar salad to share and start drinking.

We are just about to move along when the Irish trio shows up, and the fiddler, a man about my age, starts talking to us.  He chats up my daughter, too, because, hey, she IS wearing the crown.  Suddenly we realize that we are sitting at the table next to the band, right in the line of everyone's vision.  If my daughter thinks that she and the crown are going to hide, I should realize that my gauze and I aren't going to hide, either.  The band stars, and the lead singer/guitarist, a gentleman straight from Dublin, immediately gets the entire bar singing "Happy Birthday" to my daughter.

The entire night people are dancing, the band is playing, and lots of touristy type stuff starts to happen.  A Polish lady and her entourage get everyone, including my table, dancing.  The young couple next to us, who appear to be having a bad first date, suddenly sweep into the moment and parade around the bar in an Irish version of a Conga line.  Cowboys from Texas dance and dance and dance with the women at our table.  Four college boys start doing the Cotton Eyed-Joe line dance to one of the Irish jigs, to the amusement and cheers of the packed bar.

We sing a lot of my old favorite, too -- The Irish Rover, Waltzing Matilda, Dirty Old Town, and several older rock songs.  The entire upstairs bar joins in for a rousing version of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.  The band keeps an eye on my daughter, too, announcing every so often, "And there goes the birthday girl again!  The birthday girl is dancing!"

It is a wonderful night, a night worthy of a girl who spent her true thirtieth birthday not only taking her mother in for cancer surgery, not only living through the trauma of me coming out of the operation and sobbing about how my face is ruined (even though I am now cancer-free), but also coming to my rescue after her birthday dinner with friends when my face started bleeding through the pressure bandage.  Not tonight, though - no trauma tonight.   

This night, this is her birthday celebration.  A magical night. 

She doesn't turn into Cinderella again until well past midnight.  Crown and gauze still on, we head home around one in the morning.  It's a pub crawl success even though we do not get professionally insulted at Dick's.  We'll do that next time.  Who's having a birthday?  I could use round two.