Travels with Barley Read Online Free Page B

afternoon shadows on the Bama, and Gilchrist still catches some flak from regulars who liked the joint shadow-free. (His real regret, Gilchrist says, is that under pressure from some of his early investors, “we sold the property too soon.”)
    The episode left some of the faithful worried about Gilchrist’s long-term commitment, since practically nobody believes the bar would be the same without him. A couple of years ago, with sales rumors more rampant than ever, he shocked everybody by announcing that he had sold the place to a syndicate of Montana rodeo cowboys. He called a press conference to introduce the new owners. A press mob showed up, as did some deeply concerned beer drinkers, as did one of the cowboy buyers dressed in full cowboy kit. Plans for a radically revised Bama were unfurled and given out, and it was only when the press folk flipped the plans over did they see “April Fool’s!” scrawled on the back.
    Well, it was April 1.
    The joke backfired somewhat when it was later discovered that the rent-a-cowboy Gilchrist had used turned out to be wanted by the law in another state; Joe hadn’t thought his prop, who had become a recent Bama patron, needed a background check. Still, Gilchrist’s role as a kind of Merry Prankster serves him well as a saloon-keeper; this was just another brick in the Bama’s wall of lore.
    I caught up with Gilchrist for the first time on an exploratory trip to the Flora-Bama two weeks before the eighteenth annual Mullet Toss. He’d warned me that he’d be kind of hard pressed to sit still very long during what he called the “insanity of Mullet Week,” where his duties veer between mule skinner and parade marshal. The Toss turns out to be the beer-soaked climax to an eight-day series of events that is equal parts revelry, promotion, and public service. There’s the Mullet Man Triathlon (including a Mullet Woman division) the weekend before the Toss; the Mullet Swing Golf Tournament midweek; and in many years, depending on timing, the Mullet Week Easter Egg Hunt. All of these Mullet-badged events attract crowds (more than 500 people race in the triathlon and another 175 or so participate in the golf tournament) and keep the Bama very much in the public eye. Mullet Week, in fact, has become an evergreen for the local and regional press; the Toss, as you might imagine, makes a couple of minutes of pretty good local television.
    The events also all have a charity component (duly noted in event literature and on the Bama’s Web site). A portion of the golf tournament’s $175 entry fee goes to a cancer foundation. The 711 people who will enter the Mullet Toss this year will pay $15 each to enter; the fee gets them an official Mullet Toss T-shirt but some of it goes each year to area youth groups. Altogether, the Bama gives away about $20,000 a year to various charities, most of that Mullet Week money. Of course, most revelers pay a $5-a-day cover charge to get into the Bama on Toss weekend, and the bar mandates that all who congregate on the beach within proximity—even the public beach—pay the cover charge and buy their beer and booze from the Bama. So, again, doing good clearly doesn’t interfere with doing well.
    I’d driven to the Bama from New Orleans with a friend named Dell Long, who, as coincidence would have it, had been hired as a publicist by Gilchrist on a couple of Flora-Bama projects. One was a Bama-organized effort, in the months just after 9/11, that made 400 beach-area rental condos, plus free air or train travel, available to the families of New York City firemen and policemen killed in the terror attacks. Gilchrist had also led a group of 100 Panhandle businesspeople and ten homegrown musicians to Manhattan to spend some money in the wounded city to try to help pump up its economy, and try to entertain them, too. Long, a red-haired steel magnolia in her late fifties, had for years been the