Now that's just crazy, Janie
So I was talking with Lynn Anderson, the owner of the River Rock Coffee and Martini Bar, and Steve Brooks, the store’s manager the other week about booze.
Booze, in moderation, can be delicious and we were sharing a few recipes. My recipes are tried and true and some, like my Moscow Mule at the City Tavern in the Freighthouse district, are award winners (The Pitch named it the best drink in Kansas City in 2005).
So I gave Lynn and Steve a few recipes and I could tell that I was sort of stepping on their toes. Too many cooks in the kitchen – that sort of thing. It’s not like they tell me what to put on page one. They didn’t seem interested.
Anyway, I walked into River Rock last week and I saw that their featured drink was called “The Crazy Janie,” and it made me pause. I didn’t remember giving them that recipe…in fact, I was pretty sure I didn’t. So I walked up to the bar – something I’ve never done before – and asked Steve if he was messing me.
“No,” he said, perplexed. “What are you talking about?”
“I invented that drink,” I said, pointing to the whiteboard.
“No you didn’t,” he said. “I got that out of a book.”
“Dude,” I persisted, “I invented that drink at 64 Carmine Street in the West Village. It’s named after my friend, Barbara Pyle. It’s on the internet…you can look it up.”
Barbara Pyle was a vice president at CNN, one of Ted Turner’s original executives and I used to work for her. When I first met her, she was talking about her friendship with Bruce Springsteen and she told me that she was “Puerto Rican Jane” – a character in one of his early songs. Somehow that morphed into me calling her “Crazy Janie,” who was another character in one of Springsteen’s songs.
When I lived on Carmine Street, a three-block street with a zillion restaurants and more characters than Springsteen could ever dream of, there was a public relations event at one of the newer, trendier places. Somewhere along the line I was entered into a drink making contest against some mixologist. The deal was, we would be given an ingredient, and we had to create a new drink on the spot.
I was given orange vodka. I never drank the stuff, but I figured it would be a good mix with fruit juice. I grabbed a deep stem glass and filled it with ice, then orange vodka, added grapefruit juice and a dash of champagne and for my signature touch, spun the glass while drizzling grenadine into it, creating a spiral effect. It was brilliant.
It was also 1999.
The other guy was given Nocello – a walnut liqueur. I won’t soon forget that because the guy completely housed me with his concoction. No way, I thought, could he come up with a palatable drink out of that obscure, after dinner drink. Then I watched in amazement as he added vodka and Godiva chocolate liqueur and poured it into a salt and sugar rimmed Martini glass, creating a drink that tasted exactly like a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup and walking off the contest winner. Salud to that guy.
Apparently, a marketing intern for a particular brand of orange vodka found my recipe on a website dedicated to drink recipes, and added it to their book. Eight years later, Steve Brooks, who only a week earlier shunned my verbal drink suggestions, got a hold of the recipe and featured it in a Martini bar in Parkville, Missouri. We verified it for fun, and Steve was in awe of my worldwide influence.
What are the odds, you know?
I was reminded of the Village this past week as the final episode of The Sopranos aired (and yes, the story on page one deliberately ends that way…if you saw the show, you get it).
Personally, I’m glad the show is over. It jumped the shark last season with the “Johnny Cakes and Vito” love story and I always thought the premise of the show was completely nutty and exploitive anyway.
In the Village, there’s an oyster bar named “Fish” on Bleecker Street, a block or two off of Carmine Street and there was this guy who used to come in at all hours of the day and order the happy hour “oyster special” which consisted of a Belgian beer and four oysters for $8 – a pretty sweet deal.
When I asked the owner of the restaurant why he let this guy order the happy hour special when it wasn’t happy hour, he shrugged and told me the guy was the head writer for The Sopranos. It didn’t make a difference, because whenever we saw the guy – a scruffy looking, tall man with a beard who never said a word – we just called him “oyster special.” I didn’t believe he wrote the show until I moved to Kansas City and tuned into the Emmy Awards one night and saw him on stage, accepting the award for best writer.
“Hey!” I screamed, “It’s oyster special!”
Nobody watching the show with me knew what I was talking about, but that’s ok…wherever Crazy Janie is today, she knows who I’m talking about.
Stop by Frank’s and sing along with the Senator this Friday happy hour, then have a Crazy Janie with Kasey Rausch this Friday at River Rock from 7 to 9, and then visit the RiverJam and listen to the tunes all night and again on Saturday.