Catbirds

Love everything Catbirds is doing for Houston especially their recent calendar for the Houston Women’s Center! It’s super awesome! So proud of the owner for turning this place around. I highly recommend checking them out Wednesday nights for drag queen trivia or seeing some live music. Also the bartenders are the sweetest people!!

It was a small gathering of me and my some college friends. Another year had passed. Another friend's birthday swirling around. Congregating for a pause to our daily haste of work, errands, and obligations. we celebrate in droves at Catbirds, some surging towards inebriation with a Lone Star or a vodka soda, others joyriding with Catbirds' free baskets of popcorn. On the TV behind the bar, I see Bill Bixby on "The Incredible Hulk" TV series from the 1970s. Further contrasting TV's version of an 1870s Robert Louis Stevenson novella, I gaze at the divide in Catbird's U-shaped layout. My group of liberal, yuppie cosmopolitans command the western half of the bar, annoying anyone feeling adventurous enough to squeeze through to undertake the venture of a C-Bird bathroom. A saltier, grungier smattering of regulars peppering the eastern portion, with a few smoking on the patio in their denim vests and black jeans. The normally darkened interior means my vision fails me from across the room, but it appears as if the Mr Hyde to our Dr Jekyll are both as entranced by their time in this space. Because as much as The Incredible Hulk was two separate forms, they both resided in the same organic being. And we have all shown our worst faces to friend, foe, and stranger alike at Catbird's at one point or other. But the good times also have shone through in that organic being of a non-judgmental bar. I approach a cadre of women who are friends of friends. I gesticulate wildly in front of the AMI BarLink jukebox as the ladies want to request Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love" but are unable to determine the protocol for doing so. My hands wave through the air, and the ladies' eyes glimmer as the light from the digital display illuminates not just their faces but part of the adjacent mural of prominent jazz musicians. Behind me, a former roommate uses his silver iPhone to pay for some Bey (as well as some select Disney songs). The magic trick has worked though and the ladies think I conjured the tracks from the depths of the digital jukebox's annals. But the real magic is dynamism of Catbird's. Neither friend nor foe will be found there. And that is the strange case of Catbird's. You will enter it's obfuscous interior to find yourself enlightened by the unmolded retinue who go there for a good drink and a good time, unfettered by the hindrances of who they are outside of this bar. Because as time passes us by more and more, we realize that we learn less in our daily haste of DOING and more from our nightly place of BEING.