Spoken What? An Evening at Winstons

I recently saw a show so weird it could compete with the opening night of that L.A. club, Vibrator, at which an Amazon woman named the Queen of Raunch performed a cheeseburger-topless-aerobics routine on roller-skates. (She had cheeseburgers tucked into crevices all over her body, including underneath her breasts, Man, I’ll have to tell you THAT story sometime.) The show was at Winstons, one of the oldest bars in Ocean Beach. As I readied myself for the evening, nostalgia tricked me into smelling patchouli (in high school I would buy gifts from the Black to impress Andre, a surfer and O.B.-hippy-wannabe with long, blond hair who collected anything resembling mushrooms and waves).

David and I met up with friends at their home, within spitting distance of Newport Avenue, the main drag of O.B. Across the street from their place is Little Chef, where my father dines almost daily for lunch. He prefers to sit against the windows facing Newport, what he calls, “O.B. TV, Channel One.” The windows facing Cable Street are Channel Two.
On the walk to Winstons, we passed a young girl with hair so long she could have wrapped it around her body in lieu of clothes. There are three types of people in O.B.: hippies, surfers, and bikers. Half of the hippies have dread-locks, half of the surfers are in their 40s, and half of the bikers are drunk at any given time. Exceptions always exist, but they’re still exceptions to the rule.

We traversed the sand-covered sidewalk until we reached Bacon Street, right in front of what used to be Java Joe’s, but is now an insidious Starbucks. Alright, I’m not going to lie to you… on occasion I crave (and even purchase) a frappuccino, but I still miss Java Joe’s. I miss the poetry nights, the music, the scene. Those events used to bring me to O.B. at least once a week. Starbucks just seems so incongruous the way it is juxtaposed with homeless druggies and hippies eager to stick it to the same man who is selling them chocolate-covered coffee beans. Surreal.

But the surreality was yet to begin. We found the entrance to Winstons behind O.B. Bob’s Hot Dog Cart. The bar was empty, save for a few barflies left over from an afternoon of drinking by the beach. I ordered a Barbarella (Sandy, the bartendress and apparent fixture at Winstons, uses raspberry vodka and Bailey’s -- different, creamy) and staked out a seat up front, closest to the stage. Ted Washington arrived first. Ted is as famous for his spoken word and stipple-style art as he is for his appearance (a really tall black man with shoulder length dreads, a good-looking guy -- always wearing his glasses and a smile). I’ve seen him perform at various venues, from a museum at Balboa Park to our own living room. Ted told us he would not be doing his usual spoken word, which consists of him speaking and another individual playing an instrument in the background; rather, he had created a spoken word band, and this would be their first performance together.

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