Turning Twenty One

Most college students have all their hopes and dreams invested in one fateful day – their 21^st birthday. It does not even matter that they have been drinking since they were 12 (my FCP statistics tell me that they surely have been). My own 21^st birthday started out a little more… foreign than the average 21^st birthday. Unlike the many girls around me at school, I did not have a fake ID, nor did I try to charm the bouncers I vaguely knew from Chem 1000. Growing up foreign means you do not really drink that much, and if you do, you most certainly do not get caught by sneaking into some skeezy club. I told my mom the week before my birthday that I would finally be going out to the clubs with my friends. She responded the way she does every time I want to leave the house with friends, “Vhy you vant to go out? You bring your friends over and I vill cook for all of them.” This was a very tempting offer because my mom is an amazing cook. However, I was less than willing to let my 21^st birthday end with my mom serving Darjeeling tea and Persian cookies to everyone in the living room (decorated in plush blue carpet and golden curtain rods – of course). I enlisted the help of my older brother to explain the traditional American celebration. This was very effective because he is a super premium lawyer, but she still did not want me to go to the dangerous bars which would surely lead me down the paths of sin and socializing. Eventually we settled on a compromise of my friends would coming to my house for dinner and cake, and then we would go out.

So my friends come over to celebrate my birthday, and my mom set up the formal dining room for their arrival. The golden rims of the plates glittered under the golden curtain rods in a spectacle of light only appreciated by true Persians. My mom made lemon pepper Cornish hens for all of my friends. That’s right - Cornish hens. One of my friends actually commented on how difficult it is to eat the tiny game fowl with hundreds of miniscule bones. I looked at him with an appalled face, asking jokingly, “You mean you never learned to eat Cornish hens in etiquette class?” Finally, with bellies full, and a toast of champagne, we were off to the bars!

I had a romping good time going up and down pearl street, kissing a taxidermy buffalo at the pearl street pub, and being taken to a scuzzy bar that truly appalled me – the sundown saloon. Here is a New York Times review of this particular bar:

This raucous dive is a CU institution. In a spacious basement on the west end of the Pearl Street Mall, pool is the pastime of choice and the drinks are reasonably priced. The Sundown Saloon has the largest and most popular smoking room in town (legal under Boulder's smoking ban), resulting in one of the smokiest rooms known to humankind.

At 21, I had not quite embraced my hipster side yet and wasn’t ready for the large smoking room, and the “awesome juke box” full of songs I had never heard of before. A friend let me pick some songs at the juke box, and I went for the only things I recognized – Patsy Cline and Interpol. I found this bar really seedy because it was frequented by both indie CU students and locals – real hippy locals that don’t shower. Just take a look at this picture from their website – if you saw those guys on your very first trip to a bar, you might be intimidated too. In time, the sundown saloon would become one of my very favorite bars, fondly known as the scum downer. The people are super chill, there is little to no booty dancing, and their smoking room isn’t legal anymore – woo! This last paragraph is here mostly just to convince all my Ohio friends to come to Colorado so we can go to fun dive-y bars.

--By Farrah, who is going to the scumdowner this summer like “woah”