Drink 7: Five Pencils

The Name: The Five Pencils                                                                            

The Bar: The Pony Bar (637 10th Avenue on 45th street, NYC)

The Story Behind The Name: I've already ordered a drink in honor of one of my drama professors from college, but now it's time to honor a different professor. It's fair to say that this professor was not as inspiring as the other professor I've written about, but he certainly left as big of an impression.

This professor is named Hugh, and he was a visiting professor at Kenyon for three and a half years. I was only there for his last year. As I, a young aspiring drama major, looked through my course options for the second semester, I saw one that covered a field I had never tried, but knew would be a useful skill. It was a class simply titled "The Stage Manager," taught by Hugh.  A technical professor and remarkable designer who has had quite a career, Hugh certainly knows his stuff, so I was looking forward to the class. I had no idea how much it would change my life.

At this point, I feel like it's necessary to show you what Hugh looks like. But I don't want to put a picture of him on the blog without his permission, so here is an artist's rendering.

Also, he sounded like Tom Waits crossed with a grizzly bear. Got the mental picture? Good.

If you're familiar at all with the job of a stage manager in theater, you know that it is the most important job in the whole show. They basically oversee everything and make sure that the show happens. This is a job that they do while receiving little to no credit, but anyone who is smart thanks their stage managers on a regular basis. Seriously, without the stage manager, the show does not happen.

But as crucial as a stage manager is, it's not really something you can teach in a class-- you kind of have to learn it hands on. Combine this with the fact that it was Hugh's last semester before retiring, and the class was a wonderful and absurd experience. This was one of our first lessons:

"You need five pencils. Because if you don't have five pencils then...you don't have enough pencils. But if you have more than five pencils, you might be taking up room for something like a pen."

Please remember to read these lines in a gravelly Tom Waits/bear voice.

Or then there was the time that we were told:

"The most important thing a stage manager can have at any rehearsal is a BIG BOWL OF CANDY! Because everyone loves candy, and even if they don't eat it, they love it. But at big rehearsals, like the first rehearsal and the tech rehearsals, you need not only the big bowl of candy, you also need...a box of donuts. But, this is important, the types of donuts that you choose because if you get the jelly donuts or the cream-filled donuts, then those are messy. And the actors eat them, their hands get sticky, they touch the props and the whole show is ruined."

Hugh also had a tendency to interrupt himself with complete non sequiturs while speaking. So, he'd be teaching the lesson, and stop in the middle of a sentence.

"So, you can see that Tom enters on this page, so you make this mark on the entrance sheet and I went to the zoo on Saturday and I saw bats that were THIS BIG. But I didn't see the baby elephants. So now that you've marked it you know that Tom enters there. Any questions?"

 

A Scene from The Glass Menagerie, I'm assuming.

And then there's the time that he had a thermos while teaching one of his classes and told them:

"You think this is coffee. It's not. It's straight gin."

It might have been a joke. It could have very well been true. We will never know.

There are countless of other stories about Hugh, but I think you get the idea based on these anecdotes. Where is Hugh now? Well, as he said one day "I'm going to go to Mexico to grow vegetables on my rooftop garden and drink tequila." I have every reason to believe this is what he's actually doing. And although no current student at Kenyon ever met him, his legacy still lives on. To my friends, he became a figure of legend, and we began to imagine increasingly elaborate things about his life. At one point, we became absolutely convinced that Hugh was still living on campus in the church belltower, training an army of giant bats to rain jelly donut bullets down on the campus.

Ordering The Drink: I was out to drink with a group of friends to celebrate my friend Kayleigh's birthday. Kayleigh is a fantastic designer, and worked one-on-one with Hugh throughout her college career. One time, she saw him standing alone in the middle of a stage, balancing a giant wooden two-by-four on his chin. When he heard her come in, he gracefully let the two-by-four fall, caught it, looked at her, said "Hello," and walked away. 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Hugh was in the circus when he was younger. Because of course he was.

Since Kayleigh knew Hugh well, we decided that we had to get a drink in his honor that night. Although, we debated names like "The Baby Elephant," and "The Big Bowl of Candy," we ultimately settled on "The Five Pencils," to honor one of  the first lessons he ever taught me.

We were at The Pony Bar, a fun place with a great selection of craft beer. As it's known more for its beer than its mixed drinks, I didn't fully know what to expect, but the bartender accepted the challenge without hesitation. Although, after taking the order, he did have to think for quite a while before coming up with an idea. To be fair, pencils don't really translate well into drink form, so this was a tough name to assign.

The Pony Bar. J.J. Abrams would be proud of the lens flare in this picture.

But, soon enough, I had my Five Pencils in hand, and was therefore ready to stage manage.

Kayleigh poses with the Five Pencils

The Drink:

Lemon Vodka (Stolichnaya)

Orange Vodka (Stolichnaya)

Triple Sec

Lemon Juice

Lime Juice

Sugar

At this point, I finally realized I should turn the flash on.

Assessment of Drink: This drink wasn't much to look at. It was kind of a watery yellow in color. But the drink tasted good. A little sweet, but not terribly so, it tasted kind of like hard lemonade. Or, more accurately, like a lemon drop candy in drink form, as someone at the table suggested. That's kind of the perfect way to describe it. A nice, pleasant, and refreshing drink-- sweet without being cloying.

I could nitpick, and say that it might have been nice to have something that complimented the citrus, but I had every reason to be happy with this drink. I enjoyed drinking it, and that's the most important thing of all (although, after this drink, I started on their great beer menu and much preferred that. It really is the highlight of the bar).

Does It Live Up To The Name: This is where the drink kind of loses me. I didn't ask the bartender for an explanation, and he didn't offer one in return, so I'm not really sure what his thought process was.

The most obvious thing here is the number "Five." Five pencils, five citruses in the drink. I feel like he took the lemon and orange vodkas and used that as a starting point. Then he found the triple sec because that's also citrusy. And then he couldn't find two other citrus alcohols, so he just went with regular lemon and lime juice. The drink certainly tasted good, but the theme was kind of missing. The use of the number five was tenuous, but if that's what the bartender was indeed going for, I'll give him that. But, pencils? What do pencils have to do with citrus? Nothing. Pencils have nothing to do with citrus.

But, to be fair, I don't know how one would communicate the idea of pencils into a drink. And I appreciate that my drink did not have any graphite in it. Maybe the bartender was going for a yellow color? But the drink was hardly yellow at all. Maybe a drink with yellow chartreuse could have been good, and have conveyed a pencil's bright signature yellow. 

Why this drink conveyed "pencils" to the bartender will always be a mystery. But it was a great drink, and a really fun night. And nobody had any jelly donuts, so the show was not ruined.

I know I said I'd not put any actual pictures of Hugh here. But...this is not a picture of Hugh. I'm pretty sure this is the same garden gnome picture from before. But with a different hat.