"Tuesdays can get kind of crazy," says the bartender apologetically. At Twist in Belltown, happy hour on Tuesday lasts from 4:00 p.m. to midnight. The bar in the backâclosed for tonightâfeatures a giant pig suspended overhead by an apparatus suggesting the ability of the pig to rotate. The pig is mirrored disco-ball-style. The bar in the front features a purple-and-black color scheme, several televisions showing a sporting event, an adult-contemporary soundtrack in which one song segues seamlessly into the next, and craziness on several levels.
While few people seem to be taking advantage of $2.50 happy-hour drinks (including a rotating microbrew, wine, a pineapple kazi, something called blue bubbles), plenty of drinking is being accomplishedâshots, bottles of beer, champagne. A birthday celebration in full swing is dramatically interrupted: This guyâa perfect-looking blonde in cuffed short-shorts and high heels is suddenly screamingâhas been ruining her life for five years, she doesn't want to get into the details (and, to her credit, she doesn't), but she keeps going back to him. The ostensible audience for this passionate outburst composes a text message throughout, while the guy in question wears sunglasses, impassive. She storms out. He follows. This is the stuff of late at night or, one hopes, never. It's 8:25 p.m.
The happiest people at happy hour: a couple, also with the birthday party, intermittently embracing and groping each other freely near the bar. Those of most indeterminate affect: a group of men staring silently at the game on TV. The unhappiest people: those who sit waiting at low, cube-shaped tables with unbussed dirty dishes. After a spell, a visit to the bartender reveals that the person who's taken the food and drink order, while in fact employed by Twist, has not been deputized to take orders at all. She has handed the bartender a piece of paper with some numbers on it; he has disregarded it; entirely personable, he is happy to take the order again. An observation that this seems like a difficult place to work elicits the comment about Tuesdays getting kind of crazy.
A pineapple kazi, made with fresh lemon and lime, is so sweet-tart tasty that it proves to be only a fleeting tonic in the overall situation. Happy hour snacks, also $2.50 each, include shrimp cocktail with slimy, gelatinous shrimp; spring rolls and pot stickers of grocery-store-freezer-case caliber; mass-produced hard taco shells filled with barely seasoned, dry "chipotole" ground beef, pre-shredded yellow and orange cheese, and tiny cubes of tasteless tomato. This is not food that makes you happy to have a mouth.
The trapped-in-a-life-ruining-relationship blonde returns to the scene to conduct a vocal search for her missing mobile phone (a charcoal RAZR). The life-ruiner does not reappear. Back at the bar, the bartender apologizes again about the service, and two guys from out of town discuss and then depart for the miniburgers at the bar at Cascadia across the street.
