Who among us doesn't love a good honky tonk

Last week my new friend invited me to go out with her friends for her birthday. I asked where they go in Houston when they go out, and she named several clubs that I had never heard of, but I pretended that I had. Then I admitted that my friends and I go out to very, very divey bars. The places we go are pretty much as close as there is to a modern honky tonk.

Wikipedia says that a Honky Tonks is:
"a type of bar with musical entertainment common in the Southwestern and Southern United States."

But there is so much more to it than that. It also implies dancing and some shady characters, and I don't mean the James Dean type of shady. I mean some old drunk guy in the corner who looks and smells like he hasn't showered in a few days and wants to tell you something in your ear. Also, there might be some women there with questionable dental plans. A long, long time ago a friend was trying to explain what a honky tonk was to her Welsh boyfriend and he said, "so its a bar that says honky tonk on it?" and she so quotably replied, "No, if it says its a honky tonk, it is most definitly not a honky tonk."
I have several favorite honky tonks in Houston, but, due purely to proximity, The Alabama Icehouse is currently my favorite. Not only can I walk home, but I can walk Luigi there. It is as much fun as the dogpark, and it is coming to resemble one.

Luigi was so happy to be going somewhere new that he pulled my mother's arm for the second have of the walk. Then he was doubly excited because Gabby was there. As my father later put it, Luigi must have thought the Gabby had been at the icehouse all that time he didn't see her.

Dogs are great fun, and so is beer, and so is the tamale guy who comes by just when you really, really could go for a tamale, but the highlight of the night was when the band played the greatest country western song ever. We all sang along and loved it. If you don't know this song, look up the lyrics. You never know when you might be called upon to sing it in a bar. Near the end of the song the singer typically stops singing to talk about the song. Well, at Alabama the singer changed the words, "momma, or trains, or trucks" to "trailers, or crystal meth, or incest." Whoa, was that funny! We might be sittin' in a honky tonk, but it's a honky tonk in the middle of Montrose, so we know how to be cheeky about it. HA.