TIKI CULTURE

Bamboozler: Your Weekend Tiki Bar Cocktail!

With Jazz Appreciation Month in full swing, I thought I’d feature a drink that sounded like it would be at home both in a dark mid-century Tiki Bar and a boppin’ basement Jazz club. Found this one in Shag’s Tiki Drinks Deck, a fun little pack of 52 drink cards with groovy Tiki art by Shag. With a name like

BAMBOOZLER

…how could it miss?

1 Shot Dark Rum
1 Shot Light/Silver Rum
1 Shot Vanilla Rum (Note: if you don’t have Vanilla Rum, try experimenting with Vanilla Vodka, Spiced Rum, or a few shots of pure vanilla extract at a time to get the desired taste. Desired taste is kind of vanilla-y.
1 Tsp. Marashino Liqueur (or cherry juice, or Grenadine)
3-4 Shots Mango Juice

In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, add all ingredients and shake it up well. Pour into a chilled Collins glass and garnish with a marachino cherry. Niiiiice.

Tiki Chris P. reporting from the Tiki Bar!
Happy Weekend, Kids!

Your Weekend Tiki Cocktail: The Scorpion Bowl

Tiki Farm Volcano Bowl, on my personal Tiki Bar. No booze in it...yet...

When people ask me, and they do ask me, when they say, “Hey, Tiki Chris, what drinks are the ‘most Tiki’?”, I say, “Well, Tiki friend, three drinks come to mind. The Mai Tai, The Zombie, and The Scorpion Bowl, ya dig?”

Ok, people don’t refer to me as “Tiki Chris” all that much, and I don’t actually say “ya dig” as much as I sling it around on here, but you get the point. To me, and many others, those are the Big Three of the Tiki Bar menu, The Scorpion being the stingy-est, biggest of them all. Not the easiest concoction to concoct, it sure is a lot of fun when you’ve got three chicks sipping it out of a Volcano bowl with you.

The Scorpion Bowl: The Exotic Cocktail To Die For

Typical Scorpion Bowl

8 ounces of silver Rum (personally I prefer dark rum, and it gives this concoction a richer taste)
4 ounces Brandy (used something decent, not that $11 a bottle junk!)
8 ounces of orange juice (fresh squeezed is best)
4 ounces of lemon juice (you can add a little more if you want it more tart)
3 ounces orgeat syrup
2 cups of crushed ice (plus extra cubes)

Mix up everything except the ice in a big bowl, bucket, tub, whirlpool, whatever you’ve got. Toss the crushed ice in a blender for a few seconds, and add about half to your Scorpion or Volcano Bowl. Fill with the booze, add in a few cubes. Garnish with floating flowers and use those long-assed straws to drink it up. This big bowl-o-rama is best enjoyed with a couple of hip friends, some Martin Denny playing on the hi-fi, and candlelight or Tiki torches.

You’ll have to keep tasting this stuff before you pour it in for you guests, as the balance can be tricky. Too much orgeat syrup and it will be overly sweet. Too much lemon and you’ll pucker up like a duck. Fresh juices make a much better, more authentic-tasting drink (always) and will impress your friends. If you have a Volcano Bowl, add an ounce of 151 Rum to the volcano and light it up!

I got the idea for this week’s post from perusing the blog of Let’s Tiki, run by my pal Damon. He’s got a great Tiki site, with tons of info on drinks, Tiki bars, Tiki news, art, you name it, if it’s Tiki, he’s got it. Check out his in-depth post on The Scorpion here.

-Tiki Chris reporting from behind the Tiki Bar at Pirate’s Cove, the official Tiki Lounge of Tiki Lounge Talk.

2011 Hukilau (Fort Lauderdale) Website is now Live!

Ok swingin’ Tiki lovin’ kats and chicks, it’s time to start thinking of June, and the 10th Anninversary of

The Hukilau!

in beautiful, sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

This year’s Hukilau will take place from June 9th through 12th at Bahia Mar and Bahia Cabana Hotels just across from the white sandy beaches of the famous South Florida resort town.

This year promises even more great entertainment, great art, great gifts and great exotic cocktails. For a complete list of events, etc. visit The Hukilau website at www.thehukilau.com/2011.

Me, our friend Molly and my wife Colleen at the Mai Kai, Hukilau 2010.

This year also marks the 55th Anniversary of the World’s Greatest (IMHO) Tiki Bar, The Mai Kai. As always, the Saturday night extravaganza will feature dinner and Polynesian show at the Mai Kai. It’s fantabulous, kids!

I am also very excited to announce that yours truly, Tiki Chris will be helping out the fine folks at The Hukilau this year as Vendor Coordinator. So if you’re setting up shop at The Hukilau, I’ll be talking to you soon. For the rest of you kids, I’ll be there all four days so look me up! I’ll be the guy in the Hawaiian shirt

-Tiki Chris reporting from a cabana on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Tiki News: Hukilau 2011, June 9-12, Fort Lauderdale, Florida

How to find Tiki Lounge Conversations

How do people find the Tiki Lounge?

In the 1930s, the call would have been: “Tune in to WTLT Tiki Lounge Talk Radio, 1040 on your AM dial, for Topical News, Tropical Weather, and Exotic Cocktail Concoctions.”

In the 1950s it would have been: “Hey you kraaaaazy kats and kittens, dig in and set your peepers to WTLT-TV Channel 7, the swingin’ place to meet face to face with hep cats, hip kats, swingers, hipsters, flipsters and all-night tripsters. Can you dig it, baby? Then pull up a V.O. Manhattan and get fabulous.”

In the 70s it would have been “Breaker 1-9, got yer ears on good buddy? Dial in to the Tiki Lounge, get some suds and go-go juice and join the convoy all the way to Fort Lauderdale! Don’t worry about Smokey the Bear on yer backdoor, put the pedal to the metal and keep on truckin’! Over and out.”

And in the 90s it would have been 20 minutes of statticky beeps, bongs, whirs and whistles, followed by a busy signal, then another half hour of beeps and bongs, then “You’ve got mail!” Several minutes later your black and white screen would show jaggedy type saying something like “Does anyone remember what a Tiki Bar is?” with a little line drawing of a Tiki Bar, cockeyed from being scanned in quickly at work while no one was looking.

Ah, the old days. Not so easy to get a message out then. Now, if I want to tell people about Conversations at the Tiki Bar, all I have to do is broadcast it on Twitter, post it on Facebook, or run a cheap pay-per-click ad on Google.

So, in an attempt to spread the good word of living the retro & Tiki life, I thought I’d post a few links here to help you follow our antics. Tell your friends; pass the links along and tell them if they’re truly kool they will follow that swingin’ hipster Tiki Chris aka ChrisPFLorida aka Mack aka Zoot on Twitter, be a fan on Facebook, get email updates as a subscriber, Digg the posts, and bookmark TLT on delicious! (whew, so many ways for me to annoy you and your friends!)

So here goes:

Follow me on Twitter: @ChrisPFlorida

Be a fan of Tiki Lounge Talk on Facebook

Follow TLT Posts on Blogger

Subscribe to new  posts via email (100% spam free) –> enter your email in the field in the side bar!

Get RSS feeds for the Tiki Blog

See a funny video on YouTube

And always feel free to leave a comment, so the conversations aren’t too one-sided!

So there you go - in the ‘teens it will be: Follow me, fan me, friend me and feed me, Seymour!”

-Tiki Chris for Tiki Lounge Talk, the Retro Blog for kool kool kiddies.

A kool frame riffs millennium verbs (A picture says a thousand words, hipster style)

The saying goes, “A picture says a thousand words’. In hipster talk that translates roughly into “A kool frame riffs millennium verbs,” or in some circles “A swingin’ snapshot lays down a kat’s score hipper and with more jazz than some ramblin’ gin-weary monologue spread around like a tome, ya dig?”

Case in point: The picture laid out before you kats is of my bookshelf, to my left as I type at this souped-up typewriter. I was just playing around with the interwebs when I shot my peepers over, and realized that everything on this part of the shelf, with very few exceptions, is 4o years old or older. Some of these gadgets I’ve had for years. Some of them I’ve had almost all my life.

What’s really crazy is everything you see in this photo has a story. Some stories I remember vividly, as if they happened yesterday. Some are a little fuzzy, getting lost in time. But every time I glance over, I get a memory…Memories of places I used to hit that are gone forever. Memories of that far off land of childhood. Memories of things I loved to do. And memories of people I loved who are no longer around.

I’m really digging this pic. I think what I’ll do, just for kicks, is give you kats and kittens a little story - from memory - that goes along with one of the items on the shelf. Every now and then I’ll re-post the photo and give you a new story.

Let’s start with the big red car.

What you see here is a 1933-1936 Cadillac LaSalle Sedan, made of pressed steel by the Wyandotte toy company. It measures around 13″ long, and originally came with solid rubber tires and a matching, teardrop-shaped camper trailer. The design was an idealized, Art Deco version of the real car, and was very modern for its time.

In the 1970’s, my parents were antique dealers. Often my father would get up at five or six AM to hit yard sales and flea markets, looking for some kool stuff to buy and sell. One spring Saturday morning when I was around seven, my dad went out early to the yard sales, and came back while I was still asleep. He woke me up and brought me into the kitchen, where this crazy-looking toy car, big as an elephant, was sitting on the table. It was painted black, and had all kinds of little smiling faces and sayings on it… Mostly Happy New Year, 1939 I think…and little painted balloons and confetti. The paint was in pretty sad shape, and the tires were missing. I immediately fell in love with the big car, and my Dad said if I wanted, he’d repaint it for me and put some wheels on it. Of course, I said, and he got to work.

He stripped the old paint off and painted it the original Fire Engine Red. Then he made some wheels (I think out of radio parts and rubber tubing) and put it all back together. Man, was it beautiful.

I loved that car, and took damned good care of it for the last 33+ years. It’s always had a place of honor on a shelf or table, and now resides where I spend a lot of my time when I’m not out at the Tiki Bar, so I can look at it a lot. My father passed on to the promise land in 2002, which makes little things like this even more special to me. It’s amazing I still remember that day, and how happy we both were over this piece of steel. It makes me happy all over again every time I see it. (a little side note: The palm tree sticking up behind the car…my father made that for me, and the car, when we moved down to Florida in 2000. he seemed to think the car needed a palm tree, now that it was parked in the tropics.)

- Tiki Chris, reporting live from The Tiki Blog