Convert this page to a PDFPosted: Thursday, May 30, 2013
by Jack H. Schick
(I'll add photos tomorrow, if I still can)Ella got a splinter—several of them actually. She rubbed her hand across a weather beaten, crude-cut board in the splitting, desert-dried wall of an old wooden shed in the outdoor ‘Wine Garden,’ dining area at Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace. Until then, she was having a great time running around between the picnic tables on the hard packed sand in her “dress-up” dress and the “just a little bit of” make-up her mom helped her put on. She was excited over the busy, Memorial Day Eve sights, smells and sounds at the famous honky-tonk and restaurant.
Inside, the Sunday Night Band was working their way through a loud tune. The ‘noise’ blared out through the big, double barn doors that opened to the ‘Wine Garden.’ I was distracted by it, and by the strutting dudes, the spiffed up cowgirls in short skirts and fancy boots and by the other leathery desert rats who frequent The Palace, so I didn’t notice the ‘accident’ at first. In a howling panic, Ella came running over to her mom, who was sitting next to me on the second tier of rough plank benches that lined the mud brown adobe walls enclosing the ‘Garden.’ I was sure she was over reacting. In my ‘wise,’ elderly opinion, it couldn’t possible hurt as badly as the look on her face and the tearful “Ow-ie, ow-ie, ow-ie,” suggested. But then, most Grandpop’s think four year old girls over react.Ella’s parents, my daughter and son-in-law, brought her out from Orange County to the Joshua Tree area of the California High Desert to visit me. A couple of time a year we come out from Pennsylvania to stay at our vacation house there (my wife was out in February and was home watching the dogs this time). I’d driven ‘into town’ and spent a day at Ella’s house, and now she was spending a day at “Granpa’s.”
A trip to the Morongo Basin would not be complete without a visit to Pappy and Harriet’s. It’s not just the focus of activity in Pioneertown, an old western movie set town built by Roy Rogers. It’s renowned across Southern California, and beyond, as “the best honky-tonk west of the Mississippi.” I made reservations for 6:00pm—an hour before the nightly, live music began. Things tend to get more exuberant at The Palace after at the band begins to play, so I wanted Ella to have a chance to finish her dinner first.
It was a holiday weekend, and, as usual, Pappy and Harriet’s was jumping. People were lined up at the door, signing in on the waiting list for tables. I was glad I knew the place well and had made reservations in advance. One couple I kept my eye on waited for close to an hour to be seated. We arrived early, checked in with Linda, one of the owners who was handling the hostess job that evening, then grabbed drinks and a pool table to kill the time. Ella was wide-eyed at the hub-bub and noisy, non-stop action, but when I pushed the button and the billiard balls tumbled into the rack she happily joined the game.
I broke and sunk a solid. Ella’s dad was waiting in line for our drinks over at the bar and her mom was ‘taking five’ at one of the rustic, heavy wooden tables that lined the walls in the low ceiling-ed, two tabled pool room. I vividly remembered when she was that little herself, recognized her exhaustion and granted her a reprieve by ‘playing with’ my grand daughter. Regardless of the rules, it was Ella’s turn—whenever she said it was. She’s too little to use a stick so she just rolls the cue ball around the table. She was doing about as well as I was (poorly), when she shoved it too hard and pinched her finger between two balls. At sixty, I don’t handle howling and crying well anymore, so her mom’s break was over.
“What happened?” Ella’s dad said when he finally arrived with two hands full of drinks.
“She pinched her finger,” I said.
“Oh, it’s my shot, then, I guess,” he said, seeing that Mom had things (sort of) under control.
My neighbor, Jules, who is a hostess at The Palace several days during the week, had originally reserved us a table near the band’s stage, but with a four year old, I figured that was a bad idea and asked for a different table when I was in for lunch a few days earlier. We were seated at precisely six o’clock. I knew the menu by heart and was tempted to get the appetizer, Nacho Von Rabbit (ala Jesika Von Rabbit) again, but I’d already had them twice that week.
“What’s on Nachos Von Rabbit?” my son-in-law asked.
“I don’t really know,” I said, “It’s vegetarian, though.”
“It’s the name, not the ingredients he likes,” my daughter snickered. She knew I was infatuated with the local band Gram Rabbit, which features Todd Rutherford and…Jesika Von Rabbit! We knew them from Pappy and Harriet’s, of course, but my wife and I’d also seen them in Philadelphia and Brooklyn on their last national tour. When both Todd and Jesika shook our hands and welcomed us at the shows back East (we were wearing our Royal Order of Rabbit trademark rabbit ears, of course), we started calling them ‘our buds,’ and have been promoting and playing their albums non-stop ever since. I was really disappointed when I found out they’d be playing at The Palace as Rabbit and Rutherford the day after I left for home, but, after my daughter’s comment, I was a little too embarrassed to order Nachos Von Rabbit again. I got the steak salad with a side order of their famous garlic mashed potatoes with gravy, instead. It was great.
My daughter ordered a steak and my son-in-law ordered a half a grilled chicken. Those entrees are prepared on an outdoor barbeque pit and served with two (large portion) side orders (they both got a garden salad. He got white rice and she got, what looked like, half a head of seasoned broccoli). Ella had quesadillas and steak fries. We had to wait longer to be served than we would have liked to, but considering the frantic, worn-out look on the waitress’s face, the jostling, noisy crowd and that one couple I was watching who were still waiting for a table, we didn’t complain too much.
Pappy and Harriet’s is a long, low, one story, adobe building. At many places there are wine bottles ‘mudded’ right into the wall letting in translucent colored light. There are a handful of drawings and photographs and, behind the bar, a large bronze bust of Pappy, who started the place about 30 years ago. He’s long gone. The Palace is now run by Robin and Linda, two transplanted New Yorkers who’ve really put the place on the music business map.
The rough plank, wooden interior walls are covered with license plates from around the country, western memorabilia and posters of the myriad bands who’ve played there, along with some of local heroes who have not, like Gram Parsons of Joshua Tree (for whom Gram Rabbit is named). There are photographs of Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin who has visited The Palace and did an impromptu performance after finishing his dessert one night. The ambiance of the place is indescribably satisfying. It truly is a great honky-tonk.
The band began promptly at seven. The stage is against the north wall adjacent to the main dining area. There is a twenty by twenty foot dance area; a well worn, knotted plank floor, in front of the stage. We were at table #20. Our view was blocked by a section of dividing wall, but there was a large flat-screen TV on it, so we could watch the performance while not being subjected to the direct blast of the amplifiers. The band wasn’t that good (in my opinion), but not everybody can be a Led Zeppelin or Gram Rabbit. My neighbor Joe said The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, who played there the night before, were great.
We sort of got run off our table after Ella finished her ice cream dessert. The couple I’d been watching was finally seated, but there was still a waiting line. It was nigh onto sundown (that’s cowboy speak), so we mosey out the back to the ‘Wine Garden’ to watch the early evening light sparkle off the rocky Sawtooth Range crags that loom over Pioneertown. As the sun settled behind the forested San Bernardino Mountains to the west, the tops of the mesas and parched desert hills to the east still shone bright yellow and orange as the dusty day slowly faded into a blue and purple evening, then a clear and starry night.
The ‘Wine Garden’ was enclosed by a four foot adobe wall. It had an open air section with heavy ‘picnic’ tables and another section under an arbor that was entwined by green, leafy vines. Off to one side the barbeque pits were in full roar. The sweaty, smoke stained cooks flipped the steaks, racks of ribs and chunks of orange salmon. Ella was fascinated, until the breeze shifted her way and she ran off rubbing her watery, burning eyes.
On the west side of Pappy and Harriet’s main building there is a large open area enclosed by another adobe wall. There is a stage for outdoor musical performances. Under a low roof, along the southern wall, which is decorated with western motif murals, there is a sheltered dining area with more ‘picnic’ tables. There were no outdoor activities that evening, so Ella and her dad just checked it out. Her mom and I found a perch on the two tiered planks-secured-to-the-tops-of-cut-off-telephone-poles benches that lined the walls of the ‘Wine Garden.’
It was about then that Ella came running over to show us her splinters. Having survived three kids, I figured I was the most experienced splinter remover, but Ella wouldn’t even let me get a close look. He mom took her in to the ‘Heifer’ room (the men’s rest room is labeled ‘Bulls’), to see what she could do. Encountering a staff member in route, it turned into a Pappy and Harriet’s community effort. They broke out an alcohol wipe and a tweezers then held a spotlight while Mom unsuccessfully struggled to get Ella to submit to the ‘operation.’ It was a howling no-go. We took the splinters home, in situ.
Distracted by the ‘whoop-de-whoop,’ rocking-horse hills of Pioneertown Road on the way further up into the foothills to “Granpa’s” house in Rimrock, Ella didn’t seem to be suffering too badly from her wounds. But, when her mom insisted that she soak her hand in Epsom salts and a second effort at extraction be made before she could lay out on the hammock and watch the stars, Ella’s panicked again. I figured, if her dad sat on her and her mother covered her face with a wet towel, I’d have no trouble getting the splinters out with my needle nosed pliers; but, I was out voted while they tried to coax her out from under the dresser.
When her dad and I gave up in frustration and went out to star-gaze, her mom finally got Ella let her try. Soon, she was lying in the hammock nestled under a blanket next to her mom, “ooh-ing and aah-ing” at the awe inspiring Milky Way. When the full Moon rose in the east, it dimmed out the stars but illuminated a new, haunting, Joshua Tree studded desert world that has a shadowy, eerie beauty that can stun and silence even a four year old girl. In a little while, Ella was asleep. Her dad carried her inside and tucked her into bed.
Ella hardly remembered her ‘injury’ the next morning. “Yes,” she said when I asked her if she’d be braver about it the next time she got a splinter. I hugged her before she got strapped into her car seat, then flamboyantly waved and smiled as they pulled out of the driveway on their way back home. I watched the car disappear over the last hill with the brilliant, impressive Sawtooth’s and crystal blue desert sky as a background, feeling a bit sad that I wouldn’t see Ella again for a while. But, that’s the way life goes.
I looked down at my watch. “Hummm,” I muttered and thought to myself. “It’s almost lunch time! Maybe I’ll head down to Pappy and Harriet’s and see what’s shaking. Nachos Von Rabbit would really hit the spot about now.” This Article has been viewed 252 times. (Not updated in real-time.)Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.Google+ Profile» left by Hilda Cang 11 hours 14 minutes ago. NEW!
73 fans. Poor Ella.... My granddaughter is also 4 years old. I can imagine how her parents and you had felt. Luckily the evening was not spoiled.A nice scenario you described here.
Thanks for sharing. I am not sure if the pictures can still be added, Jack. It would be great if there is still time.
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