This is Tom (the guy at the end of the bar hoping it won’t rain before the set’s over). He’s the heart, the soul and the keeper of The Brunswick.
On a chilly gray afternoon in Old Orchard Beach, Mitch Alden (an accomplished, if underrated, singer/songwriter from Limington, ME), is playing his heart out to a crowd of about 27 vacationers on a patio that can accommodate hundreds, So it goes,
There’s often glamor in the notion of running a Public House on a drop-dead beach on the southern coast of Maine, but the reality is a bit different. Every day is a crap-shoot. snake-eyes turn up more often than you”d think and today is one of those days.
But it’s exactly this devotion that inspires me and brings me here to observe, to speak with strangers and coax them to let me include their pictures and their stories in NotesFromTheBrunswick.
Tom is the jeweler presented with the stone everyone had cast aside as old and out of style and re-crafted it, polished it and re-set it because he saw something everyone had forgotten: Good fun isn’t fashionable decadence, it’s a timeless dedication to diverse and sometimes difficult folks who deserve a good time at a place where they can without worrying about their kids safety or embarrassing themselves. Well, most of the time.
And so today, as the clouds sweep in from the west, the beach-goers have packed up and headed home. Mitch is still playing his funky Martin guitar at full tilt. Thirty (now) happy folks are swaying to delightful music and Tom hopes the rains will hold off for a bit and pass in time for the vacationers to return for the evening.
Salute, Tom.
Loved this piece! You got to the heart of it.