A Family Reunion and Beating Nervous Prostration

There was a family reunion in Springfield, Illinois today and I thought it might be a hoot to attend.

Different branches of my family owned both a pharmacy and a grocery, so there are lots of fun artifacts from those businesses floating around.

There was even a little silent auction of family heirlooms where I picked up a cool little thing. It costs at least 50 cents to cure syphilitic sores these days. Inflation!

My favorite part was all of the old photos people brought to show.

Thankfully the family pharmacy existed during the hilarious shyster patent medicine period of American history. These days if impure blood is causing you mercury poisoning, tumors, pimples, chronic rheumatism, loss of appetite, female weakness, and nervous prostration you have to take more than one medicine. SAD! Just yesterday I had a bad case of scald head and I had to just walk it off.

No erysipelas or catarrh on this chick's watch. I mostly just like looking up old timey diseases.

One amusing part of the whole thing was that a girl from my class at Illinois College was in attendance that I didn't know that I was related to. I'm glad to report that there are no additional embarrassing details to this particular story.

Back at the house my mom dredged up some old pictures of her own.

My long lost chubby Asian sister.

A couple of members of our STL crew invested in these bar passports, which get you free drinks at a variety of bars in town. It was an especially fun excuse to go to some new places.

One such place was ShiSha Restaurant & Lounge, which was a hookah bar with a predominantly African American clientele. I'd never even heard of this place before.

I want to say this is at the Gramophone.

Someone fatty always has the idea to eat at a dirty diner after a few drinks. Good place to arm wrestle though.

Mike Talayna's Juke Box Restaurant is my favorite place to see 45 disco balls in one sitting.

Well at this point all of the bars had closed and yet another great idea, I assume from one of the girls,  involved going a strip club in fabulous East Metro.  Larry Flynt's Hustler Club seemed like the place to take my classy crew.

I ended up befriending a couple of country dudes who invited us to sit in their VIP area and drink their bottle of Crown Royal. Zoe is seen pictured here before getting into some sort of argument with a stripper in the ladies restroom.

And that's the story of how I went to a family reunion, cured my want of vitality,  and visited a strip club all in the same glorious day.