A night with the Orioles

By Ant Perrucci

So Travis wanted me to go hang out down at the Fraternal Order of the Orioles clubhouse over on Spanish Street downtown.

“Just go do your Ant thing,” he said.

I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but I went anyway.

I got there on a Sunday night and the place was dead. D-E-D dead. Under a dozen people were sitting at the bar. The Colts and Pats were on. I grabbed a Bass Ale for three bucks and sort of gazed around wondering what in God’s name I was going to write about, feeling a little over the whole going-to-a-bar thing. Spending a week and a half going to three bars a night for the Drift bar guide we just put out will do that to you.

I sat there. I sipped my beer. I took notes:

“I can see the appeal of this place. It’s sort of like if you had a basement clubhouse but with beer.

I’m not sure about how they pack bands into this place, though.

Woah, Slick Rick’s playing on the jukebox. I love this song.”

And so on. I was, truth be told, kind of bored.

Then I started talking to people.

Specifically, I started talking to the girl two stools over. Katee Hannifin. She’s a bartender at the members-only club, only she wasn’t working. Instead she was drinking a Guinness and smoking Camel lights.

She was really, really cool, and didn’t look anything like her 32 years, and was full of cool stories about going to see They Might Be Giants back in the day, and so I made her be my guide to the bar.

Things I learned by talking to Katee Hannifin:

• The Orioles have a reputation for being pretentious (an accusation she refuted vociferously).
• The Orioles got burned by some magazine from Jacksonville a while back, which, she says, made them out to be a gang of elitists (so she was a little wary of talking to me at the outset of our conversation).
• To become a member of the Fraternal Order of the Orioles is 10 bucks a year, and it’s “a humble price to pay” for the privilege.

“It’s a philanthropic organization,” she said. “We also have the most eclectic people [as members]. Our members are the salt of the earth.”

She told me, for example, of the small-scale charitable causes that members of the club participate in.

“We do raise money for people in need,” she said. “When people need help, we do whatever we can.”

I’d never been there before for longer than a couple of minutes to stick my head in the door, but the longer I sat there on my bar stool the more I dug the place.

“It’s kind of like Cheers,” Hannifin said. Everyone knows your name at the Nest, it seems, and the familial atmosphere makes sense. The couch and the big TV and the foosball table help the relaxed game-room ambience, but the ceiling tiles were what caught my eye.

**FOR THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW, PICK UP DRIFT AT THESE LOCATIONS ACROSS ST. AUGUSTINE.**