My friend Robin wrote a really excellent anti-local blue law post yesterday.
It is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. Numerous times when I lived in Lincoln, I’d get a phone call from my mother before going home for Easter. She’d ask, “Could you pick up a bottle of Windsor Canadian Whiskey?”, or “Could you pick up an extra 24-pack of Busch Lite?” The answer would always be “No, it’s the law.” The blue laws in Lincoln dictated that no wine, beer, or liquor could be sold before noon on Sunday. This is actually a big step. Earlier in the 1990s there were no Sunday package sales in the city.
Another time, I wanted to make an Irish cream cake before a blizzard came in to town at noon. It is as if the people who write blue laws don’t consider the culinary value in pink vodka spaghetti sauce, adding wine to any recipe a la Justin Wilson, beer cheese soup, or even as a method of fruit preservation.
When we moved to Arkansas the laws were much stricter. I have to drive at least 20 minutes to get to the liquor store. You can go 3 blocks down the street at our house and buy an over-priced Bud Light, and drink it in an entirely too loud, overpriced pizza atmosphere. That’s not really my style.
The problem here in the south is that nobody wants a liquor store in his or her backyard, even a fancy-schmancy one with a wine-tasting bar like they have in Little Rock. All of the grocery stores are too small to have a decent liquor section even in wet counties in Arkansas, and I think it may offend the Baptists. One wonderful thing about Lincoln were all of the liquor stores attached to the regular grocery stores. The price and selection at Hy-Vee, Super Saver, and Russ’s is something to embrace and to cherish. (The local beer selection alone at the Hy-Vee near 48th and O St deserves an award and your patronage.)
The with three colleges, city of Conway in Faulkner county is really growing right now. Four years ago, restaurants couldn’t serve alcohol and the gastronomic choices in the community really suffered. Now we can at least go down the street and watch Sunday football, have a beer, and eat a pizza. The educated contingent in the community is really growing too, so that means more people who want to have a convenient drink at home or at a party. That means more people who want to make Flaming Cherries Jubilee at the spur of the moment, and you can’t do it with out brandy!
Finally, distributors aren’t allowed into the county. Restaurants have to bus in their own booze. They use inefficient vehicles and drivers who usually do other things to get the booze from the same places where private citizens buy their beer, wine, or liquor. Let me make this clear: each restaurant has to send a truck down to Little Rock, and bring it back filled with what they need. In the sane world, the Budweiser truck comes up once a week and serves all of the restaurants. The current scenario is completely unsustainable from a petroleum usage aspect. Oh yeah did I mention the 40 minute round-trip drive to the liquor store for the private citizen? That is 1 to 2 gallons of gas per trip. Multiply this trip by a quarter of the residents of Conway (2008 special census) at an average rate of one trip per month, and that is 172,632 gallons of gas. I’m not even going to touch all of the lost tax revenue exiting our city and county, and that is a much stronger point than the wasted gas.
So I’m kicking off a movement, and it starts with a song. My band, The Conway Twitties started playing a song at our show last week called “Get Wet (Wet Faulkner County)”. You can watch our special midnight acoustic performance on the web.
