January 30th, 2014 - How to do bar flair

Before he went off the deep end into Scientology and all around nuttiness, Tom Cruise actually made some pretty great movies.  Top Gun, Jerry Maguire, Rain Man, Magnolia, A Few Good Men, the vastly underrated Vanilla Sky. Hell, 3 out of the 4 Mission: Impossible flicks have been been well worth the price of admission (with the second being the only read dud of the bunch).

But the 80iest of the 80's movies that showcases the Cruise's pre-Operating Thetan awesomeness is Cocktail.  Come on, who hasn't seen that movie and immediately wanted to go flip bottles around?

I know that I did.  So when Keith Ritter said that he could show me how to do bar flair, I jumped at the chance to learn.

 (For the YouTube version, go here)

I thought that my previous lessons in juggling would help me with this, and for the most part, I was right.  Because I've been practicing juggling off and on throughout the month, it helped a little with the coordination of this.

But it wasn't a lot of help.  To be honest, these two skills were completely different animals.  While juggling basically broke down to a routine of tosses repeated over and over again, flipping bottles, or "bar flair," is a performance.  There's an element of spontaneity to it, and a lot of ad-libbing.  To get to where Keith is at and where I currently am, there are about a million steps.

But as Coughlin says, life is just cocktails and dreams. So who knows, maybe one day, I'll dream hard enough to get this down too.

Just hide your breakables until then.  I've still got a lot to practice.