Bar Stools

[Administrator]

You may not be old enough to drink, but you can always drown your sorrows away with a good ol' sarsaparilla. Old Joe doesn't often give out whiskey to the youngsters.

[Daisy O'Connor]

<New Day>

Daisy O'Connor hummed to herself as she wiped down the bar just before the lunch hour, taking a few free moments to tidy the place up a bit before people started streaming through the doors in a steady rhythm and she barely had time to think. The day's special, a vegetable stew that Daisy had cobbled together with ingredients she found in the back kitchen, was bubbling away and she had stowed some of her pies to set on the end of the counter on the off chance someone might be interested in a piece. They weren't officially part of McGinty's menu, she still had to run it by the owner, but they were her favorite thing to make and there was no reason to make more than one if it was just for Jerry and his brother. She was pretty certain that she could talk their way onto the menu though, for now they were just a little extra she kicked in for the customers.

The old, dingy wood of the bar barely cleaned up these days, but Daisy did her best with a damp cloth and then moved on to drying some glasses. She liked these quiet moments in McGinty's before the bustle began, when a fire had just started in the hearth at the center of the place and all the tables were neatly set and ready for the ruckus crowds that will fill them up. She took a deep breath and continued to hum, setting the glasses into place as she went about her business in her usual cheerful manor.

[Karl Gloeckner]

The door opened with a high, prolonged creak as Karl stepped inside the bar that had become a relatively familiar spot to him in the past couple of years. He would hardly say that he was a regular, but, every once and awhile, when Mr. Noble had business in Brooklyn that was brief enough to necessitate him staying in area while it was completed, he would come to McGinty’s to have something to eat and, perhaps a small beer (they were all relatively small here by his estimation). He didn’t come by every time he found himself in Brooklyn, though. To do so might make him too familiar to the other patrons and he valued a level of anonymity from bars that a crowd of overly friendly drunkards would not afford. Furthermore, he was at a bit of a disadvantage in that regard so far away from little Germany. The accent tended to stick in people’s minds more, the less frequently they heard it.

Despite his desire to remain unmemorable, he recognized the staff fairly readily now and he knew by the appealing smell wafting through the room that the young blonde barmaid whose name escaped him at the moment must have been working. Sure enough, as he approached the bar, she saw here there, humming drying glasses and looking altogether too young to work in a bar that was not owned by her parents. Either young women were getting more youthful with time or he was just getting older. Every year it seemed innocence became a rarer and rarer commodity among the young ladies of New York, regardless of their place in society.

He nodded at her as he passed and took a seat at a far corner of the bar, hoping to largely avoid notice from his fellow patrons when business inevitably picked up with the impending lunch rush. “Might I ask what is cooking in the back, young lady?” he inquired curtly, folding his hands on the bar in front of him.

[Daisy O'Connor]

Daisy glanced up as the man walked by the bar and instantly placed him, if not by name, by face. He was a quiet sort, didn't stop by often enough to be considered a regular but it was far from his first time sitting at the far end of the bar. He always kept to himself and rarely interacted with anyone beyond the general requirements to procure his order, but that hardly stopped Daisy from gracing him with a cheerful smile as she paused in her cleaning to drift in his direction. "Tis a fine vegetable stew with a bit of barley," Daisy said when he asked what was cooking and she beamed at him once again as she carefully tossed the cloth she had been using over her shoulder and wiped her hands on her apron.

Daisy was a people person, she always had been and it served her well, not only here at McGinty's where she chatted with folks as they stopped in for a midday meal or an evening drink, but also out in the world as well. For she always saw the good in folk, even the darkest souls and greeted everyone with a smile and a kind word, because in her estimation that was sometimes all it took to make someone's day. She had no solid proof of the theory, only her own successes which might seem minor and insignificant to some which made them all the more important to her. So she fixed the man across the bar with another smile and tilted her head back towards the kitchen, "Might I get you a bowl? You'd be the first to try it, it only just got ready."