Drinking & Writing Volume III: To Cure A Hangover

EXTENDED! Saturdays at 4 PM through January 30
upstairs at the Hopleaf Bar, 5148 N. Clark Street (@Foster)

Tickets are $15 donation.  Go to Brown Paper Tickets

 DRINKING & WRITING VOLUME III: TO CURE A HANGOVER Sean Benjamin and Steve Mosqueda explore possible morning-after cures in this goofy, unflinching lecture-cum-performance about the unpleasant consequences of the bibulous life. Self-loathing prose from John Cheever and Charles Bukowski--two monumental drinker-writers at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum--is intertwined with tales of the writer-performers' experiments in thwarting a hungover "poor sense of well-being" (quite unlike the "false sense of well-being" that gets an overimbiber in trouble). Cures involve cabbage, Pedialyte, sex, and various combinations of chorizo and eggs; audience-participation bits are rewarded with free drinks. Benjamin and Mosqueda neither glorify nor repudiate the hard-drinking life--after all, shit-faced happens. John Cheever and Charles Bukowski--two monumental drinker-writers at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum--is intertwined with tales of the writer-performers' experiments in thwarting a hungover "poor sense of well-being" (quite unlike the "false sense of well-being" that gets an overimbiber in trouble). Cures involve cabbage, Pedialyte, sex, and various combinations of chorizo and eggs; audience-participation bits are rewarded with free drinks. Benjamin and Mosqueda neither glorify nor repudiate the hard-drinking life--after all, shit-faced happens.  --Kerry Reid

Chicago Tribune

If January isn't the official month of hangovers, it should be, offering nothing more than post-holiday credit card bills and bone-chilling weather. As far as I'm concerned, the entire month is just one long morning after.

For the next two weeks in January, hangovers of the literal kind are the amusing subject matter of Steve Mosqueda and Sean Benjamin's current show, a Saturday afternoon diversion squirreled away upstairs in a cozy room at The Hopleaf Bar in Andersonville.

If you're looking for an easygoing pick-me-up, this might be just the thing.

Mosqueda and Benjamin have been doing this shtick since 2002, unearthing every possible redeeming value associated with those twin occupations of drinking and writing. (Needless to say, the show is not for teetotalers or 12-steppers.)

Casual but witty, "To Cure a Hangover" is an alcoholic dissertation on the pleasures and pitfalls of bending the elbow. (Both the audience and the performers imbibe throughout the show.) That Mosqueda and Benjamin are decent writers themselves only makes the experience that much more enjoyable.

The authors they quote are strictly "then" (Hemingway, Cheever, Bukowski) as opposed to "now"; you won't hear the words of drunken bloggers mentioned in these shows.

Occasionally the guys give out free drinks, but the focus here is on the aftermath -- a "constellation of symptoms" that American poet Charles Bukowski in particular riffs on vividly. The nausea. The cottonmouth. The headache. The shame. On behalf of scientific inquiry, Mosqueda and Benjamin recount their various experimental cures. (They've actually done quite a bit of legitimate research.)

Their results? The endorphins released by sex can alleviate some of the pain. When you're looking to rehydrate, Pedialyte frozen pops are better than Gatorade.

Eating cabbage leaves before, during and after drinking apparently prevents some of the worst symptoms.

And most important, Benjamin intones: "Drinking less is not the cure. That's the cure for not getting drunk." - Nina Metz