Bar, New York State, 1987

I’d heard New York accents before; American television and movies saw to that. Though I guess it was Cheers, with its fictional Boston bar (no relation to the dusty British Columbia town) that I think of when imagining a US watering hole.

Not that I haven’t seen my share of craziness in American taverns; the trouble usually came with Canadian pub crawlers drawn by Sunday liquor sales, back in the days when this country expected citizens to dedicate “the Lord’s Day” to prayer.

I didn’t get a chance to venture inside this New York State bar, since I was chased off moments after making the photo, the bartender threatening mayhem — in a thick New York brogue — if I didn’t skedaddle post-haste.

I fled with this Kodachrome memory, discovered today in the distinctive orange box Kodak used to return slides from the lab.

Have I mentioned Dwayne’s Photo? It was the last lab, in Parsons, Kansas, to develop the film. A fictionalized Netflix movie based on its final days (and of the movie’s main character, played by Ed Harris) is worth a watch. It’s title? Kodachrome.

Back in the summer of 1987, my fiends and I chose another place to grab a beer, before heading back over the border to Niagara Falls, where I switched to my Mamiyaflex medium format camera to document another fleeting scene.