June 2003
The Bedlam Bar finally opens, featuring a four-sided-wall-plus-ceiling mural with full moon, swirling night sky and glowing white stars overhead—homage to Vincent’s Starry Night.
Every night is a full moon at the Bedlam Bar.
The bar area is The Department of Mood Enhancement.
The bartender offers free counseling to those in need, encourages group therapy among barflies (no TV), and dispenses alcohol-based remedies at discounted prices during Mad Hatters Happy Hour.
Van Stein painted a prototype for the logo: A silhouette of a man howling on a cliff with moon behind him. (A full moon links to lunacy and lunatics—luna being Latin for moon; those blessed with madness become restless during a full moon.)
Some involved in the project find this logo spooky, do not quite (at first) grasp the concept: Don’t suffer mental illness, enjoy it.
So we settle on a different design, incorporating full moon and a pair of statues that once graced the arched entrance into Royal Bethlem Hospital at Moorefield’s, east London, by a Dutchman named Cibbius: life-size male nudes, one named Raving and the other Melancholy. (Back in the 1600s, mental illness was divided into raving or melancholy.)
Hence our logo: a cloud halo over full moon, winged by Raving and Melancholy, creating a subtle angel of the universe.
Six renowned institutions—dominated by Royal Bethlem—are spread throughout the mural, each with its own sense of place.
A bottle of champagne is promised to any customer who can name them all (no one ever does).
The Klepp Psychiatric Institute from Iceland.
St. Paul-du-Mausol. Van Gogh’s greatest source of inspiration.
MacLean. The best known mental institution in the United States, located in Belmont, a suburb of Boston. This is where James Taylor wrote Fire and Rain. It was also the setting for Girl, Interrupted.
The Priory, Southgate, north London, where my brother lost his taste for alcohol, became expert on the subject of addictions, and made a new set of friends.
Tricky Dick’s. Precursor to the Bedlam Bar. A late-night coffee house I ran with my brother in the mid-1970s—the looniest of the lot. Patients included Bronco John, Burned-Out Paul, Coughing Abdullah, and folk singer Tim Hardin.
A surreal Bosch-like ice age on the lower left (home to the Kleppur) depicts freezing cold water and a snake, symbolizing the treatment of mental patients centuries ago (especially in Germany), when patients were lowered slowly into snake pits or hosed with ice cold water. Why such barbaric treatment? It was believed this kind of treatment would shock melancholy catatonics to their senses.
Walt Freeman, the lobotomist, is commemorated within the mural, ice pick in hand, as is Philippe Pinel, a Frenchman who revolutionized the care of mental patients in the late 1700s. Pinel, as Keeper of the largest French asylum, Bicestre, removed the shackles and decreed that the insane should engage in conversation as therapy.
Nearby, an icon of St. Dymphna, patron saint of lunatics, for whom a blue candle always burns
On a nearby wall, Jonathan Winters’ two drawings are framed with an autographed photo of himself sitting with me inside the Montecito Bar—and this inscription: “Bedlam and Breakfast for Two.”
A genuine straitjacket is mounted to the wall. And a kazoo, accompanied by this instruction: In case of emergency, break glass.
And Vincent van Gogh’s severed ear, framed and bolted to the wall.
Around a banquette hangs original artwork by Charles Bronson, declared criminally insane in 1978 and considered Britain’s most dangerous prisoner—electrifying art reflecting his unique reality, having resided in the criminally insane wing of every prison in England.
On another wall: A Hall of Lunacy features expressionist portraits of Van Gogh, Dali, Nietzsche, and Rasputin.
Two pictures by Thomas Van Stein: Jack Nicholson from The Shining and a portrait of Edgar Allen Poe, which the artist painted while a student at college, earning him a degree.
A modest library with titles including The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, Gracefully Insane, DSM-IV Made Easy (The Clinician’s Guide to Diagnosis), and my personal favorite, I Knew 3000 Lunatics, a 1935 book by Victor R. Small about his internship at an American east coast asylum.
The décor is orange and blue, Van Gogh’s favorite colors. Orange is the color of insanity, appeals to one and all as a unifier; blue compliments orange and triggers tranquilizer hormones.
For background music, the score from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest—and anything by Brian Wilson.
Downstairs, the ladies room is decorated French bordello style. Tart Ville.
The men’s room? Poopland. Greeted at the door by a mural of Colonel Crappeur, gents enter The Battle for Dung Hill, whereby two armies of poops—the French Foreign Feces and Nerdy’s Turds—face off over who can claim Dung Hill, amid flatulent sound effects
Bedlam’s duty manager is The Keeper (official title of Bethlem Royal’s top nutcracker); the bartender, psychoanalyst; wait staff are therapists; busboys are orderlies, customers are Bedlamites. (Said one genuine Bedlamite, a witty dramatist named Nathaniel Lee: “They said I was mad, and I said they were mad—damn them, they outnumbered me.”)
Our menu is called Ideas of Reference. It presents this encapsulated history:
Bedlam, both in word and concept, derives from the world’s first mental institution, Bethlem Royal Hospital. Opened in 1247, Bedlam housed and treated Britain’s maddest visionaries for six centuries.
Three hundred years ago, aristocrats and tourists would pay admission to observe and question the “poor lunatikes” and be entertained by raving Bedlamites.
The word Bedlam has come to mean a state of mindless chaos.
Our Bedlam Bar, a whole other dementia, was conceived to celebrate creativity and madness.
If you think we’re crazy, that’s okay, because we gladly suffer fools.
It points out that one in four British people will experience mental illness at some point in their lives.
I greet customers myself and astonish them on a walking tour through the history of madness.
They all inevitably ask, What ever compelled you to think of this?
Lowering my voice to a whisper, I confide: For many years I suffered delusions, believing myself to be an international spy, operating in such places as Moscow, Havana, Zurich, and Monte Carlo, where I fantasized weaving webs of intrigue and mixing it up with secret agents, operatives, rogue spies, royalty and billionaires—and sucking secrets from the brains of hapless muckrakers. Then one day I saw A Beautiful Mind and recognized my delusions were similar to those experienced by John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician played by Russell Crowe. I even recognized William Parcher, the fedora-capped intelligence operative-in-black (Ed Harris), who Nash created in his mind.
So I committed myself to Bethlem Royal Hospital.
After three sessions with Old Sparky, I awakened with a vision: I should create a venue to celebrate creativity and madness, a retreat from reality where customers could engage in talk therapy and bar staff would offer free counseling in addition to cocktails with names like Walt Freeman’s Lobotomy (absinthe, apple juice, dash of lime, drop of kiwi liqueur), Mindfluenza (vodka, Triple sec, fresh cucumber, orange bitters, dash of pineapple juice), and Chromosome Five (the gene responsible for schizophrenia). A third place that gladly suffers fools, but particularly welcomes artists, writers, musicians, bohemians, eccentrics, and lunatics.
When the neighbors complain, our strategy is to drive them mad; if taken to court, we plead insanity.
As Dorothy Parker was known to have said, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
You’re already committed (so you might as well have dessert), says the menu. Prove you’re certifiably nuts and it’s free! (Letter from Dr. Riddlebollox required.)
In keeping with Royal Bethlem’s strict policy of distinguishing between the mentally insane and the feebleminded—which were not admitted to their asylum—our offer does not extend to idiots, imbeciles, and morons.
And The Keeper’s Cell Phone Policy: As we are trying to build a radiation shield to thwart the prying ears of Big Brother, the use of cell phones is not only permitted but encouraged (and may be monitored by management).
When we are closed, this sign on the door…
Sounds like a bar in Seaside just out of Ft. Ord.
Don't know about how much creativity we had but there was its share of madness.