Marylou's News: Best Coffee In Town

A great thing about being home for a little while, is sitting on the back porch, casually partaking in the same high school activities which once served as the penultimate goal of a many tentacled and frequently booby-trapped nightly undercover mission.

So while having some pinot noir & tall boys out back last night, Lindsay and I started reminiscing about our ill-spent childhood years. Somehow we got around to discussing Marylou's, an establishment in the center of Hanover, Massachusetts where Lindsay and I spent much of our youth serving coffee drinks in pink cardboard cups with pink straws on top of pink napkins, slid over a pink counter-top, the cost of which we registered into a pink cash register which we would later count out before close and lock in a pink lock-box before mopping the pink linoleum floors and flipping over the pink closed sign on the pink front door....
all the time wearing
pink.^1

We were discussing the trouble we would run into in conversation now, when trying to explain the experience of working at Marylou's to anyone who is not from the south shore, (as Marylou's is only found in this particular woodland habitat).

Some may describe Marylou's as the Hooter's of coffee shops, but I like to believe that Hooter's is a bit more well-run than that. They seem to be semi-pro. I doubt they have a pink lock-box. Or at least they don't have 30-odd once-teenaged girls who still have a key to their back door.

Marylou's was a lot like our boys & girls club in high school. It was our after-school activity, if you will. You got to know the men around town who drank 3 jumbo's with cream a day and who, for the most part, made up the local law enforcement community. You got to know the middle-aged women around town who had gotten a divorce/never married, still smoked cigarettes/gotta quit, had a particular order to their lottery ticket tearing, and would like to pour their own milk, please, do you have an unopened one, this one's been sitting out hasn't it, looks sour, yes mam, no thankyou.

In highschool I used to go to AA with a friend of mine who had gotten in trouble with a member of the local law enforcement (she had not been an employee of Marylou's)^2.
At one of these meetings, I saw a very nice, very shy man who I recognized as an after-school regular at Marylou's. Very shy, very kind regulars who were a man of his age were a rarity. I was thrilled to see him there...and then I realized I would now be an alcoholic in his eyes,
everyday,
after-school,
medium,
cream,
no sugar.

I admit I was a bit concerned over this initial change in our relationship, but everyday after that when mr. medium cream no-longer-alcoholic came in, he would come to my register and we would exchange a knowing and sympathetic smile over our shared secret, our one-day-at-a-time triumphs; he would mention something privately about the next meeting, ask an unobtrusive but insightful question or two about my well-being, for which I would return a knowing glance and a medium coffee with cream. He was a quiet man with stooped shoulders and a long ponytail, an outsider from the boisterous and often bawdy police force/gas attendant/ mechanic & friends regular type which dominated the Marylou's afternoon 7 by 8 interior. I think he took comfort in coming to my register with the memory of having congratulated me earlier that week, as I walked up for my triumphant '24-hour' medallion, or won '12 simple rules' in the AA raffle^3. I too was an outsider from my happy-go-lucky pink-clad counterparts, who were learning life's small lessons on the weekends, spending their workdays enjoying a frosty funky fanabla iced coffee through a pink straw, as-of-yet unburdened by the shackling weight of incurable addiction...

The truth is, he was a friend I needed and appreciated, and if I'm being honest AA was probably a friend I needed and appreciated, too. There was a reason we were only going up for those '24-hour' medallions.

As for Marylou's, well, Marylou's was the best coffee in town.

I think if anything can help better explain Marylou's, it would have to be a visual; It was an establishment hot on the local commercial scene.




^Girls with Boston accents really were meant to work in Coffee Shops



^I gotta say, there's really nothing about this I don't like.
If I had to sum up my experience at Marylou's, I would say it was a place that tried to keep something alive, which never really existed.

if that wasn't enough obscure coffee shop nostalgic anecdote for you,
find out for yourself @ www.marylous.com

^1. or else black emblazoned with pink

^2. i did actually win '12 simple rules' in an AA raffle, a book which my mother later found in my room and used as the jumping off point for reaching some quite hilariously off-base conclusions about my life, but that is another story

^3. actually, this is not quite true. said friend was actually employed at Marylou's for a little under a week, during which she managed to knock over a row of flavored beans, flooding the back counter and no-doubt sending a few pony-tailed gum smackers slipping ass-first behind their registers. needless to say, she was promptly fired...and then she got a dui.