
{"id":21234,"date":"2011-10-06T14:40:36","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T18:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=21234"},"modified":"2011-10-06T14:40:36","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T18:40:36","slug":"a-hostess-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2011\/10\/06\/a-hostess-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"A hostess thing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><figure id=\"attachment_21235\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-21235\" style=\"width: 500px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2011\/10\/06\/a-hostess-thing\/ocsc100611\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-21235\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OCSC100611.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"OCSC100611\" width=\"500\" height=\"313\" class=\"size-full wp-image-21235\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OCSC100611.jpg 500w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OCSC100611-113x70.jpg 113w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OCSC100611-150x93.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/OCSC100611-100x62.jpg 100w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-21235\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tricia Mesigian, behind the bar at Orange County Social Club, Carrboro\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favorite hostess.  Photo by Alicia Stemper <\/figcaption><\/figure><br \/>\n<strong>By Taylor Sisk<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Staff Writer<\/em><br \/>\nAt OCSC, of a Friday, on this you can rely: Jamie in the early evening, Lee on the late shift and $1.50 Pabst Blue Ribbon till the quittin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122-time whistle blows.<\/p>\n<p>Tricia Mesigian is seated on her throne. Well, actually, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seated on a back patio bench at the Orange County Social Club on a lovely early-autumn afternoon, pausing her prep to chat. But the calm of this familiar perch affords a vista of the past 10 years of rich memories and solid times, over which she has reigned as downtown Carrboro\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hostess nonpareil.<\/p>\n<p>The Orange County Social Club has just turned 10 (a full week of festivities will ensue), and Jamie McPhail and Lee Waters have been inked in as Friday bartenders since that first week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s schedule. Jamie opens, Lee closes, and, in the interim, the Pabst doth flow. <\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a family thing, you see \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a family that now numbers some 8,100 members; intimates all \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how it was intended. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I just made a list to thank everyone who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ever worked here,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mesigian says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and it was only, I think, 21 people. And that counts the nine working here now,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d including Jenny Waters and Tracy Swain, who came on board early on.<\/p>\n<p>Mesigian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s objective in opening the OCSC \u00e2\u20ac\u201c aka, Orange County, the social club, the club \u00e2\u20ac\u201c was to accommodate. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d headed south out of Virginia Tech, worked at Skylight Exchange and Cat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cradle, met tons of folks, interned at Mammoth and then Merge records, and there at Merge mined her muse: thirsty rockers.<\/p>\n<p>Her job at Merge was in sales, but she learned she had a talent for hostessing.    <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153My favorite part of the job was when Merge bands came to town,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she recalls, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and I took them out, took them around, they stayed at my house and I made them big breakfasts. \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a paid part of the job.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>But it surely was fun. It was a calling, is what it was.<\/p>\n<p><strong>They came<\/strong><br \/>\nA bar. A <em>bar<\/em> bar. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hell was awesome,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mesigian says of the once and glorious Chapel Hill establishment, itself a bar bar: cheap beers, good tunes, heady language, little to distract \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and a sound model for what she had in mind. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It would be a bar; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a rock club, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a restaurant \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bar. And then I wanted to create a place where there was a happy-hour crowd, there was a mid-evening crowd and then there was a late night.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>And, of course, it had to be in Carrboro, which Mesigian had long since made her home. <\/p>\n<p>She would be home; she would preside. It was, she says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a hostess thing.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>The town embraced her. Mark Dorosin, owner of Hell and a Carrboro alderman at the time, became for Mesigian \u00e2\u20ac\u0153this amazing mentor.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He guided her into a small-business training course, and town hall otherwise provided what assistance it could.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I really didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think I was taking a risk in opening this place,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I always said, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcI know that everyone in town whose first names I know wants to come to this bar.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>And they came.<\/p>\n<p>As for how the name came: Mesigian and her friends riffed, like will-be rockers, on names for months. She had a fondness for bars with geography in their titles. The Buena Vista Social Club CD had recently been re-released. And there it was.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even know if I said it or who said it,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she now says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And then OCSC just falling so gracefully off the tongue \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Buck and a half<\/strong><br \/>\nDean Smith keeps watch from the television wall, biding his time till game time. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I always loved hosting basketball game party-times,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mesigian says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153so that stuck.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The energy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s electric on big-game nights for the Heels.<\/p>\n<p>Otherwise \u00e2\u20ac\u201c unless something big\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gone down \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s elected, Michael Jackson dies \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the set\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s turned off, a distraction. <\/p>\n<p>Has the clientele changed in 10 years? Mesigian says no, though certainly many of the faces have.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think that people start peeping in here when they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 21, start really dipping in when they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 25, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s their place when they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 28. They start peeling off when they get married and have kids \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and then come back on a date night.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Open to close, Mesigian says, Jamie to Lee, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about great bartenders and great music. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s different people, but drinking PBR, be it 6 or 1 in the morning. That I know.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>And, my, what a body of PBR, far, far and away \u00e2\u20ac\u201c10 times more than any other brew. And still at a buck and a half a bottle, just as the day Mesigian opened the joint. Right refreshing at 5, 9 and 2. Glasses raised to a most gracious hostess.<\/p>\n<p><em>In appreciation of the community\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 10 years of support, Mesigian is establishing a scholarship fund with the town to allow, initially, seven individuals to enroll in a small-business class similar to the one she attended prior to opening OCSC. All proceeds from the OCSC anniversary happy hour shows on the event calendar will go to the scholarship fund. Mesigian will also be donating proceeds from the Cat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cradle shows and a raffle to Hunger Relief and MusiCares.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At OCSC, of a Friday, on this you can rely: Jamie in the early evening, Lee on the late shift and $1.50 Pabst Blue Ribbon till the quittin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122-time whistle blows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":21235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21234"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21237,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21234\/revisions\/21237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}