If there’s one thing my friend Jules is good for (and there are many things), it’s knowing where the good dive bars are. I’m not sure if it’s some kind of sixth sense, or if it’s just because she knows everyone on the westside, but she knows where it is you should go on a Thursday night.

Which, by the way, is a requirement for a good dive bar outing: it must be on a weekday. That way, when you’re sitting on your couch eating ghetto-sghetti while watching Swingers on your laptop and pondering either going to Home Depot or The Rumor Mill to do your laundry in the middle of the night, and your friend calls you to cowboy-up and, as she so sweetly says in her own lady-like manner, “slap some balls on” , you’ll have some awesome place to go and scream ironically after a few 7-and-7’s, “Thursday NIGHT!”

For us, the dive bar was Backstage.

Located across from the Sony lot in Culver City, this little bar, next to a gas station was the kind of place where, as we drove up, I asked, “How did you even find this place?” Of course, the boring answer was that she used to work for Sony. I prefer to think, though, that some awesome dude who had a walk-on on Blossom took her there once. The boy faded away but the dive-bar remained kind of thing.

Anyway, it’s a small-ish place with a fireplace, a pool table, and a Playboy pinball machine. Totally cheesy… which of course means I loved it.

>And then there was the small manner of the karaoke stage.

>There were good ones, there were bad ones, there was the guy that was a dead-ringer for Hurley from Lost who did the best fucking Zeppelin impersonation I’ve ever heard. I screamed along with him through several songs, after which he came up and gave me the bro-hand-punch, and shouted something or other for 30 seconds that I nodded emphatically to, punctuated by a “You like Whitesnake?” at the end to which I shouted, “Fucking right! You were awesome, man!” After he left, Jules leaned over with a, “What did he just say?!” and I replied honestly with, “I have no fucking idea. Whitesnake was involved though… Thursday NIGHT!!!”