I'm thinking about that damn Cisco Pike nostalgia piece again. There was no way on earth that I could ever be a scenester. Back in the day I am talking about again. Olivia's served plates of food and a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce (Tabasco) was a regular every day condiment sitting next to the salt and pepper shakers. During that same period I went to Fred C Dobbs exactly once, so you can tell I didn't hang out there. In the first place, it was way the hell across town .... miles and miles away on busy boulevards ... and those miles and miles are longer at night, and farther yet if you don't have a car and must rely on public transit, and longer still if that transit was the L.A. county bus system. Even if you drove, finding a place to park was a hassle. And the place was in a part of town I was a stranger to, located somewhere on the Sunset Strip section of Hollywood. Everything in the surrounding environment seemed so neon-lit, glittery, and plastic that I felt like the tourist I was, it just wasn't my scene. I've since been reminded that the staff at Fred C Dobbs threw an eggshell in the grinds before brewing coffee, an old trick inherited from someone's grandmother, supposed to reduce coffee bitterness.

The only thing I remember about that single coffee house adventure was on the way back, being stopped by the police a few blocks down the road for a defective tail light. The only souvenir from that outing came to me a few years later in the form of a button, which had a drawing of a fews guys in sombreros on horseback, that said: "We don't need no stinking badges." I don't know if it had anything whatsoever to do with the coffeehouse, but I was told that the buttons came about as a fundraiser as the coffee house Fred C Dobbs was in financial trouble after the Sunset Strip riots.  ¶ 5/29/2006 08:49:00 AM