City Butterfly

City Butterfly
SOCIAL NOTES & NEWS FROM YOUR FRIENDS IN THE 570

Dinner, dessert, dancing and more!
This week’s flight begins in Luzerne County on Saturday night, where we enjoyed a splendid meal at one of our favorite Back Mountain Restaurants, The Metro Bar and Grill. When chicken rosemary — and only chicken rosemary — will do, this is our go-to place. Plus, they let us trade a Caesar salad for the standard broccoli option without hesitation. Who can beat that?
Our bellies almost full (we purposely left room for dessert), we headed to another Back Mountain hot spot — Hillside Farms. Even though it was cold enough for a winter coat and chilly rain drops were falling, ice cream lovers were in no way deterred. There was still a sizeable line at the counter. But that was a good thing. It gave us time to think. Our first instinct was a simple vanilla, chocolate swirl in a cone. But then we saw rocky road and chocolate chip mint, butter pecan … how about a sundae? And then we noticed something called “Chicken Scratch” on the menu. Chicken Scratch? Now that sounds interesting. We were about to investigate that further when we decided to stop dilly dallying and go with our initial instincts to keep things simple. So a vanilla chocolate twist it was. We made short work of that cone and then it was time to fly into the Electric City, where we heard the Banshee was the place to be.
Penn Ave’s Irish pub indeed had everything we could have asked for and more (well, everything except Chicken Scratch, but we digress). Plenty of peeps showed up for a night of fun. Between the beautiful Miller 64 girls on hand to promote Miller 64 Night, and a fabulous concert by the Coal Town Rounders, a good time was had by all.
As we sashayed and shimmied our way to the bar, we spotted quite a few familiar faces, including Markie Dennebaum, Alex Molfetas, Eric Brocius, Audra Colville, Eddie Karwaski, Samantha Urbanick, Ashley Farrow, Christiana Bartolini, Samantha Watkins, Amanda Pace, Jeffrey Christ, Kate Beese, Josh Wilson, Jim Roberts, Melinda Marhevka, Charissa Willson, Anny Lou Clapp, Jim Graham and Rachel Tracewski, just to name a few.
Of course, one particular table of naughty types caught our eye, too. We spotted electric and diamond city’s own Johnny Lamberton, Eric Toffey and Tom Bonomo mixing it up. We can’t be sure, but we think they may have stationed themselves within our flight path just to get a column mention …
So there it is. We’d have given them more ink if they just would have busted a move on the dance floor with the very saucy Tina Imel and Marie Rhodes, who simply couldn’t resist groovin’ to the sounds of Coal Town Rounders’ Jason Zarnowski on upright bass, Ian O’Hara on banjo, Matthew Hiller on mandolin and Christopher Kearney on guitar. Thanks for a fun night, guys. You’re the best!
Sunday was a day to sleep in, and Monday was back to work (although a butterfly’s work really is never done). And of course, Tuesday was Primary Election Day. Don’t worry, we won’t get too serious here, but we’d be remiss not to mention our stop at the polls in Scranton, which were noticeably quiet. It only took us 10 minutes to vote; we were in and out of there in no time. And we couldn’t help but notice, we waited longer in line for an ice cream cone than we did to vote.
We filled in our circles and even cast a few write-in votes for the first time. We just hope the election board can make out our “chicken scratch.”
— cb