Oktoberfest Kerouac, Dali Deal: More Things To Do This Weekend

ST. PETE, FL – This weekend Oktoberfest will be dominated by the Kerouac festival at the Flamingo Sports Bar, 1230 9th St N.

Open since 1924 the Flamingo Sports Bar will be transformed into the city’s largest Kerouac festival. The 48th
Annual Oktoberfest event will feature an extraordinary night of music and beat poetry in honor of author Jack Kerouac, who had his last drink at the Flamingo Bar before his death, Oct. 21, 1969 at St. Anthony's Hospital, just down the road in St. Petersburg.

The Kerouac drink special is the “Shot and Wash”. There will be music and you can sit on the deck in front of the iconic Kerouac window right on Martin Luther King Jr. St. (9th St. N.) Bring a folding chair and take in the sights and sounds of one of St. Petersburg's oldest neighborhood bars.

As for other weekend activities, visitors to the St. Petersburg Dali Museum on Saturday will get a reduced ticket deal of $10. One catch: the museum closes early at 2 p.m. because of a museum gala Saturday evening.

(For more local news from Florida, click here Scott Adams news)

Dali Museum Deal

Many don’t know that Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dali actually met. It took place in 1956 at the infamous Russian Tea Room in New York City. They were in the company of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso where they were all guests of Dali and his wife Gala. As the story goes, nearby sat actor Marlon Brando and Ginsberg prompted Dali that they would like to meet the actor to which Dali gestured to Kerouac and declared “He is more beautiful than Brando”.

The Dali Museum will reduce its ticket prices to $10 on Saturday because it is closing early, at 2 p.m. Saturday’s admission price is more than half off the regular $24 ticket cost for adults. The reduced admission is not available online.

More on Kerouac

Beat generation author Jack Kerouac died October 21, 1969 right
here in St. Petersburg where he had been living since 1964 with his third wife
Stella and mother Gabriel. It was his mother’s idea to move as Kerouac
ironically referred to St. Petersburg as “the town of the newly wed and the
living dead” and “a good place to come die”. A notorious alcoholic, Kerouac
died from complications brought on by a brutal beating he received at the
Cactus Bar in St Petersburg; weeks later resulted in hemorrhaging from his
chronic cirrhosis.

The Cactus Bar has been misidentified in many publications
including the Tampa Bay Times which erroneously claimed that it was Cactus
Charlie’s at 400 34th St. N
http://www.tampabay.com/features/food/bars/cactus-charlies-lounge-keroua....

This registers “Pants on Fire” on their Truth-o-meter.

The reason this correction is important is because the real
Cactus Bar was (and still is) located in a black neighborhood and it was
involved in the 1968 Race riots in St. Petersburg that followed the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968 (see photo).
Unfortunately, it is no longer a bar but the building still stands at 1844 18th
Avenue South in St Petersburg.

In that time frame of 1968/1969, Jack Kerouac was working on
what became his last novel “Pic” about a young African American boy and the
racial difficulties that he experiences. Published posthumously, Kerouac wrote
“Pic” in a voice that is stereotypically black. The rest of the story is that a
year after the riots of 1968, Kerouac was drinking at the Cactus Bar and
slipped in to his character Pic’s African American dialect. Unfortunately, the
brothers at the bar thought that he was mocking them which led to the brutal
beating.