Click on the photo to view the gallery, which includes 30 images from the Langdon Street Cafe’s street parade, the farewell party and the marriage proposal.
Ben T. Matchstick and Meg Hammond never forgot how to play — even when they were working 85 hours a week to keep Langdon Street Café afloat. Evening performances at Langdon were like one long rotating party complete with improv performers, outlandish decorations and wild dress-up outfits.
Over the course of the last seven years, Langdon hosted masquerade balls, vaudeville weekends, burlesque shows and fringe experimental performances. Matchstick and Hammond held fanciful evening soirees — the hot pink party, legendary night, nutty ballet — that were as much about mingling and finding romance as they were about experiencing a party that was half-performance.
It was, as Matchstick put it, “a big playpen” for 20- and 30-somethings.
Their last night was no different. Last weekend Matchstick and Hammond bid a fond farewell to their fans and friends to mark the close of the café, and they did so the only way they know how — with an over-the-top final show that mixed live music, theater and socializing over drinks. They brought back their famous kissing booth one last time. Amateur actors pranced around in risqué cabaret outfits (one sported short-shorts over fishnet stockings and a fake German accent), jugglers worked the crowd and Cirkestra played soulful klezmer-style circus music.
The crowning moment was a real-life touch: Hammond, dressed in a poofy Texas whorehouse-style dress, pretended to be an animal trainer, cracking the whip at three performers (wearing fake leopard skin coats) as they performed tricks, the last of which was a partial disrobing that revealed the words “Will,” “You,” “Marry” emblazoned on their chests. Hammond thrust the word “Me?” at Matchstick, along with lollipop that bore “yes” or “no” signs. Matchstick licked the candy and enthusiastically nodded his head up and down. The crowd gasped; champagne bottles were uncorked and the band struck up a chorus.
Hammond’s parting proposal was as much a bid for marriage as it was a pitch for a starting over after a long stint in the 24/7 world of restauranteering.
Unlike most late-night venues, Langdon not only held its doors open into the wee hours, the café also served coffee and continental breakfast fare at 8a.m. The day began with commuters and then segued into a lunch/laptop away-from-the-home office crowd. By late afternoon, most days young mothers played board games with their children at the booth tables. In the evening, people came in from work to relax with a beer at the bar. By 7 p.m., the music started all over again.
If theatricality was Langdon’s trademark, the nightly concerts were the café’s evening stock in trade. Over the course of the last four years, Langdon hosted 2,200 shows. Singer songwriter Anais Mitchell made her debut at Langdon, and she brought her musician friends to play there for “Transcontinental review.” Klezmer, classical, death metal, rock, R&B, jazz, reggae — you name it and they played it. Some of the names that made the stage included The Low Anthem, Session Americana, Mike and Ruthy, Nathan Moore, Devan Sprule and Young Republic.
Much as they loved the bands, the theater, the customers, their employees, Hammond and Matchstick didn’t enjoy the long hours or the meager compensation. (Hammond took home $8,000 last year.) Despite a concerted effort to beef up the menu, hire a chef, and run Langdon more efficiently as a restaurant, their plans stalled when a leak in the building this spring pushed out a tenant and made a portion of the cafe unusable.
With a wedding looming in the not so distant future, and the long days behind the bar counter behind them, Hammond and Matchstick, both in their mid-30s, will go back to their former lives — Hammond as a visual artist and Matchstick as a theater performer.
“We” “Wish” “Them” “Joy” “And” “Luck.”