SPILLING the Tea

Get in your saddle and join 63-year-old author Michael Caven’s unlikely ride in 1983 from destitute homeless addict to son-by-adult adoption of legendary Texas club empire mogul, the much older Frank Caven; his new life includes visits to the White House and a rarefied life in a penthouse in the sky with neighbors Texas icon Jimmy Dean and Hollywood treasure Greer Garson. From the intrigue and drama of a Texas gay bar empire to the unexpected journey ten years later of Out On Main, the USA’s first LGBTQ-themed restaurant that celebrated gay history and made history of its own, Michael Caven’s life has been anything but ordinary. Michael Pappas was an empty vessel and chameleon; Frank and Michael together create Michael Caven, the fabulous and wildly bipolar persona that could alternatively lighten or darken any room he entered—depending solely on his mood. The tea spilling former chameleon takes the reader on a dizzying rollercoaster of gritty and outrageous realities: being a high-end money/drug boy in NYC; the Las Vegas kitsch villa in Sarasota of his step-mother Mary with stuffed toy poodle cadavers and Wally the sleazy parrot screaming “25 dollars lap dance”; a topless South Florida stripper bar (also owned by step-mom) with a Sunday special “Chicks with Tools” night (by invitation only); a spiritual reckoning with an old enemy in the Amazon; Neiman Marcus’s very own wicked version of Mr. French; a smorgasbord banquet of A to D list celebrities, gay bar lords, vicious Texas queens, hustlers, shamans, strip club owners and drug dealers---not for the faint of heart! Nor for those without a sense of humor to the absurdity of life, being extremely human and open to having some Texas fun, letting it all hang out on the wild side. The last part of the memoir is where David Sedaris meets Anthony Bourdain. The restaurant business: a brutal business, every evening a production, any dinner could become a happening or a disaster; any night a celebrity or famous writer might show up; or in harsh weather, no one shows up at all. In the end, you are only as good as your last meal. Before all this new reality-socked co-founders Michael Caven and Tom Grote in their faces, they were idealists, they liked to dream and envision a world as they hoped it would and could be. “I wonder what would happen if famous gays and lesbians from different historical time periods met, what would they say to each other?” Michael asked Tom one fateful afternoon. And so begins the Out On Main Restaurant story. This main dish spills plenty of tea and takes the reader on an unlikely journey of the groundbreaking little restaurant in the Midwest that could and did. And in the process, mainstreamed LGBTQ history and culture in Columbus, Ohio, of all places. Anthony Bourdain is in restaurant heaven, looking down with a smile.