For 53 years Appleton’s venerable cocktail lounge Cleo’s Brown Beam has been wetting the whistles and slaking the thirsts of locals and visitors alike. Every firefighter who comes to town to pick up their truck from Pierce seems to make a stop at Cleo’s. As does virtually every comic who performs at Skyline. Even when they were playing as far away as Madison or Milwaukee, comics Lewis Black and Kathleen Madigan make the effort to drop in. In fact, it was reportedly a visit to Cleo’s that inspired Lewis to say, “You pay less for liquor (in Wisconsin) than anybody I know anywhere in the country. Nobody pays less for liquor than you. How? I don’t know if you’re using that farm subsidy money or if you’re just hijacking liquor trucks, but this is f*cking insane!”
In addition to its strong drinks and reasonable prices and year-round, holiday decorations, one of the great draws at Cleo’s is its signature cocktail, The Dirty Snowball; a delicious and highly potent “booze shake”. However, this past week, they added an N.A. version of the Dirty Snowball to their alcohol free cocktail menu called the NAKED Snowball. While I applaud their efforts to offer tasty drinks for sober customers, there’s just something that just seems wrong about an alcohol-free version of this drink with such a drunken reputation. It just seems to me that…
A CLEO’S DIRTY SNOWBALL WITH OUT ALCOHOL IS LIKE….
A stripper without daddy issues.
Dolly Parton without a backache.
Appleton without another new car wash
A pedophile without a panel van.
Congressman George Santos without his pants on fire.
The stretch of highway 41 between Ballard and Richmond without skid marks.
Any pair of my underwear… without skid marks.
Post Malone without more ink on his face than the walls of the stalls of a high school boy’s room.
Alec Baldwin without a trigger finger itchier than hooker’s cooch.
Ed Sheeran without hair as red as the ink in the books of the Silicon Valley Bank.
An ad for a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate without more finger-pointing than a game of charades.
A Governor Tony Evers speech with out a “Do not drive or operate heavy machinery” warning”.
Aaron Rodgers without more drama than a six-pack of Broadway theaters.
