Conception

Unfortunately, my friends and I did so much strange stuff in college that the origination of the idea for the Tiki Bar wasn't crazy enough to really stick out in my mind. I'm fairly certain it was Mike's idea, most of the brilliantly crazy stuff was. I'm fairly certain we were discussing what we could put in our dorm room to make it the "place to be" amongst our friends. The Tiki Bar never made it out of the idea stage while we were in the dorms, instead we ended up with a futon and a webcam. Considering that American University is a dry campus, it was probably for the best.

Less than a year later, the idea resurfaced. The school year was coming to an end, Mike was itching to move off-campus and I'd decided that the dorms really weren't the best place for me to be living since I hadn't actually been a student at AU for 6 months now. I'd just gotten a real job and we found a pretty sweet deal on an apartment in Clarendon. The more we talked about the new apartment and how we were going to decorate it and set it up, the more we started talking about this idea of having a Tiki Bar in our apartment as if it were a foregone conclusion. I even ordered a custom Tiki Bar sign off of eBay. I won the auction and the seller emailed me to ask what text we wanted to put on to it. I don't really remember how we came up with the idea of grabbing "Pleasure Dome" from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Kahn", but we did and the name stuck. Read on for the details on the Pleasure Dome Tiki Bar version 1.0