The Barista
In the fall of 1979, she spent a semester more or less living at Milo's, a coffeehouse three blocks off the University of Kansas campus. There was a barista there — a wiry, dark-haired man named Owen — who kept two cups going at all times: a small ceramic for espresso, a larger mug for the drip. He would pour, swirl, sip the espresso; pour, swirl, sip the drip; return to the espresso and swirl it differently. He never held either cup still. He never swirled the same way twice.
Klepp watched him for a full winter. She started calling him, silently, "the alternate squirrel" — for the twitchy caffeinated way he moved between his cups, and for the specific look of a person doing four things at once without touching any of them for long. She never told him. She left Milo's owing $3.75 on a tab and never went back.
A year later, when four people got stuck together in a double-booked practice room, the name was already in place. She said it the first night. Nobody asked what it meant. Nobody ever did.
Owen the barista is not credited on any Alternate Squirrel record. He is, by Klepp's own account decades later, the reason the band existed at all.
