The location was the Moose Club…loaded with Kenoshans…a final farewell to Mike Cholak…legend. Cho Momma passed a short time ago and friends, family, and well-wishers from all over the place came to pay their respects to a true KTown Icon. From the minute my wife and I walked in the door, stuff started hitting us in the face regarding this gathering. First, the sheer size of the crowd was massive…but not a surprise. Second is the giant, life-size cardboard cut-out of Cholak looking at you as you approach the hospitality table. FREAKED me out cause all I saw was half of it when I walked in and my first thought was “this MF is punking everyone just to see what size crowd he can get”. And then you walk 10 feet to the bar and order two drinks and it OPEN BAR!!!! What???? Cholak is giving drinks away…no fuckin way! It was all vintage Cholak…zigging from beyond while we are all still on earth zagging..and wishing he was punking everyone. But he ain’t…and that’s some bullshit.
Once we got our drinks, my wife asked me what we were going to do…all I could think of was, “let’s go find some Dons”. They weren’t hard to locate. The place was crawling with em. En route to finding Dons, we got to catch up with A Hoff, Dirty World, Joey T and a few others we hadn’t seen in a minute. And then we made a break for the Dons, and it was then I saw the raffle table!! My wife had already gotten a raffle ticket and being the degenerate gambler that she is, she didn’t even tell me. I said out loud, “this dude has a raffle table of Uncle Mike’s Mystery Prizes at his own memorial service…classic”. My dejected wife said, “Yeah, but we didn’t win”. Thanks for the heads up ma. In my head I had this immediate conversation….”Dude, why didn’t you let me win one of these…I’d have kept it for two years unopened and sold it on-line for $500″. The answer I got in my head was, “take your ass out to Highways enough to win one in a raffle, stash it, sell it in two years and say it was from my memorial service…ain’t like I’m gonna be there to blow the whistle on ya”.
Then some kind words were spoken. The multiple eulogies that were shared all came from the heart and showed the genuine love and combined hurt that everyone in the room felt. I even heard a few of my own words shared with the room and that was kinda cool. Disbelief was still the theme of the afternoon. No way this dude is gone. Still hard to wrap your head around. But god damn was his final send-off one for the books. Then much of the room headed out to Uncle Mike’s to keep the party rolling. Gotta give props to my guy Smitty….of all the Dons, he celebrated the life of Mike Cholak like Cho Momma would have loved. Relentlessly. Thanks to Katie Coshun and her husband and their family for making us all feel welcome at a pretty dark time. And then it was time to close out the day and begin life without a once-in-a-lifetime dude. RIP Michael. For the record, had I won an Uncle Mike’s Mystery Bag, it would have remained unopened and been cherished like I have loved our friendship for 40 years. Thanks for some of the best times of all of our lives Cho Momma.