With all you have to do and feel as a death care professional, you need no excuse for the occasional glass of wine or sip of bourbon. And, of course, 2020 in itself is actually a great reason to enjoy an adult beverage. Just in case you’re looking for more justification, how about this: Drink to help kids!
That’s the rationale deathcare attorney Poul Lemasters is using these days, now that every purchase of his growing line of Blue Monkey Quarantina merchandise helps to buy new coats for needy kids.
Kids helping kids
As a child, Lemasters rarely had the opportunity to select and wear a new winter coat.
“I lived in a home of hand-me-downs,” Lemasters recounts. “I’m never going to knock that because it’s all many people have, but there’s something that’s very nice when you get to pick out a brand new coat.”
In 2009, Lemasters had the opportunity to pass on this lesson to his children Max and Chloe. When the holidays rolled around, he and his kids purchased several new coats and donated them to a local charity.
The next year, Max and Chloe wanted to do it again — but at a larger scale. They asked for monetary donations to help out with their purchases, and each year, the Lemasters family’s enthusiasm and donations grew. By 2012, their efforts were so successful that the family raised and contributed enough money to purchase an astounding 454 coats for distribution to local kids.
“We wanted to do it bigger every year,” Lemasters says. “That became our mission.”
Reaching out to the deathcare community
The Lemasters’ mission — to buy and distribute more coats every winter than in the previous year — soon became a personal challenge to dad Poul.
“When I first started doing it,” Lemasters recalls, “I just asked people to donate. We have some good people who write checks to us every year. Then I started to think, ‘What can I give them for donating?’”
As an attorney, Lemasters had developed an impeccable reputation for helping his clients with what he calls “proactive prevention,” or, to put it more eloquently, “cover your ass” measures. He decided that a set of legal forms that contributed to deathcare professionals’ CYA efforts would be a nice reward for a donation to what had become an non-profit organization, Lemasters Coat Drive.
“I did three CYA form packages: one for cemeteries, one for funeral homes, and one for cremation,” Lemasters says. “I sold them for $149, a ridiculously cheap price, but the whole $149 went to the charity.”
The forms packages were a hit, so the following year Lemasters offered sample policies and procedures documents for funeral homes, cemeteries, and crematories for $249 each and garnered even more donations for the coat drive.
Enter the blue monkey
This year, Lemasters is offering something a little different in exchange for your donations: barware, t-shirts, and a little blue book of cocktail recipes — all inspired by his newfound fame as the proprietor of the Blue Monkey Quarantina.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced cities to shut down and families to quarantine in place beginning in March, Lemasters and his wife Shelby began broadcasting a nightly cocktail show on Facebook Live. For 62 days, Poul demonstrated how to create classic cocktails. Of course, he put his own spin on each drink, adding a dash of alcohol history and several splashes of personality. The broadcast and Poul’s basement bar became known as the Blue Monkey Quarantina, named after a stuffed blue monkey Shelby found in a thrift store and the first drink he concocted — the Quarantini.
The success of the show inspired not only a second season (which is now live on Sunday and Wednesday nights), but also a line of merchandise that Lemasters sells on the coat drive charity’s website, www.coatdrive.org. One of the newest items is the 200-page Quarantine Cocktail Show book, which is full of recipes, history, and even some of the comments viewers left during the live stream.
“For every book we sell,” Lemasters says, “it’s enough money to buy one new coat. The money from everything we sell goes to the coat drive — 100%. We keep nothing.”
Everyone needs a CYA t-shirt
If you’re not into cocktails, there’s plenty of other merchandise available, including CYA socks, Blue Monkey stickers, and the classic “Corpses Attempting Hilarity” card game — a perfect stocking stuffer for your fellow deathcare professionals. But seriously, even if you don’t need a shirt sporting an image of a blanketed donkey, the opportunity to help the Lemasters Coat Drive purchase a new coat for a needy child is reason enough to make a donation — especially this year.
“More people are in need this year,” explains Lemasters. “St. Vincent de Paul is a charity that serves our local [Cincinnati] area. They normally get anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 requests for different things at this time of the year, including coats. They’ve already received over 5,000 requests.”
This year, the Lemasters Coat Drive is expanding its reach beyond the charities and schools in Ohio, partnering with organizations in Kentucky and Virginia for help in distributing new coats to needy kids.
In his book, Lemasters says that the alcohol you use to make a cocktail in your new Blue Monkey Quarantina shaker or martini glass will keep you warm, while the coat purchased with the money you paid for those items will keep a child in need warm all winter.
“It’s a good excuse to have a cocktail,” Lemasters says.
As an officer of the law, Lemasters is quick to point out that he’s not advocating overindulging or using “helping kids” as an excuse to drink in excess.
“As I’ve said, don’t say that to the police,” he says. “If they ask why you’ve been drinking, don’t say, ‘Because I’m trying to help children.’”
