I am just sitting here thinking, remembering back, oh about 20 years or so.  ZZ-Top was at the height of their popularity with Eliminator, and all the conservatives were bitching and moaning about the ZZ-Top girls and the impact they were having on society.  Remember them?  I can barely.  And I was really paying attention, too.  I remember one had these really funky boots, and they had short skirts, and the car would always show up, that’s about it.  Maybe their impact wasn’t as great as was initially feared.  I do wonder from time to time what happened to them.  Are they living in Riverside now, married with teenagers, their lives totally consumed by trips to the soccer field and ballet practice?  I sort of hope not but I am not sure what other fate I would have them suffer. 

But that is not the point of tonight.  No, it just made me think of something else.  It was about the same time that the conservative pundit, Dr. James Dobson, came out with the idea that the problem with American women was the demise of sewing circles.  I don’t remember everything with perfect clarity, and I don’t think he meant all women or all their problems, but he definitely ascribed many of the feelings of isolation, helplessness, and detachment that he saw in many women who came to him for counseling to the fact that women no longer just got together to sew things. 

I was younger then, and thought he was completely crazy.  And he might still be.  Liberal that I am there is no way I am going to find myself on the same side of an argument as Dobson.  But I will have to admit that in my youth I did miss the central point of his argument.  The emphasis there is not on sewing, but on being together in one place, united by a simple ritual that allowed them to escape, even for a few moments, their lives.  I was naïve enough at that point to think that you didn’t need to ever escape from your life, that you needed to embrace it and submerge yourself in it.  Oh well, we live and learn. 

And for 20 years, I didn’t give it a second thought.  My family grew up, I saw my children into adulthood, and slowly I began to see things differently.  And so tonight I am looking at that same problem from a man’s point of view, and I am decrying the decline and fall of a great American institution; the corner bar. 

To be honest, the hay day of the corner bar was before my time.  It began to die off in the 60’s as ‘family time’ began to eat into what was available to men (just as picking up kids from school and taking them to a bevy of activities doomed the sewing circles).  But I remember them.  Never went in, of course, always saw them through the glass.  They were the first places to have color TV and so seemed both magical as well as forever out of my reach. 

The corner bar, or the social club, like the Elks or Moose, was the male equivalent of the sewing circle.  Unlike the meat markets that bars are today, the corner bar was an oasis, a place of safety where a man could meet with his friends and unwind.  You couldn’t get into trouble there.  Everybody you knew was watching what you were doing.  You went in, had a beer or two, talked as much as you liked, and then went home.  Am I glorifying it?  Maybe just a little, but I’m not sure that’s wrong.  It was a place where you could go, where you could escape from the family that both gave your life meaning and at the same time circumscribed it’s breadth.   For an hour or two you could be the person you visualized yourself to be; witty, philosophical, caustic, pathetically beaten down; it was really up to you. 

It’s all gone today, of course, for both sexes.  Women don’t get together unless there is a purpose to it.  Men don’t get together except to coach teams or if women tell them to.  We talk, but there’s no intimacy.  All communication is an exercise in one ups-manship.   No one gets to see us as we are.  No one really knows us.  We are self contained, defined by our families and our responsibilities, we are what we are every minute of every day.  And the toll it extracts is invisible and incalculable. 

And so, I am sitting here at Findley’s Irish Pub in the Magnolia complex of the Opryland Hotel (and you don’t even want to get me started on that), and even though this is the very antithesis of what the corner bar stood for there is something in the wooden bar, the glass mirrors above the bar, and the barely comfortable stools that somehow manage to take me back.  Maybe it’s because the bar isn’t very full, I can hear myself think.  No one is talking about some stupid client call that they made today, and no one is complaining about their ex and the fact that they never pay alimony without a court order.  And yet I look down the bar at the person next to me and have almost no desire to talk to them.  What’s the point.  I will never see them again.  I am alone and in a strange and disquieting way, comfortable in that aloneness, in the fact that nobody knows my name.  In the fact that nobody really knows me.  And isn’t that what’s wrong with all of us today.