Crying Over Spilt Beer
There's probably still a bar that uses the old beer schooners. Maybe in Chicago or Topeka or Bemidji, one of those towns with a flair for the traditional, for ethnic sausages and casseroles and good barbecue.
The schooner, if you remember, is a beer glass with a wide base, then a thick glass stem that suddenly blossoms out into a heavy glass bowl, most often with big, decorative "thumbprints" in the glass.
It looks a little like a wine glass, but shorter and fatter, the country cousin of the wine glass, the cousin who comes to the city in clothes she made herself, asking if she can stay with you until she finds a job.
Back in the days when I had sideburns and put salt in my beer to make it fizz and to bring out the flavor, I liked places that used the schooner. It rested heavy and thick in my hand.
"I'll have a schooner of Budweiser," you could reasonably say, and it sounded a little like, "I'll have a flagon of mead," and so it made the deadly dull business of boozing after a newspaper night shift seem more like a heroic deed. Sometimes, I had a package of Corn Nuts with my Meadweiser.
The schooners started disappearing from my local bars about 30 years ago, which makes this an "old man column" about the "good old days," and you're free to ignore this kind of column until you cross 50 and something you like disappears from the world.
At the time of the schooner's disappearance, a bartender friend of mine explained that they were more expensive than mugs and top-heavy, so they were frequently knocked over by drunken patrons, women gesturing angrily at their boyfriends and the occasional guy waving his hand while describing a play in last week's Jets' game.
"We'll just replace 'em with mugs until they're all broken," he said, and he served me beer in a schooner until the last of them was gone from the place.
Another small thing gone.
I kept going out for beer after work because no reporter ever finished covering a city council meeting and then went out looking for a salad.
...continued
