Every time one of those soft porn beer commercials comes on TV, women see red. That’s what the feminist leadership says, anyway, and I see no reason to disagree with them. Nobody likes being portrayed sitting around a bar with feature-perfect erogenous droids appraising each other like over-priced designer goods churned off an assembly line somewhere in southern California.
Men should see red too, and they do; although no masculine leadership has yet emerged to declare their indignation. They also turn enviously green because every man, even those who know better, likes to hope there really are bars where one sip of beer turns women into Katie Holmes and the men into Tom Cruise.
It was this impossible quest that took me to the Silver Bullet while vacationing in my hometown of Weiser some years back. Ron Yankey was disgusted when I suggested it instead of The Crescent for our reunion beer. “It’s not like the one on those TV ads,” he assured me with the patient indulgence of a father lecturing his five-year-old son. “They have Coors on tap. You know, it’s Mina’s old place, we don’t want to go to a dump like that.” (Neither of us would drink non-union Coors.)
Indeed I did know, but I wanted to go anyway. Mina was a classmate of ours and Weiser’s first and, to the best of my knowledge, last stripper. In school she had been the designated fat girl – the one you accused your buddies of carrying a torch for when you wanted to provoke them.
Mina’s family left Weiser in our sophomore year of high school and nothing was heard of her for 10 or 15 years. Novelty strippers were all the rage and an advertisement in the Idaho Daily Statesman for the Tops Down Club in Boise included a picture of its featured performer, Big Tiny Little. It was Mina.
Several years later she came back to Weiser and took over the old Stockman’s Bar premises, which had gone through a succession of owners and names. Mina renamed it Big Tiny Little’s and enjoyed a brief period of celebrity, with her clothes on, before going broke. She left town again and has not been heard from since.
I could see some vestiges of Mina’s occupancy as I sat at the Silver Bullet bar with Ron sipping a bottle of Budweiser. We were the only ones in the place and it was Saturday night. Maybe, the gang from the ski slopes hadn’t arrived yet. I knew they never would, of course. There are about as many skiers as polo players in Weiser. I just wanted to sit there and revel in nostalgia looking over the manifestations of past trends in the tavern, still evident beneath the slap dash redecorating of each successive owner.
Above the kitchen you could still make out the faint outline of Ye Olde Pizza Shoppe from the pizza parlor incarnation. Hanging on the wall near the men’s room were two dust covered dartboards and a faded sign absolving the Tally-Ho Pub of an responsibility for injuries resulting from the misuse of its darts.
The only thing that stirred any memories in me or Ron, though was the faint outline of the name Stockman’s on the door leading into the back alley. When we were just kids and Weiser was the bustling commercial center for surrounding farms, mines and logging operations, the Smoke House, along with The Crescent, just acorss the street, was a favorite lunch spot for local businessmen.
In front, opening on to the street was a café. It was there that I had my first cheeseburger, sharing the counter with such eminent citizens as Sam Emerich, owner of Globe Furniture, and Lou Farber of Farber’s Ladies Wear. It was a heady experience, my first taste of the sophisticated world of business.
Thinking back to that congenial time while sitting in the wasteland of the Silver Bullet, I couldn’t help blame television for all the bleakness of modern culture. Those people didn’t try to construct their lives in response to characters created in some never-never land behind the TV screen. The just lived them. If life was pretty much the same in Lovelock, Nevada as it was in Weiser, Idaho it was because the people had a common heritage and faced similar challenges.
The sameness induced by universal television seems to sap enterprise, dull the intellect and reduce life to the lowest common denominator. All of which is clearly evident in any beer commercial.
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