SimplyMom: On the Road

Posted by Mary

I had lunch at Cheers this week. For the record, nobody knew my name.

It wasn’t surprising, really. After all, Cheers – the Boston watering hole made famous by the eighties sit-com and memorialized forever in the Nick-at-Night line-up – is just like most vacation tourist traps. They’re a lot like the billion dollar babies signed right out of high school by pro sports teams that spend two months in the headlines and the next two seasons on the bench. A lot of hype, but really not a lot of substance to back it up.

Not that I expected the patrons at Cheers to greet me with a jovial “Mary!” when I came through the door. In fact, after an afternoon of elbow bending at the long wooden bar, a lot of the visitors were having a hard enough time remembering their own names, let alone mine. (And Cheers itself faced a similar problem, since the bar/restaurant’s real name is the Bull and Finch. Which everybody does seem to know, but no one uses with any regularity.)

We stopped by Cheers – oops, the Bull and Finch – during our “mini-vacation” in Red Sox territory. My husband was born and raised in Massachusetts, so we were visiting his family there, and took the kids to “Beantown” (does anyone really call it that?) during that stay. Eating at Cheers topped the boys’ “must do” list - well, except for Steven, who had it listed under “go to a Red Sox game.” We had to explain to him that – unlike the situation with the Phillies here – some teams actually do sell out baseball games. Some even do it with regularity and others – the Red Sox among them – have a waiting list for the right to stand near the bleacher seats.

Of course, we tried to steer them on more educational pursuits, not fully convinced that Norm and Carla are the proper role models for growing children. And I needed to think ahead, after all. Let’s face it - when Max’s “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essay begins “My mom took me to a bar in Boston,” I wouldn’t be winning any points with the PTA.

So for balance, we did work in a bit of a history lesson. Well, if you could call anything relayed by a man wearing a combat helmet and speaking through a duck call “history.” The man – who called himself “Colonel Duck Tape” – was our tour guide on a “duck tour” of Boston. For those unfamiliar, a “duck tour” is a guided tour of an area (they’re popular in Philly, too) similar to a bus tour – but in this case the bus is a renovated World War II amphibious landing vehicle. Affectionately known as a “duck,” it tours the city on both land and water, which was a relief to Max, who asked earlier in the day, “When did we become so interested in ducks?”

He became very interested – so much so, the good colonel made Max his “special helper,” allowing him to distribute stickers to those who answered trivia questions. (May I add that I collected enough stickers to wallpaper my powder room? The only way the colonel could have stopped my dominance of his “show tunes” category was to threaten to actually use the duct tape.)

Max even piloted the vehicle down part of the Charles River while Colonel Duck Tape took his break, while we were treated to a tour that was part American history, part pop culture trivia. I learned no one would ever learn my name in Cheers, since it has no regulars. Locals leave the old Bull and Finch to the tourists. I’d have better luck frequenting one of the 94 Dunkin Donuts in the city.

Yikes! I suddenly realized my eight-year old went to a bar and drove on his summer vacation - and it's only July. This is going to be quite an essay.

Maybe I’m better off if no one knows my name, after all.

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SimplyMom: On the Road

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