This appeared in the Dade County Sentinel in summer 2010, a week or so after the staff killed the “Beer and Loathing” headline I’d written for my news article about a county beer board meeting (link)(which I had found outrageously funny). I believe it was a matter of making the article fit into the newspaper, not of stifling my famous wit – but still, it was too good a headline to waste, so this was one of those rare instances when you write a story to go under a headline as opposed to a headline to go over a story. In Dade County, Ga., the beer board meets infrequently, only when a new establishment opens that sells beer; but coincidentally, the city of Trenton, Dade’s County seat, was concurrently considering passing a wine-and-beer-by-the-drink ordinance. So this was one of the few times that Bob’s Little Acre commented on issues, as opposed to squatting in the dirt swilling beer and being quietly subversive.
Beer and Loathing in Dade County: Wherein Bob Comments on the Issues of the Day
By Robin Ford Wallace
When he was a little boy, my nephew Carter had one joke: “Pee-pee.”
To call it bathroom humor would make it seem more rich and multifaceted than it in fact was. What he’d do was tell a long, incomprehensible kid joke; then, just when you had given up trying to figure out what any of the sentences he’d strung together had to do with any of the others, he’d rear back and deliver the kicker: “Pee-pee!” he’d shout triumphantly.
And of course you’d laugh, not just to be kind to the knock-kneed, big-eared kid, but because it really was funny. It was funny because no matter whether the joke was about a chicken, a light bulb or a guy walking into a bar, the punchline was always: “Pee-pee.”
Now Carter has grown into a drop-dead, lock-up-your-daughters handsome young man, and probably his sense of humor has matured somewhat as well. I expect he’d be puzzled as to why doddery old Aunt Bob is telling the pee-pee story now.
I’m telling it because it finally struck me I have a pee-pee line of my own: When I’m writing a Bob’s Little Acre and things start to drag, I tend to rear back and shout triumphantly:
“Beer!”
There. You laughed, didn’t you? It never fails. I can’t explain it, but beer has an intrinsic humor value.
I noticed it early on, as a teenager reading one of the Victorian romances girls favored in those more innocent days. There was a scene where the heroine, a governess of course, had run away to Germany because of the usual tragic misunderstanding. (There was only ever the one plot. The heroine thinks the good guy, whom she loves, is a bad guy, but actually that’s his brother.)
Anyway, there’s our heroine, sitting with her parasol in a German biergarten, sampling the excellent local pilsners, when in comes the hero, his muscled chest practically bursting out of his starched white shirt, and he takes her in his manly arms and says something along the lines of:
“My darling! I have come to take you back to England, by force if necessary!”
And I thought, wait a minute here, what about those excellent local pilsners? We can’t have a love scene while she’s drinking beer! I had the notion of her looking trustingly up into his steady dark eyes and saying something along the lines of:
“Hic.”
It was so hilarious I still laugh every time I read the phrase “by force if necessary.”
To say nothing of the word “beer.” Beer is just amusing. It makes you burp and burps are also funny (though less so than other gaseous emissions), and it’s the same color going in as coming out, which it does so quickly the joke is you don’t buy it, you rent it.
Anyway, I have always found beer a scream and in Bob’s Little Acre I have relied upon it. Here is a sentence from the first Bob I ever wrote, The Great Lies of Gardening:
“To stumble across a perennial blooming in the spring, a year after we’d forgotten we planted it, convinces us there is something in the universe bigger than we are, that drinks less beer.”
This summer I met a man who told me when he first read the column, he said to his wife, “This girl won’t last five minutes in Dade County talking about beer all the time.”
That made me glow with pride. It’s been five years now, and not one group of angry citizens armed with pitchforks and torches has ever darkened my door!
But then it made me sad. No, it wasn’t pitchforks and torches that did for Bob’s Little Acre but poor Bob was dead just the same. These days, with my much heavier news-reportin’ duties, I manage only about one column every three months. What slew Bob was not moral opprobrium but honest labor.
And that’s created a new problem: Without the outlet of the column, humor cells periodically back up and attack my brain, a condition known as BLADS (Bob’s Little Acre Deprivation Syndrome), a tendency to go for cheap laughs in wildly inappropriate situations.
Thus, when you’re reading an article about civil litigation and you come across the sentence, “And how are them hemorrhoids, Mabel?” you know you are dealing with a BLADS outbreak. And if you penetrate into the Ultima Thule beyond paragraph 12 or so of a county commission article, God help you, there’s no telling what you’ll find.
Anyway, I’m not asking for your pity but please just imagine what Trenton’s proposed beverage ordinance has done to my BLADS. I can’t walk into a room anymore where there’s not somebody shouting, “Beer! Beer! Beer!” Sometimes I have to just lie on the floor and twitch.
At the special called city commission on the subject, a man said he bought beer regularly at the Ingle’s but that he knew it was a sin and thus didn’t want restaurants to serve it. To me, he typified Dade’s attitude on the issue. Dade wants to drink but it also reserves the right to feel terrible about it.
It reminds me of Mad Magazine’s spoof of Lawrence of Arabia, a tortured introspective 1960s movie that depicted Lawrence as torn between civilization and bloodlust. The Mad version had Peter O’Toole charging across the desert waving a sword and shouting, “Flesh wounds only! Flesh wounds only!”
I have no real opinion on this issue. I make no bones about liking beer, and especially red wine, but I love Dade the way it is and would hate to see it change.
But whatever’s done, twere best done quickly. If I hear one more person rearing back and shouting “Beer!” I may pee myself.
END
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