Tracking Norm

 George Went. To be more precise, George Wendt Went. 

He's gone to take a stool at that big bar in the sky. 

For those of you who were not watching commercial television back in 1993, Cheers left the airwaves on May 20 of that year. Forty-two million households were watching back then, and if you missed it, you probably didn't have a lot to talk about around the water cooler the following day. Or maybe you were the kind of person who would just lean against the wall and nod knowingly as other people talked about something for which you had no experience. Or perhaps you avoided the water cooler because that jerk from accounting was always hanging out there and he was always trying to get you to go out to karaoke with him on Friday nights. 

Or maybe there wasn't a water cooler at your job. 

Or maybe you didn't have a job.

What I am suggesting is that there used to be a thing called "Must-See TV." The National Broadcasting Company wanted you to forget any notion you might have had about doing anything but planting yourself squarely in the couch in front of your television set and staring at their two hour block of programming that they believed would keep you there for every following Thursday night because everyone would be talking about it the following day around that allusive water cooler. 

Cheers was one of those shows. It was an anchor of sorts, already established and set up the highbrow antics of its spinoff, Frasier. 

I'm getting away from my original premise: George Wendt passed away last week at the age of seventy-six. George played bar-nacle Norm Peterson. He appeared in every one of two hundred seventy five episodes of the sitcom, and was a special guest star on an episode of Frasier for continuity's sake. Norm was an institution. He was greeted by the patrons and staff of that Boston bar in such a lusty manner that I aspired to having a similar experience. It was the dawn of the nineties, and my drinking days were passing behind me, but I was still envious of the reception: "Norm!" Every Thursday for eleven years. 

So I made it my habit, every Tuesday, to stop by the pizza place my friend owned. I would pull up a stool and anybody who was working there would toss two slices of pepperoni into the oven and bring me a large cola product. "Dave-O" was the cry that went up in that corner of the mall. 

And it was as comforting as you might imagine. 

Now that pizza place is gone. So is the friend who owned it. And George Wendt has left the building. And this earthly realm. He will be missed. Maybe not around the water cooler. He didn't so much stomp on the Terra as hold down that portion of it that was beneath his bar stool. 

Aloha, Norm.