Well, I will be hornswoggled. We got tagged, and are official locals at the Front Page.

It was a Friday crowd and we were drinking and watching the dozen or so flat screens to see of the BLM protests scheduled for that evening were real, or some hoax perpetrated to stir up trouble. I have no idea why the Bureau of Land Management has everyone so riled up these days. But instead of that, what we got was a military coup in Turkey. We discussed which side we ought to be rooting for- the secular Generals or the Islamist Prime Minister. We couldn’t decide, and in only a couple drinks it seemed like Mr. Erdoğan was back in Istanbul and the coup may have failed. Or cut one of those Turkish deals with the military. You can’t say that things are not interesting these days, you know?

It was kind of odd, the way it turned out. When the disaster happened and we had to leave our last watering hole, we named ourselves the “Willow Refugees,” and had done a fairly good job of sticking together. Jon-without and JPeter were stalwarts, of course, and before the frantic reveling of the first part of the summer, I was there most evenings. Senior Executive Jerry stopped by, relishing the idea that there are only 25 weeks left in his distinguished government career, and he refuses to do another transition of the Administration next Spring with whoever the new guys are.

Heather and Liz-with-an-S are there when they can, finally on the correct side of the bar where they can enjoy themselves. So, to a degree, the old gang is still alive and kicking, even as the memories of Willow drift further apart.

We had a grand time sorting out the nature of the bridal gift that Liz-S feels obligated to take to a reception over the weekend, and all of us had inputs for Heather’s resume, so she can finally escape the clutches of food-and-beverage wage slavery. We have integrated some new faces as well, Scientist Cindy and Master-Mounter Keith from the Smithsonian Institution. And independent regulars Tennessee Clifden and Key Grip Thomas are among the usual suspects and delightfully eccentric in their approach to life.

Sadly, we have also had some attrition in the ranks due to life’s entropy. Old Jim and Chanteuse Mary retired to Vegas. The Chief is busy doing his White House thing and hasn’t appeared since Willow closed. John-with-an-H really prefers Lyon Hall, but he has been having problems with his back and doesn’t get out as much as he used to. The Missile Twins have adopted a new place for their Wednesday outings, the Spanish-themed SER restaurant. It makes sense, since it is closer to their house and requires no complex parking like the Front Page.

The owner of our new place is George, and he runs two full-tilt food-and-beverage enterprises in town. He bought one of the two Front Page watering holes- the name came from the original location down by Dupont Circle, close by the Washington Post, the newspaper we love to hate. Hence the name of this Arlington semi-dive, which opened in an attempt to expand before the then-owners gave up and sold both. There is a regular birth and death cycle in the restaurant business, and in fact Heather mentioned that the Hard Times bar in Clarendon and Café Asia in Rosslyn had just been shuttered.

We normally see George-the-owner at happy hour, which is when our greenbacks go the furthest toward getting us down the road to the last couple stops before pleasant oblivion. Then he heads off to his other place, which I think is The Exchange, which bills itself as the District’s oldest sports bar, and has a host of local fans downtown.

George has always aimed toward embracing the lower tier of Washington nightlife, eschewing the phony-baloney power bullshit that is so much the essence of this self-important city, and with locations near the White House and in posh Ballston, he gets the more fun crowd. And devoted locals who like his happy hours.

George is a big guy with olive skin, Greek lineage, I presume, with dark thinning hair and aan infectious grin. He was , wearing a Hawaiian print shirt in teal, sunglasses strung around his neck on a Croaker lanyard. Over time, we have become a group that he will greet personally to ensure we are happy and will keep coming back. I saw his hand appear in front of me, and I turned away from my well vodka and diet tonic and shook it with enthusiasm.

Normally George will just do a quick grip-and-grin of recognition, and I am always afraid he has spied me puffing on my nicotine vaporizer and will formally ban it. This afternoon, the heat outside made us grateful to be in the air-conditioned bar, and the lingering daylight streamed through the plate glass windows.

George looked us up and down. At Willow, the angle of the bar at the front was our turf, and Old Jim always arrived in plenty of time to secure it for us. Woe betide the day-drinker who lingered on HIS stool. Things could get ugly until order was restored. We called it the Amen Corner, and it was home for nearly a decade.

There are no corners on the bar at The Front Page; instead, the dark wood is truncated where the corners would have been. That enables another couple of paying stools to be placed there, and makes it a bit easier for the servers to rush by with the heaping platters of Chicken wings and tenders, or the red-hot piles of nachos smothered in melted cheese and sour cream headed for hungry drinkers.

Anyway, George looked up and down and gestured broadly at us. “The South Side Gang,” he said with a certain air of majesty, like he was a king dubbing some nobles. We looked blankly at him, and he smiled.

“At the Exchange, I used to have a bunch of regulars who always congregated at the same place on the south side of the bar. They came in every happy hour, just like you guys. I called them the “South Side Gang.” They lasted almost a decade, right up to the point they became hard-core alcoholics and needed to be taken away.”

We all raised our glasses in salute, basking in the idea that we had survived the transition from one thing to another thing. That is important these days.

George smiled. “Of course, I don’t think some of you have ten years left, but we will do what we can.”

“Amen to that,” said Jon-without, and we went back to drinking.

On the beveled edge of the south side on The Front Page, closest to Wilson Boulevard. Just like we belonged there.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com