Sunday Music: Norm's Last Call? Knowing WHAT Love Is (+ Bigwig And "Cheers")

I watched Cheers as reruns. Or, at least, I wasn’t up that late catching them live, to my memory. I’m sure I didn’t see all of them, but I’m also sure something about a group of adults getting together and talking like friends - not at church, not at school, not at anywhere official, especially given the characters backstories, uniforms, and whatever details they gave us, they made an impact.

Yes, this is me saying RIP George Wendt. And, in a way, I need to say RIP Norm Peterson, because - maybe, it was his most memorable role, at least in my mind, as Norm on Cheers.

It’s weird how fictitious characters can exist in your psyche.

I got caught looking at some clips, mostly just looking for fun character quips, when I stumbled across the final scene. I’m positive I saw this before, but probably only as an “only thing on TV” one night (and yes, you are right to wonder why was I watching a sitcom about bars in middle… oh, whatever. Sure. Why not).

I wouldn’t have gotten it though. I wouldn’t have felt it. Not then. Not at those ages. It would have been, literal, at best.

I transcribed the scene below because, even without full context, this is a moment. A real life moment. The writers still kept some jokes, a bunch, actually, but they wanted to make a statement about the underlying foundation of the whole show. I didn’t expect it to hit me as hard as it did.

Before you read it or maybe even remember it - do you think Cheers was a show about love? You have to read this:

How do you NOT judge something? You enjoy it. You’re present with it. You’re not thinking about the time before, or the time later, or whatever other regular life stuff starts swishing and swirling in your head. You love it when it’s right there, right in front of you or under you or behind you, and for half a second even, your expectation meets your reality and you let go of the past.

You know what love is. It’s not your stated identity. It’s in your state of being as much as it creates your state of being.

You may make it all more complicated than it needs to be, but, we all do.

What a closing scene. RIP George, this was a gift. Nobody else could have delivered it like that.

ps. I know, I know - this is a SUNDAY MUSIC POST. so.

I grew up singing - ok, kind of screaming, sometimes - along to New Jersey greats, Bigwig, who covered the theme from Cheers in their very Bigwig way. So fun. And, so fitting.

There’s a picture of me, somewhere in this house, of me at a Bigwig show. Another kid, not even a friend per se, but from our local scene, she took it of me dancing and singing along at an American Legion show or somewhere like that. After she got the picture developed, she showed up at another show weeks or months later, walked up to me and said, “Hey, I got this picture of you that just came out really great, I wanted to give you a copy.”

Again, not a friend, just an acquaintance in the greater/smaller community. I couldn’t even tell you her name or what she looked like at this point, just that feeling of, “You know, that girl who’s here sometimes, with the camera? She took this.” It’s all I have, to memory. Besides remembering the picture AND the gesture.

There are places, and people, that fit into time. They fit around experiences. They make our memories as much as they color them.

One love I’ll come back to, over and over, is that sense of community our weird little late 90s NEPA music scene had. Everybody didn’t know each others’ names, but we all knew the words. Or enough of them. And we weren’t scared to sing along in ways that made everybody else want to join in too.

That was love. That was a stool. That was greater than any petty god-that’s-MY-stool-beef. Norm, I see you. George Wendt, I feel you.

Because that stuff is really, truly, deeply - special. I don’t know how to recreate it almost 20 years on, in my life, but I’m trying. All it takes is watching a scene like this and getting Bigwig stuck in my head (and then laughing to myself about how they had to change the album cover after the Warner Brothers cease and desist) for the bajillionth time.

You always come back to your first loves. Plural. They are so very rich, after all.

Wasn’t there for this one, but hey, might as well have been