Audio By Carbonatix
This week we continue our series on home improvement, courtesy of the Professor Emeritus for Stereotypical Wisconsin Drinkers, Mayor John Hickenlooper and the Wazee Supper Club (1600 15th Street). The Professor would seem an odd home-improvement tutor; he nearly had a heart attack at my home a few weeks back while we were working on the wiring and putting a dent in my beer fridge. With a few beers on board, the inevitable jolts did not hurt nearly as much as they might have, but our clouded judgment was most likely the reason we blew the main circuit to my unit. The Prof started having chest pains as soon as he realized that the beer fridge had also lost power. Thank God for circuit-breakers.
As for Hickenlooper, after his restaurant group bought the Wazee Supper Club several years ago, he wisely left well enough alone. And so this venerable watering hole still has the next greatest thing for your home after a beer fridge, a kegerator, a big-screen TV and a ceiling mirror: a dumbwaiter.
Early in the evening, the Professor retired to the bar for a smoke, which is when he spotted the dumbwaiter that delivers beer to the second level of the Wazee. He ran back upstairs looking like a kid on Christmas morning, dragging us one by one over to the beer elevator (or, as the Mormon Representative’s wife noted, “It would be called a beer Œlift’ in England”) and making detailed plans for installing a beerevator in his new home. Listening to him carry on, I was pretty sure he’d tear down that new house and rebuild it if that’s what it took to get a dumbwaiter in there.
Just think: With a beerevator in place, you no longer have to worry about spilling precious drops of beer as you sprint upstairs to the bathroom during commercial breaks to relieve yourself or throw up. Simply put your drink on the beerevator, make the dash, and the drink will be waiting for you at the other end. You’ll save so much in carpet maintenance that you’ll recoup the cost of redesigning your home in no time.
But the Professor wasn’t just the Institute’s Bob Vila that night; in the process of confirming a long-held Institute stereotype regarding women and glasses, he revealed another new talent. Here’s how it happened: After a few pieces of the Wazee’s incredible pizza, the Professor went downstairs for another heater and a new beer to be sent up on the beerevator. While he was below, the Southern Representative and I cajoled his wife into breaking out her new glasses. The spectacles added another level of attractiveness to this already attractive blond nurse, and we urged her to immediately forgo the use of contact lenses. Then the Professor bounded up the stairs, took one look at her and immediately exclaimed, “Those are hot.” There’s only one explanation for how he could be so in synch with a conversation he had not witnessed: Unfettered by concerns about how to carry beer safely up the stairs, his mind had found formerly unharnessed powers of telepathy.
After a night of pizza and beer, the Institute can highly recommend the Wazee Supper Club for a mind- and gut-enhancing evening. But then, when a beerevator is involved, things are always looking up.
