Who knew picking out the seating for a patio could be so complicated. Margaret Meade would have had trouble with this job. It isn’t bad enough you have to pick out the style of furniture; that’s the easy part! Steel, wicker, plastic, wood, it really doesn’t matter, as any bid comes out to be the same price. The real problem comes in that you have to decide how the lay of the land the furniture resides. Pick out chairs too tall and too scattered, and the girls don’t like to sit on your patio. Pick out all couches with thick comfy seats too close, and the guys get goofy. Somewhere in between, you get the sweet spot that satisfies the battle of the sexes, and makes the girls happy to sit by the fire and talk about relationships, and makes boys happy to sit just outside the rail, quaffing a brew, watching the HD sports report and eyeing the gals. Throw in a preacher, and you soon have the recreation of the American nuclear family.

Sans the whole style issue of the furniture, the problem is how and what do you lay out the patio? Do you use dog pack dynamics, which really work well for guys, or do you get a bit more squishy, and go Oprah, and talk it all out, like the girls would. Drawing on anthropology and reindeer game social dynamics, who gets invited and how do you get multiple social groups interacting on the patio, round the fire pit? That is the million dollar question.

A couch seems like such an easy choice. Go to any bar in town with a patio and you’ll see lots of people sitting on them. But back up in time and you see a very different dynamic as to how all the people assembled on that couch. Put one guy on the couch first and he gets the whole thing to himself. Lone wolf’s scare the girls and no red blooded guy is going to sit down beside another guy. Scoot to the far side of the couch, cross your leg to the away side and maybe you get a desperate couple willing to sit on the opposite side. Three guys on a couch just doesn’t happen.

One girl though, will never sit on a couch by herself. 1) It seems so selfish to take up the whole couch to yourself and girls are good about those social precepts. 2) A girl by herself is a target, and soon enough, two guys are on either side of her. Good girls don’t put themselves in this position. But hey, good girls go to heaven, bad girls get to go everywhere. Still, single girls at a bar are a rare breed. Most eligible girls travel in packs, two at a minimum, but usually in packs of four or more. Take the same couch and all four girls crowd in without hesitation. Four girls on a couch are imposing to almost any guy. We’ll take four girls any day.

The fight comes in when couples walk in and look to the firepit for some real estate. Walking in, the guys take the lead and dog-pack sociology is the rule of the day. Who can stare harder, gets the best seat. Get two dogs who stare equally hard though, then the contest reverts to girl rules. For a guy, what happens here is very socially opaque, as a glance or two, a few words are exchanged between the two girls, but a social dynamic no less volatile transpires, and the social hierarchy is set and maintained. The guys just do as they’re told, foretelling what is going to happen later when they are married. The women are far smarter. The guys think they are in charge, but in reality, they are just puppets. Girls rule. Ask any 50 year old guy.

Maybe if Tiger had followed a few simple rules of patio social dynamics, he wouldn’t be in the world of hurt he is now. Listen to your wife, and do as you’re told. Every married guy knows this rule. It is the only thing that explains all the poor saps you see at the Mall holding their wife’s purse, while she is off somewhere shopping. Even Tiger doesn’t get out of this one.

Call me Eddie. I know, I know, Edward is newly popular, what with vampires and all, but Edward is a tad pretentious, and besides, I’ve been charged with writing about an Irish bar, not some place in London, or some other outpost of culture and breeding. It still baffles everyone I know, how me, a son of the mountains of Appalachia, is the one writing about Irish pub culture, what with my four Irish nationals as partners. Surely one of the four, all who know their way around a pint of Guinness, should be the ones telling this story. I’ve never been to Ireland, and the closest I have ever been to anything Irish is some bar in Dallas, wearing a logo tee with the “kiss me I’m Irish” stamped on the front. It’s not exactly a resume that exudes confidence in knowledge of the “old sod”. “Eddie boyo, you’re the one with the computer, and besides, you’re the one that needs to learn about the Irish. You write”. Just like that, I am a writer.

I could go on and on about my favorite subject, me, but there is a story to tell, so work must intrude. The ‘Wolf is a local’s bar. Sure, the Queen is welcome anytime, that and her three knuckle headed sons (I always liked Andy best), but this is a place for the common man. Not common, the way my Aunt Edna used it, as in “that woman is soooo common”, but common in the way Oscar Wilde meant it, which is to say all the rest of us not born with a silver spoon in their mouth. The business plan is the acme of simplicity. Great food, cold beer and wine, the best of spirits, music and entertainment, and all at a most reasonable price and in a place that's for the whole family. What’s not to like? Everyone can use a bargain.

The bar started life as a bank. I wouldn’t read too much into that, except to say, we have the safest food locker in all of the Phoenix metroplex, and we ripped out the teller cages and made them into the satellite bar, so we could serve drinks through the openings. Hugh, one of the boys, and an engineer, had a plan to keep the pneumatic tubes, so we could deliver drinks through them to the outside patio. Aimee, our lady manager, even came up with a nice cozy to pad the glasses for the launch up the tube. The test runs were a disaster. Guinness and Harp don’t do well with a 5g landing, and the clean up took days, so the tube got scrapped. Besides, exploding beer in the “tube” just had the wrong connotation, especially now that the Irish are on speaking terms with the Brits.

My real problem comes in that my knowledge of the Irish could be summed up on the back of a box of Lucky Charms and consists of nothing more than cliches, lies, and half truths. That, and the fact I was always getting into boyhood fights with Paddy, who lived down the street, and later became a tough man who later went to prison. Sort of dampened my whole enthusiasm for learning about different cultures. Somewhere, there has to be a manual on how to be Irish. Maybe the internet has a tutorial on what it means to be Irish, something that would explain why there are ten times more Irish living in America than there are in Ireland. I mean, who stayed behind?

So that is my job for the next little while, finding out all about the Irish, and all about Irish pubs and bringing that information to you. Along the way, maybe I will come up with an explanation of why green is so integral to the Irish persona. To paraphrase Barack though, “c’mon” does everything have to be green? How about mixing in some other color, say blue or yellow.... just not orange! So grab a pint, sit back, and enjoy the ride. It is going to be one great story.

Call the Roll: Urban slang for when it feels like everyone you know is at the pub, so you could do a roll call like back at school.