Readers and writers blog

So there I am, looking for bartender blogs and not too discouraged by a web comment from a fellow searcher, Mark Hensler, that good ones are hard to find. Because I have found a good bartender blog. Right near the top of Google.

It’s written by a guy named Joe — yeah, Joe the bartender, shades of the old ‘Jackie Gleason Show.’ And Joe owns a bar in Seattle, right near a hospital from which a lot of his patrons drop in — an interesting bunch that includes surgeons, interns, nurses. And Joe has a life partner named Walter with whom he has adopted twin babies. And Joe writes the juiciest details about his patrons’ lives — the plastic surgeon who’s having breakup sex with a surgery intern, the chief of surgery who’s an alcoholic, the resident physician who’s in trouble because a baby was kidnapped on her shift. And what’s more — get a load of this — Joe names names.

God, this is too good to be true.

And, of course, it is too good to be true. Because any idiot except me — any idiot, that is, who watches nighttime soap operas — would have known that the weblog The Emerald City Bar is a complete fiction, a spinoff from the ABC series ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’

Even I got the picture when it slowly crept up on me, joyous as I was at finding this site, that Seattle Grace was a strange name for a hospital and that the Peyton Place antics of the bar patrons seemed, well, a bit extravagant. A trip to Google for ‘Seattle Grace’ brought me back to my senses.

And Joe seemed so nice.

There are two other blogs spun from ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ one of them another fake blog — is that a ‘fog’? — called The Nurse’s Station, written by a fictitious ‘Debbie’ as in the subtitle ‘Debbie Does Seattle Grace,’ and another entitled Grey Matter that does in fact tell you it’s from the writers of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ telling you what’s happening on the show.

The fact is, there are plenty of blogs attached to soap operas. TV Guide has one, as do the shows ‘As the World Turns,’ ‘All My Children,’ ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and so on. But all the ones I could find are done by writers summarizing episodes or by some of the stars involved or by fans themselves. Some of these blogs draw a lot of comments, mostly from readers who seem to have some sense of reality.

The Emerald City Bar also draws a lot comments from readers, but some of them, quite frankly, don’t seem to understand that it’s all stories, not real life. Well, I’m told that a lot of soap opera fans — let’s be charitable — don’t care to make the distinction.

I suppose ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ isn’t a soap opera in the traditional sense — it’s on at night, and it’s weekly rather than daily. But any show that you can call ‘a continuing series,’ building on the story and characters from preceding episodes . . . it’s a soap opera.

I guess Mark Hensler was right. He was looking for bartender blogs that would be the equal of waiter blogs he enjoyed — Waiter Rant (see our blogroll), The Insane Waiter or I Serve Idiots — but couldn’t find any. Heh, heh, and I thought I was so clever because I had gotten one. When all I got was soap in my eyes.

Our blogroll won’t be carrying it, but here is the link for The Emerald City Bar. We can’t list it because we’re not sure it was the best I could find, just the first I could find. I’m sure there are others out there.

I’m just afraid to look.

– Sid Leavitt