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The Legend of Betty's Bar

(Author's Note- This post is about Betty's Bar, the dive west of Huntington Park on Nationwide BLVD, not Betty's in the Short North.)

There's a cool nostalgia to an old bar, the kind of place where you can walk through the door and feel like you're walking in the footsteps of the those who drank there long before you. Places like Lindey's, where you can imagine great political debates of the halcyon days of Vern Riffe and Jim Rhodes happening a generation ago. Places like the Golden Dawn in Youngstown, where the walls are seemingly still thick with the sulfur smoke of the steel mills that the workers would carry in on their clothing- a smoke that hasn't billowed in some thirty years. Places like Harry's Chocolate Shop in West Lafayette, where you can just see Purdue co-eds celebrating their footballers National Championnnnnn... (okay, maybe not that last one.) Betty's Bar on Nationwide Boulevard, just west of Huntington Park and East of Bum Town, is not one of those places.

Married McCampus and I ventured into Betty's before last night's Clippers game for a beer, not having any idea what to expect. As we entered, the first thing to become apparent was the lack of air conditioning. Seriously, the Devil was sitting at the end of the bar bitching about how hot it was. They had a few box fans going, but the only task they seemingly accomplished was rushing the stench of stagnant air, stale beer and BO to our olfactory nerves faster.

The second thing we noticed was the nearly naked bartender, prompting McCampus to wonder aloud, "Where are we?" We'd soon learn that we were smack dab in the middle of Betty's Thursday Happy Hour, otherwise known as "Thong Thursday." As the name entails, Thong Thursday is a weekly promotion (piggybacking on the Clippers Thirsty Thursday marketing campaign, no doubt) in which the marginally attractive Grove City High School grad former attendee bar tends in a thong bikini.

Realizing that the Death Valley conditions inside Betty's Bar would leave us feeling Nagasaki'd if we stayed, we ventured onto the partially covered patio. I say partially covered because, while it looks like they intended to roof the entire patio, they seem to have run out of supplies about half way through the job.

It was here, on the patio at Betty's, where the vision appeared to McCampus and me. Dressed only in a white sundress, which so perfectly contrasted her bronzed skin that it was obvious God had created the sun so that it would exist to shine upon her, she approached our table and struck up a conversation. She said words, I'm sure, and we responded in the same vane, yet what she said is lost now beneath the recollection of her effortless smile, impeccable complexion and tastefully revealed side boob.

After a few minutes, she said she needed to return inside to meet up with her friends. And then evaporated into thin air. Was she real, or an apparition brought on by the hallucination-inducing heat inside Betty's Bar? The world may never know.

Ultimately we would continue on to the game, which the Clipmunks won in 11 innings, and to the Piano Bar where, I'm not joking, Joe King joined the band on stage.

Yet we're left to always wonder whether the lovely lady in white was real, or a spirit trapped forever in Betty's Bar, on the outskirts of Bum Town.

-The Godfather