Transcript for Episode 10: Diane Chambers Is an LGBT Alley

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Cheers episode “The Boys in the Bar.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Carla:  So what are we going to do about these guys, huh? 

Diane:  Carla.

Carla:  What? 

Diane:  You're not prejudiced against gays, are you? 

Carla:  Well, I'm not exactly crazy about them. I mean, I get enough competition from women. 

[audience laughs]

Carla:  I'm telling you, if guys keep coming out of the closet, there isn't going to be anybody left to date, and I'm going to have to start going out with girls.

[audience reacts uneasily]

Carla:  Ew. 

[audience laughs]

Diane:  Carla, you don't have to worry about me. I like my dates a little more masculine than you. Not much, but a little. 

[audience laughs]

[Cheers theme song plays]

Drew:  You are listening to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast about episodes of classic TV shows that deal with LGBT themes. I'm Drew Mackie.

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin. 

Drew:  And if that intro didn't tip you off, today we are talking about Cheers, specifically the episode "The Boys in the Bar." Glen, why are we talking about this episode today? 

Glen:  This is one of a few episodes of Cheers that deal with gay issues. This is in the first season, and it's the episode where because Sam embraces a former friend and colleague who has come out of the closet the other men in the bar are worried Cheers will become a gay bar. So it is another episode about straight panic. 

Drew:  Straight panic, and actually features at least a real gay character, too—I guess three real gay characters, sort of. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. And maybe a couple fake gay characters. 

Drew:  I am glad we are talking about this episode because it's a pretty well-written piece of TV, and the way it deals with gay themes is especially good for something that aired in early 1983. Yeah, for something from this period, it's basically everything I could want from a gay episode of a sitcom. 

Glen:  When you said you wanted to do this show, I was insistent from the get-go that we talk about this episode. It was the one episode of TV I really wanted to talk about. 

Drew:  Sorry to make you suffer through the other nine episodes of garbage that we've talked about. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's just trash. Well, I sort of had a bit of a moment of panic yesterday before I sat down to re-watch it wondering—now having watched nine other classic episodes of gay TV—if this episode of Cheers would lose its luster, if it would come off as tone deaf, if it just wasn't as good as I remember having now seen other sitcoms deal with it. I was very, very worried, but spoiler alert: I still love it.  

Drew:  Yeah. It's great. It's a great perspective on Diane Chambers, who is Shelley Long's character. And in the same way when we did the Simpsons episode, I'm like, "I'm so excited to talk about The Simpsons," I'm so excited to talk about Shelley Long because she's a very important person in my life. I don't know her, but I feel like she's in my life. 

Glen:  It's because you live with me, and I am Diane Chambers. 

Drew:  I feel like I am Diane Chambers, too. 

Glen:  Oh, my god. We can't both be Diane Chambers. Is Thurman Sam? 

Drew:  I think we should write a movie called Too Many Diane Chamberses. No. That doesn't work. 

Glen:  Diane's Chamber. 

Drew:  [laughs] That's porn. 

Glen:  Whatever. 

Drew:  That's porn. Cheers, if you somehow don't know, was—

Glen:  If you don't know what Cheers is, turn off this podcast right now. I don't want my voice in your ears. 

Drew:  It's weird, but [it] ran for 11 seasons on NBC in 1982 to 1993. My joke is that—I like to say that it's like Wings, but instead of an airport it takes place in a bar. I don't know if people understand that I'm making a joke when I say that, but I think it's funny. I suppose it's worth pointing out that this aired during the first season, which was not something that people really watched when it was first on. I was looking it up. This episode when it was first broadcast was the 41st most-viewed show that week, which is to say that no one was really paying attention to it. It got renewed by NBC anyway because it got nominated for some awards, and based on the renewal and the Emmy nominations, it started pulling better ratings in the summer when they were doing reruns because that's where most people found it for the first time, and it slowly climbed its way up from there. It was even worse overall for the entire season. It was the 74th most-watched show, which means that it was pulling worse ratings than both Trapper John, M.D., and That's Incredible. 

Glen:  It's worth mentioning that the first season of Cheers is sort of a weird beast and not really like the other seasons once it started gaining popularity. And because this was before the days of Netflix and Hulu, people who saw second season and beyond didn't really have a way of seeing early Cheers until it was in syndication. But this first season is very socially aware, and each episode really plays out like a short play—like a lot of sitcoms do, but—

Drew:  It's Norman Lear-esque, you could say. 

Glen:  It's Norman Lear-esque, but there's just a stage quality to it that some of the other sitcoms we've watched didn't have. 

Drew:  It's like a two-act play because it literally is just two long scenes back to back. 

Glen:  Yeah, and it does deal with dark themes. There's an episode in the first season where Diane loses her childhood cat, and that brings up all these old emotions from when she was a young girl and her parents were getting a divorce and she contemplated suicide. Having that cat and caring for that cat were what kept her from killing herself, and that's pretty dark for a sitcom in 1982. 

Drew:  Especially considering where Diane Chambers would go in future seasons, which is—I guess there's a reason I say this is one of the best perspectives we ever get on her, because it's everything I like about her and everything that people find irritating about her in the best possible way. 

Glen:  On one hand, that is just Shelley Long's rise in her career and her just becoming a bigger thing, and it's also because they introduce Frasier, and Frasier sort of took away the best parts of Shelley Long's character. He got to be the one who was introducing culture to the bar, and all she had going for her was that she was in this weird relationship with Sam Malone. 

Drew:  Yeah. I suppose we should just—so everyone can understand Diane's dynamic on the show, she was introduced as a potential love interest for Sam. They dated. They didn't date. It was an on again/off again thing. She eventually started dating Frasier, and then Shelley Long herself didn't like having Kelsey Grammer on set—probably because she was aware that his presence was taking away from what her character was supposed to do—and then she left the show after season five to go make movies. Let's talk about the movies on the back end of this. There might be a reason we both relate to both Diane Chambers and Shelley Long. 

Glen:  Well, the first season especially has Diane Chambers bring a sort of Pygmalion, My-Fair-Lady-in-reverse quality to the show. Sam is the ruffian, and she is the cultured one thinking she sees potential in him and in this episode especially looks at Sam and sees her lessons on being socially aware and the humanities paying off or rubbing off on him. 

Drew:  Just because someone will point out that we didn't say this if we don't say it outright, the name of the episode "The Boys in the Bar" is a reference to the movie and play The Boys in the Band. It was a Broadway play, became a movie, is on stage now—it's weirdly current. Also, the original staging of it was directed by the guy who was the guest star in the Mary Tyler Moore episode. We talked about that. 

Glen:  Yeah, yeah. Ugly one. 

Drew:  [sighs] God damn it, Glen. This episode is also about Glenn Burke. Have I told you about Glenn Burke before? It's one of my favorite trivia footnotes in American pop culture. 

Glen:  How does he spell his name? 

Drew:  Two Ns.

Glen:  Mm. Wrong. 

Drew:  Yeah. He was a professional baseball player for the Oakland A's and then the Dodgers, and he got injured, I think, and then quit pro baseball and then came out in 1982. So the portion of this episode that deals with one of Sam's teammates coming out as gay is allegedly inspired by the Glenn Burke story, and that is an interesting story just because he was one of the first pro athletes to come out in that way. He was quietly out to all his teammates when he was on the team, and some people say that no one cared; some people say that some people did care and were jerks about it. He also invented high fiving. Remember, I told you this? 

Glen:  I think you may have told me this, and I just didn't care, so I forgot. 

Drew:  You should care. It's such a weird thing. Okay. So people probably gave high fives before 1977—like your parents, when they were younger, probably gave or at least saw high fives being given. However, there is not a single documentation of high fives being given or the term "high five" until after 1977 when Glenn Burke, playing for the Dodgers, gave one to Dusty Baker because he had hit a homerun, was rounding the bases, and Glenn Burke put his hand up, and Dusty Baker reflexively slapped it in a teammate camaraderie way. And that was recorded on cameras, and people noticed it. And as near as we can tell, that is the first time we know someone gave a high five in the way that we give high fives now, and it's just a very weird thing to think about. You gave a high five the last episode to Emelie. It's just a part of our—

Glen:  I was trying to slap her. 

Drew:  Well, I guess you failed. But it was a really good high five. You didn't biff it, so at least good for that. It's just kind of mind blowing to think that not only did these things not exist before 1977 but also that it was a gay man who was at least halfway responsible for doing it. Then after he retired, it became kind of his thing. He lived in the Castro, and he gave high fives as a greeting to his fellow neighbor gays. 

Glen:  So you're saying the high five was the original gay handshake as opposed to a blowjob. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Yeah. So whenever you see straight people giving a high five, point out that they're appropriating your culture and that—

Glen:  And I'll slap them. 

Drew:  I guess Glenn Burke was also black, so I guess we're probably appropriating his culture, as white gays tend to do. But, yeah. This episode was directed by James Burrows, who is the most prolific TV director ever, probably. He directed all but 35 of the 275 episodes of Cheers, and then he also directed Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Phyllis, The Hogan Family, Dear John, Night Court, Wings, Frasier, Friends, News Radio, Caroline in the City, Dharma & Greg, and Will & Grace [laughs]. I'm reading off this list, but I wrote it as "Will & Grave," which I think is a much more interesting show. I guess that's Will & Grace with a goth Grace. 

Glen:  I kind of want to write that comic book now. 

Drew:  Please. Write that comic book. It's weird that we haven't done a Jimmy Burrows episode yet. But the episode was written by Ken Levine and David Isaacs who are co-producers on the show, and also have ginormous bodies of TV work, including many of the things I mentioned in the Burrows sequence. Do you know, Glen, that Ken Levine is also a director sometimes and directed a little movie called Mannequin 2: On the Move? 

Glen:  I have mixed feelings about Mannequin 2: On the Move. 

Drew:  I just like that Mannequin has had such a weirdly enduring presence on this podcast, by which I mean it's come up twice and that's two more than it might have come up. I don't know. 

Glen:  It probably should have come up eight or nine times and you just edited them out. I wouldn't know. 

Drew:  You would remember talking about it. 

Glen:  I'm always talking about Mannequin. 

Drew:  I wouldn't edit out you talking about Mannequin. I just edit out you talking about things that make you sound dumb. Yeah. The episode was nominated for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series but lost to the pilot for Cheers. It did win a WGA Award and a group called AGLA—the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Entertainment Industry—awarded the episode for realistic depiction of homosexuals. I do not believe that AGLA exists anymore. I couldn't really find, but nice that they said something about it, right? 

Glen:  Depends what the trophy looked like. 

Drew:  [sighs] Details from this period of history are spotty at best. Historical records are spotty at best? Is that the line? Oh. Sorry. So we're at the cold open. 

Glen:  It's meaningless. Let's skip it. Oh, my god. Do you have a stretched metaphor? I thought about making one, but I was like—

Drew:  What was the stretched metaphor? 

Glen:  Something about putting the cover on the pool table. 

Drew:  Oh. Okay. Interesting. So real quick, the cold open has Harry Anderson of Night Court fame—he was recurring on Cheers as a con man named Harry, right? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  And he basically cons Sam and Diane into giving him free drinks because he's a jerk who always does this. But when Sam comes into the back room where Harry's playing pool, he's like, "Harry, how did you get in here?" and he's like, "Oh, I came in—"

Harry:  I came in the back door.

Sam:  I don't have a back door, Harry. 

Harry:  Well then, it's my secret. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  And if you're talking about not wanting to appear gay, the idea of having a secret accessible back door that you don't want other people to know about—I didn't think that was—that wasn't my read on the situation, but I actually wrote in my notes. Glen, do you have any thoughts on this interaction? I guess you don't. I guess I—

Glen:  I did think about that, but I was like, "That's a little juvenile." I'm just kidding. We're a very juvenile podcast at times, but I'm just so excited to talk about the actual content of the episode. 

Drew:  Yeah. I agree. So it is meaningless. Scene one, we're in the bar. Diane is returning to work from five hours in a sensory deprivation tank, and there is a book release party happening in the bar. Do you have any thoughts on the fact that she spent five hours in a sensory deprivation tank? 

Glen:  No. It just opens up with poking fun at Diane for, on one hand, being—I don't know—not woke enough but—it's poking fun at Diane for being one of those eccentric intellectuals who would be in a sensory deprivation booth but not be immediately aware that there is a book release.  

Diane:  Never have I felt more aware and sensitive to what's going on around me. 

Man:  Excuse me. 

Diane:  Oh. Excuse me. You see, the whole idea is that there's a total lack of sensory input. What the hell's going on here? 

Cliff:  It's a book promotion party. 

Diane:  How can that be in a place where no one can read?

[audience laughs and ohhs]

Sam:  My old roommate Tom Kenderson wrote his own autobiography, and I'm in it. 

Diane:  Oh. So this is a press conference to announce the arrival of yet another thick-headed jock epic. Well, there must be confetti all over the Library of Congress, huh? 

[audience laughs]

Sam:  Hey. For your information, this one happens to be different. It's got a lot of good stuff in it. 

Diane:  Like what? 

Sam:  Well, I haven't read it, actually.  

Diane:  Oh. Didn't want to wear out your lips? 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  So it's just making fun of Diane before she gets to be a star in this episode. 

Drew:  She's the hero of this episode. She's the heart of this episode. 

Glen:  Well, I'd say Sam is the heart of this episode. 

Drew:  Oh. Interesting. Okay. Well, we can argue that out. I feel like they wanted to—they had to have a way to remind us that Diane Chambers is kind of a fruitcake and she has weird ideas about stuff and only a batty weirdo would want to pay to spend money in a sensory deprivation tank. But yeah, she's not immediately aware that there's a book release party, and it is for Sam's former teammate Tom Kenderson, who in addition to being Sam's teammate was also his roommate and—

Glen:  Mm-hmm, and best friend. 

Drew:  —best friend, and he wrote a book called The Catcher's Mask. 

Glen:  He's a catcher. 

Drew:  Oh, I didn't think about that either. Oh, my gosh. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's a gay baseball player, and he's a catcher, and Sam's a pitcher. 

Drew:  Right. Ohhh, my gosh. I did not think about that. You're totally right. Okay. That's actually a pretty good joke. 

Glen:  The show gets the setup out of the way pretty seamlessly. Everyone seems to have a story about Tom, like Sam shares their wild escapades, Coach talks about Tom playing pranks on him. And when he enters, Carla immediately is in love with him. 

Tom:  Hey, wow. What a to-do, huh? 

Sam:  Huh? How about this? 

Carla: [clears her throat] Hey, Sam. Sam?

Sam:  Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Carla Tortelli, Tom Kenderson. 

Tom:  Carla, nice to meet you. 

Carla:  [breathing heavily] I love you, Tom Kenderson. Here. Here's my number and a couple of quotes from past lovers. 

[audience laughs]

Tom:  Uh, thank you, Carla. 

Sam:  Carla. Come in, sweetheart. 

Carla:  Sam, he breathed on me, Sam. I'm a whole woman. 

Sam:  Coach—

Glen:  And he's pretty much put forward as a man's man—a real Sam Malone, one might say—and Sam embraces him as such, like, "This is one of my former best friends. We are basically the same person," which will fall flat on its face when he stands up with Tom in front of the press and a reporter asks, "So how'd you feel about Tom coming out?" 

Drew:  He has not read the book. 

Glen:  He has not read the book. 

Drew:  He was supposed to have read the book. He did not, and Diane is speed reading through the book and actually seems to get to that point in the book before the announcement has happened. 

Glen:  Diane gets a lot of good jokes in about how people in this bar can't read. 

Drew:  Right. I want to say a quick thing about the actor playing Tom, Alan Autry. Do you—

Glen:  Name's familiar. Did I sleep with him? 

Drew:  Most assuredly, you did not. I know him from being on the Carroll O'Connor series In the Heat of the Night, which was a rural southern cop procedure that I don't know why it was on in syndication at 2:00 p.m., so if I had a minimum day I would come home, and before you got to cartoons you had to watch an hour of In the Heat of the Night. He was on that. He also became the mayor of Fresno from 2000 to 2008—Christian homophobe, Republican, argued in favor of Prop 8, did not want gays to be married. So apparently, playing a gay character in this episode did not give him empathy for what it's like to be an actual gay person. 

Glen:  So it's a real scandal that we slept together. 

Drew:  Yes. It really is. He's not—I don't necessarily find him to be super attractive, as attractive as Carla seems to find him in this episode. He's much less attractive now and also has given up acting to appear on The 700 Club. That's basically his TV. Yeah. I know. Glen made a barf face. So, yeah. Sam realizes he's gay, he's not joking, this is not another famous Tom prank, and—

Glen:  Immediately ducks out of Tom's embrace. They had had their arms around each other, and Sam immediately drops his arm and—as we have covered on this podcast before—straight histrionics. 

[audience laughs]

Sam:  Is this some kind of joke, Tom? 

Tom:  I wanted you to read the book, Sam. It's still hard for me to tell people from the old days. 

Reporter:  Sam, you were saying that you two used to do everything together. 

Sam:  No, no, no. No, no. No, you misunderstood that. No. As a matter of fact, people used to come up to me and say, "Hey. You two are best friends, and yet you are completely different." 

Diane:  Sam! Sam, there's an emergency in the back room. 

Sam:  What? 

Diane:  I found holes in the pool table. 

Drew:  She gives him the parts of the book that he should have read. Sam's in disbelief because the idea that this person he knows could be gay is a complete violation of his idea that he's an inveterate skirt chaser as he remembers him, and Diane points out he was overcompensating, that he—

Diane:  Here. Here, in this paragraph right here. Want me to read it? 

Sam:  No, I'll read it. Right there? 

Diane:  Yes. 

Sam:  "From the outside, my days in baseball seemed glorious. But the greater my fear became of my true sexuality, the more I compensated with typical Don Juan promiscuity." 

Diane:  Does that explain it? 

Sam:  I don't know. I've only read it once. 

[audience laughs]

Diane:  He was denying who he was. He's no longer doing that. 

Sam:  I should have known. I remember sitting in a piano bar with him, and he requested a show tune. 

[audience laughs and applauds]

Glen:  Which when someone comes out, that is the bottom line, like, "Don't read things into things. This situation is not yours to understand. This is what it was. It's now this." 

Drew:  Right. Yeah, that's really tough for people. 

Glen:  Yeah. And I think in other episodes we've talked about people want to make someone's coming out about them. And I just want to be very clear that unless I was married to you and you're a woman that I've had children with and shared a life with, I don't owe you anything when I come out because it's not about you. And I've had people in my life who gave me shit about not coming out to them in the—quote/unquote—right way, and I don't know what the right way is. I did it on my own timetable. 

Drew:  Wait. How did you—what was the wrong way? What's the example of the wrong way? 

Glen:  Well, I've had people say it was the wrong way if I did it over email instead of a phone call or in person, or when I did it, and it should have been a bigger event—like I should have taken them out to drinks. And it's just like—absolutely not. 

Drew:  Yeah. That sounds like a huge pain in the ass. 

Glen:  Yeah. Though to my freshman-year roommate's credit, when I was ready to come out to him—he's also gay—he ordered a pizza and put on Hello, Dolly!, and we stayed up until 4:00 a.m. watching musicals and eating pizza, and he just let me say what I needed to say. And that is a right way to come out. 

Drew:  That's good. Yeah. 

Glen:  But again, it was when I was ready to do it, and it had nothing to do with anyone else. So Sam's hurt in this situation, while understandable—and he does quickly move past making it about him. That's my rant. 

Drew:  I'm just running through my head about people that I've had that conversation with and people I haven't had that conversation with. There's a lot of fucking people from high school or even early college or family members that I don't have real relationships with where I have never had that conversation, and I don't know how they feel about it. But the internet made that a lot easier, and posting these Gayest Episode Ever podcasts on Facebook like "This is what I'm talking about," I'm not going to restrict it so only certain people can see this because I actually want people to listen to it. But I skipped over any sort of formal introduction to my homosexuality because I don't care. Yeah. 

Glen:  Yeah. You eventually get over caring. 

Drew:  Yeah. Just google my name. Gay stuff comes up. I don't really care. 

Glen:  So I understand why you said you thought Diane was the heart of the episode, but I think she's the moral compass of the episode, which is different because this is not personal to her. And it's in this scene where she makes the argument to Sam that this isn't about the issue of homosexuality; this is about a friend he has who is close to him who needs him in this moment.

[audience laughs]

Diane:  Sam, I do understand why you're upset. You're afraid that now people will think that you're—

Sam:  Nah, I'm not upset. I'm not upset! It's just that guys should be guys, Diane. That's all. 

Diane:  Sam, look. Your friend Tom's out there. He needs your support now more than ever before. He really hasn't changed. He's still the same guy you used to tinkle off balconies with. 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  And so Sam goes back out into the bar, embraces Tom, is like, "You were there for me when I was an alcoholic. I'm going to be here for you now," and he embraces him again in front of the press. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. The last photos to be taken of them together. 

Glen:  The last photos to be taken of them together, which will lead into this second half of this episode. But this moment, I think, is doing what we have wanted other episodes that we've talked about to do, and they have made—even though this is a one-off character, they have made the gay plot integral to the main character of this show. It's about him. It's about him coming to terms with something and making a choice about someone who is important to his life. 

Drew:  Yeah. I got to say, a different show, it might have been all about Sam's process of trying to reconcile his discomfort around homosexuality with his feelings towards his friend, but he gets there in 90 seconds, honestly—it's like that conversation with Diane, to him going out again. I even like that the way he lets Tom know that he's still welcome in the bar is a very Sam Malone way. He asks him, "Are you still a gin and tonic man?" And that is all he really says, and Tom understands that he doesn't have to leave. He's still welcome here. And it's a very nice moment, and it's a very Sam Malone way of addressing the situation. And then he goes out and puts his arm around him again and says, "It's okay." 

Glen:  Yeah. The show doesn't shy away from that dumb-in-hindsight moment of Sam saying he thinks guys should be guys. He says it, Diane makes a horrified face, and then he quickly finds the better path. And even that line you said, referring to him as a gin and tonic man—he's acknowledging that he is still a man and being gay does not make him less of a man, less of a friend, less of a baseball player. So yeah, this show accomplishes in one act what a lot of shows spend their whole episode doing, which allows them to move on to the second act. 

Drew:  This moves along very quickly, and it's a very lean plot. There is not really a B-plot. There's an act one and an act two that are tangentially related. By act two, it's the day after. The story was run in the local papers. Everyone's reading the local paper. And Tom does not show up again. He's not a character. He doesn't show up again in another episode. He does not show up again in the second half of this episode, which is sort of surprising. This half is all about something Norm mutters at the end of the first act, which is something about Vito's Pub, and as everyone's looking at this nice picture of Sam and Tom in the paper together, Sam asks Norm, "What did you mean by that?" 

Sam:  Hey. Norm. 

Norm:  Mm-hmm?

Sam:  What was that you said yesterday when they were taking pictures, about Vito's Pub?

Norm:  It was nothing. Don't worry about it. 

Sam:  Talk to me, Norm. 

Cliff:  Norm, I think it's best he hears it from us. Go ahead. Tell him the story. 

Norm:  All right. You heard of Vito's Pub? 

Sam:  Yeah. It's a gay bar, right? 

Norm:  Yeah. Didn't used to be. Used to be a great bar. I hung out there myself. 

Coach:  Wow. What a story, Norm. 

[audience laughs]

Norm:  I'm not finished. 

Coach:  There's more? 

Norm:  One night, Vito lets a gay group hold a meeting in the back room, right? Gays for the Metric System or something. 

[audience laughs]

Norm:  Story got in the newspaper, gets a lot of attention. Next thing you know, Vito's Pub turns into Vito's Pub [said salaciously].

[audience laughs]

Norm:  All the regulars left, Sammy. Out went the oars and the moose heads; in came plants and ferns. Ferns—[shudders]. Just don't want that to happen to Cheers. That's all. 

Sam:  I don't believe that stuff. Bars don't turn gay overnight. 

Norm:  You don't have to believe me. I have scientific proof. Cliff? 

Cliff:  It happened. 

Norm:  See? 

[audience laughs]

Glen:  This is a very odd episode for Norm. He's really the one who comes off looking the worst. 

Drew:  It would have made more sense for me to have Cliff be the one because Cliff objects to things a lot and likes to correct people, and Norm is just kind of—especially as the show goes on—he's lazy. He doesn't care about anything. He just is—he wants to be left alone and do his thing, which kind of makes sense why he'd be worried about the bar going gay. But whatever. This is just the version of Norm we're getting in this episode. Two quick things. Number one, I can never point out to people often enough that George Wendt, who plays Norm, is Jason Sudeikis's uncle. And once this is pointed out to you and you're looking at Jason Sudeikis—who I think is a fairly good-looking guy—you will see flashes of George Wendt in there for just a second. From a certain angle, he'll look just like George Wendt. You'll be like, "Ah! George Wendt!" It's like he's possessed by the ghost of George Wendt. George Wendt is not dead. 

Glen:  No, he is not. 

Drew:  Number two, fern bars were a trend in the late '70s [and] early '80s. They were upper-scale, cleaner yuppie bars that were trying to attract female clientele where either they wouldn't be hit on as grossly or at least the men who would be there would be on their level and maybe they'd actually want to consider dating these guys. They weren't gross barflies like Norm and Cliff. And they don't really exist anymore, but one of the first ones was the first TGI Fridays before it became a chain. And now the only vestige we get of fern bars is Bennigan's and TGI Fridays, and I guess sort of Applebee's—any place that has those faux Tiffany lamps and ferns, I guess. But I feel like we should just open a fern bar because it's been enough time that we can bring it back and people would like to listen to Fleetwood Mac and drink fancy cocktails. 

Glen:  I mean, that's my night right there. 

Drew:  Yeah. Let's do that. 

Glen:  Back to Cheers. 

Drew:  Sorry. 

Glen:  This is the point where Diane blows Norm's mind by telling him—

Diane:  The fact of the matter is, there are gay people in this bar all the time. 

Norm:  Eh, no way. I haven't seen a gay guy in here in ages. 

Diane:  Oh, I see. You can spot a gay person? 

Norm:  A mile away. 

Diane:  And there are none in here right now? 

Norm:  Nope. Looks like a straight crowd to me. Too ugly to be gay. Too ugly to be out. 

[audience laughs]

Diane:  Well, I wasn't going to say anything, but you've gone so far in proving you're open-minded, Norman. There are two homosexual gentlemen in this bar at this moment. 

Norm:  Come on. Get out of here. 

Diane:  They told me they were gay, that they appreciated what Sam had done. That's right, guys. They're here right now, and you don't even know who they are. 

Glen:  Which does send him in a bit of a spiral trying to figure out who the two gay men are. And of course the show offers him two obvious candidates—one man in a very trendy, gay mustache, and another very attractive blonde guy in very tight jeans. 

Drew:  I noticed that was well. Yeah. He's very good-looking. I looked him up. I'm 90 percent certain that the blonde guy is an actor named John Furey who is the final girl's boyfriend in Friday the 13th Part 2, and the guy with a mustache is an actor named Michael Kearns, who's one of the first openly gay actors from this era. Also, he came out as being HIV-positive kind of a long time ago, back when there was very few celebrities who were open about that status. And I found him on Facebook, and I sent him a message last night like, "Hey. I think this is you, but can you confirm that this is the character you played?" He has not responded to me as of the recording of this podcast. So if I get it wrong, I'm sorry. But I like at least that one of the potentially gay-seeming men in this episode is played by an actual gay man—maybe. They ask for light beer. 

Glen:  They ask for light beer, which is, like, the clencher. 

Drew:  But most beer is light now. Most people—six-packs are Coors Light, Bud Light. Straight men don't object to drinking light beer. I hate light beer. I think it tastes like garbage. 

Glen:  I mean, whatever. Beer's beer sometimes. I'll drink whatever. Light beer is great for speedball, which I've mentioned in this podcast before. 

Drew:  You would actually drink Coors Light? 

Glen:  Oh, yeah. 

Drew:  Ugh!

Glen:  And Tecate. I don't know if Tecate is a light beer. You just want to drink beer that's as close to water as possible because you're not going to chug an IPA. 

Drew:  No. It's too good to chug. 

Glen:  You want to savor. Yeah. Light beer is great for chugging. 

Drew:  I guess I'm past the point of chugging in my life. But I've never been invited to one of your speedball parties, so I don't know. 

Glen:  Do you want me to throw one? 

Drew:  Kind of. 

Glen:  Okay. So the men of the bar argue about what to do in this situation. 

Drew:  Did you notice that Cliff accused Norm of being gay because they've never seen Vera? 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  It's funny that they'd already pointed out this early in the first season that they'd never seen Vera, and you never see Norm's wife Vera. She's always offscreen. 

Glen:  Well, you said that James Burrows directed some Mary Tyler Moore, so he was probably aware from the trope from that, because you don't see Phyllis's husband ever. 

Drew:  That's true. Yeah. 

Glen:  So I think it was just a thing that was in sitcoms, like, "Let's not pay an actress to be this person. Let's just reference her offscreen." Yeah. But things get sort of loud. A third potential gay comes in. Someone comments that it's an orgy [laughter], at which point Diane's like, "If anyone would like to have an intellectual—"  

Man:  Sam, I'm telling you. Within a month, there's going to be wild music and guys dancing and exchanging phone numbers. 

Diane:  You know, Sam, you've got some really great friends here. You've gone out of your way to make a bar where customers can feel like they belong, part of a family, and now they're walking out on you. 

[barflies chatter in protest]

Diane:  Quiet! Perhaps we should step into the back room? Anyone having something intelligent to say can follow me. 

[audience laughs]

Diane:  Fine. Anyone with a two-bit opinion!

[barflies chatter in agreement]

Drew:  What do the potential gay guys think is going on at this point? Because there's no one else in the bar, and literally, the bar empties except for Coach who's behind the bar. Everyone else goes in the back room and just leaves them there. It's really like, "What the fuck is happening?" They have to be—anyway. 

Glen:  They do acknowledge that this is the weirdest bar they've ever been to as this episode wraps up. Once in the back room, everyone tries to mob mentality sway Sam's opinion to get him to throw the three gay men out of the bar. And if he does not do so, they threaten to take their business elsewhere. 

Drew:  I will say, at least—everything everyone says is complete garbage, and Diane Chambers reacts to it appropriately, pointing out that they're being—I think "sniveling bigots" is the term she uses. The only person whose argument really holds water is Carla, and it's a very self-centered argument. She says if the bar goes queer, then—

[audience laughs]

Carla:  No emotional appeal here, Sam. This is a purely intellectual argument. You let this bar go gay, you're going to have to hire male waitresses, right? That means that I'm out on the street, and I'm not going to be able to feed little Sammy Tortelli. 

Drew:  So she's not wrong, but her reasoning is very selfish. 

Glen:  Well, she's wrong in that she's like, "This should be a very fact-based discussion and not bring emotions into it," and then she, of course, tries to name her unborn children after Sam to tug at his heartstrings. 

Drew:  Wait. We didn't talk about—earlier in this scene she says that she doesn't like having gay guys in the bar because it's competition for her, like she has enough trouble getting dates so if more guys come out of the closet she's going to have to go lesbian in order to get a date. Then she looks at Diane and makes a "yuck" face. It's actually not a bad moment. But it would not be unreasonable to think that Carla Tortelli is a lesbian because there's that vibe about her. 

Glen:  Well, Diane's comeback for it is perfect. She's like, "Don't worry. I like my lovers more masculine than you. Not much." [laughter] "But a little bit more." There are a lot of good jokes in this episode that we're not talking about, but it is an episode of Cheers, and so it's enjoyable and well-written, and you will laugh. 

Drew:  Right. Sam is also worried that if the bar goes gay there'll be fewer single straight women coming to Cheers—like, wait. When did heterosexual women start going to male gay bars as a thing? Was that not a—Sam obviously doesn't know about that phenomenon the way he's talking about it. 

Glen:  I don't think that was a thing for a very long time. 

Drew:  I tried googling to see when did this become a thing, and it's actually very hard to find. 

Glen:  I feel like it was in the 2000s. I think it took a long time. Quote/unquote—fag hags would be a part of gay bars at some point in the '90s. Maybe earlier. I don't know. Wasn't going. But it becoming a thing for just straight girls on their own to go because they aren't getting hit on—

Drew:  Mm-hmm. Is that a West Hollywood specific thing? 

Glen:  No. I think it was a Chicago Boystown thing, too. I think any big city—maybe not a big city. Any city with—whatever. Never mind. 

Drew:  I did try to look it up. Sam seems to be won over by these arguments that he should just ask the men to leave, and he actually—even though Diane's protesting through this entire moment, he asks Diane what [they] should tell the boys, and Diane says "Hi. We're a group of sniveling bigots, and we don't appreciate your kind here." And everyone's like, "Yeah. That sounds good. I like that response." I did look up—like, wait. Could he legally do this? Yes. I just wanted to make sure to find out what the legal standing was. Fun reminder, the Federal Civil Rights Act does not include any provisions for people regarding their sexual orientation. A lot of states have passed laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination, but Massachusetts did not pass theirs until 1989. So yeah, there would not have been a single law in place that would have punished Sam Malone for asking these men to leave his bar solely on the fact that they were gay. Fun. 

Glen:  Luckily, he changes his mind because they're such nice gentlemen. 

Sam:  Hi, fellas. 

Men:  Hi. 

Blonde Man:  Hi, Sam. What's going on? 

Sam:  Well, I got a little bit of a problem. Maybe you can help me out. See, I'm the owner of this bar. 

Mustache Man:  Yeah, we know. We read the article in the newspaper. 

Sam:  Oh, right. Right. 

Mustache Man:  That took a lot of guts. 

Blonde Man:  It really did. 

Hoodie Man:  So what's your problem?  

Sam:  As a matter of fact, I don't have a problem. Coach, get these guys a beer on the house. 

Coach:  Right, Sam. 

Norm:  What's the matter Sammy? You chickening out on us? 

Cliff:  Yeah. Sammy, Sammy, Sammy. I thought you always had more character. 

Sam:  Hey. Listen. Those guys are staying. Anyone else wants to leave, that' fine. 

Norm:  Okay, Sam. You know what kind of bar this could turn into. 

Sam:  It's not going to turn into the kind of bar that I have to throw people out of. 

Diane:  That was the noblest preposition you've ever dangled. 

[audience laughs]

Drew:  That is a beautiful line. Everything about that exchange is perfect, and that is—[sighs]. That is why Cheers is an amazing show, and that is why I'm glad that this is the episode we're talking about today. Sam leaves the room for like five seconds—

Glen:  To collect himself. 

Drew:  Right. And the barflies' solution is to act like it's closing time? 

Glen:  Yeah. They pretend the bar is closing at 7:00 on a whatever day this is. They all leave the bar. The three potential gay men leave with them, and then moments later, the—quote/unquote—straight barflies return, celebrating their outsmarting of the evil homosexuals. 

Diane:  What's going on here? 

Norm:  Well, we just get [sic] rid of your friends, Diane. 

Cliff:  Yeah. It was all Normy's idea. The man's a genius!

[barflies grumble their agreement]

Diane:  Norman, I think there's something you should know about those guys. 

Norm:  Yeah? 

Diane:  They're not gay. In fact, one of them tried to hit on me tonight. 

Man:  What? But you said they were!

Diane:  I said there were two gay men in the bar. I didn't say who they were. They, along with myself, have had a wonderful time watching you make complete idiots of yourself. Yeah. The guys I was talking about are still here. 

Drew:  And I think the line is "Right, guys?" And these two men who have in fact been in the background the entire time—I went back and re-watched the episode a second time just to see if they have any lines or anything. They do not. They're not named in the credits, either. So there's a host of minor barflies, some of whom are recurring and some of whom are not, and these two that are standing on either side of Norm lean in and kiss him on the cheek, and everyone finds this uproarious. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. I mean, Norm is a good sport about it, says one is better than Vera. I don't love this moment, but in an episode of television I do love, it's fine. It's whatever. I feel like one of the guys who kisses him played a principal in something that I watched. 

Drew:  I tried—so I was looking up to pick out two of the three potential gay men, but it's really hard to—I tried to find out who these people were, but they're all doughy white men who were middle-aged back then and kind of all look the same in the first place. Also, it's been 35 years, so none of them look the same now, so I'm like—[scoffs]. 

Glen:  I want to say Head of the Class. I want to say he was something on Head of the Class. But maybe I just want to talk about Head of the Class. 

Drew:  Did Head of the Class ever do a gay episode? 

Glen:  I'm going to research that right now—[makes robot noises]. 

Drew:  What is—

Glen:  That's me researching it. 

Drew:  I don't think that's the noise you're—no. I can see—on paper, it might sound like "That's kind of icky, and it's kind of jokey," and it is kind of a dumb surprise at the end. So earlier in the episode, Norm makes this statement that he knows there are no gay people in the bar because the crowd that's in the bar that day is too ugly, which goes back to that stereotype [that] gay men are attractive—which you said you were in favor of during the Seinfeld episode. The more I think about it, that's kind of a sucky stereotype because there's people who are not going to fit that stereotype who are no less gay, and that's just going to make life harder for them. But whatever. I like that in the end the actual gays are as schlubby and doughy and unremarkable as any of the other barflies. So that's a good moment. We wouldn't necessarily lean in and kiss a straight man on the cheek as a character—do you do that? 

Glen:  No. 

Drew:  Okay. 

Glen:  I'll kiss dogs. 

Drew:  Oh. Yeah. But not on the mouth. 

Glen:  Yeah, no. No. Did I pause too long? 

Drew:  Yeah. It's a nice subversion of expectations if you haven't seen this episode before, and I like that everyone tacitly learns a lesson. And then, bam! That's the end of the episode. They kiss Norm, and there's not even something that plays over the end credits because Cheers didn't really do that. 

Glen:  Nope. This episode achieves—this episode is great because it does two things. It makes the gay issue personal to one of its main characters, and as soon as it achieves that, it then takes that moral decision Sam has made and puts it to the test in a grander scale—he has now made this decision that he's supportive of his gay friend, but is Sam supportive of gay people? And so it takes that personal link and what people say is the reason that gay rights have achieved what we have in the past however [many] decades—because we've come out of the closet and everyone now knows a gay person, and so it has personalized the issue. And so Cheers personalizes the issue for Sam and then confronts him with the situation where he has to then make the decision: Is this just a decision that I am comfortable with with my friend, or is this something that is now part of who I am? 

Drew:  You're right, and it actually solves the problem of what we talked about in the Simpsons episode where John Waters's character tells Homer, "Now just every gay man in the country has to save your life, and then you'll be okay with them, too." In this instance, every other gay person doesn't have to have a personal connection for Sam. He gets the point and is like, "Okay. They're okay, too. This is the decision I'm making on it," and that's good. 

Glen:  Yeah.

Drew:  I like the idea that Sam is not comfortable around gay people, and he doesn't ever really get super comfortable around them because it's not his thing. He doesn't know very many of them. It's a new concept for him, and it's not—we don't see a whole lot of growth there. But the fact that he's not comfortable around gay people is not used as an excuse to discriminate against them, and that is something people have a lot of problems with with a lot of various groups where it's like "You are weird because X, Y, and Z," and that's fine. You don't have to like any particular—you don't have to be comfortable around any particular group, gay or otherwise, but once you make the decision that you're going to use that discomfort as an excuse to penalize them or segregate yourself from them, you're being an asshole. 

Glen:  Your misery shouldn't be their misery. That's a self-imposed thing you're doing. Whatever. We also only lightly touched on the fact that this is about an athlete coming out in 1983—a professional athlete in baseball. We have not come that much further. 

Drew:  Glenn Burke, I guess, but he's not super well-known today and also didn't play for that long. And I don't know—I think people who probably remembered him would have found out he was gay, but I'm not sure how big of a national news story that was, really. 

Glen:  But I'm just saying, it's not a regular thing. 

Drew:  No. 

Glen:  An out gay professional baseball player would still be a big deal today. 

Drew:  Right. Yeah. Totally. Can we talk about—

Glen:  Shelley Long? 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  Yeah. This episode is pretty cut and dry, and obviously we liked it, and there's not a lot to discuss. But there is a lot to talk about with Shelley Long. 

Drew:  She's a twit. A lot of the time she's on the show she's a twit, and you don't see very much of that here. I love that she is a twit. I love that she—the thing I love most about her is that she is someone who has it in her head that she deserves better and strives for these things, even though she very frequently displays none of the ability to do those things properly. She's a fuck-up. She fucks up a lot, and that never stops her from trying again and her belief that she's an artist, she's an intellectual, and this is the way she wants to live her life [laughs]. And I feel like everyone on the show is constantly batting her down, and I feel this is probably something you and I both relate to, to an extent, and probably—gay and otherwise, a lot of the creatives I know here in Los Angeles have a little bit of Diane Chambers DNA in them. Not literally [laughs]. 

Glen:  Ugh. Yeah. And again, I always have to separate Diane Chambers seasons four and five of Cheers from the concept of her character originally. There's a nobleness about her in those early seasons that is treated as a joke sometimes but is also earnest. She actually does believe that the pursuit of academics and introspection and thoughtfulness are things that improved her life, and she wants to bring those concepts and those pursuits to the people of Cheers, and it sometimes comes off as condescending, but her heart is in the right place. And yeah, she may think that she's better than them, and that's sort of where she falls flat, because she always has to get taken down a peg or two. But what great hero has not been taken down by hubris? But yeah, she's a great character. I don't know. I just have a lot of love for her. 

Drew:  I feel like it's not a character—there was a certain sort of high-minded feminist character that existed in a lot of other shows when we were kids that you don't really see very much anymore. I feel like most of them are probably derivative to some extent of Diane Chambers. I was trying to think of a modern example, and the closest I can come is maybe Britta from Community, which you have not watched Community, but kind of Alison Brie's character from Community, too. It's almost like the Diane Chambers personalities got separated into two separate versions. But from the idea of failing constantly, it's Gillian Jacobs's character, and from the idea of being wide-eyed and a little naïve but optimistic, it's Alison Brie's character. So there's that, and—

Glen:  I was going to say Pearl from Steven Universe. 

Drew:  She definitely is. She actually—yeah. 

Glen:  No spoilers for last night's episode—this is not our Steven Universe podcast. But no—again, people who don't watch Steven Universe, it is a cartoon show about a half-alien boy who's raised by three lesbian space rocks. 

Drew:  One of whom is a Diane Chambers who is fancy and needs to be taken down a peg very often. 

Glen:  Yeah. But she's just someone who believes there are right and better ways to achieve things and does her best to live her truth in that way and is crestfallen when other people don't see that. 

Drew:  Right. Perhaps the greatest Diane Chambers character of all is Shelley Long herself, whom we do not know but we know a lot about. It's interesting to look at what Diane's role was on the show, and then see Shelley Long as someone who maybe thought she deserved better than what she was getting—especially towards the end of her character arc when they'd changed it in a way that you don't like and I don't like and she probably didn't like—and tried to step away from Cheers and have a film career. She's kind of the object of—

Glen:  Ridicule. 

Drew:  —ridicule, now, for doing that. She walked away from a successful show where she was a very important part of the show, and the show turned out to be fairly successful without her with Kirstie Alley. And the idea is that her movie career was nothing and doesn't amount to anything, and I don't really think that's true even though—

Glen:  I mean, don't say that in front of a gay man who loves Troop Beverly Hills because they will slap the teeth out of your face. 

Drew:  I really like Troop Beverly Hills. I think that's such a good fucking movie. Was not a financial success, I don't think, and critically is—the Rotten Tomatoes score, not great. 

Glen:  What was a success financially, Drew? 

Drew:  [gasps] I almost called it Outrageous Business again. Outrageous Fortune, which we watch—we ended our Cinco de Mayo with a screening of Outrageous Fortune, which is the 1987 female-female buddy comedy starring Shelley Long and Bette Midler, which is great. It's a fairly solid, dumb '80s comedy. 

Glen:  It has a spy plot and everything. 

Drew:  Oh, it's so good. I was thoroughly entertained by it. And people are shocked to find out that this movie Outrageous Fortune made more money than Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which is a buddy comedy that also came out in 1987 but started two men. And Planes, Trains, and Automobiles was a movie I could not get away from. My brother really liked that movie, so he rented it a number of times when we had rental nights. But also, it was just on TV a lot. So I've seen it in part dozens of times, and I don't love it. I realize that it was a big deal, but I think people think about that as just being a very successful '80s comedy. It made $49.5 million. Outrageous Fortune made $52 million. It was, by a few million dollars, a greater success. Even today, whenever there's a female-female comedy that comes up, there is a fucking insipid debate about whether people have any interest in watching these. 

Glen:  We should also mention that Outrageous Fortune was an R-rated female comedy. They swore, they had casual sex, there was violence, they were mean to each other. There is just a different bar of success for female comedies that does not exist for male comedians and their movies. Men are allowed to fail, and women are not is sort of the moral.  

Drew:  And even when they succeed, we will still find a way to try to say that they failed, like Shelley Long, who five fucking seasons on a hit show—and then she made some movies. Some made money, some did not, some are ones that people care a lot about today, and I don't know what the end of this is other than we should all be like Shelley Long and—

Glen:  Try. 

Drew:  —try and do stuff that people might not expect you to do. And then, when you fuck up, just do it again because it doesn't really matter what people think, and you'll find your own way to do it. 

Glen:  Like this podcast. 

Drew:  Like this podcast! Oh, my gosh. This podcast. 

Glen:  Speaking of—

Drew:  This is our last episode. Can you believe we did 10 of these things? 

Glen:  Yes. 

Drew:  Yeah. It feels like it just took so much of your—

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  Okay. Well, sorry. This is the last episode of our first season. We are going to do a season two. I don't know when it's going to launch, but the idea was—this was just kind of a side project. We were like, "Let's do 10 episodes and see if anyone cares," and some people have cared. 

Glen:  At least three. 

Drew:  [laughs] At least three people. We've had five guests, at least. At least five people drove across town to our house to record with us. But people have reached out to me on social media and told me they enjoyed it, and I really appreciate that. We will do a season two. We have someone idea of what episodes we're going to do. We don't know when it's going to launch. For people that know about me from my now former podcast We Are Not Young Anymore, I'm actually going to start a new movie podcast with Tony Rodriguez who was our Golden Girls guest. We're going to start a movie podcast this summer. So this is going to go on hiatus, and I'm going to work on getting that off the ground. But at some point, we're going to come back to this, and I look forward to you guys listening to that. Hopefully, you'll still like it. 

Glen:  And in between, we'll do some bonus episodes. 

Drew:  Yeah. We got some cool stuff planned—some fun one-offs and maybe some TV shows that don't quite fit the criteria of a classic sitcom and some interviews with people who can speak to gay—can speak to television and also gay. Those will be cool. It’s not going to be completely dormant, but—yeah. Thank you for listening, everybody. 

Glen:  Thanks. 

Drew:  Glen.

Glen:  Yes, Drew? 

Drew:  In this subsequent hiatus, where can people find out what you're doing? 

Glen:  They can find me on Instagram, @BrosQuartz—that's B-R-O-S-Quartz, again, a Steven Universe reference—and on Twitter @IWriteWrongs—that is "write" with a W. Am I anywhere else? Oh. DeadGayArt on Tumblr, which I don't really update that much, but maybe I will now that I'm not doing this. 

Drew:  Yeah. Again, I'm sorry it took up so much of your time. This has been a great imposition on you. 

Glen:  Where can people find you, Drew? 

Drew:  Well, I was also going to say, Glen is also going to be a guest on our new movie podcast.

Glen:  Oh, yeah. I don't know what I'm going to talk about yet. 

Drew:  Yeah. I'm sure it'll be a terrible episode. 

Glen:  Care Bears II: The Next Generation. 

Drew:  We have the power to veto. You can find me on Twitter @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E. You can find this podcast on Facebook @GayestEpisodeEver. You can find this podcast on Twitter @GayestEpisode. And then you can just find us in all of our social media links on our homepage, which is GayestEpisodeEver.com. 

Glen:  Bye forever—question mark? 

Drew:  No. No. If you want to subscribe to us, please do that on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or on SoundCloud where we're based—SoundCloud.com/GayestEpisodeEver. And even though we're going on hiatus, please give us a rate and review. I know I said last time "Someone write something really funny. We'll read it." The rate and reviews we got in the past week have been very nice and very earnest, and I thank you all, but no one made a dirty joke. So make a penis joke, and maybe we'll say that in—

Glen:  I don't want to say that. This is a clean podcast. 

Drew:  It's not. It's not—it's a gay podcast. So make a penis joke. We'll read that in one of our bonus episodes. The first person to make a penis joke in a rate and review, we'll read that. Now, I think that's everything I have to say. Glen, are we done?

Glen:  Bye forever—question mark? 

Drew:  Bye forever? See you in a few months. Season over!

[“Hey Hey Guy” by Ken Laszlo plays]