Sherry in the Piss Missile: Why I Fell in Love with Frasier

image courtesy of Mouse Powell.

I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have a lot of rich friends.

Wait - before I get to rambling, I have to suggest you go to Spotify and put on a playlist called ‘frasier crane’s apartment’ while you read this. Ok- let’s try this again. 

I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have a lot of rich friends.

I grew up around wealthy people. I know folks who are doing well. But me and the immediate circle of people I see most days? We are not rich.

There has also been this air hanging over the past decade that suggests we will never be as rich as the generations who came before us, an air I’m fairly certain is backed by fact.

But in the late ’90s and early 2000s, at least on television, that didn’t seem to be the case. People were thriving. Everyone was buying houses and wearing low-rise jeans. Nobody was fretting over the news, being bombarded by social media, or wondering whether they were supposed to get salmon sperm injected into their under-eyes so they might look slightly more refreshed.

I actually just did this while I was in Mexico. The pain was so sublime that I nearly fainted in the dermatology waiting room. Tony had to hold a cold water bottle against my neck while people practically stepped over me. But my eye bags do look refreshed, so it has all been worth it. 

Anyway, step into the world of Frasier.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, allow me to catch you up to speed.

Frasier takes place in Seattle, Washington, where, even though I know this to be untrue, it is somehow almost never raining. Frasier Crane, played by Kelsey Grammer, is a psychiatrist and radio host. People call into his show seeking advice about their various situations and neuroses.

Frasier is pompous and uptight, uppity and ridiculous, but somehow still really lovable. He loves opera, French food, expensive furniture, and drinking sherry. He looks for any possible reason to pronounce something in its original accent rather than use the regular anglicized version like the rest of us.

He is also somehow always dating a new babe despite having a deeply receding hairline.

Let’s sidebar here for a mome. This is short for “moment,” and I would like to use it all the time from now on, so please tuck that away.

Frasier is not an attractive fella, guys.

He is bald, but also kind of has a mullet? And yet he manages to pull this off as some sort of sophisticated high-society look. I’m realizing as I type this that none of it adds up. But when you’re watching the show, it is all completely believable. You accept that this bald, mulleted psychiatrist is one of Seattle’s most eligible bachelors and keep it moving.

While we’re over here on this sidebar, another thing I cannot quite wrap my head around is that Frasier is a spin-off of Cheers, the show about everyone drinking at a bar in Boston. I certainly would have been drinking at a bar in Boston all the time too if my bartender were prime-time Ted Danson, but don’t get me started.

I have never actually watched Cheers. So here is this character we are supposed to believe is an extremely fancy man, and the last time audiences saw him before Frasier began, he was apparently spending every night sitting around in a neighborhood bar?

Hm.

Okay.

Back to Frasier, as much as I would love to continue dwelling on Danson.

Frasier was filmed in front of a live studio audience, which means there are only so many settings in which the show takes place. This lends a lovely rhythm to Frasier’s life.

He is almost always either at home in his spectacularly decorated apartment, at the radio station speaking in his calm baritone into a studio-quality microphone, or at Café Nervosa, the coziest coffee shop whose real-life equivalent I will spend the rest of my life searching for. Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake captures the vibe but not the decor. I can’t explain it. The search continues.

Frasier has live-in help in the form of the charming and eccentric Daphne, his father's British physical therapist. He is close with both his father and his brother. He drinks exactly the right amount of sherry and wine to celebrate without ever getting drunk or waking up hungover. He orders fancy coffee drinks without checking his banking app first. He goes to the opera. He wears an Armani suit to his reservation at Le Cigare Volant. He owns a three-bedroom condo with a view of the Space Needle.

He is living a life that, unless some very fortunate and strange things happen, I will never be living.

I spend the better part of my year riding around the country in an RV with somewhere between five and seven grown men, depending on how many crew members we can afford to bring out with us. The RV has been torn apart from its original family configuration and professionally outfitted to suit our touring needs.

In that RV, I have a bunk.

Now, I love my bunk. I have a little curtain I can close for privacy. The boys gave me one of the bottom bunks so my dog, Winnebago, can hop in and out without breaking both her legs. I’m not really a “pink” gal, but when it came time to purchase bedding, I chose a children’s pink velvet comforter with gold stitching so I could bring an iota of girlhood into the “piss missile,” as we so fondly call the RV when its black tank is nearly full and sloshing around, producing smells you thought could only come from agricultural endeavors.

I have shower caddies Command-stripped to the walls to hold and organize my things. I have a mount for my hand-me-down iPad with a little arm that pulls away from the wall and adjusts for my viewing pleasure.

My bunk is my castle when we’re on the road.

Never mind the bruise I sometimes get from cracking my head on the overhead light when I wake up in the middle of the night, forget where I am, and sit up too quickly.

The setting I just described is where I first fell in love with Frasier.

The show, not the man. In the Cheers universe, my heart belongs to Danson.

Times were lean, and the only subscription I had was Amazon Prime because it had already been paid for at the beginning of the year.

One night after a show, hurtling toward the next town while tucked inside my bunk, I scrolled around looking for something low-stimulation enough that I might eventually fall asleep to it.

Frasier seemed like the perfect boring show to lull me into dreamland.

Except it didn’t.

Instead, I found myself staying awake for several episodes at a time, quickly becoming invested in the silly plots. It wasn’t that I was on the edge of my seat. I just immediately liked the characters, and even more than that, I loved the world they invited me into.

I wanted to be sitting at Café Nervosa, drinking a “double Kona with cream” with my fastidious brother Niles. I wanted to yap into a studio-quality microphone for a mere three-hour shift, then return home to my massive gallery windows, Chihuly sculpture, and curmudgeonly dad.

Did I want to be Frasier Crane?

Look, I can’t pretend this is cutting-edge television. It is a ’90s sitcom. But I guess that is exactly what makes it so good.

There is the warmth, the nostalgia, the characters, and the almost total absence of real-world consequences. No one is ever in any real danger or trouble. At worst, they are humiliated.

A dinner party goes wrong. Someone gets caught in a lie. Frasier says something pompous in front of exactly the wrong person and spends the rest of the episode trying to claw back his dignity.

There is friction between the characters, but it mostly takes the form of playful banter rather than true conflict. Even when they are angry with one another, you never get the sense that anyone is going to leave for good.

There is something dear about Frasier and his brother Niles, hands down my favorite character, being so fundamentally different from their father while still genuinely loving and enjoying his company. There is something lovable about Roz constantly teasing Frasier for being a pompous dork while remaining one of his closest friends. There is something funny about Frasier always believing himself to be slightly more famous than he actually is, and everyone around him making sure he never gets away with it for too long.

The people on Frasier are ridiculous, but they are safe with one another. They can embarrass themselves, insult each other, ruin the evening, and still show up the next day for coffee as though nothing fundamental has changed.

When I think about it, perhaps this is where my life is actually similar to the world of Frasier.

My life on the road, while not filmed in front of a live studio audience, also moves through a limited number of settings: truck stops, various-sized music venues, and Planet Fitness locations in varying stages of maintenance or decay.

We spend hours teasing and humbling one another because it makes the passing of time more interesting, and because we know each other in ways that most human beings probably should not. Like Roz and Frasj, as I have taken to calling him, my bandmates and I are a pretty solid example of men and women working together and becoming genuine platonic friends.

Of course there is conflict among us.  When so many people live in such a confined space, a little barking at one another is inevitable. But we wake up every day knowing the cast is not going to change. No matter what jokes were made the night before, what tensions arose, or who left the gas cap behind at the last fill-up, nothing fundamental between us has changed.

We are all going to show up for one another.

Partly out of love, and partly because no one wants to be left stranded in Albuquerque, New Mexico.