Student bartenders go where everybody knows their names

One of the lessons 1997 College graduate Deana Lewis learned in her time at Penn was the similarity between a bartender's apron and the collar of a Roman Catholic priest. During her last semester at the University, she took a job behind the bar at the Palladium on Locust Walk, and just like that, people started to tell her all kinds of things. Guys would lean over the brown varnished wood to tell her stories about how their girlfriends were avoiding them that night. Girls leaned over and discussed why their boyfriends weren't returning calls. "It's something about the apron," the former women's basketball starter said. "It makes people feel like they can tell you anything." Other Penn students working at local bars described similar experiences. "Sure, you have a chance to talk to anyone in the place because you're the bartender," Smokey Joe's Tavern bartender and College senior Eric Scott said. "You're part of everyone's group sitting around the bar and you're everyone's friend." But College senior Adam Kelson, who also works behind the bar at Smoke's, cautioned that putting on a bartending apron does not turn the average college student into fabled Cheers playboy Sam Malone. "It's a myth," Kelson said. "It's a fun job and you're around people, but it's really just hard work." "Whoever you are outside the bar is who you are while you're behind it," he added. "People don't become the center of the party because they're a bartender." Rather than tales of late-night adventure, Kelson tells of nights behind the bar where the work is so fast and furious that he is often exhausted by the time he leaves around 3 a.m. But local pubs seem confident that Penn students can handle the pressure, and they stock their staffs with present and former Quakers year after year. "I built this bar in 1983, and I can't recall a time when there wasn't at least one Penn student tending bar here," Palladium owner Dwayne Ball said. And Smoke's bartender Bob Hogan, who has worked there for 20 years, said the bar staff is almost entirely Penn students. "It's part of what the bar is about," he said. "It's a college bar and we've been doing it since it opened in 1961." Hogan, who noted that having students around makes him feel young, said bartending is a great experience for college students. "You grow up very fast doing it," he said. "It's like going to a party every night where you're the only one that's sober." Lewis added that although her role as a bartender made her more approachable, it also gave her a certain distance. "It's funny," she said. "All of a sudden you're not out there, but behind the bar watching everyone and what takes place between people in a social situation."