May 2002     PAH! #140

Benito's, the venerable, century-old-and-then-some Cuyahoga Falls saloon won't see the light of June.

By then it will be flattened to make room for an office building. Commerce vs. blues & jazz. Which is better for the community? Before you say "final answer," go there on Wednesday and listen to Peggy Coyle sing.

I love the sight of that ruddy gray two-story joint with chipping paint, on the dreary tip of a dead-end street in the shadow of Route 8 North. A few booths, a piano and bandstand that is about as big as my kitchen, and a path of worn linoleum that loo ks shoddy to those who don't know better.

Ah, but those who do know better see not worn flooring but all of the happy feet that wore it out.

And will wear out the next place.

That's Lew's Jazz, a Dixieland ensemble headed by Lew Kunkel, has swung every Saturday night at Benito's for a remarkable 26 years. Steve Bauman, a talented trumpet and sax player, sits in regularly with the band. He is around 40, four decades younger (no kidding) than three of the band's members.

Steve decided the time was right to record That's Lew's Jazz. He funded and produced a recording session on December 7, 2001, sixty years to the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Many of the songs on the CD were popular on that day which will live infamy.

Debbie Roth, whose late husband was legendary drummer Bill Roth, who performed at Benito's, says on the liner notes: "Benito's isn't a place, it's the people. And they'll follow Phyllis wherever she goes."

Phyllis Lay runs the place. And it is true. There will be another Benito's and we will follow her. The worn flooring belongs in the Smithsonian, true, but the magic of the place is the people, lovers of jazz and blues, dancing and conviviality. That something in the air that makes you feel like you're outwitting the indigestible candy of pop culture.

Women have told me that they feel especially safe at Benito's. It's not hard to understand why. You simply can't use "meat market" and "Ira Gershwin" in the same sentence.

We meet friends there, but a few weeks ago, we were disappointed that our friends had to cancel. They had to stay home that night. Sullen, they had to figure out how to tell their small children that their priest had some time before been a molester.

The church scandal was getting serious, affecting the very place that is like a church to me. (Likewise, I don't go to Benito's every week either!) Both celebrate life through song, benevolence an d community. The only difference is my choice of beverage. On Sunday mornings, I stand in line for a sip of wine. On Saturday nights, Jack Daniels.

Before, my biggest beef was getting aggravated over priests whose homilies dragged on. Now, I'm fumi ng because cretin Archbishops and Cardinals, worse than pedophiles, actually set aside sanctuary for the abuse. Call the molesters sick, evil or both, but how do you offer counseling and treatment to those in charge, whose minds weren't clouded by pervers ion, but still nourished it? Now, a million bucks in hush money later, those of us who relish all that is rich about our faith shudder that our favorite priests, who honored their vows, now have to bear the brunt. They get the cold ice pick stares. They face the fallout of disillusion and anger. Many compare this scandale 9-11 in its we'll-never-be-the-same-again gravity. If so, then the local priests are the ones left to sort out a hundred stories of figurative rubble.

They are also the ones who must rebuild the church.

Well I hope a good deal of what ails the church does get flattened like Benito's. I'd celebrate the implosion of Cardinals Law and Egan and those on their staffs who were, as Nazis cried, "just following orders." Who needs 'em.

Andrew Greeley explains why Cat holics remain Catholics: "They like their heritage, their communalism, their sacraments, their sense of God's presence in the world, their stories, their images, their rain forest of metaphors. They should give that up because their clergy fail to be what they should be and because some of their leaders are idiots?"

The future doesn’t rest in the hands of its most prominent leaders anyway. In the vein of "all politics is local," the church’s future is in the hands and hearts and homilies of the foot soldier priests who will, mass by mass, week by week, reclaim what had been foolishly squandered.

When the church gets a little healthy feng shui going, when the evil clutter is cleared, maybe then will we find room not only to move, but to wear out the floor with new dances. Maybe once all the church's cacophony over sexual obsession ebbs, we will be able to, like the one from Assisi, respond to the voice which calls: "Francis, Francis, rebuild my Church, for as you can see it is falling into ruin!"

And we will reconvene. For on late Saturday nights as well as on Sunday mornings, it isn't the building, it's the people.