Cigars and Coke with Frasier Crane
Tossed Salad and Smoke in Queens, one October in 2023.
12th October, 2023
Rego Park, Queens, NY
I have never been to Rego Park on purpose. I’m not sure anyone has.
You don’t go to that part of Queens; you wash up there, the way a single thong washes up on a beach, and you stand around wondering what current brought you in. The current, on this particular night, was Kelsey Grammer.
Let me back up.
There is a kind of New York evening that arrives with no announcement, no posters, no press, that turns out to be one of the strangest nights of your life. This was that. The only two corners of the internet that knew it was happening were a brewery called Faith American and a cigar lounge called Havana Dreams, and neither of them, frankly, seemed entirely sure either. There had been zero publicity. None. For a reason I’d later understand and find oddly moving: the SAG strike was on. Grammer wasn’t allowed to promote the Frasier reboot, which was premiering that very night on Paramount+. So instead of a red carpet, he had a humidor in Queens. Instead of a press junket, he had me and my cartoonist friends.
I should explain why I was there at all, because on paper I am the least likely person in that room. I’m an Australian cartoonist who draws for a living and apologises for existing. I am not, by temperament, a man who fawns over celebrities. I once stood next to a Hemsworth at a barbecue and managed only to ask him whether he wanted onions on his hot dog.
But here is the part I don’t say out loud at parties.
Frasier saved my life.
Not in the way people mean when they say a TV show “saved their life,” which usually means it was on while they ate a sandwich. I mean during the pandemic, when -with the exception of 7pm- the city went quiet, and the walls of my tiny East Village walk-up began their slow, patient closing-in, the thing that got me to morning was Dr Frasier Crane. It was running on Netflix then, the whole run, and I would put away three, four, five episodes a day. Three before bed, minimum, the way other people take a tablet. There was something about that warm, jazzy, oblivious world, that very particular fictional Seattle, all sherry and apricot walls and brothers being insufferable at each other, a pre-everything calm I could climb inside and pull shut behind me.
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I got hooked on the nostalgia of it. The whole Frasurbane of the thing, before I knew that was a word other people had also coined in their own lonely apartments. A spin-off from Cheers, of all the unlikely lineages, this fussy radio psychiatrist peeled off from a Boston bar and given his own life two thousand miles away. When I finally got to Boston, I went to the actual Cheers bar like a pilgrim, and they had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Grammer from his Cheers years, younger, with the longer hair, the mullet, frankly. I stood in front of it for longer than a grown man should. It cheered me up.
I’m not too proud to tell you that a piece of laminated cardboard in a tourist trap did more for my mental health that year than several actual professionals.
So when my friend Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, who is a Frasier superfan of a devotion that makes mine look like a passing interest, mentioned there was a thing in Queens, I went. Ie got there before Hilary did, which means that according to the official record, the canonical comic Hilary later drew of the entire evening, the first two things she noticed upon entering were, in order: 1. Cigar smoke and 2. Me and 3. Kelsey Grammer “just hangin out like old pals.”
