Corner Bar

When you overfill a draft of Guinness, and a fluffy ring of foam slowly works its way down the pint glass, that's called a "bishop's collar. " Barkeep lingo, don't you know. No word yet on how the bishops feel about this, but if they happen to stop by the Bishop's Collar, a laid-back corner bar/sidewalk cafe in Fairmount, they needn't worry about sloppy tap work perpetrated in their name. "This is the one place you can't get a bishop's collar," says Megan O'Neill, who co-owns the place with Jeff Keel, allaying concerns about the pouring skills of her bar staff.

Taras W. Sawchyn, 34, manager of a family-owned corner bar in Kensington, died Friday of injuries he suffered in a one-car accident on Aramingo Avenue. Police said Mr. Sawchyn was alone and heading south on the Aramingo Avenue ramp that connects to Delaware Avenue about 11:30 p.m. when the 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass he was driving mounted the concrete median, then slammed into an Interstate 95 abutment. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The results of an autopsy were pending, authorities said.

In the Technicolor glow of stained-glass poultry, Rose Parrotta is stomping her feet to Johnny Cash, reliving her wilder days in the apple orchards of New York and filling her Happy Rooster with an infectious energy boost. She welcomes friends to her little restaurant in a playful headlock, leading them around the thick brass bar pole. Even diners unknown to this diamond-studded dynamo get a blast of her charisma. She preens like Vanna White beside her ambitious chalkboard menu, discoursing on everything from her hand-scribbled boutique wine list ("people want forward fruit, but I won't give it to them!"

Charles "Poppy" Sharp, 67, the fiery Camden civil-rights leader and founder of the Black People's Unity Movement who first challenged the city's power structure and then became a kingmaker in the city's mayoral elections, died Sunday morning at Virtua-West Jersey Hospital Camden from complications of cancer and diabetes. In his final years, both Mr. Sharp and the BPUM were part of the establishment. But in the late 1960s and the 1970s, "Poppy," as he was widely known, was the man who most forcefully brought civil rights and 1960s-style black activism to Camden.

There is self-service for gasoline at the pump, soda at the fast-food joint, and groceries at the supermarket. Next time you're at a corner bar, how about you get your own beer? Tir na Nog, a pub in the Phoenix, at 16th and Arch Streets, recently rolled out a two-tap self-service beer bar that seats six to eight people, the first of its kind in the city, and among the first on the East Coast. "Everybody wants to be a bartender," manager Ken Merriman said Wednesday night as patrons pulled their own brews.

A patron was shot and killed inside a corner bar in Point Breeze early today, police said. The victim, in his early 20's, was pronounced dead at 12:23 a.m. inside the Holiday Cafe on the 1800 block of South 18th Street, police said. He had been shot in the head. Investigators were seeking a description of the shooter and trying to establish a motive, police said. Contact the Inquirer Online News Desk at online@phillynews.com or 215-854-2443. Follow the Inquirer at www.Twitter.com/PhillyInquirer and www.Facebook.com/PhillyInquirer

You slip a C-note to a quiet guy sitting at the corner bar, the bar with the melted ice-cube windows and the red neon Schlitz sign and the barstools with the ripped vinyl seats, and you whisper, "Blue Note in the seventh in Atlantic City. " The next day you come back and he slides an envelope under your wet beer glass. "He came in at 15-to-1," he says. He doesn't smile. You do. Can it ever be the same? Can well lit, orderly and, for cryin' out loud, legal betting ever replace the neighborhood bookie?

Frank Cascerceri is playing David to Bruce Springsteen's Goliath, and he doesn't even have a slingshot. All Cascerceri has is a corner bar in the Northeast, a 50- by 20-foot joint where 50 people is a crowd. But the rock star and two music companies have come down on Woody's Pub with a federal lawsuit because the bar dared to play such Springsteen numbers as "Pink Cadillac," "I'm On Fire" and "Dancing in the Dark" last summer without a license. The songs were played by a disc jockey who works the bar on Tyson Avenue near Brous four nights a week.

At least eight people were injured, some seriously, when a man opened fire early today with a shotgun inside the Hadfield Lounge in Southwest Philadelphia, police said. A witness said two men had quarreled outside the corner bar, at Hadfield and 57th Streets. After one of them entered the bar, the other followed him inside and began shooting about 12:30 a.m. There were about 30 people inside at the time and more than eight may have been injured, police said. The identities of the attacker and most of the victims were not immediately available.

Mary Jo Deitch - M.J. for short - has come a long way since Lou's and Pete's. Has gone a long way too. Lou's and Pete's was a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood bar somewhere in Bridesburg. You couldn't call it a corner bar because it wasn't on a corner. It was in the middle of the block, which is why it was "so tiny. " It was where M.J. would while away Thursday nights sipping Seagram's while her husband-to-be tried his darndest to shoot a decent game of darts. Deitch still spends Thursday nights in Bridesburg.

A patron was shot and killed inside a corner bar in Point Breeze early today, police said. The victim, in his early 20's, was pronounced dead at 12:23 a.m. inside the Holiday Cafe on the 1800 block of South 18th Street, police said. He had been shot in the head. Investigators were seeking a description of the shooter and trying to establish a motive, police said. Contact the Inquirer Online News Desk at online@phillynews.com or 215-854-2443. Follow the Inquirer at www.Twitter.com/PhillyInquirer and www.Facebook.com/PhillyInquirer

If I were telling this tale as a joke, I'd say it's the one about a bar, a priest, and the Last Rites . The last is the title of the debut production at the brand-new, 96-seat Waterfront South Theatre. It opens Friday at Fourth and Jasper Streets, a block off Camden's Broadway. "It's life, it's art - and it's how cities repair themselves," playwright Joseph Paprzycki says, welcoming me into the light-filled lobby of the tasteful, three-story structure. Outside, workers install railings on the front steps; on stage, designer Robert Bingaman applies finishing touches to the Last Rites set. It evokes the corner bar that stood on the site in 1967, when the nearby New York Shipbuilding Corp.

There is self-service for gasoline at the pump, soda at the fast-food joint, and groceries at the supermarket. Next time you're at a corner bar, how about you get your own beer? Tir na Nog, a pub in the Phoenix, at 16th and Arch Streets, recently rolled out a two-tap self-service beer bar that seats six to eight people, the first of its kind in the city, and among the first on the East Coast. "Everybody wants to be a bartender," manager Ken Merriman said Wednesday night as patrons pulled their own brews.

Rachel Marcelis had a smile for everybody. The 22-year-old barmaid at Fat Pete's, a corner bar in Wissinoming, had a rare gift. "She made everyone who walked in feel instantly welcome in a neighborhood that is not always so welcoming," said pub owner Dennis Gannon. On Tuesday, her night off, Marcelis dropped in at the bar at Torresdale and Devereaux Avenues to say hello to friends. She had just had her hair done up in a bun and wanted to show it off. As she left just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, a man in a red Mustang pulled up and called her over.

Reid's wrong about Americans Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made some insensitive and imprudent remarks and the Republicans are falling all over themselves, like a gaggle of geese, to make political hay over it. I suspect their outrage is motivated more by partisanship than belief that Reid is a racist. However, there remains one unsettling aspect to this saga. Reid must hold his fellow Americans in very low esteem if he really embraces the belief that Obama was electable because he is light-skinned and doesn't use "Negro dialect.

Clarissa Branch's eyes teared up yesterday afternoon as she signed the large cardboard memorial for a cousin killed inside Abay's Wheeler Bar in Southwest Philadelphia. "R.I.P. little cousin. I love u," she wrote in blue marker amid the dozens of other messages scribbled on the board set up at the entrance to the corner bar at 2421 S. 62d St. "He has two little babies he won't get to see grow up," she said of Arthur Jennings, 20. The bar - closed in response to the slayings there early Sunday morning of Jennings, Claude "Netty" Snelling, 30, and Jamar Thompson, 31 - remained padlocked yesterday.

It is 3 a.m. on Friday morning, and last call at Manayunk's Liberties U.S. Hotel Bar & Grill was supposed to be an hour ago. There are no patrons tonight, or, at least, no ordinary ones. Instead the bar in the green heart of Eagles country is occupied by actors adorned in New York Jets gear, a bartender who's only played the part in movies, and dozens of crew members working on everything from lighting to costumes to props. ESPN has taken over this modest Main Street nightspot, one of five sets in the Philadelphia area used for seven Monday Night Football commercials.

RE ANNETTE BUSH'S letter on the Christmas Eagles-Cowboys game: First, there have been NFL games on Christmas since 1971. Why is it a problem now? And you are obviously out of touch with the psyche of the Delaware Valley. I didn't encounter one person not looking forward to enjoying a meal with his family and THEN, as a family, gathering around to watch their beloved Eagles do battle with the hated Cowboys. If anything, it brought a little something extra to the day. No one had to decide between his family and the Eagles unless someone who wanted their way or the highway forced him to choose.

The problem isn't that a restaurant and bar are planned for a dilapidated building next to the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Bensalem. Frankie's Mercury Saloon had been there for years until it closed in 2003. But the new owner, Gerald Curran, wants to reopen the Route 13 tavern this summer - with a deck. At a township meeting this week, Curran could not convince Council members that the deck would fit in with the community - especially the neighboring nuns, an order founded by St. Katharine Drexel.

Perhaps St. Patrick's Day was not the best time to visit a neighborhood pub, but fortunately, The Pub of Penn Valley defied my expectations. The patrons, instead of being jostling pub-crawlers at the bar, seemed relaxed as diners on a cruise. At the same time, the Pub - in calling it that, the regulars are picking up on its name of a few incarnations ago - is hardly a place where diners have what you could call a meet-and-greet meal. Food is everything here. (Along with the neighborhood feel.