Every year when we go to Utah for Christmas, I try to get together with a group of cool Norwegian returned missionaries that I knew while I was there. (I say "cool" to denote that they are pretty laid back, don't sugarcoat their mission experience, and make constant jokes like, "I haven't [insert questionable activity here] since we were in Norway!") Usually we go to the Olive Garden--nice predictable Olive Garden. That gets a little old (although the bottomless pop and breadsticks are a great selling point--I wonder if they get mad if you went in and just pretended you were lingering over the menu, filling up on the free stuff; maybe I'll have to give that a try sometime). Anyway, as a joke, I mentioned to one of my friends that I was thinking of going to a microbrewery because it would be a much closer fit to our group. When he said that he would join us sinners, I took it as a challenge to find a place that was just enough on the edge to be fun, but still vanilla enough not to scare away some of them with more churchy standards. Coincidentally, the New York Times a couple of weeks back featured Salt Lake in their travel section and listed some cool night spots. One of them caught my eye, just because of their clever name: The Tavernacle. That would have been perfect--until I just visited their website; it's just a dueling piano bar that serves alcohol. D'oh! Back to the drawing board. Any suggestions out there of a place that has a seedy reputation but in reality just makes the patrons FEEL like they're being rebels, without really rebelling? What is the happy medium between Elmer's Pancake House and Hooters?

Speaking of rebels, I remember when I was in college, I had a teacher's assistant that thought I was going to hell in a handbasket. One morning, he called me around 10 am and I was pretty groggy, having gotten in from visiting the hot springs around 4 or 5 that morning. When I mentioned this, his response was, "I don't even want to know." I got a little rush out of thinking that someone thought I was a rebel--and without having to even bother with the effort of being rebellious--I mean WHO'S got the energy these days? Well, a couple of weeks later, a friend and I decided to see what kind of response we could get out of the people in my apartment complex if we were to be seen drinking beer in the hot tub that was in the middle of the courtyard (I know, tame or even a non-issue anywhere outside Happy Valley, Utah, but this was the school that only sells caffeine-free Coke and CHEESE CURDS at football games!). We went down to the grocery store to buy a 6-pack of Coors Cutter (the fake beer). Carrying the 6-pack to the checkout, who should we run into but the same teacher's assistant. He took one look at what I was carrying (and I don't think he looked closely enough to see that it wasn't what he thought it was) and said, "I don't even want to know." How simple was THAT--two innocent relatively tame acts got me labeled as an alcoholic carouser that had no business being at BYU when there were thousands of pure, wholesome angels who would kill to be there (but only kill if God commanded them, which happens surprisingly often in the scriptures and in some cults). Anyway, when we got back to the hot tub, we opened a couple of the Cutters (which were AWFUL--but we endured them, hoping to not be seen as the poseurs that we were) and sure enough, several people walked by, saw the brown bottles, and took it upon themselves to lecture us. I guess we were doing a community service, giving all those people practice at giving self-righteous diatribes to the fallen among them. And I was getting much-needed practice at completely ignoring them.