Woodward watching

In Somerville bar, a new sport

Urban Eye by Francis J. Connolly

The Mount Vernon Restaurant, in Somerville, where many beers have found me over the past decade, is a dandy spot for a Super Bowl party. Which is what was going on there last Monday night, pretty much, if you could overlook the fact that there was a dead baby involved.

Monday, of course, was Nanny Night, and the Free Louise crowd was out in force. Not the Woodward family or Louise's attorneys, mind you -- they were off somewhere else, in high-priced digs no doubt, swilling champagne and savoring her newfound freedom. What we had here, at the famously user-friendly Mount Vernon in down-to-earth East Somerville, was the rest of the Woodward crowd: the assorted groupies, fanatics, and lonely-hearts who had met Louise through the miracle of Court TV and claimed her as one of their own.

They were in their glory, these friends of Louise who'd never met her, and their glory was conveniently available to all the major media. Having rented out one of the Mount Vernon's function rooms, they'd set themselves up as the Official Woodward Cheering Section and thoughtfully alerted the Fourth Estate, which came a-running.

By early evening the place was crawling with media types, dutifully recording the gushing platitudes of Louise's loyalists and filming the obligatory cheering-crowd scene that erupted each time Louise's mug flashed on the overhead TV. The scene was one you've seen a thousand times -- sports fans crowded into a neighborhood bar, cheering their team on to victory -- except that these folks were not from my neighborhood, and their team's victory seemed wanting for glory.

The Louiseniks did not ingratiate themselves with us regulars, who wanted nothing more than the quiet beer or three and a chance to watch Monday Night Football in peace. It's not so much that these people were annoying -- though many surely were -- as that their raucous joy was so hard to fathom.

What possible reasons had brought these people to a restaurant that none had ever patronized before, miles from the Cambridge courthouse whence their heroine had lately been sprung, to cheer long into the night about involuntary manslaughter? Good food and friendly service, which the Mount Vernon offers in abundance, did not seem enough of an answer on this night.

Granted, some of the revelers had clear motives: for the handful of British accents scattered throughout the room, cheering Woodward's freedom was presumably a demonstration of patriotism. And a lot of the American accents were there mainly to get themselves on TV or in the paper. But aside from the expatriate patriots and the homegrown media hounds, most of the crowd seemed to consist of, well, fans.

These were folks who had followed the Woodward trial the way most of us at the Mount Vernon follow the Bruins, say, or the Red Sox. They had watched all the action, heard all the expert analysis, and knew all the players, even without a scorecard. Now the season was finally over, and their team had won; why shouldn't they celebrate?

Why, indeed? The party at the Mount Vernon was, in fact, the logical consequence of our camera-eye culture -- a culture that takes a lot of what we used to think of as important stuff, like law and politics and government, and reduces it to the level of small-screen entertainment.

In this culture, the public becomes the audience, and the sacred right to know becomes the spurious right to watch and be amused. In the sort of culture where public discourse gets replaced by The McLaughlin Group, is it any wonder that we also get Court TV, and O.J., and now Louise and her fans?

As I was thinking this through, Billy the bartender approached one of Woodward's most ardent supporters. "So, since Louise didn't do it," he asked with feigned innocence, "who do you think killed that poor little baby?"

Louise's friend was in no mood to talk about Matthew Eappen. As she launched a tirade in Billy's direction, he turned away, a knowing grin on his face. I tossed another couple of bucks on the bar -- to help compensate for the tip he'd just lost -- and headed home to watch Monday Night Football in peace.

Francis J. Connolly is an associate at Kiley & Company, a nationally known polling firm based in Boston.