During the Stoned Age, when Crocodile Dundee and Outback Steakhouse roamed the earth with impunity (and nary a sliver of ironic detachment), so did a beer called Foster’s Lager.
Foster’s Lager was created in 1887 at a brewery in Melbourne built by two Americans (but of course my countrymen were responsible) and it became available in America in 1972, as packaged in 750 ml heavy metal “oil” cans fabricated at the same plant where smokestacks for WWI dreadnoughts were turned out.
These oversized cans were considered the epitome of macho by any junior high school boy in Keokuk who could actually manage to lift one.
(Meanwhile, in Floyds Knobs, I managed; then again, those were the daze of my adolescent athletic pursuits — may they rest in peace.)
Australia was an exotic and elusive concept during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but we had Foster’s Lager and AC-DC, often both at once, the combination of which occasionally produced hallucinations of Vegemite and kangaroos.
Consequently I learned a lot in 1985, when a well-traveled but still quite youthful Australian fellow named Mark Douglas took me under his wing during a brief group trip stay in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), USSR.
Mark learned that it was my birthday, vowing to...Read more
