Making Takeoffs Cheerier

As they might say at the “Cheers” bar of TV fame: Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came--to the airport.

Starting in November, air travelers can hoist a few with Norm, Cliff and the crew from Cheers in a bar done up to resemble the fictional pub on the long-running comedy.

Paramount Pictures is supplying the name, and Host International, a division of Marriott Corp., will provide the bars at airports and hotels across the nation. The bars will feature lots of wood, the familiar Cheers logo, Cheers merchandise and perhaps even robotic versions of some of the characters, a Marriott spokesman said. Terms of the deal were not released.

The Cheers series was based on a real tavern in Boston called the Bull & Finch, “so there will be bars based on a fictional bar that is based on a real bar,” a Paramount spokeswoman explained.

The first bar won’t be in Boston or in Los Angeles, where the series is taped, and certainly not in Bethesda, Md., where Marriott is based. The first Cheers will open in the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport, because that is the next location slated for lease negotiations, the Marriott spokesman said.

Marriott plans to operate 46 Cheers bars within five years.

Touch-Tone Topography

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In Defense of Day Care

Becoming part of a small but growing group, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, one of San Francisco’s oldest law firms, will open an on-site day-care center today, becoming what it believes to be the first West Coast law firm to do so.

The facility, staffed by a full-time director and a full-time teacher, is geared to handle 10 children a day, ages 6 months to 6 years. It is intended as an emergency recourse for any of the firm’s 475 employees who encounter unexpected baby-sitting troubles.

Mark Levie, the partner in charge of the San Francisco office, noted that the firm was able to conform to the city’s stringent codes for such facilities by incorporating fire exits and other elements into the design of its new offices. The firm moved last August to the Old Federal Reserve Bank Building.

Noting that the center would cut down on absenteeism and stress, Levie said: “We think it will more than pay for itself.”

He’s wholeheartedly behind the idea, even though his own three children recently passed the age limit.