With everyone grasping for ways to help, New York bartenders say
                they have felt, in a strange way, lucky.  In this week's tragedy,
                they have had a clear and useful role to play.

                "I'm here behind the bar to say, 'Let it out, just let it all out,'" said Audrey Saunders,
                bar manager at the Tonic on W. 18th St.

                "Every person who walks in this bar is an opportunity to help," said Saunders.
                "From the minute you put the napkin down and look into their eyes, you are reaching out."

                Saunders says it's why "we became bartenders in the first place.
                It's not about slinging liquor, it's about making connections.

                "People are feeling unattached and frightened and they are looking to us to
                look back at them and understand. Bartenders have to step up to the plate."
                Saunders hasn't had to manufacture any empathy.

                As a former bartender at Beacon, a sister restaurant to Windows on the World, she lost
                many friends and colleagues who were working in the sky-high restaurant Tuesday morning.
                "We all feel loss. We're all in this together," she said.

                Stephanie Kozsdiy, a bartender at the Baggot Inn, on Third St. between Thompson
                and Sullivan Sts., said, "The mood here has been dark and heavy all week."
                Still, she felt "grateful to be able to help in a small way. "I'm opening the doors.
                I'm just opening the doors and letting them talk and grieve," Kozsdiy said.

                The neighborhood has been shut down since Tuesday, but the home-bound have been
                wandering in, many of them new faces, looking for a little extra solace with their Scotch
                and soda. Yesterday, a customer she had never seen before plopped some money on the bar.
                "Buy some firefighters a drink on me," he said. (The bar is located next to Fire Station No. 2.)

                The sense of community has been tangible at the Brooklyn Ale House in Williamsburg,
                where owner-bartender Sean Patrick  Connelly says he has felt "proud that he
                could be there for people this week."

                Sometimes, as a bartender, it's hard to gauge the extent or nature of a person's
                sorrow, but this week, said Connelly, "it's been easier to talk to everyone, because
                everyone's going through the same emotions.

                "Strangers are talking to each other. People are asking: Have you talked to your family?
                It's amazing and a little scary how this has brought everyone together ... that
                something so bad had to happen for people to appreciate each other."
                Connelly said that rather than sapping his energy, being able to lend an ear, to have a
                role to play, "has been energizing."

                Not everyone is up to the task. One of his bartenders, a young woman who was not
                directly affected by the tragedy, was so shaken she had not been able to work since Tuesday.

                So where do bartenders go to vent after soaking up so much grief?
                Kozsdiy, of the Baggot Inn, said she relies on her husband, and her cats, Trevert and Flavius.
                "They've been quite helpful," she said.

                She looks forward to the first day it will be all right to turn the music back on.

                "I don't want to sound callous, but survivors need to see happy people again."