Are Your Oldies Golden or Moldin’?

A lot of my posts start with me going on about how things were when I was a kid. But I think I ought to be allowed due to the myriad of changes in the world that have taken place since I was a wee lad.

I’m not a big fan of change, especially when it’s sprung on me all of a sudden-like and it’s not my idea. When faced with sudden change I tend to wave the stem of my pipe at it and ‘Hurmph!’ a lot. I had a tiny bit of change tossed at me recently. The battery in our trusty Honda died and we had to have it replaced. My wife did a splendid job of dealing with the fellows in the greasy coveralls at the garage near her office. I really think they like her there. Whenever we’ve needed repairs done they’ve gone out of their way to help her at a reasonable charge.

As many of you may know, when you disconnect a car battery you lose the stations that you’ve preset on your car radio. This is an inconvenience, but certainly not the end of the world. On the drive home after picking up the car from the shop my wife did her best to reset the stations. She got some of them right, but not all of them. The Central Coast doesn’t have a huge selection of stations that cater to my tastes. Plus the terrain changes quite a bit as you drive along the coast so some of the best stations don’t reach all the towns you have to drive through.

I am a child of the 60s and the 70s. In the late 60s all I had was a transistor radio, so I listened to a Chicago radio station called WLS. This was AM, of course. In the 60s the whole concept of what FM radio might be was totally alien to me. I was pretty sure that hippies who sniffed glue and smoked pot listened to FM radio. WLS played top twenty, or maybe top thirty songs, so over the course of two or three hours you heard every single song in their catalog, but that was okay.

In the 70s I learned what a great thing ‘stereo’ was, and that you didn’t have to sniff glue to listen to FM. In the mid-70s my friends and I learned that in addition to cool music, there was some subversive comedy happening on the radio—especially on Sunday night.

The fun on Sunday night actually started on television. At either ten or ten-thirty on WTTW, the Chicago Public Television station they started showing Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Nobody had ever seen anything like that. Once Monty Python was over you’ve turn on the radio and listen to the National Lampoon Radio Hour. A lot of early Saturday Night Live folks were on the National Lampoon hour, like Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Belushi. Lampoon was more strange than laugh out loud funny, but certainly worth listening to. Next up was the Doctor Demento Radio show. (I never really ‘liked’ the song Fish Heads, but I appreciated what they were going for)

It’s no wonder some of us were so tired on Monday morning. But none of us were too tired to imitate that previous night’s Monty Python bits.

Occasional chunks of comedy and irreverence aside, most of my music listening during the 70s was top twenty and thirty. I was also very active in the high school choir, so this got me interested in Broadway showtunes. I liked to sing a lot back then, at home and in the car, so I gravitated toward singers near my range. I also liked clever wordplay and good storytellers. This meant that my album and 8-track collection included a lot of Paul Simon, Barry Manilow, Heart, Bread, Billy Joel, ELO, and the like. I’ve come to like many singer/songwriters over the years, but my heart has stayed in the 70s.

But something weird happened in the 1970s. Young George Lucas made a movie called American Graffiti. I didn’t see the film at the time but it seemed to glorify the music and goofy times teenagers experienced in the late 50s and early 60s. My sisters bought the soundtrack. There was some weird ass music around in the 50s and 60s.

Before long everywhere you turned you were getting blasted with 50s and 60s music. Even one of my favorite television shows, ‘Love, American Style’ featured a segment about life in the 50s. This segment went on to become the series Happy Days, which spawned Laverne and Shirley and seven or eight other series.

At some point someone decided to officially refer to a big portion of what was passing for pop music in the 50s and early 60s as ‘The Oldies’.

A lot of people, who were probably only scraping by with their music when it first came out, must have been making money hand over fist during the renaissance of The Oldies in the 70s. Good for them, I say. Everyone deserves to make a living.

I think the renewed interest in The Oldies more or less peaked with the release of the movie Grease. I think by that time we’d all had our fill of Sha Na Na. Besides, by that time George Lucas had given us Star Wars to focus on, and the 1980s were coming. Who had time for the Big Bopper?

The other day I heard from the Big Bopper again. Or maybe it was Buddy Holly. I was in the car singing along with a Barry Manilow classic (1979’s Ships, if you must know) and when the song ended they went right into some sappy sock hop do-wop diddy. It seems that one of the stations that my wife had programmed into the radio, a station that claims to have ‘all the classics you love, all day long’ has taken it upon themselves to smush together songs from the 50s through the 80s! If you want to know how good this combination goes together, mix yourself up a big glass full of mustard and milk. It’s just plain wrong. My wife tries so very hard to attend to my wussy 70s music needs (when she’s alone in the car she either listens to NPR or heavy metal CDs) so I in no way blame her. How could I? There's no way she would do such a thing on purpose.

Some things go great together. Other things make me want to drive an ice pick into my ear drums.

Take Three Stooges and call me in the morning…

There was a story going around a few years back about someone who was dying of an incurable disease and given little to no chance for survival. Instead of getting high on prescription morphine or Demerol and living his last few months in a medicated fog, this person decided to fight with the best medicine of all—laughter. (Although when you’re trying to push a kidney stone the size of a raisin out of your penis, there’s nothing better than a big hypodermic needle full of Demerol to take your mind off your problems.) The story claims that after weeks of watching tapes of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers, the dude’s cancer went into remission and he’s alive and well and selling homeowners insurance in Tulsa.

I don’t know if the story of this cure is true, but I do know that certain activities like intensive exercise, exposure to sunlight, and even petting a kitten or a puppy can trigger the body to act in a certain way. It causes the blood to flow more rapidly throughout the body, and it even releases certain elements like endorphins, oxymorons, and midoclorians into the bloodstream.

I don’t know the physiological effects, but after a hearty extended laugh I feel really good. (Unless it’s one of those cases where you find yourself laughing so hard that you don’t think you could stop. You just keep laughing harder and harder until you think you’re going to pop a blood vessel in your brain.)

One day, if I ever come down with a nasty case of toenail fungus or get a really bad canker sore on my lip, I’ll sit down and watch a few hours of the Benny Hill Show and see what happens.

Of course if I ever diagnosed with something really, really horrible, like the brittle bone disease that Samuel L. Jackson’s character had in the movie Unbreakable, or some form of cancer, I would immediately pull out he big guns in my home treatment arsenal.

My treatment would involve repeated viewings of the Will Ferrell film ‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy’. In fact, I’d probably have it looped and playing on at least one television set around the clock. I’m not here to say that Anchorman is a perfect film. It’s not. It has one major flaw; it’s too short by nine or ten hours.

Will Ferrell is a young man and I’m sure he’s going to make a bunch more movies before he retires, but as of this writing Anchorman is the jewel in his crown. His performance is letter perfect. The writing and direction are both top-notch, provided by long time Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay. (I haven’t seen it yet, but rumor has it that McKay punched up some of Ferrell’s scenes and dialogue in Bewitched.)

The supporting cast draws from the stable of today’s funniest actors and comedians. Many of them have starred in or been featured in other films that would be in my ‘cured by comedy’ festival. They include: Steve Carell, Fred Willard, Chris Parnell, Tim Robbins, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Jack Black. Paul Rudd and Christine Applegate are not two people who I would have necessarily cast in a comedy of this type, but they both knock it out of the park, along with the rest of the cast.

A major part of the appeal of this movie is that everyone on the screen sells it. There are no sly winks at the camera, letting us know that the actors are in on the gag. Most of the characters are clueless idiots, and the actors are confident enough to play them exactly that way. It’s the same factor that made Ben Stiller’s ‘Zoolander’ such a joy. When performances are unflinching we don’t feel the need to question them, and that means the scenes and dialogue get to take a direct path into our brains.

I’ve always believed that sincerity = comedy. Early in his career Steve Martin pulled this off to a ‘T’ in the movie The Jerk. I guess the whole formula first clicked fifty years earlier with the likes of Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin.

I hope I never have to find out if laughter is indeed the best medicine, but if I do, I have no problem filling the prescription.

What’s that smell?

The smell in question is the stink being raised by some movie theater chains over the running length of Peter Jackson’s upcoming version of King Kong. The theater owners are crying like a bunch of milk babies because Jackson’s current cut of the movie is clocking in at almost three hours.

The exhibitors are booing and hissing because they claim that the audiences won’t sit still for a movie that long, and that’s just a steaming bowl of butter-flavored popcorn topping. Give an audience something entertaining to watch and they’ll sit there all day. The real reason they don’t want to play a movie that long is because it lowers the number of times the film can be showed in a day.

Back when I was a theater manager, the optimum running time for a movie was around a hundred minutes. A little over an hour and a half. That way you could schedule your show times for 12, 2, 4, 6, 8 & 10, which was easy for people to remember. The timing worked out well. You could shepherd one audience out (nobody seemed to want to stay and read the credits back then), pick up the cups and popcorn buckets from the aisles, and then load the next audience in, with five or ten minutes left for them to buy candy, drinks and popcorn.

For a first-run theater, the concession is where it’s all at. For the first few weeks of a new movie the film distributor skims up to eight percent of the ticket cost right off the top. Sure, playing eight bucks for a bucket of popcorn is highway robbery, but keep in mind that it’s what’s paying for supplies, salaries and keeping the electricity on. The longer a movie is in release the less the distributor takes out of every box office dollar.

The movie chains want King Kong to be shorter so they can have more showings per day and sell more five-dollar bags of M&Ms. I don’t blame them, but don’t try to cast the blame on us.

Gosh, I hope this movie is good. I have my worries about Jack Black. I love him in Tenacious D, but this might not be the right role for him. I’ll wait and see about Adrian Brody. He’s a good enough actor that he might effectively vanish into his character. And then of course there’s Naomi Watts. I’d pay to watch her wash socks.

David Green is an Astronomer!

That’s what I believed when I was in fourth grade, while attending Edgar Allen Poe grade school on the south side of Chicago.

I knew it because I had read it.

I didn’t really know David Green. He was in the fifth or sixth grade. I knew that he was a school crossing guard, which was something akin to royalty at Edgar Allen Poe. Crossing guards got to wear spiffy orange belts. They were made of seatbelt material. (I was intimately familiar with seatbelt material because I used to play jet pilot in the back seat of the family car. Back in the late 60s only some cars came equipped with seat belts. Nobody ever wore them, as I recall, but I used to have a blast playing with them.) The crossing guard belts featured one strap that went around the waist and a second that came up over one shoulder. They were totally bitchin’.

If you were a school crossing guard you got to leave school a few minutes early so you could beat the crowds to your appointed intersection. The guards didn’t have stop signs, but they had orange belts and that seemed powerful enough to make cars stop.

(I petitioned really hard to become a crossing guard, and the next year, my last at Poe school I made the team. The only problem was that the intersection I was appointed to was far off the beaten path. The entire time I stood guard not a single kid needed help crossing. Not a single kid crossed. After a week or two I stopped going. I kept the belt and used to play around with it for a while, until I grew too fat to fit into it.)

One day I actually had occasion to stand face to face with David Green. I was in an upstairs hallway of the school admiring a fort that someone had built as a class project. The entire thing was built out of Popsicle sticks. A couple of kids were standing around it. I thought to myself that whoever built it must really like Popsicles. There were hundreds of them. One of the other kids admiring the model joked that it would have taken the kid who made it a hundred years to save up enough Popsicle sticks. He continued on that it was a good thing that you could buy the sticks at the art store. I laughed along with the joke, thankful that my tongue was stuck in first gear that day.

I don’t know if he was the one who made the model, but I talked to David Green right next to it. It was a long time ago, but our conversation went something like this.

“Hey, you’re David Green, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Yeah, well I hear you really like astronomy. I think that’s cool.”
“What are you talking about, kid?”
“I just read it. That’s all. Sorry.”
“Where’d you read it? Show me?”

And so I did.

Edgar Allen Poe was a three-story brick affair, built in a section of Chicago that used to be called Pullman. It was called Pullman because that’s where the factories where they used to build Pullman railroad cars were located. Around the turn of the century Pullman employed a lot of people, so he build his own housing, churches and schools. There was an abandoned factory at the end of my street, and another one just one street behind our house. My friends and I spent countless hours climbing around inside the derelict buildings. It’s a wonder we survived, or at the very least didn’t fall victim to lockjaw from all the rusty ladders we used to scale.

Poe school was built with functionality in mind. Safety came second, or third. My parents would have died early deaths if they knew the hours we spent up on the school rooftops. It was pretty easy to get up there because there was a metal fire escape that ran up and down the outside of the building. At some point they had constructed a cage of sorts around the lowest section of the fire stairs. The cage was made of cyclone-type fencing, with a sheet metal door you could exit out of the cage through if you came down the stairs. This safety precaution was easy enough to defeat. All you had to do was climb up the cage and then you had access to the fire escape, and the lower of the roofs. Once you were on the lower roof you were good to go.

David Green followed me outside, to the cage. We were the only ones outside. The blacktop ‘playground’ that formed a big ‘U’ around the back and sides of the school was empty. The cage, along with the metal door in the middle of it had been painted probably a dozen times. The fencing was thick with multiple coats of paint. The door showed old coats of paint where kids had scraped into the surface.

I was still pretty naïve at the time, so I didn’t understand all the words and phrases that were scratched into the paint. I do remember that someone had stuck a bumper sticker on the door that read “Save Water—Shower With A Friend”. I still blush. Near the bottom of the door I showed David where his name was scratched in.

It said DAVID GREEN IS AN ASTRONOMER.

At least that’s what I thought it said.

David Green stooped down to read. He stood back up and then pushed me down on the ground. He waved a fist in my face. “Did you do that?” he asked. “Do you think that’s funny?” he continued.

It must have been a chilly day. My face had to have been cold, because I could feel the warm tears running down my cheeks. I might have said something, but I can’t think of what. He stood over me for a moment and then was gone. I’m pretty sure I never saw him again.

For the life of me I didn’t know what in the world had happened. I ran home.

Later that day, or maybe it was the following day, my best buddy Donnie Draves and I returned to the scene of the crime. We looked at the door and then I saw the problem.

Reading letters scraped into layers of paint on a metal door is hard work. Especially for a kid. Donnie and I examined the writing and figured out why I got pushed down.

David Green may or may not have been an astronomer, but that wasn’t the subject of the message. Donnie and I figured it out.

DAVID GREEN IS AN ASSHOLE.

Truer words have never been written since.

It’s Good Eunuch For Me…

Conan O’Brien makes me laugh, but a little self-deprecation goes a long way. David Letterman is still funny, for a cranky old man, and Leno’s monologue elicits more than a few laughs out of me (in contrast to Letterman’s sloth paced delivery, Leno opts for the machine gun approach, telling a dozen jokes for every one or two Dave delivers, thus he comes out on top due to the simple law of averages), but in my book they still pale compared to the master, Johnny Carson.

Carson could milk just as many laughs out of a good joke as one that tanked, which was his special gift, but one of my favorite things about watching Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was the guests he featured.

These days just about everyone you see on a talk show are there to promote a new movie, book, video or album. Of course there was a lot of plugging going on in the olden days that I hold so dear, but there was also a lot of guests that stopped by to simply stop by and pay Johnny a visit.

Johnny had a lot of pals, like Jimmy Stewart, Don Rickles, Shelly Winters, Buddy Hackett, George Gobel, Dean Martin and Burt Reynolds who would just stop by to shoot the breeze and maybe tell a few anecdotes or jokes. These members of Hollywood’s old guard came out cold. Today’s talk show guests are pre interviewed, which is how the hosts can miraculously come up with questions like, “I heard that while making your latest movie you had some sort of an encounter with a pack of albino bats.” Johnny Carson would talk to his guests naturally, and if they happened to bring up a story about some albino bats, that was cool, but they were so at ease that were just as likely to come up with an equally funny story. Nothing was forced.

Buddy Hackett was one of my favorites. Part of the reason was because Johnny genuinely liked him and thought he was funny. Another part of the reason was that he told jokes and stories that were mostly racy, and usually a couple of words had to be bleeped out and I would have to rack my brain to figure out what he had said. And one of the biggest reasons was that he told long jokes and stories. Four, five and six minutes long. While Buddy was telling his joke you could see Johnny looking off camera, probably being told that they really needed to go to a commercial break, but Johnny rarely cut anyone off.

I miss Johnny. Not enough to buy those ‘Best Of’ video compilations I see for sale. But I do miss him a lot.

I heard a great quote on the Tonight Show one night. It was spoken by an actor or an actress who was responding to a bad review that his/her movie had gotten. The actor/actress dismissed movie critics by saying, “Critics are like the eunuchs who guard a king’s harem. They know what sex is. They see it happen every single day. But for the life of them, they just can’t do it themselves.” I thought this was a pretty neat quote, but I had to look up the word ‘eunuch’ in the dictionary. Then I had to look up the word ‘castration’. Once I knew what a eunuch really was the quote was even more powerful to me.

I love movies and based on the reviews of Roger Ebert, I once considered writing movie reviews for a living. But then I thought about that quote and wondered how I could sit back and criticize someone who was doing something that I was incapable of. I can’t cook, so I could I tell a master chef what’s wrong with his bouillabaisse?

Movie critics are not moviemakers, yet we trust their recommendations and heed their warnings. At least I do. Which is why I didn’t see the animated movie ‘Robots’ when it was in the theater. The critics called it thinly plotted, childish, one-dimensional and they mocked Ewan McGregor’s American accent.

Shame on them. And shame on me for listening to them and missing Robots on the big screen. I watched it last night and I can’t recall liking an animated movie more since the first Toy Story movie.

Robots has got a lot of things going for it. For starters, it was produced by the creative forces that gave us the film Ice Age (a film that I had my share of problems with, based mostly on character design and some story elements, but which I still enjoyed a great deal). The next great thing about Robots was that it was designed by the mega genius that is William Joyce. If you’ve lived a sheltered life and don’t know who Joyce is, do yourself a favor and run a GIS (Google Image Search) on him and see what you’ve been missing.

Okay, so the plot of Robots is pretty lightweight, but that’s sort of the point. It’s almost a fable or a fairy tale. The filmmakers understood that from the beginning, which is why they kept the pace so fast. The action and dialogue move along at a lively clip. The Toy Story movies dealt with some complex issues and they built some deep characterization, but at the same time there are huge sections of both movies that move at a snail’s pace. Robots starts off at a pretty fast pace and never really slows down.

Oh, another thing that the critics warned us of was the return of Robin Williams playing the same motor-mouthed character we’ve seen (or heard) him deliver in other animated movies. I was really worried about this. A little Robin Williams is a good thing. Which is what Robots delivers. The character he plays does sound like Robin Williams, but there’s a degree of restraint that was not present when he was playing the Genie of the lamp. There was also a happy absence of celebrity impersonations and pop references that tend to age a film.

This film is gorgeous. The animation is top notch. There’s a slew of big name actors that weren’t at all necessary. Halle Berry is a delight for the eyes but her voice is ordinary and her performance was wasted. The critics were right about Ewan McGregor’s wavering accent. The only voice actors that improved the movie were Greg Kinnear, Amanda Bynes and Robin Williams. Mel Brooks had his moments as well.

If you’re in the mood for some lightweight fun that might make you feel like a kid again, rent a copy of Robots. At the very least, check it out on HBO a few months from now.

Movies that I'll always stop for...

I’ve made it quite clear in previous postings that I’m an old, old man. Yesterday I got another year older, but I don’t especially have a problem with that. I’ve seen a lot of things change since the stork dropped me off in the cabbage patch. (Yes, that’s how I came into the world. If you try to convince me again that my parents ever had sex, I’ll do that thing where I stick my fingers in my ears and go, “La la la la la” at the top of my lungs)

One of the biggest and best things that happened was the invention of cable television. How we avoided mass extinction with only four or five channels to pick from, most of which that went off the air after one or two in the morning, is beyond me.

Way back then you didn’t usually turn on the television until there was something on that you wanted to watch. Can you even imagine? You sat down to watch a show, then turned the television off and went and did something else.

Thankfully, today we don’t have this burden to deal with. Fifty years ago it was up to the television programmers to come up with something good to entice us to watch. These days it’s up to us, the television viewer, to seek out and find something enticing to watch. It’s a good thing that television remote controls have evolved to match the task at hand.

If I were a stand-up comedian (which I’m not—to much standing involved) I could go off on a riff about all the different ways people channel surf. My wife, daughter and I all have our different methods of scanning for things to watch. Huge amounts of tolerance keeps us from killing one another over this.

My wife manages to hold her tongue while I’m flipping around (which must be hard for her to do, because it can be so sharp and sarcastic at times). But the one thing she never holds back at is mocking me for the movies and shows that I click on to check out.

All I can do is pity her for not having as sophisticated a palate as I was born with. After some fourteen odd years of living together, here’s a list of movies she knows I’ll always stop at. Some them she actually likes herself. Perhaps some of my good taste has rubbed off on her after all this time.

- Godzilla (Any and all of them. Even the one with Ferris Bueller in it.)
- Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Although these days I always wonder what Mr. Rooney has stashed in his desk drawer.)
- Predator (This movie is sooo much better than people give it credit for. I’ll usually stop for the sequel as well, but it pales compared to the first.)
- RoboCop (Always the first one in the series, most times the second one, and the third one only if no one else is in the room.)
- The Incredible Hulk
- Finding Nemo
- A Shot in the Dark (As well as any of the Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers in them.)
- The Fifth Element (Bruce Willis doesn’t get more charming than here. My favorite dialogue exchange happens at the ticket counter. “We’re newlyweds. Just met. You know how it is. We bumped into each other, sparks happened…”“Leeloo Dallas mul-ti-pass.””Yes, she knows it’s a multipass. Anyway, we’re in love.”
- Independence Day (Yes, you read right, and no, I haven’t been drinking gasoline.)
- Stargate
- Nighmare Before Christmas
- Ronin (a great movie that never found the right audience)
- Pitch Black
- Near Dark
- Galaxy Quest
- Stuck On You
- Memento
- What's Up Tigerlily?
- Kung Pow
- Lord of the Rings (Any of the three but especially the third.)
- Star Wars (Any of the six, even with JarJar.)
- Smokey and the Bandit (This one worries me a tiny bit. But not much.)
- The Hustler (Newman + Gleason + Pool = Cool)
- The Great Escape
- The Conehead Movie (Once I gave it a chance I was hooked for life)
- Rocky (I’ll check out any of the first four, but the second one is my favorite and I’ll watch if from start to finish.)
- Sky Captain
- My Neighbor Totoro (as well as Kiki's Delivery Service)
- Fat City (It’s from the 70s and Stacy Keach plays a washed up boxer who tries for a comeback.)
- Planet of the Apes (I’ll take a peek at any of them, but only stay for the first one.)
- The Cincinnati Kid (Steve McQueen burns up the screen, and Ann-Margret is so damn sexy she practically leaves puddles of lust behind wherever she goes.)
- Fail-Safe
- Dr. Strangelove
- Disney's Beauty and the Beast
- Flight of the Phoenix (I’ll stop and watch the remake as well.)
- When Worlds Collide (Great concept, pretty good execution, not much cheese.)
- Alien (All of them. Even Alien Vs. Predator.)
- The Omega Man (I wish it were on right now. I should go check. Nope.)
- Monsters, Inc.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (I’ll check out any of them, but he second one still leaves me cold, even after years of trying to like it.)
- Buckaroo Banzai (Flawed, but an A+ for effort.)
- Key Largo (Bogart does his best work in this film.)
- Journey to the Center of the Earth (I refuse to eat goose pate even to this day. Poor Gertrude.)
- Jaws
- Five Million Years to Earth (Part of the Hammer Quartermass series. A childhood favorite that I still cherish today.)
- Mysterious Island (I don’t care if it ignores the book. I still hold it precious.)
- Firefox (Clint Eastwood speaking Russian AND flying the fastest jet on the planet? Count me in!)
- Our Man Flint (Hey buddy, got a light? Oww!)
- To Sir With Love (Those schoolgirl days…)
- The Road Warrior (Not a big fan of the first Mad Max film, but I’ll always stop for this one and Beyond Thunderdome.)
- The Verdict (of the Newman/Redford team I always liked Paul Newman lots more)
- Army of Darkness (As well as Evil Dead 2)
- Blazing Saddles (As well as Silent Movie, Young Frankenstein, and The Producers.)
- Hair
- Johnny Dangerously
- Crimson Tide
- Around The World Under The Sea
- Silent Running (Bruce Dern as a creepy hippy trying to save the rainforest. Why not?)
- Dead Calm
- Magnum Force (Along with Dirty Harry. You got a problem with that? Well, do ya’ punk?)
- Return of the Living Dead (Smart and funny—what a combo!)
- Marooned (Gene Hackman is good in anything.)
- The Silencers (Any Matt Helm movie is worth a quick look.)
- The Birds (As well as most Hitchcock films.)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Poltergeist
- The French Connection
- Toy Story
- Slap Shot (Paul Newman at his cynical best.)
- Tobor the Great (Tobar is Robot spelled backward.)
- Inherit the Wind
- Robot Jox
- Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

THE THREE TIMES THAT I ALMOST DIED (that I'm aware of) Part One

When I was a kid I ‘heard’ a lot of things. Have you ever seen those collections of Urban Legends that were popular a few years back? That was the stuff of my childhood. It seems like everyone that I came in contact with back then had a friend, aunt, uncle, boss, sister, third-cousin, army buddy, or driving school teacher who was good friends with the guy, girl, or whatever the legend was about. The closest I ever got to the source was Susan, a teenage friend of my sisters who lived next door to us on the South Side of Chicago. She claimed to personally know the girl who was so happy with her complicated hairstyle that she froze it solid with hair spray. Weeks passed without her washing it. Somehow a pregnant Black Widow spider found her way into the varnished hair-do and decided to make it a home to her new family. Susan swore to me that she was sitting there in class when the spiders decided to emerge from their cocoon and see the world.

I used to hear lots of stories about kids who died imitating their favorite superheroes. There was a kid who lived out on a farm and his favorite comic character was Superman. He liked Superman so much that he thought he had superpowers himself. One day he tied one of his mother’s clean bed sheets around his neck and jumped off the roof of the barn. (In one version of the kid fell like a rock and splattered on whatever type of ground they have around barns. In the other he did such a good job of tying the makeshift cape around his neck, that when it got caught on a nail at the edge of the deck it hung him until he was dead. He was still hanging there when his parents got home from church.)

Another Superman story featured a kid who saw bullets bouncing off of Superman’s chest and thought he’d try that with his daddy’s pistol. There were also a lot of variations on the story about the kid whose favorite comic character was the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch. “Flame On” indeed.

I guess somewhere down deep I knew most of these stories were made up, but that part was squished beneath the much bigger part of me that wanted them to be true. I guess if I had really understood the whole concept of the Urban Legend, I would have started cooking up my own. Who knows? Maybe my friends and me were creating our own. At the very least we were giving continued life to existing stories and probably embellishing on them along the way.

I never ‘heard’ any stories about dumb kids killing themselves by imitating characters from television shows, but I’ve got one of my own. It happened when I was eight or nine.

I had plenty of television series that I enjoyed a lot back then. Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea was a big one, as was The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, It Takes A Thief, Gilligan’s Island, Speed Racer, Bozo’s Circus, The Banana Splits, and the family favorite in our house, The Fugitive. But the standout of the group, head and shoulders above all the rest, was Mission: IMPOSSIBLE. (Just typing the words sends a tingle racing up and down my spine.)

Back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and I was eight-years-old, TV’s ‘prime time’ ran from seven to ten, instead of today’s eight to eleven (I used to know why they changed it, but have since forgotten). Mission: IMPOSSIBLE was on Sunday nights at nine. They probably moved it around in the schedule in the years that followed, but during my ‘honeymoon’ years with the show, it was Sunday at nine. I owe a cigar and a steak dinner to whomever made this decision. It was perfect for me. By the time it came on the only Sunday shows that we watched (The Wonderful World of Disney and maybe The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for me and my sisters—The Lawrence Welk show for my parents) were over. My sisters were upstairs finishing their homework or doing whatever it is that older sisters do. My dad had headed upstairs to bed, and my mom was probably in the kitchen smoking Salem cigarettes and drinking coffee.

This meant that for all intents and purposes, the television was mine! My bedtime was ten, so the timing was perfect. One hour of television dynamite and then off to dreamland.

I could go on for hours about how much I loved Mission: IMPOSSIBLE, and why, but that’s not my goal for today. (Perhaps another time. Oh yes, another time.) Today I wanted to tell you about how my love for Mission: IMPOSSIBLE almost got me killed.

The core members of the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) included:

Jim Phelps: Master tactician and leader of the team, who always managed to find a way to stay one step ahead of the enemy.

Cinnamon Carter: Fashion cover girl and society ingénue. (And yes, I know it’s not necessarily logical to pick a top model, whose face has been on the cover of every major magazine, as a member of your secret squad of agents. Perhaps team leader Jim Phelps reasoned that the target of most of his missions, be it the Russian mob, third-world drug cartel henchmen, or defecting nuclear scientists, weren’t big magazine readers. And besides, Cinnamon was a skilled actress who could blend into any role she played, from socialite to scrubwoman.)

Rollin Hand: Stage magician without peer, master of misdirection, and man of countless faces, Rollin could impersonate anyone from drug lords to heads of state.

Willy Armitage: Definitely the muscle of the group; in addition to the heavy lifting, Willy was an expert martial artist, adept with weapons, and as dependable as the day was long.

Barney Collier: The undisputed renaissance man of the group, Barney was a master electrician, mechanical engineer, pilot, architect, deep sea diver, and no matter how hot the action got, he remained cool as a cucumber.

Of course Jim Phelps wasn’t the original team leader. That was Dan Briggs, who was a talented strategist, but lacked some of the social graces needed to be a truly effective leader. We never learned what happened to Dan Briggs. Perhaps he was killed during the course of a mission. Or maybe he was captured and he’s rotting in a jungle cell somewhere, refusing to give his torturers a single scrap of information. I missed him for a while but I was quickly won over by the way Phelps took care of business.

My favorite of the group, though, was Barney. He usually had the most to do during the missions, so he always seemed to be the most important member of the team to me. Let’s say for example that the mission involved a deposed military leader who was sitting on a stockpile of nuclear warheads that he was planning to make for sale to the highest bidder. Well, Barney might have to crawl through the heating vents of the foreign embassy where the kook was holed up, defeat a sophisticated security system, dodge and duck the armed guards roaming the halls, tap into the telephone system to reroute all communications, pick the locks on at least five or six doors, and then break into the vault where the warheads were being stored. He would have to hide his efforts by first secretly dropping down a flexible movie screen in front of the vault door, and then setting up a movie projector that would project the image of the undisturbed door onto the screen. Only then could he open his really good bag of tricks to crack the locks on the door, neutralize the nuclear warheads, and then use a sonic disruptor to disintegrate the floor of the vault so the warheads would drop down into the subterranean caves beneath the embassy. While all this was going on the other team members would be doing their magic to cause distractions and delay the warhead auction.

In the end the deposed leader will have sold off the warheads to a particularly nasty lot of blokes. He’ll have their cash in hand when he opens the vault door to reveal…nothing. Cut to a shot of the IMF team driving away as gunshots echo throughout the halls of the embassy.

I think part of the reason Barney was my favorite was because of my dad. My father was a television repairman, so I grew up tinkering around with radios and televisions in his basement workshop. One of my favorite treats was junking old televisions that owners had dropped off for repair. Either the set was deemed unfixable, or the owner didn’t like the sound of the estimate and told my dad to keep it. Either way it was junk, and my dad would let me take it apart and strip it down for spare tubes, usable parts, and the precious copper yokes that used to be wrapped around the neck of the picture tube.

Of course I would pretend that I was doing something altogether different. I would either be defusing a bomb, trying to repair an encryption device before enemy bombers flew overhead, or some such fun. Back then televisions and radios had lots of big bulky parts that were ripe for goofing around with.

Then I would get bored. A bored Fred with a screwdriver in hand is inviting trouble. I started wandering around the basement, pretending to pick locks, pry open hidden compartments in things, and of course, tightening any loose screws I happened across.

And then I saw the fuse box.

I’d seen Barney tinkering with fuse boxes on Mission: IMPOSSIBLE. I had to climb up the outside railing of the stairs to reach it, but I was clever that way. I popped open the cover with the screwdriver and saw maybe a dozen fuses screwed into the panel. (I guess this was back before circuit breakers. The fuses I’m talking about were metal and about the diameter of a quarter. There was a tiny window in the face of the fuse and looking in you could see a tiny metal bar. If the bar was melted though it meant that the fuse was blown. I goofed around with twisting the fuses. Then I loosened the screws that held the fuse panel in place. Inside I could see some big fat copper wires. Some were thick as my finger. Copper was worth a lot of money, I knew, from scavenging the yokes from the castaway television sets. I was rich, I reasoned.

The plate wouldn’t come all the way off, so I jammed the screwdriver inside to try and loosen the copper wires.

I woke a long time later. I was on the basement floor, ten feet from the stairs. I had a horrible taste in my mouth. Blood. I had bitten the inside of my mouth. The screwdriver was nowhere to be seen. I tried to get to my feet but my legs were made of rubber. I felt really strange. It took me a long time to get upstairs.

My sisters must have been watching me, because I don’t remember seeing my mom as I climbed up to my bedroom. My body was tingling from head to toe and it wouldn’t stop. My hands seemed to be made of rubber too. I couldn’t turn the doorknob to the bathroom. I decided to hold it and lay down on my bed. I woke when I was called for dinner. I ate in silence. I was usually the quiet one, with my mom and sisters carrying the conversation. I went upstairs and went back to bed.

I woke in the middle of the night and this time I was able to open the bathroom door. I remember how much it hurt when I peed. It had never hurt before. I guess it was starting to dawn on me what had happened. I padded down the stairs and returned to the scene of the crime. The paint on the fuse box near where I’d jammed the screwdriver in was scorched black. The screws that I had loosened were gone, but the panel was only drooping open an inch or so. I bunched my pajama sleeve around my hand for protection and swung the fuse door shut. It mostly looked like it had before.

The tingling stayed for a few days, especially in the hand I was holding the screwdriver with. It took a few days more for the inside of my mouth to heal. As I type this I’m running my tongue around trying to feel a scar. Nothing.

If I had been a little smarter I would have probably been scared enough to tell my dad what I’d done. If I’d been a lot smarter I guess I would have never done it in the first place. Today, thirty-seven years later I recognize a miracle when I hear one.

That was the first time (that I know of) that I should have died.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about my opinion, I thought the Tom Cruise Mission: IMPOSSIBLE movies were silly little diversions. Neither movie captured the heart of what I loved about the original television series. But people like them, so live and let live. I always say.

Who will claim these lost people?

No, they aren't the lost people from the Lost island. I know what happens to them. These are people whose images were found on exposed rolls of film stuck in antique cameras.

For the writers out there seeking inspiration--look no further.

Here's the URL for a site put up by a camera nut who haunts the shelves of second hand shops. I guess he sometimes finds exposed film stuck in old cameras. He processes the film and shows the world these images for the very first time.
http://westfordcomp.com/updated/found.htm

I don't know about you, (well, some of you I do) but I could have hours of fun imagining the backstory of any of these photos. It's fun to imagine, isn't it? I think so too. Do you ever imagine what your mommy does when one of your many 'uncles' visits and she locks you in your bedroom? I like to pretend I know what all those strange sounds are. The banging on the walls, the squeaky sounds that mommy's bed makes, glass breaking, and then in the end, the sad sound of desperation.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE HOBOS GONE?

Oh that’s right. The Hobos were run out of town by the Homeless. That’s a shame. Hobos always had a slightly mystical turn of the century charm to them. The Homeless just aren’t trying hard enough. Everything was better in the olden days—even the poor.

Happy Halloween, y’all. I’ve always had a weird attachment with Halloween, because it was a crutch for helping me remember when my birthday was. I was born two days after Halloween, which I always thought was much cooler than being born two days after Christmas. Anyone unlucky enough to be born close to Christmas has got to suffer. They’re going to get shorted on one of the days.

As a result of my birthday coming so hot on the heels of Halloween, I don’t have a lot of childhood memories of Halloween. Even though Halloween meant loads of candy, which I love today and much as I did back then, my birthday was always more important to me.

You could get candy any day of the year, but there was only one day a year when I was in control of our house. Not total control, mind you, but lots more than I was used to.

I had two older sisters, and the youngest one was five or six years older than me, which meant I was a mistake. My arrival into the world was not scheduled, but tolerated. My mom went through the ‘change of life’ when I was very young, so my sisters Nancy and Marcia had a very active hand in my raising. Which is cool, and which I am grateful to this very day for. But anyone out there with older siblings knows what it’s like to be the runt of the lot.

The majority ruled in our house when it came to making decisions like what to watch on television, which movies we would get to go see, or what to have for dinner. I’m sure I was on the majority side more and a few times, but what I remember is always being a minority of one. If there was something I wanted to watch on television and it was on against something my sisters wanted to see, well, at least I get to see it no on the TVLand channel.

But on my birthday, I was the big cheese. I was the headman. I was the one in control of the television. Plus, there was cake and presents, making it a day of days. As far as presents, my parents were never too cheap when it came to keeping me supplied with toys and games. I could count on Nancy to give me a few Hardy Boys books, and Marcia would always kick in with a pair of slippers or some Peanuts paperbacks.

I do have strong memories of one Halloween. I must have been nine or ten. I always loved the Red Skeleton Show on television, and one of the characters he played was a lovable tramp. There were a lot of lovable tramps on television back then, and I sort of thought the whole concept was cool. So it was so shocker when I announced that year that I was going to be a hobo for Halloween. My mom went along with it and agreed to sew some patches onto an old pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. I was stuck without a hat, and no self respecting hobo would be seen out in public without a scuffed and beaten old hat, so I decided to make my own.

I’m pretty sure it took me two or three hours to make that hat. I used the pieces of white cardboard that new shirts and underwear came wrapped around. I colored the cardboard brown with crayons and then got busy cutting and taping the mess together. It was sort of a puzzle, figuring out how to make it work. (I think that’s one of the reasons I became a writer. No, not the making hats part, but rather the solving problems part. What is writing fiction if not solving one problem after another? Don’t answer, I was being metaphorical. I think Halloween is an appropriate day to be metaphorical. It’s such a diabolical word. Much like the word ‘diabolical’ itself.)

The rest of the day is pretty much a blur. I know it happened because I have a photograph of me in costume, which I wish I could lay hands on at the moment. I probably grabbed a pillowcase and went trick-or-treating with my best pal, Donnie Draves. Everything from then on would have been a sugar haze, anyway.

We always got treats and never tricked. We would plan out elaborate tricks that we wanted to pull off, but I guess we weren’t mean spirited enough to follow through. Besides, like I said, we always got treated.

Wanna See A Dirty Picture?

Well, I got no dirty pictures for you, but what I do have is an exceptional movie for you to rent. That is, if you like a heaping helping of violence in your movies. Most of us do, but most won’t admit it. That’s why people continue to watch the Rocky movies. No matter how much cheese Sylvester Stallone heaps on us, we always cheer him on in the end, when he’s punching the snot out of whomever.

The movie I’m suggesting you rest is titled ‘Unleased’ in United States, but around the rest of the world it’s known as ‘Danny the Dog’.

It features martial artist Jet Li as you’ve never seen him before—as an actor. Sure, he kicks the shit out of just about everything that moves, but this boy can act as well. How good is he? For starters, he holds his own up against the likes of Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, and that’s a lot.

In a nutshell, it’s the story of a young boy raised in a cage to be a human pit bull. (Yes I know I’m using dog stereotypes, and that probably more people are killed tripping over wiener dogs than are killed by pit bulls, but it’s late and I need a quick analogy, so deal.) Bob Hoskins plays a loan shark who raises the boy to kill on demand—which helps a lot when it comes time to collect overdue loans. One thing beautifully leads to another and Danny the Dog (Jet Li) comes in contact with blind Morgan Freeman. Wait, that doesn’t actually happen in the movie, like Being John Malkovich. What I mean is that Danny the Dog comes into contact with Sam the blind piano tuner, played by Morgan Freeman.

I hope you didn’t laugh when you read that, because I sure laughed when I typed it. “Well look who we have here, it’s good old Sam, the blind piano tuner.” Believe me, it works. Having a blind man see human being inside the killing machine does reek of treacle a bit, but you can blame the French. The film was written Luc Besson (the love him/hate him director of The Professional and The Fifth Element) and was directed by Louis Leterrier, a Besson protégé who also directed the underappreciated and misunderstood film, The Transporter. The French aren’t as jaded as we are, so to them a character like blind Sam the piano tuner is a sweet idea. Again, if anyone could pull off a character like this, it’s Morgan Freeman, and he does.

A secret little shining star hidden in this movie is Ms. Kerry Condon, who plays Morgan Freeman’s stepdaughter. But not really. She plays a character that is Morgan Freeman’s character’s stepdaughter. (Must stop doing that.) Condon is immediately recognizable, yet I knew I’d never seen her in anything before. Kinda like Ron Howard’s daughter who played the blind girl in The Village. You’re sure you’ve seen her before, yet you never have. Condon plays a just-turned-eighteen schoolgirl, who’s cute as a button. (Yet with enough simmering underlying sexiness to make any fathers watching—like me—kind of uncomfortable.)

Danny the Dog is pretty much a blank slate when he comes in contact with Sam and his stepdaughter and that’s when Jet Li really shows his acting chops. All his character knows about the world is what he picks up while living in a gangster’s cellar or when he’s unleashed and ordered to kill. Danny learns about the world at a natural, unrushed pace.

And of course there’s enough martial arts action to choke a Vietnamese pig. Which is a lot, I think. The fights were choreographed by the genius Woo-Ping Yuen, who called the shots in the Matrix movies and both volumes of Kill Bill. There’s a lot less wirework in this film and that’s probably because he had the likes of Jet Li to work with, as opposed to Keanu Reeves. Master choreographer + master martial artist = movie magic.

Did I mention how good Bob Hoskins is? I haven’t liked him this much since The Long Good Friday.

I hope this movie finds the audience on home video that it missed while in the theaters.

Was Tom really all that Swift? Were Frank and Joe Hardy?

My wife claims that I’d be a better writer today if I’d read the ‘classics’ when I was a wee lad. She might be right. I never read David Copperfield, but I know the name of the Hardy Boys’ speedboat (which they bought with reward money from solving crimes too tough for the local bumbling police chief to solve), and while I might not have read Jungle Book, I can tell you how many bathrooms there are aboard Tom Swift’s flying laboratory.

If I’m being honest, and I can think of no reason to be otherwise, I grew up on a steady diet of junk literature. Besides the evening newspaper, my father wasn’t much of a reader. My mom would stay up late reading romance novels and Readers Digest Condensed Books that she would trade back and forth between friends and relatives. I don’t recall my two sisters doing much reading or what their preferences were.

I attended Edgar Allen Poe grade school on the south side of Chicago. The school mascot was the Raven. Every seat was filled and teachers rarely held kids back. You learned what you wanted to learn and then they passed you along. I remember watching a lot of movies in school. The educational kind. On Fridays almost all the teachers showed movies. We were even allowed to bring candy to school on Friday. If you were reasonably well mannered you could coast along through the grades without being noticed—or learning much. I recall there was a library on the second floor of the school. I don’t know if they had copies of Jungle Book or David Copperfield. You weren’t required to read books so I didn’t read that many.

Then we moved. It was only thirty miles away, out into the suburbs, but it was a fresh start of sorts. I enrolled in Sunnybrook grade school. Our school mascot was the beaver. Our basketball team was the Sunnybrook Beavers. No lie. The year after I started attending they decided to change the name of the team to the Sunnybrook Nationals. The teachers at Sunnybrook were different than at Poe. They remembered my name, for starters. The class sizes were smaller and there was a genuine emphasis on learning. I wasn’t familiar with this concept, but I caught on fast.

Another big difference between the two schools was the libraries. At Poe the librarian, Mrs. Middleton, guarded the books like they were her little ducklings, and you had to have a very good reason for taking any book down off the shelf. At Sunnybrook, I don’t remember the name of the librarian, but she actually offered you books. She took you around and suggested titles that might interest you. How wild was that?

It was in the Sunnybrook library that I got my first sweet taste of serialized fiction. I rode the bus to school (as compared to Chicago, where the school was only a block away from home) and kids who rode the busses had to wait for them to arrive in the library. A door at the rear of the room opened out to the parking lot. A teacher usually sat by the door and announced which bus was loading, and looked bored most of the time. Meanwhile, us kids sat at the desks and either did homework, played desk football, or dug through the National Geographics looking for the ‘good’ issues. One day I was doing none of these things. I idly scanned the shelves and saw a series of books about a group of youngsters called the Bobbsey Twins. I picked one up and paged through it. It was little kid’s stuff, stupid, really, but by the time my bus was announced I was a couple of chapters in.

Then I did something horrible. Something that I regret to this day. I took the book with me. I didn’t check it out. The librarian was long gone for the day. I stole it. I stuck it into the pocket of the winter coat that I’d been sweating in for the last half hour and walked out the door.

Which was worse, I wondered. Stealing a book from the library or stealing a baby book from the library. That night I examined the book and tried to figure out why I’d taken it. It was certainly written for a younger age group than I was in, but this book was weird. It had been written in the 1920s and it was written in a denser writing style than I had ever experienced. It may have been a little kid’s book, but there were a lot of pages and the text was small. There was a lot of attention paid to mundane details, the most minor of characters were introduced with whole chunks of back history. And of course, because it was written in the 1920s, the characters had only a few of the conveniences I took for granted.

Everything seemed to involve a great adventure. If you wanted to do something as simple as wash your hands, you had to bring the wash basin downstairs, put on your wool jacket (the one with the blueberry stain on the sleeve, from the time that horrible Jimmy Creggers pushed you down into the blueberry bush near Hobson’s Creek. Mother and the wash woman tried their best to get the blue out, but to no avail) your rubber galoshes (last winter your feet were too small for them, so mother bunched up some rags and scraps of cloth into the toes) and your favorite mittens (which were a gift from Aunt Francine who claimed they were woven by the mystical old gypsy woman who lived in a caravan at the edge of town. She claimed that whoever should wear the mittens shall be eternally lucky. You told father once that whenever you wore the mittens you seemed to do well if there was a test at school. Father laughed and told you that there was nothing mysterious about my getting good grades. He then commended me on my study habits). Now dressed, you carried the water basin outside to the water pump. The pump handle had to be pulled once, twice, three times to bring water up, and then a few more times to run the brackish water through. With the basin full, it’s time to give your hands and face a good scrubbing. But while you look for the bar of soap and a wash cloth, Scraps the dog gets curious and while attempting to see what is in the basin he succeeds in knocking it over, spilling water on the rug that Uncle Nathan brought back from Spain after the war.

Part of what hooked me on the Bobbsey Twins was the period stuff and the attention to detail, but the other part was the element that made Edward Stratemeyer (creator of the Bobbsey Twins, as well as Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and a dozen other series) a genius was that each book began with the characters talking about the great adventure they’d just had, and ended with a teaser for an upcoming adventure. On the surface this was such a cool concept, because to a reader it meant that these characters didn’t just start and stop in the book you were holding. They existed before that particular book began, and kept on keeping on long after the particular book ended. Heck, they probably even did cool things that never even made it into the books.

Of course, only slightly below the surface, this was blatant and shameless advertising. How could I bear not knowing about the great times these characters just had, and were about to step into? I couldn’t.

Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway because this is my confessional of sorts, in the days that followed I stole all four of the Bobbsey Twins books from the library. I had every opportunity to check them out, but I was afraid of being made fun of for reading such baby stuff. I did it and I regret it. (To make matters worse, after reading the books I hid them away in the garage. There was a hole in the drywall, so I tucked them in the wall. Years later my father decided to do some refurbishing and I just happened to be standing there when he ripped the drywall down and the books tumbled out. He asked me if I knew anything about them. I lied and said I didn’t. I knew then, as I know now, thirty-five years later, he knew I was lying. He didn’t push me on the subject and he never mentioned it again, but he knew I was lying.

After the whole ugly Bobbsey Twins debacle, I checked out all the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books in the library. And then I found out they had them on sale at the stores, so I started collecting them. These weren’t as well written as the Bobbsey Twins had been, but they were a good read. (In fact, the early Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books had been written in the same wordy, detail packed style, but around the 1950s all the books were rewritten, streamlined, and in effect dumbed down. The only good aspect of this was that a lot of the racism and stereotypes were removed. I’ve read a lot of the originals and some are so politically incorrect they’d make your hair stand on end. The books that I’d swiped from the library had been the original versions)

While waiting for the next Hardy Boy adventure to be published, I spent a lot of time at the public library. It was only a mile or so from our new house. They had a great Young Adult section, and best of all there was an air-conditioned reading room. In the summer, when it was too hot to play ball or do anything destructive, my friend Kenny Madison and I would bike to the library and cool down. After a while Kenny stopped coming along and I read most of the Young Adult section from A to Z. There was no David Copperfield, but there was S.E. Hintion, and I never found Jungle Book, but I did have a nice run-in with The Mad Scientist’s Club.

A few weeks ago I came across a book at Borders that took me back in time to when I first met the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys.

The book is ‘Operation Red Jerico’ and the subheading reads that it’s ‘The Guild of Specialists Book 1’. The author is Joshua Mowll, a British graphic designer.

The book takes the form of a journal from the 1920s, recounting the adventures of fifteen-year-old Rebecca MacKenzie and her younger brother Doug.

Intentional or not, the pretense of the book mirrors the basis of the Lemony Snicket series. Plucky children, secret guild, missing parents, kids being bounced between relatives like pinballs. But that aside, it’s still an outstanding book.

Because it’s a journal, nearly every page features extensive diagrams and maps. There are vintage photos and newspaper clippings. Brother Doug is a talented sketch artist, so there are plenty of pencil drawings of people, places and events.

Every important location is detailed in foldout gatefolds, and the book ends with extended appendices and notes. The overall book design is a delight.

I found this book in the kid’s section of the store, but I don’t know what kids will make of it. It’s a definite curiosity. Perhaps it was created with readers like me in mind. My daughter Dakota is twelve. She showed little interest in it. She’d sooner wrestle with a fifty-pound Harry Potter book.

If you dig innovative Young Adult fiction, look for this book at a store near you. It’s only fifteen bucks, and even if you don’t buy it you should give it a good look anyway. See if it sparks any memories.

SULU IS GAY?!? THAT CAN'T BE RIGHT!

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- George Takei, who as "Star Trek's" Sulu was part of the Starship Enterprise crew through three television seasons and six movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of Frontiers, a biweekly Los Angeles magazine covering the gay and lesbian community.
---------------

Did you know about all about this? Were you somehow involved in on the cover up?

You realize, this changes everything. Everything!

I hope for your sake you didn't know about this all along.

This is so very wrong. I feel betrayed.

Didn't he have to sign some sort of Federation oath?

I'm repulsed, yet strangely aroused.

No! Wrong!

Of course, this explains the dreams.

Me, trying to land my shuttle in Sulu's docking bay. Him, yelling for more thrusters, more thrusters.

I should call my priest. Well, not Father Andrews. His cellblock lost their phone privileges for a month after some idiot started his mattress on fire.

Maybe Sister Pat. She promised to come over and rebuild the engine of my Harley, after she gets back from her religious retreat in San Francisco.

How could Sulu be gay? Next they'll be telling us that Captain Kirk is really bald. Or that mop top Chekhov was only put on board to reel in the 'Beatle crazy' youth of the 60s.

I think it's all a bunch of lies propagated by Khan. I bet he's behind it. Him and his luscious long hair, and those washboard abs and pecs of perfection.

That's it. Never happened. Not true. Not going to melt all my Sulu action figures with a blowtorch. No need to peel the posters off the ceiling.

Everything's fine. Deep breaths.

All is good.

"Live long and use plenty of lubricant"

I HAD ANOTHER GOOD IDEA…OR DID I?

Just like my horse in the basement story idea, which I discussed down yonder, I’ve been bouncing around another idea inside my noggin, which I think is pretty good, but that I can’t say for sure if it’s original or not.

Last year for Christmas I did a parody of one of those ‘family updates’ that some families send out every year, detailing what the Smith or the Jablonsky family has been up to during the past year. “Timmy hit a homerun during the big t-ball tournament, Earl finally got around to painting the garage, Marge won first prize for best pumpkin loaf at the church raffle”Stuff like that. I got lots of good feedback from my parody piece, but I also know that a few people didn’t get the gag. (At times my humor can be as dry as Joan Rivers’ hootchie)

I decided to do something different this year. I was thinking about doing a riff on everyone’s favorite holiday classic, The Little Drummer Boy. The story is preposterous, of course. Anyone who’s ever been anywhere near a newborn baby will tell you that the last thing a baby wants to hear is a snare drum solo.

I thought it would be funny to have the Drummer Boy panic, once he sees the Little Trumpet Boy, who is ahead of him in line, get smitten by a lightning bolt after his trumpet solo makes the baby Jesus cry.

So maybe Drummer Boy has to go through extreme (and comedic) measures to coerce one of the Three Wise Men to let him put his name on one of their gifts.
“Congratulations on being born, and being the son of God and all that. Enjoy the frankincense.”
Wise Man #3 …and Little Drummer Boy

I think I could make it funny. Maybe even do it as a mini comic book, but I’ll be darned if it seems like a really familiar idea.

Is it familiar because it’s been bouncing around in the back of my head for a while, or because it’s not my idea?

I drink a lot of diet soda (pop) and I think years of guzzling phenylalanine has addled my brain. I’ve also been having reoccurring flashes of déjà vu. But maybe I’ve already mentioned that.

WHO IN THE WORLD IS BUYING THIS STUFF?

Christmas and Hanukah are now on the horizon and approaching at a fast clip, which means it’s time for the catalogs to start showing up in the mail. Brookstone, Levenger, Sharper Image, Hickory Farms, and the daddy of them all (with regards to containing the most useless junk at the most inflated prices) Hammacher Schlemmer.

For years I used to look forward the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog with delight. (Similar to the delight I used to show over the arrival of the new Sears Roebuck catalog when I was eight or nine. Back then there were limited ways to learn of the existence of a new toy. Either you; saw it in a television commercial, saw it in person in a store or at a friend’s house, or in the ultimate source—the Sears Catalog. The new catalog would appear toward the end of the year, and it was fat as the phone book and it stank gloriously of ink on cheap newsprint. Every toy worth owning was in there to be check marked, cross-referenced, and drooled over. Years later I discovered that there was another section of the catalog to be drooled over, but that’s neither here nor there.)

The Hammacher Schlemmer catalog was famous for featuring the three or four ridiculously priced extravagant gifts peppered amidst hundreds of moderately priced extravagant gifts. The big stupid stuff would be like things like a one-man submarine, a solid gold tennis racquet strung with platinum strings and came with a diamond encrusted tennis ball, or a full-sized hot air balloon that looked just like the Star Wars Deathstar.

After you read about the wild stuff, you could browse through the pages filled with Scandinavian Moose Hide Moccasins, replicas of the New York Public Library Reading Lamps, and the Go-Anywhere Wind Meters. It always made for quality bathroom reading.

The latest batch of catalogs have recently arrived, and they’ve got me thinking. I noticed that Hammacher Schlemmer has really cut back on their ‘big’ items. They’ve only got one, as far as I can tell. It’s an $80,000 replica of Robby the Robot from the movie Forbidden Planet. I wonder how many of those they’re going to sell this year? Back in the 1990’s with all the Internet start-up money flowing around, sure, I know three or four people who might have bought one, but do we have as many people today with ‘stupid’ money as we used to? Anyway, that’s just Robby.

I paged through the rest of the catalog and started wondering exactly how many of some of these items they were selling. Here are some examples:
$429.95 - goat suede shirt
$499.00 - gasoline powered remote controlled truck
$139.95 - fish finder watch
$269.95 - Irish walking cape (trip to Ireland sold separately)
$59.95 – two pair of Sea Island cotton socks
$699.95 – portable backyard ice rink
$1,099.95 – animated light-up Santa on motorcycle (Ms. Claus available for only an additional $949.95)
And my personal favorite—
$39.95 – The Children’s ATM Bank (which allows them to deposit money, then use their very own ATM card to withdraw said money to buy a $500 gasoline powered remote controlled truck!)

Maybe I just hang with the poor crowd, but this catalog seems to be aimed at Lotto winners and the recently bereaved that have come into a ton of inheritance money. Even so, how many goat suede shirts can they sell in a month? Have you ever seen anyone walking around in one? Ever seen anyone playing a little hockey on a portable backyard ice rink?

Maybe I’m getting too cynical in my old age. Or maybe I’m just confounded by the amount of money some people must have to burn. How could anyone spend sixty bucks for two pairs of socks? If you added up all my sock purchases over the course of my lifetime, I don’t think I’m anywhere near sixty bucks.

If I ever get stupid rich, and you see me walking around wearing a fish finder watch and an Irish walking cape, do me a favor and slap me silly, okay?

ALWAYS THE LAST ONE ON THE BAND WAGON…

I’ve always loved that expression, but do many bands even have wagons these days? When is the last time you saw U2 riding around on a wagon? I would switch over to ‘I’m always the last one on the bus’ or ‘the last to board the plane’ but it doesn’t have the same ring to it.

The thing that I’m late I’m one of the last to do is to sing the praises of the film A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. Val and I saw it this weekend and we were both floored—I believe me more than here—by how most excellent it was. I never read the graphic novel it was based on, but that wasn’t a necessity for enjoying it.

The movie was directed by David Cronenberg. His movies have always been hit or miss (mostly miss) with me. I enjoyed The Dead Zone, but I think that was mostly due to a striking performance by Christopher Walken (before he turned into the cool living cartoon that he is today), and The Fly had a lot going for it, but none of his other films have connected with me.

The cast of the History of Violence was aces, all the way across the board. Even the supporting and bit players were top notch. You know that these characters existed before the movie started and you have no doubt that they continue on doing what they’re do, long after the credits roll.

Even the tiny Canadian town that passes for a tiny Indiana town is a character.

But the best part of the movie, hands down, was the story. It was a beaut, and it pulled you along from start to finish. Thanks to massive budgets and the miracle of CGI, filmmakers can create whatever they want and put it up on the big screen, but without a solid story everyone is wasting their time.

I know that sounds simple, and it is, but it’s something that’s missing from a good chunk of what Hollywood pumps out every Friday. Everyone loves a good story. That’s what first attracted me to Stephen King. I don’t like horror novels, and none of his have ever particularly frightened me. But he tells a great story.

In the past I’ve been accused of candy coating my writing. D’you know when you need to candy coat? When you don’t have a strong enough story.

I was taught that the plot of the story runs from the beginning to end, like a clothesline, and it’s what you hang all your story elements on. I always like that analogy, but I wish I’d been told that your clothesline needs to be powerful and taunt, otherwise elements of your story will droop down into the mud.

I’m glad that I sat through History of Violence, but I think I would have enjoyed reading a quick paragraph summary just as well. It’s one of those movies that I walk out of and I’m glad to be a writer. The movie had succeeded at something I strive for when I sit down at the keyboard.

If you get a chance, check this movie out. Like I said, it’s got a great story, plus you get to see Maria Bello naked. I call that a win/win situation.

EVER HAVE SUCH A GREAT IDEA THAT YOU WERE AFRAID IT WASN’T YOURS?

Neither have I, but I do have a pretty interesting idea for a Young Adult novel that I’m not sure where it came from. I don't know if it's my idea.

For starters, I’ve never intentionally stolen a story or an idea for a story in my life. Well, there was that one time, but I don’t think it counts because I apologized. (There was a big likable fellow who worked at Jim Hanley’s comic shop on Staten Island, who kept telling me about this story he wanted to write about the Grim Reaper coming to kill someone, but when he shows up at his intended victim’s door he’s mistaken for someone responding to an ad for a roommate. The Reaper winds up renting the room from the guy and pretty soon the fellow is wondering why all his friends are dying. I thought it was a really fun idea and told him so, but he never wrote it up. After months of asking him if he’d done anything with it I got frustrated and wrote a comic book story about the Grim Reaper attempting to kill a doddering old woman, a fairly simple task, but a comedic series of mishaps keeps getting in his way and prevents him for completing his mission. The story was illustrated by Kyle Baker and saw print in a comic called Asylum. I later apologized to the fellow at Hanley’s, and he said it was cool with him.)

Anyway, a few days ago I had a germ of an idea. I scribbled ‘Horse in the basement’ on a Post-It and went back to what I was doing. Over the course of the day little bits of bacteria and microbes formed around said germ. By the end of the day I had it. Sort of. Here’s what I had:

Ten or fifteen years ago a friendly old coot who works part time at a local animal shelter gets a strange animal dropped off during his shift. Someone brings in an injured foal (baby horse) from a nearby, urm… riding academy, or maybe a farm, but they bring the foal, who was born with a crippled leg, to the shelter to be put to sleep. The old coot can’t bring himself to put the animal down, so instead he brings it home and puts it in his basement. His wife nearly files for divorces him, but in the end she lets him try to nurse the animal back to health. He cares and nurtures the horse until it’s healthy and healed enough to walk around with only a slight limp. (?) But the old couple, their children long since moved away, have grown attached to horse so in the basement it stays. The basement is unfinished and big enough so the horse can walk around a small circuit to get some daily exercise.

Years pass and the wife dies. Tears flow like raindrops. The old coot continues to care for the horse. A few more years pass and the old coot dies too. The couple never had a great relationship with their kids, so they leave the house to their only grandson. A teenager named…urm…Burt. Burt and his folks fly in for the funeral and to check out the house and the horse is discovered.

That’s the premise. Now for the conflict.

The horse is much too big at this stage to get out of the house. He’s as big as a friggin’ horse. The only way to get him out is to rip open the back of the house and dig a ramp down to the basement. The problem is that the house is like two hundred years old. Well, not old enough to be a historical monument, but it’s of a certain style and construction that collectors covet them and spend millions of dollars to own one. They even better than Frank Lloyd Wright houses. Burt’s parents see the dollar signs and convince Burt to sell the house to some bloke who has showed up from …urm, Canada, with a check for two million bucks.

Burt wants to be a millionaire, go to the college of his choice, blah blah blah, but the problem of course is the horse. If they tear up the house to get the horse out the value drops to a fraction of what it is now. Even if they do an expert job patching things back up. The dude from Canada certainly doesn’t want a house with a horse in the basement, so the only alternative is to put the horse down. Kill it dead and chop it into small enough sections to be carried up the basement stairs.

It’s a ghastly concept, but we’re talking about a lot of money here. Or, and Burt’s sister may or may not have a rare medical disorder that require expensive surgery that their medical insurance won’t cover, for some convenient reason.

Burt has a difficult decision to make, and things only get worse when he takes a liking to the horse (feeding it, walking it around, toting bags of crap up to the backyard garden). What will he do? Will the parents force him to make a decision he doesn’t want to make? Will he free the horse and flush his fortune down the toilet?

I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far yet.

But here’s my problem. I know that this isn’t necessarily the best story that’s ever been written, but I like it a lot. Pieces of it come to me effortlessly. Writing it would be as simple as falling off a horse.

But is it my story? It’s coming to me so easily that it’s almost as if I’d heard it before.

Did I read it when I was a young’un? It’s seems so familiar that I almost think I did, except for the fact that overall it’s a pretty lame story (pun intended).

Maybe I should search at Amazon or Google ‘horse in basement’. Or maybe I should just go ahead and write it and see if that jogs my memory.

As with most things, time will tell.

LITTLE OLD LADY WHO?

When I was a kid I heard something that scared me. This was around the time the war in Viet Nam was winding down, so I must have been eight or nine. What I heard was that all the big nations in the world had doomsday bombs hidden away in case they should ever be overrun by a hostile nation. This concept boggled my mind. It was one thing to have thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at other countries. I could sort of understand that one. I grew up on the south side of Chicago. If you were walking home down an alley at night you were less likely to get jumped and robbed if you were carrying a baseball bat, than if you were empty handed.

Bullies love taking cheap shots. They seem to lose most of the wind from their sails if a prospective target is capable of fighting back. So we needed our missiles to keep the other guys with missiles from taking a cheap shot. That I understood. But the whole doomsday scenario was staggering.

The way that I heard it was that if the impossible did happen, if Russia, or China, or even Canada proved capable of conquering the U.S. of A., and actually set foot on our sacred soil, that all they would be getting was a nuclear wasteland.

For starters, the military had planted a string of hundreds of nuclear warheads a couple miles off shore, up and down the East and West coastline of the U.S.. Once triggered, they would create a thousand foot tidal wave that would wipe both coasts clean. While this was happening, dozens of specially constructed nuclear-tipped missiles would fire one mile straight up and then detonate, covering the country in a thick cloud or radioactivity. If the bad guys won, we sure the hell wouldn’t let them take us alive.

I used to spend sleepless nights wondering just how this whole doomsday procedure would be initiated. It would have to be some sort of automatic sensor or something that would detect that the country had fallen into enemy hands. It wouldn’t go off until it thought we were as good as dead, right?

But what if there was some sort of malfunction? Glitches happened all the time in movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe. What if the doomsday device lost a gear or blew a transistor and all of a sudden decided it was time to exterminate the United States?

Certainly the President would have a way to override the device. He would have to have a button to push to stop the madness.

It wouldn’t be just one button, though. One button would be too easy to press accidentally. No, it would have to be a series of buttons. Perhaps they needed to be pushed in a special sequence. Maybe even a coded sequence that changed from day to day. Or best of all, a password. People can forget coded number sequences, but passwords are easy to remember.

The President probably had to enter a special password to deactivate the device and avoid the destruction of the United States. He probably got to make up his own password, to make it easier to remember. Maybe the name of his first girlfriend, or the title of a favorite book.

If through some wild sequence of events, the likes of which only happen in Michael Bay movies, if I was suddenly deemed the only sane person left in the world to shut down the doomsday device, I know what my secret password would be. I would make it: LITTLEOLDLADYWHO?

I would never forget it.

Don’t be alarmed that I’m telling you what it is. It was my intention to. Because, if a wild series of events could fall in place making me the only person capable of deactivating the device, then it’s just as likely that a cracked piece of masonry would drop off the Washington monument and crack my skull open, just about the same time the device accidentally triggers itself. (Hey, don’t laugh. Stuff like that happens all the time.)

So, if (and I realize what a big ‘IF’ this is) I’m put in charge of stopping the device and if something should happen to me, anyone who has read this will be able to step up and save the United States.

Why LITTLEOLDLADYWHO? you ask? And why am I so certain that I’ll never forget it as a password? Well, when I was a very little kid, long before I’d heard of the whole doomsday possibility, I had convinced myself that I could yodel. I think I’d been watching the version of Heidi that starred Shirley Temple, and someone was yodeling at her. It sounded like a pretty fun thing to do, and didn’t seem to be too difficult so I gave it a go. What came out of my mouth was “Little Old Lady Who?” and I thought I was golden. I spent the day traveling the neighborhood entertaining everyone within earshot with my newfound ability.

And then finally that night someone told me the cold hard truth. It might have been one of my sisters. It smacked me in the face like a giant hand made of ice (because it stung so much). I didn’t know how to yodel. I only knew how to say Little Old Lady Who? The people I’d been singing it to all day must have thought I was an idiot. “What’s that fool boy think he’s doing?” “I don’t know, but I know one thing for sure he ain’t doing, and that’s yodeling!”

I was crushed. I guess I still am today. Years later I heard one of the Three Stooges do a bit where the punchline was Little Old Lady Who? I’d been watching the Stooges from the cradle, so I guess it was already planted in the back of my brain by the time I watched Heidi and began my short lived yodeling career.

So there you have the password to save the country, and the reason I’ll never forget it. Use this information wisely, please.

What if Freud was right? Imagine the implications.

For starters, I’m not talking about the whole cigar = phallus thing. That one is just dead wrong. If cigars weren’t bad for your health I’d have a thick one in my mouth right this very second. That, plus a cigar worth smoking is going to cost you at least ten bucks, which is enough to buy a good book, or could feed an entire village of those starving kids you see on late night infomercials.

The thing that I’m worried about is what Freud is supposed to have said about mistakes. He claimed that there were no mistakes. You say what you really think and you do what you really want to.

As you can imagine, there are both lightweight and heavy-duty implications to a concept like this.

Lightweight: Ooops! I bought a gallon of triple fudge Heath Bar crunch ice cream; when I forgot that I was supposed to get the non-fat, sugar free, Soy vanilla. Silly me.

Heavy-Duty: Oooops! The wife and me were doing some gardening in the yard. Somehow the hedge clipper got away from me and I managed to gouge into her femoral artery. Ain’t I a goof?

I have a hard enough time taking responsibility for all my conscious actions, but if Freud was right, now I’ve got to take on everything I do and say on the sub-conscious level too? This is such a massive concept for me to try to absorb, but then I start to consider that not only am I operating on two levels, so is everyone else around me.

If we decide to climb aboard this train of thought, then the next stop down the line is the notion that, yes, we do make our own luck. Consciously, we really want that new job promotion that is about to open up, and we think we deserve it far more than Larry or Judy. Now try to imagine what’s happening in our unchecked sub-conscious?

The next day Judy has to be rushed to the hospital because a copier toner cartridge, which someone stupidly left leaning on the shelf over her cubicle, has dribbled enough toner into her coffee cup during the course of the day to make her pee blood.

And gee, Larry’s in a bit of a jam. It seems that a couple of guys from the were chatting, while doing their business at the urinal, about how Larry has so much porn on his office computer that he’s had to request a bigger hard drive from the boys in IT. This wouldn’t have been so bad if CEO of the company hadn’t been sitting in the handicapped stall, reading the Wall Street Journal, like he did every morning.

I guess if we have tight enough reigns on our waking mind, our sub-conscious can’t get too far out of control. Of course now I’m thinking about the movie Forbidden Planet, which was a mixture of Freud’s theory of Id, Ego & Superego, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. If you haven’t seen the movie, (Forbidden Planet, not The Tempest) in short, it’s about a group of space travelers who settle down to live on a planet once inhabited by an ancient alien race, the Krell, that apparently vanished overnight. In a short time the space settlers begin to mysteriously die, torn apart my invisible monsters. As it turns out the Krell had been such an evolved (and apparently lazy) race that they had created an elaborate underground machine that was capable of attending to their every need. If a Krell was hungry for a plate of steamed Nurelian swamp root, all he had to do was wish for it and the machine below would make it appear. Things went bad, though, when said Krell went to bed for the night and dreamed that it would be really great if a monster were to kill his neighbor, and while he was at it, destroy his entire living pod, so he could have an unobstructed view of the ammonia pond.

The moral of the movie was that if you’re going to build an all-powerful machine capable of fulfilling your every wish, don’t. You’re going to regret it in a hurry.

Which brings me to 4:50 last night. No monster attacked me in my sleep, but my wife did crack me a good one on the head with her elbow. It hurt me enough to wake up and look at the clock so I could tell her what she had done and at what time it had happened.

My wife has never hit me with her elbow during the waking hours. As far as I can recall, not even once by accident. Was her subconscious pissed at me last night and decided, what the hell, why not give him a good shot to the head now? I don’t think so. I think it really was an accident.

We have six cats. Two of them sleep on the bed with us. One spends most of his time in the laundry basket on the hall landing. Another fancies the cat tree in the living room. The last two, brothers who don’t realize that they’re technically not kittens any more, divide their time between the couch and anywhere else they flop down in exhaustion.

This is WHEN they sleep. A good part of the night they participate in the cat Olympics. The events include the synchronized stair chase, two and three-cat wrassle matches, and their favorite, the bed dive. And it’s not unusual for them to incorporate the other events, like the stair chase or the cat wrassle into the bed dive event.

Each night there’s enough activity in our bed to fill a dozen installments of Penthouse Forum (although the average reader might be a tad disappointed by the content). So is it possible that the elbow I took to the head was the result of my wife getting mauled by a cat who had tunneled beneath the blanket? It is certainly possible and probably highly likely.

I think I slept better when we had a hand me down mattress and only one cat, than I do now that we have a ridiculously expensive mattress and six cats. That’s what I think.

Of course this raises the question; are cats aware of what they’re doing when they bite and scratch us, or trip us when we stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Sometimes I wonder if I was supposed to be gay…

As I type this I’m listening to the soundtrack to the Broadway hit Mamma Mia. I like a lot of Broadway show tunes. People who like Broadway show tunes are supposed to be gay. That’s what I’ve heard.

I don’t have any other homosexual tendencies. I like having sex with women (I mean WOMAN, as in my wife) and have never been what they call bi-curious. Still, I’m far from what you’d call a typical hetro macho male. I like building stuff (if putting together bookcases and desks counts as building) and lifting heavy objects, but I’m not into sports, like diehard hetros are supposed to. I do watch the Super Bowl each year, and enjoy most of it, but the truth is that I mostly watch to see the cool commercials. When I was young I used to play a lot of sports in the neighborhood. We would always be playing football or softball in the nearest vacant lot. But as an adult I’m not into sports at all. Of course, that could have something to do with the fact that I’m a great big fat tubby who would have a myocardial infarction if I got together for a pick-up game of b-ball with the guys after work. If I had a job, and if there were guys present.

Speaking of guy and jobs, that reminds me of a time several years ago when I was living in New York and worked at DC Comics. There were a bunch of guys who would spend their lunch hours at a local high priced strip club. They used to ask me along but I always declined. Most times if I went out of the office at lunch I would go to an arcade down the block and play pinball. So why didn’t I go see mostly naked girls and drink overpriced cocktails? Well, nobody likes looking at naked ladies more than me. (Okay, that’s not true, and we all know it, but for the sake of argument let’s just pretend that nobody likes looking at naked ladies more than me.) And I’ve been in my share of strip clubs in my day. But the thing of it is that I kind of thought the notion of going to a strip club during lunch was just plain silly. A.) I wasn’t making a ton of money back then, and laying down ten or twenty bucks for some watered down drinks never seemed like a good investment. B.) The whole point of going to a strip club, at least I always thought, was to get excited/aroused/interested in the vast quantities of nude flesh parading around on stage. Who wants to get all excited/aroused/ and interested and then have to go back to work? C.) Drinking during the middle of the day has never worked out for me, and paying $4.50 for a Diet Pepsi just so I can see naked chicks works even less. So I never went to the strip club with the guys. Did they think I was gay? I don’t know. I quit DC to move to California to get married, so perhaps those who did rethought their opinion. Either way, it doesn’t matter.

I guess my real problem is that I don’t live up to the image of the heterosexual as portrayed in our modern culture. When I was young, based on what I’d seen in movies and on television, I thought that when ‘the man’ came home from a long day of toiling at whatever he toiled at, one of two things would happen. Either his wife (dressed in a smart outfit, neatly coifed, and complete with earrings, necklace, and high heel shoes) would meet him at the door with a peck on the cheek and a pitcher of chilled martinis, or he would loosen his tie while heading to a sideboard loaded with booze bottles, and he’d pour himself a stiff drink of some brownish liquid on the rocks. (Of course there was always ice in the ice bucket) That’s what I thought, even though nothing of the sort happened in my house. At my house my dad would come home, pour himself a short shot from the pint of Segrams whiskey he kept somewhat ‘hidden’ in the cupboard, and then follow it with a can or two of Schlitz beer. My mom never served him, and there was rarely a peck on the cheek, but that’s a story for another day. My point is that people drink like fish in the movies and on television. They also used to smoke like chimneys and light their cigarettes with a decorative lighter that sat on the coffee table next to a cigarette box. For years my mom smoked Salem cigarettes straight from the pack and lit them with a matchbook.

Still, I saw it so often I thought that was the way men were supposed to act. Drink lots of booze, smoke from morning until night, and if someone gave you a hard time you slugged them on the jaw. I don’t do any of those things and it bugs me to this day.

I’m not gay. The truth is that I don’t think the gays would have me. I’m fat, bald, have a scraggy beard, and mostly wear shorts and t-shirts. As the saying goes, I certainly wouldn’t shag me. I’m not gay but I like a lot of things that fit into the whole gay stereotype, including Broadway show tunes, enjoying an hour or two of watching figure skating on the television with my wife, and I’m certainly not thuggish. If someone walked up to me on the street and socked me in the jaw I’d probably fall down and cry a little, but I don’t think I’m alone there.

I downloaded the Mamma Mia soundtrack off the Internet and it’s not bad. I'm glad I didn't spend fifteen bucks for it. I think I like the original ABBA version of the songs better. Yeah, I like ABBA. I like Barry Manilow albums too (just the old ones from the 70s) and I listen to the soundtrack to the movie Xanadu at least once a week. If you have a problem with what I listen to you can call me gay, or you could walk up to me and give me a sock in the jaw. I’d prefer former over the latter.

Oh, and if you don’t recognize the photo in this post then you’re missing out on Little Britain, the funniest show to come out of England in a long time. Look for it on BBC America or buy the first season on DVD. It’s a hoot and a half.