Month: December 2010

If I could just hold you again

When it comes to nostalgia, there are those things that are true memories and those which are false memories.  No decade has more of this going for it than the 1980s.  Eighties nostalgia is a juggernaut that began when I was in high school back in the early 1990s and really hasn’t stopped since, especially since I’ve had students who say they’re nostalgic for the 1980s, something I find hilarious considering they weren’t really old enough to remember it (And no, they don’t, because that would be like me saying I remember the 1970s when I was born in 1977 and my only memory of anything world events before 1981 is seeing Jimmy Carter on a television screen.  That might be a 1970s memory but it doesn’t exactly put me inside Studio 54).

If you are truly a Child of the Eighties, you are fully aware of these two sides of nostalgia because for every movie, television show, compilation album, or Glee medley that says, “Remember Eighties?  Here it is!  No, don’t think about anything that really happened.  This is Eighties.  Enjoy these memories.”  You’re not supposed to remember that Wang Chung had three good songs, only that they recorded “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” and made a seizure-inducing video to go along with it.  You’re not supposed to remember Fresh Horses, the piece-of-crap other Molly Ringwald/Andrew McCarthy flick, just Pretty In Pink.  And you’re not supposed to remember the Cloris Leachman years of The Facts of Life.

Okay, sorry about that last one.

Anyway, I’m one of those people who will listen to a flashback station on Sirius and be happy that Alan Hunter has decided to play “Stone in Love” instead of “Don’t Stop Believin'” for the hour’s dose of Journey.  Maybe it’s because I’m a nostalgia dork, or maybe it’s because I’ve been exposed to so much Eighties nostalgia for the past two decades that I need more than something that scratches the surface.  I think that everyone reaches that point in his life, where he wants more than just another playing of “Hungry Like the Wolf,” and usually there is one work that serves as a trigger for the true memories that lie beneath the VH-1-produced surface.  For me, it was “At This Moment” by Billy Vera and the Beaters.

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Can I Have Christmas Chocolate?

My English classes this week were reading Dylan Thomas’s short story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which is a cute story about –well, the title’s kind of self-explanatory.  But what I love about the story, besides Thomas’s use of the English language, especially in his imagery and his wit, is that it’s one of the few Christmas stories that I have read (or seen on TV) that doesn’t attempt to teach me any sort of lesson.  Instead of Scrooge, etc. learning the “meaning of Christmas,” Dylan Thomas simply talks about the Christmases of his youth as a matter of fact.  I’m not sure if my students enjoyed the story (most of them spent two days either bitching about the fact that they had to be in school when every other school district in the area had the entire week off, or attempting to sleep), but we had a great discussion about holiday traditions and why we enjoy them so much.

Over the course of this discussion, I brought up some of the things my family has done since I was a little kid.  This included such time-honored traditions as my mother forcing my sister and I to sit at the top of our stairs and take a picture, getting a toothbrush in our stockings, and the long arduous process of opening the gifts under the tree.  Furthermore, I talked about how when you get to be my age and you have a family on your own, you find yourself either starting new traditions or carrying on old traditions either by yourself or with your siblings or children.  One such tradition has been holding on to the idea that while Christmas is a day, there is a whole Christmas season.

The idea of Advent has been around for at least a few hundred years and is marked in several ways by different religious denominations.  I grew up attending the Lutheran church and the tradition there was that during the four Sunday services prior to Christmas, there would be an advent wreath, which is a wreath with five candles (four purple candles in a circle and a white one in the center), sitting near the altar.  At the beginning of the service, the acolyte (which I think is what Catholics would call an “altar boy”) would light one of the purples candles (each a different shade of purple and I believe with a meaning, which I once knew, but my rejection of most things religious in my teens and twenties and suppression of Sunday School trauma led to this information being purged from my memories), with the  white one for Christmas Eve/Day to signify the birth of Christ. 

However, this wasn’t the only way I knew how to celebrate the Christmas season.  There’s been the obvious running of the Christmas shopping gauntlet and a barrage of Christmas-themed television specials and movies (as well as short stories in my English classes), but the most important one, since I’ve been a kid, has been the PeA advent calendar. 

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The Routine

A "fall in the suburbs" shot of a brother and sister that's worth some caption about Americana, but I can't think of one.

In the middle of my sister’s wedding last month, I walked over to her and said jokingly, “Now we are so happy, we do the dance of joy!”  She finished the sentence along with me, as it’s one of the many weird in-joked the two of us have, most of which have something to dow ith the countless hours of crappy 1980s-era sitcoms that we grew up watching in syndication because my father was too cheap to spring for cable. 

It is entirely fitting, by the way, that I turn to sitcoms when I think about what growing up with my sister was like.  I know brothers and sisters who are weirdly close, or have one of those relationships where the brother may as well be another father.  I also know brothers who are perfect confidants and had greeting-card upbringings.  While Nancy and I had annoyingly ordinary childhoods, we weren’t exactly the Cleavers of the Bradys.  On some level I guess you could say we were the Cunninghams, even though my parents didn’t have an older child who mysteriously disappeared (I’ve always thought that Chuck Cunningham was an early anti-war activist and a member of the communist party so Mr. C. drove him to the Canadian border under the cover of night because while he loved his son, he was proud of his country and didn’t want to face the humiliation of HUAC) and none of my friends were cool guys who lived above my parents’ garage.  Besides, we didn’t really grow up watching Happy Days unless WPIX was rerunning it in the afternoons.

No, we were more accustomed to vegging out in front of stuff like Growing Pains, The Wonder Years, Full House, or Charles in Charge.  Full House, especially, stuck with us over the yars because it gave my sister her longest-running nickname (unless you count the Wonder Years reference “butthead”).

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The Jericho Gambit (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Five)

The cover to The New Titans #82, picking up where we left off four issues ago.

Is it me or does it seem that I’m taking forever to get through coverage of what amounts to about 12 issues of Titans comics?  Well, I guess when you’re doing these once a month it is going to take a while, but in thinking of what it was like to buy New Titans off the shelf back in the early 1990s this is very appropriate.  The title, creatively, was doing very well and what the new editor, Jon Peterson had brought was the shot in the arm it had so desperately needed.  However, there were several times where it was terribly late, and that makes it kind of surprising that within a year or so it would be selling well at all.

Who knows why fans put up with it?  Perhaps having a book run a couple of weeks late isn’t that bad in the beginning of the Image Comics era of books that would ship late up to a year (to the point where it would become a running joke), although DC was able to get four Superman titles out on time each month, so it’s not like their operation was a complete disaster.

Anyway, I remember riding up to Amazing Comics each month with my money in my pocket and being excited when the book was there and a little dismayed when it wasn’t, although not having Titans meant that I could dive into the back issue bins for a few minutes and maybe add to my Wolfman-Perez collection.

It’s also pretty appropriate that I took forever to get to this point because not only had the book been shipping late, but the story itself had been dragging on for a little bit.  Not in an X-Men sort of way, but the last issue that I covered was New Titans #78 and I’m starting this with #82.  There are four issues (three plus an annual) that had a little bit to do with the story but didn’t advance it, and all of which I’ll get to next month when I take a look at the long road to the “Total Chaos” storyline.

For now, though, we have “The Jericho Gambit,” which concluded the “Titans Hunt” in New Titans #82-84.  What “The Jericho Gambit” actually means is beyond me.  Webster’s defines “gambit” as  a chess opening in which a player risks one or more pawns or a minor piece to gain an advantage in position.  No, seriously, that’s what Webster’s says.  I looked it up. But whose opening move is this?  I’d say that Jericho made his gambit back in issue #71 when he kidnapped all of the Titans or maybe even #72 when the ‘beests killed Golden Eagle in an effort to get Aqualad.  I think that they were going for a title that sounded a little like “The Judas Contract,” which is the most famous New Teen Titans storyline (and one I’ll get to at some point), but this time around there was nothing on the cover to indicate the name of the istoryline and I don’t know how much the book was advertised.  From what I remember, It wasn’t covered in Wizard (then again, DC had to kill Superman in order to get coverage in Wizard).

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Roy Rogers Rides Into the Sunset

The last Roy Rogers on Long Island.

This afternoon, my sister informed me that the last remaining Roy Rogers restaurant on Long Island, located off of Sunrise Highway and the William Floyd Parkway in Shirley, has closed its doors.  She linked to a story on Newsday but because Newsday and Cablevision have teamed up to nickel and dime everyone for everything, I wasn’t able to read the story.  But the gist is that Hardee’s (which owns the franchise) decided not to renew the restaurant’s lease.

It truly is the end of an era.  Roy Rogers was one of the only fast food restaurants in the Sayville area when I was a kid, located on Sunrise Highway near Johnson Avenue in the same shopping center as TSS.  That location closed in the early 1990s and I believe a Vitamin Shoppe stands there today.  Not that there aren’t any Roys restaurants out there anyway, especially for those of us traveling up and down I-95 through the mid-Atlantic corridor, and in the greater Alexandria, Virginia area.

In honor of the demise of Roy Rogers’ presence in my native land, I am reprinting a piece from an old website of mine.  In December 2002, I took my only trip to the Roy Rogers in Shirley, traveling out there with my sister.  I then wrote about it on “Inane Crap”, the site I had at the time.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the photos from that day (somehow they were lost and the Internet archive has been no help).  But you can enjoy my pretentious use of son lyrics and attempts at wit, and at the end of the piece I’ve linked an old Roy Rogers commercial.  So at least there’s something to scroll down to.

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