random stuff

Liberty Enlightening the World

So a week or two ago, I was cleaning up some stuff in my basement and in a huge Rubbermaid tub that was full of old VHS tapes found an old tape labeled “Liberty Weekend.”  I don’t remember grabbing it from my parents’ house when I moved away, but that’s not a surprise considering I grabbed quite a few things from their basement that I am sure they were happy to get rid of.

Still, I had to wonder why we had a tape labeled “Liberty Weekend” (not why I grabbed it–that’s explained by my love of having random crap) and then I noticed that the handwriting on the label was neither mine nor my parents’.  It was that of my dad’s old friend, Chuck, or “Uncle” Chuck as we used to call him.  He was the guy who once copied the entire Star Wars trilogy from laserdisc to VHS for me, so that meant that he’d probably put something together either using the footage from Liberty Weekend or for Liberty Weekend.

After realizing what it was, I had to wonder why he had put together the tape to begin with, unless he had been trying out some sort of editing equipment and decided to have a little fun.  Then, I actually started to watch the tape and remembered how huge the Statue of Liberty centennial celebration was twenty-five years ago.  So much so that not only did I decide to take the time to reflect on the weekend but a lot more.

Because in all honesty, it was very hard to escape the Statue of Liberty’s 100th anniversary, especially if you were a kid living in the New York City area.  The weekend of July 4, 1986 was a four-day party in and around New York City (especially New York harbor) and it was quite possibly one of the hugest things I had seen at the time, or since.  But the story really starts a few years earlier and encompasses more than a fireworks show and a concert that wound up in my basement in Virginia a quarter century later.

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Losers Bizhub, Winners Collate.

Though it is more than 25 years old and as a whole a pretty uneven movie, when I think about my job being accurately portrayed (or at least lampooned) in film, I think of the 1984 Nick Nolte film Teachers. One scene, in particular, has always worked and will always work. Mr. Stiles, nicknamed “Ditto” because of the amount of worksheets he produces, is in the main office using an old-fashioned mimeograph when another teacher approaches him and yells, “You’re always hogging that machine!” She then proceeds to squirt ink on his face and smack him around before being physically hauled away.

Now, I’ve never attacked another faculty member with ink, but I definitely can say that there are moments when I have become violently angry at a copier, using several four-letter words that are wholly inappropriate for a classroom but okay for the teacher’s lounge whenever the Risograph craps out in the middle of making 120 copies of my four-page, double-sided worksheet. Most office environments no longer have archaic copying systems like mine and are able to invest in something like a Bizhub; however, your average public school is not most offices. Since we cannot afford the Cadillac of copiers, we duplicate, we collate, we stack, we sort, and we manually staple everything we produce.

I am sure there is no formal statistic for the amount of time teachers spend putting papers together, but ask any teacher and he will tell you that at least a couple of times each marking period, his planning period is spent with the pages of a worksheet packet spread out among the rows of desks in his classroom in the correct order so he can move from page to page and stack then, then staple the stack together and move on to the next. I’ve done this dance myself, both in my classroom and at home and usually it takes me as long as two or three hours to put everything together.

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Scared Straighter

The shouts echo through the near-empty room, and while the volume of voice and harshness of his tone would make any normal person wince, the boy he is screaming at doesn’t budge.  In fact, he seems to be staring past the raving man and putting his best defiant face forward.  He might seem like he isn’t listening to the man talk about how he got to prison and what all of his experiences in prison have done to him as a person, but someone thinks he is.   More than likely this person is his teacher or a mentor or the head of some program that’s meant to take kids off the streets and make them realize that if they continue their behavior, they will have a very hard life.

The inspiration for such an experience is Scared Straight!, a 1978 documentary that showed a group of juvenile delinquents spending three hours with a group of convicts. Most of the delinquents had been in and out of trouble with the law and the idea was to have them face reality and change their lives.  For the most part–although there definitely are critics of the program who say it wasn’t–the teenagers were “scared straight” and the documentary inspired several other television specials, including follow-up shows, and local scared straight programs that were conducted through sheriff’s departments and public schools.

I wasn’t the the type of student to ever wind up in a scared straight program.  I was an honors student and my life was very straight and narrow; I hadn’t stolen so much as a pack of gum in my lifetime and never even had an overdue library book.  However, in the spring of my junior year of high school, I found myself standing in the middle of a prison cafeteria watching my friend get reamed by a guy named Tracy and his fellow inmate, Cedric. Of course, we weren’t tough-as-nails juvenile delinquents and I think that the two of us would have both urinated all over ourselves if we went on the trip not knowing that we were going to get yelled at by felons because we were not in the scared straight program but part of an 11th grade social studies elective called You and the Law.

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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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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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The Devil’s in the Creme Filling

In the annals and aisles of snack cake history, Hostess seems to get all the recognition.  I am sure that’s because being a nationally distributed brand, it’s been easier to get a hold of Suzy Q’s and SnoBalls and the iconic Twinkie.  But while the lunches of my school days did sometimes involve me peeling apart the remnants of an obliterated Hostess cupcake, I have always pledged my allegiance and had a very fervent love for the Devil Dog.

Manufactured by Drake’s Cakes, the Devil Dog is a hot dog-shaped chocolate cake and creme filling sandwich that comes one to a pack and usually about a dozen or so per box.  It’s a lot like Hostess’s Suzy Q, except it’s far superior.  Sure, the Suzy Q is actually bigger and has more creme filling, but Hostess’s insistence on moist-right-out-of-the-wrapper cake often leads to those cakes being unnecessarily sticky and ultimately leads to the cake sticking to your hand.

That cake, by the way, is nearly impossible get off with a napkin.  I have lost count of the number of times I have purchased a Suzy Q or a Twinkie at a convenience store, marveled in disgust at how much grease was left behind on th white cardboard, at it anyway, and then had to find a place to wash my hands after I was done eating.  I don’t know about you, but this is quite irritating, especially because it shouldn’t happen.  Icing, I can understand.  In fact, anyone who buys a Suzy Q is well aware of the potential for icing fingers, much like sticking one’s hand into a bag of Cheetos will turn the fingers orange.  But the cake is supposed to hold the icing in and provide a barrier of protection from mess, not be the reason for it.

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Domesticated Animals

The front page of Target.com, where you can get all of our essentials for going to college.

I think I have lost count of the number of times my wife and I have been walking around Target, looked at all of the “dorm gear” that’s on sale and said, “I wish they would have had this when we went to college.”  I mean, every single time, without fail, as we wheel the cart past the school supplies or toward the granola bars and spot a mini-fridge or stackable storage containers or three-pack of Old Spice body wash, we scrunch our noses and remark how good kids these days have it.

Too bad the economy is so fucked that they won’t have jobs when they graduate.  BWAH-HA-HA!!!

Okay, that was rude and probably uncalled for.  But I have to admit that I’m kinda jealous that everything the kids in my area who are attending college need (and then some) can be found at Target of all places.  I didn’t have the convenience of a Target when I was heading off to Loyola back in the summer of 1995; instead, Sayville had a K-Mart that was so hectic and disorganized that I once nearly had a panic attack when I stepped inside.  And I’m not the type who is prone to panic attacks.

I don’t know, I just find it kind of both genius and funny that Target and other stores like it have latched on to going away to college and turned it into a shopping season of sorts, the kind of thing that you throw in to the back-to-school sales on July 5 and take down the day after Labor Day because the Halloween candy needs to be shelved.  If they did this fifteen years ago, I completely missed it, as I had to deal with schlepping out to Linens and Things on Sunrise Highway in Patchogue about a week and a half before I headed to Baltimore.  They could have been running a sale, but I was completely oblivious to it and I don’t remember seeing commercials about outfitting me with a laptop and all sorts of wireless wonder so that my life was complete in the dorm.

Then again, it was 1995 and my graduation present was a Packard Bell desktop PC with a 2400 baud modem and HP Laser Jet 4L printer, which took up half of my parents’ car and my friends were all carrying beepers around in their pockets.  So … yeah.

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Let’s go to the movies

UA the movies in Patchogue, NY after it closed down and before it was demolished.

Time and time again, I find myself mesmerized about how disposable the culture of my childhood really is.  Granted, Hollywood in recent years has been finding ways to pillage and plunder the cartoons and movies that I loved when I was growing up, but when I think of the places where I spent most of my time, they are the malls and multiplexes that seem to be nothing but demonized.  I mean, I guess that people interested in historical preservation really wouldn’t have any interest in saving a concrete multiplex whose design is as bland and nondescript as any of the thousands that have been built, torn down, and rebuilt in the last 40 years; and I guess that said design, like a cookie-cutter multi-use stadium, dictates that it falls without any ceremony.  After all, what replaces the multiplexes and shopping malls are stadium-seating megaplexes and town centres that are upgrades and more aesthetically pleasing to the community.  Nobody misses those eyesores.

Except me, that is.  And probably others in my generation who are products of that transitional part of the late-20th Century when “medium” was “small,” but “mega,” “super,” or “extreme” sizes hadn’t been conceived. You know, when there was still something left of what most people get nostalgic for when they talk about “America” or the “American Dream.” I think the assessment that my generation doesn’t have much to look back on really is only because the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were all about knocking down the “smaller” feel of our parents’ enterprises and creating cold, impersonal places. The place, for me, that will always epitomize the era is the United Artists Patchogue 13 multiplex, which was located on Sunrise Highway, just east of Nicolls Road.  (more…)

Shake, it’s Great!

I guess it should be embarrassing to admit, as well as a little hypocritical since I constantly complain about how coddled my students are, that from the time I was in first grade until the time I was in high school, my dad packed my lunch every day.  Every day, I took a brown bag with a sandwich, a drink, and some sort of snack.  The sandwich and snack changed over the years, but the drink was always the same:  Yoo-Hoo.

A chocolate drink of mysterious origin that you had to shake before you enjoyed, Yoo-Hoo was  vitamin-fortified high-fructose corn syrup that had a tangy sweetness.  It wasn’t as viscous as chocolate milk and way more shelf stable.  In fact, my dad would buy it in three-packs that he would then keep in the freezer.  Then, he would put the box at the bottom of my brown paper bag with the sandwich and snack on top.  Theoretically, it would keep everything cool while it sat in my locker all morning; in reality, it was a frozen chocolate brick that as it thawed wet the bag through condensation, usually falling through the bottom of the bag, and depending on how late I had lunch that day would either be cold or warm by the time I had to drink it.

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Set my world on FIRE!

There are certain moments in your life where your mettle is tested.  Dealing with a bully.  A car accident.  Asking a gorgeous girl out on a date.  But at eight years old, such challenges are not really there.  That’s not to say, however, there aren’t tests, that there aren’t things to prove indeed at an early age you’re a man.  I was raised in a small town where nothing really happened, so I didn’t have to grow up too fast and therefore my early test of manhood was a seemingly innocent one:  the Atomic FireBall.

A small, jawbreaker-sized red ball of candy, the Atomic FireBall has the heat of an entire box of red hots, taking the flavor of sinnamon to maximum levels of tolerance.  Pop one in your mouth and there is an instant heat, which make your entire face feel warm and actually sweat a little.  Keep the FireBall in your mouth and it lets up a little, but that’s because I think the makers obviously know that people eating Atomic FireBalls do their best to suck on them all the way to their cores.

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