Monday, September 29, 2003 6:59:38 AM Joe Coluccio
C'mon, babe, bend over, shake a tail feather.
Now I like a poetic image as much as the next person, but I was taken aback when the loud speaker in the shower room at the local spa that I attend each morning exhorted me to "scratch myself like a monkey." I tried it, rhythm pounding and water sealing my eyes shut.
The whole point of going to exercise daily on machines devised by Tomás de Torquemada is to become healthy and glowing. A secondary goal is to be able to parade my body around with a kind of grace that one finds in people who can dance. I have, as usual, succeeded minimally in the first and have managed to elude any semblance to Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. (I did once dance with my umbrella but it was during a violent rain storm and I punched a hole in the canvas back of a lawn chair.)
In my high school days a whole host of like disembodied amplitude modulated exhortations entered my consciousness. New dances would spew from the radio on a daily basis. Everyone was gaga over them. And I admit that even I fell sway, in a chair, while reading adventures, to the lush and heavy rhythms that throbbed from my blue transistor Arvin radio. Weekends when I would away to the hops, sock and brew, I was far too clumsy and embarrassed to dance. My chubby body not at all in sync with the beatific beat in my soul.
How graceful could I look while making a chuffa chuffa motion like a railroad train, now. Or trying to grind invisible softened boiled potatoes into mashed spuds. Or twisting in a jerky parody of Chubby Checker. Could I hully gully or frug, jerk or watutsi (sadly brought to our attention nowadays by those wild wacky antics of the Burundian hutus and the Rwandan tutsis . Hey hey hey , Pony, like Bony Maroni, We would neigh, like a lost mustang herd chased into a stark rocky western canyon. The maximized wonders of the funky chicken, arms back, heads down, Peck a Peck, eventually turned into an awful wedding ritual.
Dance after dance mixed finally into high glosslallia. La la la la La la la la la La dooty wop ja boop a womp bomp a lum momp. Heat and sex. It looked like such fun. My secret sin, Do Bop Shoo Bop was that all I wanted to do was grope my partner in a very slow sensual dance. Scarcely more than a sliding embrace, a soft swish across the floor. We never moved. Just inhaled.
So I spent more than half the dance watching from the benches that lined the gymnasium, longing but trying to look very sophisticated, while girls danced with girls. And daring guys who looked very cool or very silly bent over like a fluff tailed duck and clucking, danced.
Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight!
KC, I couldn’t have said it much better myself.
As for the monkey thing, the modesty curtain on the shower was pulled shut. I hope.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Sunday, September 14, 2003 5:07:29 PM Joe Coluccio
It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom mid-PA called State College. I and three of my closest high school friends had been accepted as freshman at the wonder filled Universal State of Knowledge. All motivation to be any level of student stopped in the middle of my senior year when I was told that I was accepted to the Pennsylvania State University. What idiot of pedagog thought early admission would prove a good idea. Or was it perhaps financial? I was insufferable around the guidance counselor’s office. Smug. Try as they would to scare me, I had made it! At last I could truly devote my weekends and even school nights to drinking beer and carousing. We had all become masters of shirking school assignments and looking aged in bond enough to get served at local bars and the occasional State Store. A plague was loosed upon the old town.
I barely survived the declining months of spring into graduation. The day after the high and mighty ending ceremony held, on account of new construction at the new High School (Across the valley from me as I sit here writing, I hear the drums of band practicing), in the declining football field of Seneca Junior High. I stepped on a snake in the empty stone dirt and brush lot at Verona and Frankstown. My terribly shaken hung over mind convinced me it was an apparition worthy some biblical intent. A shade of alcoholic exhalation. It was not. Had a more objective reality. I continued on, shaken and reformed, somewhat. And sick. Perhaps snake bitten.
The campus at State College was truly beautiful. Autumn, dead deciduous leaves swirl and tumble through sunlit regions of light defined by shade of tall timber to a luscious green lawn that slopes a long angle to the streets of the small and commercial lit town. Blacktop paths that lead in wide and sensuous curves from building to building are everywhere ignored for the softer blanket of grass and a growing covering of brown red yellow leaves. Students lay mid clover reading, sleeping, and dreaming. The buildings, fantastic copulas and caps, bell tower and Grecian sound columns, here and there a spattering of modern unrelieved concrete and tinted glass. Even seeming an atomic explosion could not upset these aged august and venerable buildings which would in a few scant years be invaded by political unrest and the explosion of youth that would unsettle the whole country. Power to the people!
Somehow I started to college with the right attitude. I was chaste and studious. Didn't last the year. None of us did.
I enrolled in the Aerospace Engineering Program. It was a matter of no small irony that some years later, 1969 to be exact I worked for a Cleaning and Tailor Supply firm on 12th Street two scant blocks south of Broadway in Oakland California and employed via manpower laid off aerospace engineers to help me unload fifty pound sacks of diatomaceous earth off a large flat bed truck out of Lodi, CA. The head of the aerospace department had an appropriate German accent. I don't recall his name, but he may have been part of the Rocket Team that rained Vergeltungswaffe Ein (V1) Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (V2) on Great Britain.
I was Space happy as a kid. And misdirected. I translated my love for astronomy more importantly cosmology into the practical solution that Aerospace Engineering offered. It has taken me years to realize that the "Inner Reaches of Outer Space" as old Joe Campbell called them were always available to me. ...we grow old. we grow old...do we dare to eat a peach?
Anyway
The guy with the gut German akksent, not afraid of cliche, we were told, same as the day before at orientation, to look to the person to the right of us, then to look to the person to left of us. Dramatic pause in the frozen silence of our pensive gaze, "Zey will be gone by zee end of za year!" I took him serious. I was gone and looking for a job by summer vacation. And the guy next to me who stayed was out of a job about six or seven years later, save for helping me hump Dynaflo into the basement of the Rosenburg Brothers.
What, you may ask, did I do for that year. Tried to get laid. College girls are hip and the sexual revolution had not yet reared its sensual head. Tried to get served. College bars are hip and card with the diligence of a prison guard. Tried to party on weekends, fraternities were uninteresting to me and we, none of us, had any money for night life. Tried to study, what a bore. Tried to... well mostly I just visited my friends, read new and dangerous ideas, listened to Ornette Coleman, got new friends and entered into the soap opera world of trysts and affairs, and got into a lot of trouble.
Watched the Beatles on TV. Ed Sullivan for the first time. We all wore Beatles wigs and made fun of them. An ignominious start for the icons of our generation. Heard about Kennedy being assassinated while I was uselessly studying from a Chemistry book that would turn to a Calculus book. Looking out over the West Hall quadrangle from my desk.
Next week I'll turn my futile brow to a weekend in Chicago, the zoo, South Bend and a nation in deep mourning.
Ciao Bambini!
It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom mid-PA called State College. I and three of my closest high school friends had been accepted as freshman at the wonder filled Universal State of Knowledge. All motivation to be any level of student stopped in the middle of my senior year when I was told that I was accepted to the Pennsylvania State University. What idiot of pedagog thought early admission would prove a good idea. Or was it perhaps financial? I was insufferable around the guidance counselor’s office. Smug. Try as they would to scare me, I had made it! At last I could truly devote my weekends and even school nights to drinking beer and carousing. We had all become masters of shirking school assignments and looking aged in bond enough to get served at local bars and the occasional State Store. A plague was loosed upon the old town.
I barely survived the declining months of spring into graduation. The day after the high and mighty ending ceremony held, on account of new construction at the new High School (Across the valley from me as I sit here writing, I hear the drums of band practicing), in the declining football field of Seneca Junior High. I stepped on a snake in the empty stone dirt and brush lot at Verona and Frankstown. My terribly shaken hung over mind convinced me it was an apparition worthy some biblical intent. A shade of alcoholic exhalation. It was not. Had a more objective reality. I continued on, shaken and reformed, somewhat. And sick. Perhaps snake bitten.
The campus at State College was truly beautiful. Autumn, dead deciduous leaves swirl and tumble through sunlit regions of light defined by shade of tall timber to a luscious green lawn that slopes a long angle to the streets of the small and commercial lit town. Blacktop paths that lead in wide and sensuous curves from building to building are everywhere ignored for the softer blanket of grass and a growing covering of brown red yellow leaves. Students lay mid clover reading, sleeping, and dreaming. The buildings, fantastic copulas and caps, bell tower and Grecian sound columns, here and there a spattering of modern unrelieved concrete and tinted glass. Even seeming an atomic explosion could not upset these aged august and venerable buildings which would in a few scant years be invaded by political unrest and the explosion of youth that would unsettle the whole country. Power to the people!
Somehow I started to college with the right attitude. I was chaste and studious. Didn't last the year. None of us did.
I enrolled in the Aerospace Engineering Program. It was a matter of no small irony that some years later, 1969 to be exact I worked for a Cleaning and Tailor Supply firm on 12th Street two scant blocks south of Broadway in Oakland California and employed via manpower laid off aerospace engineers to help me unload fifty pound sacks of diatomaceous earth off a large flat bed truck out of Lodi, CA. The head of the aerospace department had an appropriate German accent. I don't recall his name, but he may have been part of the Rocket Team that rained Vergeltungswaffe Ein (V1) Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (V2) on Great Britain.
I was Space happy as a kid. And misdirected. I translated my love for astronomy more importantly cosmology into the practical solution that Aerospace Engineering offered. It has taken me years to realize that the "Inner Reaches of Outer Space" as old Joe Campbell called them were always available to me. ...we grow old. we grow old...do we dare to eat a peach?
Anyway
The guy with the gut German akksent, not afraid of cliche, we were told, same as the day before at orientation, to look to the person to the right of us, then to look to the person to left of us. Dramatic pause in the frozen silence of our pensive gaze, "Zey will be gone by zee end of za year!" I took him serious. I was gone and looking for a job by summer vacation. And the guy next to me who stayed was out of a job about six or seven years later, save for helping me hump Dynaflo into the basement of the Rosenburg Brothers.
What, you may ask, did I do for that year. Tried to get laid. College girls are hip and the sexual revolution had not yet reared its sensual head. Tried to get served. College bars are hip and card with the diligence of a prison guard. Tried to party on weekends, fraternities were uninteresting to me and we, none of us, had any money for night life. Tried to study, what a bore. Tried to... well mostly I just visited my friends, read new and dangerous ideas, listened to Ornette Coleman, got new friends and entered into the soap opera world of trysts and affairs, and got into a lot of trouble.
Watched the Beatles on TV. Ed Sullivan for the first time. We all wore Beatles wigs and made fun of them. An ignominious start for the icons of our generation. Heard about Kennedy being assassinated while I was uselessly studying from a Chemistry book that would turn to a Calculus book. Looking out over the West Hall quadrangle from my desk.
Next week I'll turn my futile brow to a weekend in Chicago, the zoo, South Bend and a nation in deep mourning.
Ciao Bambini!
Monday, September 08, 2003
Monday, September 08, 2003 7:01:43 AM
Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse.
Nick Romano - Knock On Any Door. - Willard Motely
You can spot them in the morning. Like a line of arrogant ducks on the penny arcade shooting range, leaning casual, stern ever moving eyes with their backs arched and heavy pushing against the plate glass that advertises cigarettes for a hundred bucks a pack, milk - more fresh and frothy than from the udder of Elsie, slurpies, and deli sliced humps of chipped ham; displayed, chockablock next to posters of marshmallow peeps or chocolate turkeys complete with stuffing or rainbow lollipop christmas trees or sugar sweet valentine hearts or horrible halloween hostile hysteria. Egyptian Civilization was formed and guided by the predictable swelling of the Nile. Our civilization is equally served by such bright and cartooned advertisements taped as temporary decoration on the aluminum trim double glazed picture windows in a strip mall.
What is it, do you suppose, that makes freelance workers line up at the automatic sliding door and contiguous windows of the local C Store? The thrill of blocking customer traffic? What is it that makes this blacktop curb the perfect starting place for those who put roofs on houses, mow lawns by the millions, unstuff the kitchen sink and bathroom toilet, add supposed ozone depleting refrigerants to the cooling side of your air conditioner, set and install the picket fence, paint same fence and the side of a house, cover the paint with aluminum siding. Fixit handy guys, all. Does this mooring in the morning take the place of matins?
They wear bandanas made from old snot rags and tee shirts that prior to dismemberment had perfectly good sleeves. Each pick-up truck, one has the emblem of a small boy peeing on a Chevrolet, another the small boy pisses on a Ford, has a gun rack fashioned in the rear window, witness to the fact that these Minute Men are as ready as those who bedeviled the British on their long march back to Boston from Concord. Each has a cup of tepid coffee in hand, testimony that they have been in position since at least 4 AM when the twenty-four hour operation changes both staff and personality. They laugh large and swear in loud voices, hawk spittle that we can only hope is that cold coffee from their warm mouths as it lands perilously close to our newly shined brogans.
Isn't it hard enough just to get yourself to work without these local tradesmen making you run the gauntlet of rude approval because you were too lazy to fire up the coffee pot? Isn't it bad enough that the coffee you are served has, although hot, the consistency of something scrapped from tar paper and the taste of something vile and long boiled, but have to hear the following dialog.
"Can you believe that Gino's wife left him?" Bravo, you think, Mrs. Gino. "Yeah, she ran away with his girl friend Lottie!"
or
"I went, hey dude, leave me alone. He went; you can't tell me who to leave alone. I went, look buddy, just leave me alone. He went, I don't think so. I went, pal, apparently you don't know who you are messing with. He went, duh! I went, Oh yeah and clocked him cross his chin with my right. He went down..."
My old man would take me in the summers to work, with Sofis, the plasterer and Barney and Betts, painters both and we would sit at the 6 AM counter of an all night diner in East Liberty. They would talk about women and kid me with little mercy. Discuss the jobs for the week and the Pirates and stupid politicians. It was quiet chatter in a busy place that had pies in slices on stainless steel and curved glass display, succulent large donuts on a tray greasily staining a scrolled paper doily, proud rows of Cheerios and Cornflakes high above on a shelf in individual boxes that could be cut down the sides and the middle and filled with milk a banana cut in slices atop the flakes, eggs and sausage and flapjacks spitting on the iron brown grill.
In the evenings I would join my friends at the corner of Frankstown and Verona Roads and line up in front of the porthole windows of the men's room of the Eastwood Movie Theater and talk about girls and boast about fights like we full fledged members of the some mob. We formed a gauntlet that blocked paying customers from entry. The cops would come and chase us away and we would scatter like fleas and then after twenty minutes regroup with even more vicious stories.
The only places that resemble the 24 hour diner now are MacDonald’s and they are overrun by retired folk who voice their own cluck of disapproval if you invade the space. There are no breakfast counters at C-Stores. The Eastwood Theater closed over thirty years ago. I guess these guys need a place to go in the morning. My real question is: Do they ever go to work? They are still there at noon, when all you want is a fast bite to eat. A chicken skin on cardboard with paste, please.
I yam what I yam!
- Popeye to anyone who would listen.
Live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse.
Nick Romano - Knock On Any Door. - Willard Motely
You can spot them in the morning. Like a line of arrogant ducks on the penny arcade shooting range, leaning casual, stern ever moving eyes with their backs arched and heavy pushing against the plate glass that advertises cigarettes for a hundred bucks a pack, milk - more fresh and frothy than from the udder of Elsie, slurpies, and deli sliced humps of chipped ham; displayed, chockablock next to posters of marshmallow peeps or chocolate turkeys complete with stuffing or rainbow lollipop christmas trees or sugar sweet valentine hearts or horrible halloween hostile hysteria. Egyptian Civilization was formed and guided by the predictable swelling of the Nile. Our civilization is equally served by such bright and cartooned advertisements taped as temporary decoration on the aluminum trim double glazed picture windows in a strip mall.
What is it, do you suppose, that makes freelance workers line up at the automatic sliding door and contiguous windows of the local C Store? The thrill of blocking customer traffic? What is it that makes this blacktop curb the perfect starting place for those who put roofs on houses, mow lawns by the millions, unstuff the kitchen sink and bathroom toilet, add supposed ozone depleting refrigerants to the cooling side of your air conditioner, set and install the picket fence, paint same fence and the side of a house, cover the paint with aluminum siding. Fixit handy guys, all. Does this mooring in the morning take the place of matins?
They wear bandanas made from old snot rags and tee shirts that prior to dismemberment had perfectly good sleeves. Each pick-up truck, one has the emblem of a small boy peeing on a Chevrolet, another the small boy pisses on a Ford, has a gun rack fashioned in the rear window, witness to the fact that these Minute Men are as ready as those who bedeviled the British on their long march back to Boston from Concord. Each has a cup of tepid coffee in hand, testimony that they have been in position since at least 4 AM when the twenty-four hour operation changes both staff and personality. They laugh large and swear in loud voices, hawk spittle that we can only hope is that cold coffee from their warm mouths as it lands perilously close to our newly shined brogans.
Isn't it hard enough just to get yourself to work without these local tradesmen making you run the gauntlet of rude approval because you were too lazy to fire up the coffee pot? Isn't it bad enough that the coffee you are served has, although hot, the consistency of something scrapped from tar paper and the taste of something vile and long boiled, but have to hear the following dialog.
"Can you believe that Gino's wife left him?" Bravo, you think, Mrs. Gino. "Yeah, she ran away with his girl friend Lottie!"
or
"I went, hey dude, leave me alone. He went; you can't tell me who to leave alone. I went, look buddy, just leave me alone. He went, I don't think so. I went, pal, apparently you don't know who you are messing with. He went, duh! I went, Oh yeah and clocked him cross his chin with my right. He went down..."
My old man would take me in the summers to work, with Sofis, the plasterer and Barney and Betts, painters both and we would sit at the 6 AM counter of an all night diner in East Liberty. They would talk about women and kid me with little mercy. Discuss the jobs for the week and the Pirates and stupid politicians. It was quiet chatter in a busy place that had pies in slices on stainless steel and curved glass display, succulent large donuts on a tray greasily staining a scrolled paper doily, proud rows of Cheerios and Cornflakes high above on a shelf in individual boxes that could be cut down the sides and the middle and filled with milk a banana cut in slices atop the flakes, eggs and sausage and flapjacks spitting on the iron brown grill.
In the evenings I would join my friends at the corner of Frankstown and Verona Roads and line up in front of the porthole windows of the men's room of the Eastwood Movie Theater and talk about girls and boast about fights like we full fledged members of the some mob. We formed a gauntlet that blocked paying customers from entry. The cops would come and chase us away and we would scatter like fleas and then after twenty minutes regroup with even more vicious stories.
The only places that resemble the 24 hour diner now are MacDonald’s and they are overrun by retired folk who voice their own cluck of disapproval if you invade the space. There are no breakfast counters at C-Stores. The Eastwood Theater closed over thirty years ago. I guess these guys need a place to go in the morning. My real question is: Do they ever go to work? They are still there at noon, when all you want is a fast bite to eat. A chicken skin on cardboard with paste, please.
I yam what I yam!
- Popeye to anyone who would listen.