HOLIDAY EXHALE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-30-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     As much as I love Christmas (it's my birthday after all), there's a little part of me that's thankful that it's all over. "There's a lot of planning and stress mixed up in one single day," that part of me says, so it must be my mouth. For one thing, exchanging gifts is a two-part process with me. I exchange them once with my recipients, and then they exchange them once more with the store I bought them from so that they can get what they really want, and in their own size, not the insulting size I thought they were. In my defense, something as simple as buying a dress is fraught with confusion and despair, because whoever thought up dress sizing is an idiot. Size zero? An entire person who is not a paramecium with literally NO size? That defies physics. Where would you sew the buttons? I'm revamping the system: Reese Witherspoon would be a size 13 because she's about the size of an average 13-year old. If you're a size 50, that means you're a little bigger here, and a little smaller there than you used to be, and now we all know what size everybody is. No more "plus sizes." Mathematically, how do I know how much you started with, and how much you added to it? From now on, "bootylicious" describes it much better. Sizing solved, you're welcome.

     I'm not so great at decorating for the occasion either. The guy down the street from us has a teeny-tiny yard and a zillion blow-up characters crammed onto it. If I had to blow up that many PSIs worth of crap I'd be in an oxygen tent at the hospital right now. He's got a Santa, some reindeer, a Grinch, a snowman and I think there's some stuff he forgot to take down from Halloween. I have a fantasy that a huge Nor'easter blows in from the Sou'west on Christmas Eve and the Santa and the reindeer go airborne, with all that hot air inside them. They travel for a few hundred miles and end up above a house in the suburbs of Cleveland, and inside the house a husband and wife are trying to break it to their son that Santa Claus is just a story that parents make up to prepare their kids for the many disappointments of life. They're enjoying the reality check a little too much, because the kid is always rubbing it in their faces that they don't understand the first thing about his math homework. But he has the last laugh when he wanders over to the window and points up at the sky, and there's Santa and the reindeer floating along, as plain as the red-nose on my face. Okay this story went on for too long but it has a happy ending when the kid ends up in the military. All because of these lawns full of blow-up dolls. If I ordered a blow-up doll and I couldn't make it explode, I'd send it back.

     When I was a kid we used to set up our tree on Christmas Eve, put the lights on and decorate it. The trick was not to be too heavy-handed with the tinsel. Just a couple strands on each bough should do it. Unfortunately, we always bought the tree from a sale at our church about a month before Christmas, and by the time Jesus was ready to be born there wasn't a needle left on the tree, just the ornaments and tinsel. I asked my Mom if there was something we could put in the water to make the tree last longer, and she told me to bring her six aspirins. Turns out the aspirins were for her and had nothing to do with the tree; she had six children.

     I'm so glad my Mom never made me go sit on a Santa's lap at the mall. Even as a kid I would have found the whole experience demeaning for both of us. What kind of conversation would I have had with him? We have nothing in common, he's just trying to ply me for information so he can tell my parents what gifts I want, but I may have already mentioned it to them in passing two or seven times. They're over there snapping pictures that they can embarrass me with in the future, goading me to do something I'll regret or say something about his breath. I'm trying my best to make small talk about free agents the Yankees might pursue but my mind is already on line at the pizza place in the food court.

     There's also so much pressure to look good. Everything that occurs between parents and children during the holidays is based on capturing a timeless photo of the event. Remember when parents used to take their kids to the portrait studio for photos? Here, sit on the sled in front of the tree and play with the presents, but you're not allowed to open them. It's the perfect way to get wallet sized shots of your kid with a look of abject sorrow on his face. My Dad would take home movies of us Christmas morning, coming down the stairs to open our presents. After staying up all night too amped up to sleep, he'd hit us with about 3 billion lumens of photography lighting, and there I am, immortalized at age six looking like Peter Lorre in "Hotel Berlin."

     Okay, I will confess to being a bit of a Christmas curmudgeon, but the only so I can plead down to a lesser charge. Whenever a Christmas carol plays during a car commercial I run for the remote control mute button, because I don't want to forever associate my love of Subarus with my hatred of "Carol of the Bells." But I still love hearing a choir sing something majestic, and I still love the smell of a real Christmas tree, and I still love getting together with friends and family when we're able to again, and I still love getting a year older. Maybe I should have ended with the family and friends. Happy holidays to everyone, and please stay safe!

A MERRY COVID CHRISTMAS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-23-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     We were longing for just a small taste of a regular Christmas season, so we sat ourselves in the car for a few minutes while we remembered how to work it, forced ourselves out into the cruel world, and headed for Manhattan just like in normal times. And darned if it didn't feel pretty good. To the casual observer (and this is why you should dress for the holidays), it seems as though we're in a bad scene in a bad movie right now, and Owen Wilson is there, and Vince Vaughn is in it and Steven Seagal is directing, and we're already over budget and trying to do re-writes on the fly and Rotten Tomatoes is going to make a salad of it. I wish we were at least getting paid to be in this bomb, but it's the only bomb we have.

     In normal times we'd have tickets to "A Prairie Home Companion," or a holiday-themed show in a tiny theater in the Village, something campy and quirky. But that'll have to wait until next year. So we wandered over to see the tree at Rockefeller Center, and that was a much different experience from previous years. Instead of being packed onto 49th Street wishing you were on the Number 7 train during rush hour because it was less crowded and a more pleasant experience, you could spread out and do a few calisthenics if you so desired. People were keeping their distance from one another, and I had so much space I was thinking of putting in a bocce court. It was almost civilized.

     We took a few selfies of my thumb with the tree in the background. This year's tree is a 75-foot tall Norway spruce from Oneonta. When they unfurled it they found a small owl hiding in the boughs. They named him Rockefeller, so he might one day be heir to a fortune. He had to travel 170 miles to get here, but at least he didn't have to come all the way from Norway like the tree did. The wildlife center nursed him back to health and released him onto Broadway, which had less people than the desolate forest he grew up in. We sometimes see a barred owl that hangs around in a tree in our back yard looking around for prey that he can swoop down and grab. He had his eye on my neighbor Paul, who was feeding branches into his wood chipper. It's possible that he could have made off with Paul, but he never let go of the wood chipper.

     We had reservations at Tony's on 43rd Street, our favorite Italian eatery. Usually you can look inside a restaurant and tell if it's any good by how many patrons are there. Now, it's quite the opposite, and for once, being scared of every living human seemed vaguely heroic. But the tables were properly distanced, and I was able to slide pieces of veal saltimbocca underneath my mask when no one was around. It was somebody's birthday, and they brought out a giant dessert with sparklers in it, blazing away. In normal times it would have brushed past me and almost lit my hair on fire, but neither the sparklers nor my hair had the heart for it these days.

     Ordinarily we'd head over to 9th Avenue and find a place to knock down a couple cocktails, but not this year. Bars are a breeding ground for sloppy behavior and people tend to let down their guard. Most dumb ideas that people regret were born in bars after a few drinks, and often the dumbest idea was that last drink. Peoples inhibitions go haywire. "Hey honey, you got a beautiful bridge of your nose, just let me see what you got under that mask. Just let me see one nostril and I'll guess the other." And who needs a taproom full of drunk covid molecules running amok? A covid molecule that you ordinarily wouldn't give the time of day can look SO CUTE after a Long Island iced tea.

     On the drive back home we saw so many deer on the side of the parkway that it seemed like they were the only ones having any fun. I asked my wife, don't deer hibernate? Shouldn't they be building a burrow underground or something? Not out carousing around in a giant stag party. I guess I'm a little envious- for once humans are the ones who seem like they don't have it together at all.

     Since our little night out, indoor dining has gone on an unfortunate hiatus. If you blame Cuomo, you're still not getting it. Public enemy number one is the relentless, invisible invader. A close second are large swaths of the entitled, the ill-informed, the mask-less. The reason experts exist is to know more than you and I, and now would be a great time to listen to them. Stay safe and let's all get to the other side together.

     We can't do all the things we usually do right now, but we had a really nice evening. We adjusted, we adapted, we accepted. In normal times we'll remember when there was a "new normal." I can't wait until that's the "old normal."
 

WE WENT DARK

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-17-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     In my other, other life, I've been a rock & roll musician for as far back as I can remember. Actually a lot further back than that, because rock & roll musicians can rarely remember back very far. It's been one of the great passions of my life, and as in other forms of art, there is no better way to process the trials and tribulations of life than to create something that says what normal words, such as "pandemics REALLY suck," cannot say. So I wrote a song about it. It's called "We Went Dark (love in the age of the coronavirus)," and I recorded it in my basement on my cheap 8-track digital recorder. I play all of the instruments on the recording, not because I'm such a great musician, but because when you tell your musician friends that you wrote a song about a highly contagious incurable disease and you'd like them to come over to your house and play on it, you might as well write a song about a dialtone.

     Not to be content with that (it's been a long, long quarantine), I decided to make a video to go with it. If you have four minutes to spare you can give it a listen at the YouTube link below, if you can fit it in between cat videos. I probably should have put some cats into the video, now that I think of it, penguins would have been even better. Or put the word "challenge" in the title and thought of something poisonous for people to swallow during the song. That would have increased my hits and made my song a hit. But it's just me, my camcorder and a cheap editing program, and if you want to swallow anything poisonous, that's hopefully not my fault.

     To mix things up a bit I had my two female bandmates sing in the chorus. I've never been in a band with two women before this one and it's a little different than playing with the guys. With the guys, you could drop a ten-foot Steinway grand piano out of a two-storey window straight onto the lead guitarist's head, and once the dust had settled the drummer, completely stunned, would say, "I didn't know we had a piano player." By comparison, when I'm in a band with two girls, I'm the odd man out, because I'm a man, and because I'm a little odd. I'll give you an illustration to show you what it's like: Pretend I just killed someone, like say, the guy who wrote the "Kars for Kids" jingle, and I refused to confess (although in real life I'd be kind of proud of that). The cops say we want you two girls to wear a wire, and  get him to admit it, do you have any questions? And one or the other would ask, "What color is the wire? Because I think I know what I'm going to wear with it."

     I bought a green screen and boned up on my special effects for the video. I'm pretty sure a nine-year old on Tik Tok could have done the same thing in about 15 minutes, but it took me three months. Part of the reason it took me so long was because of the facial hair. I play each instrument wearing different hair, and I remember sitting outside on the deck with my wife after more than two but less than six margaritas, thinking of different types of facial hair every band member could wear. The conversation was over once I realized how inane it was, and that fact that I ran out of margarita mix at the same time was purely a coincidence.

     However, I soon found out that I hate wearing a beard, and I can't believe that there are baseball players and sculptors and psychoanalysts and such that always have one. In fact, during the pandemic, just about everyone I know grew one, even the women. But I couldn't wait to get rid of it. After I took a shower it simply refused to dry, and food would end up in it, not even necessarily my food, and what if I got it caught in a metal lathe or broke off in an ice storm? A life with a wet, frozen beard full of food chewed up by a metal lathe was not for me, so I had some other variations on the theme, but nothing too extravagant. It's not like I could put my hair in a bun or anything, even if I had a bun that could hold all of it, and I limited myself to hairstyles that could be achieved in prison.

     The outtakes at the end of the video prove how valuable it is to have a qualified stunt man to do the things that you should have the common sense not to do. For instance, when I was walking my dog in the woods in back of my house I noticed this Tarzan vine, and I thought, wow, I should videotape myself swinging from this vine, and who knows, maybe it will give health insurance claims adjusters something to think about in their spare time. I don't know how people usually find out that you shouldn't swing from a Tarzan vine after you've had two knee surgeries, but I found out the easy way. Another shot I wanted to get was of me spinning around on a chair with the camera trained on me, so that it would look like the world was spinning around behind me. All of a sudden I'm Stanley Kubrick, only not as easy to work with. So I wedged a swivel chair between two logs in the woods and pointed the camera at my face. It's the type of thing that if your mother caught you doing, she'd say, "Don't do that, you'll break your neck." And if you kept on doing it SHE would break your neck to speed up the process. Long story short, I almost broke my neck.

     In closing, let me just say that as artists, we all suffer for our art. And during a pandemic, we suffer in solitude. So I can't wait until this whole thing is over and I can share my suffering with YOU.

THANKSGIVING LEFTOVERS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-10-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     I hope everyone had a small and safe Thanksgiving- good things come in small packages these days. Turkey size is proportionate to gathering size, and even Governor Cuomo had to downscale his dinner after he took some flak about it. He was planning to invite his Mom, who is 89-years old, until people found out and called him a hypocrite for telling everyone else to scale down. I was actually planning to do the same thing as Cuomo, but his Mom wouldn't answer my calls. Everyone's looking for small turkeys this time around, but they're harder to find since they can hide more easily. Ours was sized somewhere between a cedar waxwing and a pileated woodpecker, but it was of impeccable moral character. My sister Diane said she got a 26-pound turkey for $26 dollars, which was quite a bargain. If you got the same deal in British money it would be pound for pound the best deal ever. I know there's a joke there somewhere but I was obviously unable to find it. Anyway, my sister posted a picture of her turkey and I swear it looks like it could bench press about one-fifty straight out of the oven. It had an actual 6-pack.

     I've heard people say that they spatchcocked their turkey, something that it must have taken a lot of guts to admit. To spatchcock a turkey you simply cut it down its back with a pair of scissors, remove its backbone, and, listen, I'm just not cut out for this sort of thing because I'm afraid giblets will be involved, and the thought of it is just offal so you'll have to figure it out yourself. We cook a regular turkey in the oven, just as the Pilgrims would have done it, if they had a regular turkey or an oven. You probably heard about the original Thanksgiving, back at Plymouth Rock. If I was there it would have only been because I mistook it for a rock festival. "Hey," I ask one of the elders (hard to find an elder who is older than me), "one question: why do y'all wear your belt buckles on your hats? The hat stays on fine, but don't your pants fall down?"

     Actually there is quite a rivalry going on between the folks in Plymouth and the Pilgrims down in Virginia, who also lay claim to a Thanksgiving celebration two years before the 1621 affair written about by colonists in Massachusetts. Either way, the English were in charge of the meal, and they are rarely mentioned for their exciting cuisine. If the Italians had popped over on the Mayflower I could be eating Margherita pizza while I watch the football game on TV instead. The traditional accounts tell of the settlers struggling through the long winter, and the Wampanoag native people helping by providing them with turkey seeds, or whatever, but the real story is of a much more complicated and wary alliance between two camps that needed each other to survive.

     There is also a rumor that Benjamin Franklin once proposed the turkey as the national bird, which is false, even though he did once expound on the virtues of the bird as opposed to the bald eagle in a letter to his daughter. Franklin WAS consulted about his thoughts on a national symbol, and his suggestion was a depiction of “Moses standing on the shore, and extending his hand over the sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm pharaoh who is sitting in an open chariot.” Those who were still awake by the end of the sentence immediately bonked themselves on the head with a ball peen hammer to try to induce a coma. I don't think the bald eagle is a bad choice, but the thing is bald, for heaven's sake. Certainly it's less risky to say out loud than "titmouse" or "peacock," and less time consuming than "undulated tinamou," so I guess it's fine. I think the founding fathers wanted a bird that looked like it wasn't going to take any crap, one that looked like it could swoop down and snatch your toupee if you said something unflattering about certain members of Congress, even though it was common knowledge.

     I saw an article in the Times that theorized that the reason Trump wanted to stay in office this badly even though he was so ill-suited for the job was that he loved to do things like pardon turkeys for Thanksgiving. Well in Trump's defense, who WOULDN'T want to do that? The president gets to choose one of them to live while sentencing the other to death, like in an episode of "Wiseguy." I would whisper to the chosen one, "I'm going to let you live for now, but take a good look at what happens to your little friend, and if you breathe one word about this to anybody, it'll be YOU next time. Do we understand each other?" And the turkey says, "We're live on four networks and everyone in America heard you." "In that case things aren't looking so good for you."

     By this time we've finished our tasty dinner, had our walk around the neighborhood and are sitting down to dessert, arguing about whether or not the Felix the Cat balloon once collapsed and killed someone during the parade. I don't know if there is alien life on other planets or not, but in my fantasy they come over to Earth (they don't call it that) and land on 6th Avenue right in the middle of the Thanksgiving parade (they do call it that). When they get on the radio they report back the findings to the home planet: "You can't believe the size of the cats they have here, if one sits on your lap it'll kill you." Happy holidays to you, your family and your cat.

SOCIAL STUDIES

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-03-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     If I was a sociologist I'd be saying, "Wow- in these unprecedented times lie a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study a myriad of human behaviors, as the world learns how to survive and thrive while apart from one another. What can we learn from this?" I'd also be saying, "If I had stayed in school another four years, I could have become a psychologist and made $70,000 dollars more a year." One of the few good things about surviving a coronavirus pandemic is that the next time it happens, I won't have to hear the phrase, "In these unprecedented times...." Now they're precedented, and I hope we do learn a few things from them.

     For instance, what are the effects of isolation on the elderly? And before you start talking behind their back I'd like to point out that I'm more or less the elderly, too. I read in an article that grandparents are lying to their children that they've been quarantining so that they can visit their grandchildren. Then they're posting facebook selfies at the bar living it up with no mask. What good is facebook with no face? And what else have our parents been lying to us about? It wouldn't surprise me to find out that vegetables aren't that great for you after all.

     Some couples are holed up 24/7 as they work from home and have no social life anymore. Sociologists are wondering, will this result in a baby boom? Because there's no one you want to get intimate with more than somebody whom you're already with EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF THE DAY. They say "absence makes the heart grow fonder," and I say, "pandemics make the heart want to run itself over with a Subaru." I've been at this quarantine game for eight months now, and I'm even sick of myself. I never knew I had so many bad habits. I've started chewing my nails because I'm so sick of the annoying things I usually do.

     Are there any adverse effects from spending this much time with my brothers and sisters? We spend more time together as a sextet than we ever did, even when we were growing up, via Zoom meetings every other week. I would have suggested it years ago, but I wasn't sure whether "bi-weekly" meant two times a month or two times a week. So far it's been really fun to re-live every embarrassing moment of my youth once each one of them points it out, "not remembering" that the others already mentioned it. I'm trying to use the time as a group therapy session, since we all felt oppressed by my Dad at times. We had a very rough childhood, because my Dad wanted us to do chores sometimes and our homework, and never realized how unrealistic those expectations were. 

     What are the effects of watching this much "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch?" I find myself writing dialogue in my head for the cat. This cannot be healthy. Soon I will have seen every episode of every television show made before 1995. I'm waiting for more programs to be produced before 1995, because they don't make 'em like they used to. I'm working on a pilot myself, and I must say, it's diabolically clever. So far I only have one character sketched out, the character of Alexa. She's a bookish nerd girl who's always sitting in front of her laptop computer at the kitchen table. A few times an episode somebody asks really loud, "Alexa, what's the weather today?" or "Alexa, tell me a really bad joke," which sets off the Amazon Echos residing in 50 million very annoyed American homes (wow my sitcom is one of the highest rated in history! Thanks America!). Her sister's name is Siri. 

     As long as we have all this time to study things, I'd like to study why every time I turn around, somebody says they are receiving death threats. Has anyone ever died from a death threat? I've never received a death threat, because I usually don't say anything controversial, just dumb. But all I have to do is say I HATE bananas, and I'll start receiving death threats from some fringe banana supremacy group. I probably shouldn't have mentioned that I HATE bananas. I sometimes wonder how it all works: does someone call you up on the phone and say, "By the power vested in me I hereby THREATEN you. To DEATH!" I don't know about you but I have caller ID that even shows your number on my television screen. Sometimes it says "Spam?" next to the number and I have no doubt it would also say, "Possible Death Threat?" Which I would probably pick up thinking that it might be my wife. And if I don't pick up you're going to get so frustrated that you just about want to KILL me. You could send an email I guess, but that's going right to spam, too. When I clean out my spam folder a few months later I'll find out that I was death-threatened, along with my email server being shut down and a $27,800,000.00 business proposal from Chiba, Japan (which I really did receive and I'm following up on that one). You could tell me in person, I guess, but then you run the risk of me counter-death threatening you. "You dare to dost threaten THEE with death? Well, I hereby counter-threaten THOU! Or is it THY?" At which time I get to choose the weapon, and I choose beating you to the death at Scrabble. You'd better get your affairs in order.