I don’t think I ever quite got the worth of Kindergarten. Back in 1956, pre-school hadn’t been created and kindergarten was the launching pad for your school years. Most of the kids in my class were discovering the wonders of their newfound social circle, while others were simply enthralled with their own boogers or the taste of white paste.

After careful examination of all the circumstances involved, I decided that kindergarten might hold some untapped value; the only question being what and how.

First of all, the teacher was well past the nurturing stage and into basic little-twerp management. So, there was nothing to be had there.

Secondly, 5 year olds are so random in there interests that I had a difficult time connecting with anybody. Why did I want or need to be there? You sat around all day dicking with insignificant whatnot and making a mess and I could do that at home. Really, nothing to be had there either.

Thirdly, my main mover, music, was commandeered by a dispassionate piano hack (hereafter referred to as Mrs. Piano Hack) who turned off her hearing aid every time she led us in song. My innate musicality found that approach highly offensive and I just wanted her to stop mauling the piano.

Finally, as a result of points one, two and three, I was painfully bored and needed a reason to hang in there long enough to make it to the 1st grade. That reason was to work on my performance skills and give my classmates a lift at the same time.

Most of the kids just banged around gormlessly but others brought their own specialties to the table. One little dweeb, Jimmy, liked to set fire to the boots in the coat closet using lighter fluid until Mrs. Piano Hack would see the smoke and have to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher. That was Jimmy’s go-to move and while temporarily exciting, the long-range consequences were potentially disastrous.

My go-to move was far less dangerous and, hopefully, a lot more memorable, although to Jimmy’s credit, burning boots are hard to forget. No, I decided that the one thing that was lacking in that boring classroom was good entertainment and I devised a plan to provide that.

The plan went thusly: At exactly the same time every day, Mrs. Piano Hack left the classroom to go down the hall to retrieve those little milk cartons for us on a metal tray. I could pretty much estimate how much time it would take for her to plod her way down there, stack the cartons and get back. As soon as she left I would leap on the table, air guitar in hand, and lay into a blistering rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”. By the time I got halfway into the first verse all the kids were surrounding me, dancing and yelling as I swiveled my 5 year old hips and sang my ass off. The kids loved it and I made it a daily ritual, but there was one fatal flaw to the plan.

I had a hard time getting off stage and lingering too long on the table always led to Mrs. Piano Hack walking back in, grabbing me by the back of the shirt collar and tossing me into the hallway and its makeshift solitary confinement. I’d have to sit out there for long stretches until Mrs. Piano Hack figured I’d served my time and then she’d let me back in.

Actually, there was a flaw in her plan as well. I liked it in the hallway and I’d rather be there than in the classroom with all that chaos and bad piano playing. So, it was kind of a win, win for me because sitting out there allowed me ample time to let my mind wander and daydream all sorts of wacky things and it gave my imagination quite a workout. That imagination was atrophying in Hack’s classroom so the hallway was a blessing in disguise.

Periodically, my mother would be called down to the school to deal with my constant removals from the classroom and the first time she came to find me in the hallway, she said, “I’ll go down to the principal’s office and get you back into class”. I begged her not to do that and explained my reasoning for not wanting to return. Unfortunately, I was going to have to get back in the classroom or I was in danger of repeating kindergarten.

It was hard for me to believe that I had to go back to that soul killing kindergarten room but faced with another year of Mrs. Piano Hack, I lightened up my table show schedule and made it out of there at year’s end.

Kindergarten wasn’t a total waste because I learned some valuable lessons in show biz and public relations: size up your audience carefully and know when to stop basking in the glory and get off stage. When I finally became a professional musician, those revelations became useful in nearly every gig I’ve ever had.

Mrs. Piano Hack wasn’t much in the guidance department but her quest to squash my performance creativity helped give me that rock and roll edge.

Rock on, Mrs. Piano Hack!

My dad (father #2) loved the grandiosity of staged illusion and made it a major part of his performing repertoire. When he spoke of the history of magic and magicians it was with great reverence for the craft and he worked hard to hone his own skills so that they were a worthy contribution to the greats that came before him.

He made himself, Frederick the Great, and while that smells a little like Michael Jackson dubbing himself the “King of Pop”, my dad realized the marketability of ’sounds like’, ‘acts like’, ‘is like’. So, he was Frederick the Great and all his promotional material lauded his superior feats of prestidigitation.

My mother was his assistant and between the two of them, they cornered the market in the looks department; she, statuesque and beautiful and he, dashing and debonair. Coupling that asset with my dad’s work ethic to the act and they had a very successful regional show.

The legendary illusionist, Harry Blackstone (from the same state), was his benchmark and he carried himself with as much class as the great master, decked out in tucks and moving through his routines like a ballet dancer. He was serious about this art and meticulous with detail, and before long they were not only working locally but traveling to other cities to open for other, bigger acts.

To my dad, this was show biz on a grand scale and, while I never asked my her if she really enjoyed this act, I have the feeling that my mother joined him in the small scale glory that was theirs. As good as my dad got, however, he still ran into the same road block that always seemed to arrest his dreams.

The nearby bar.

On the road or 500 feet from our house, the challenge was always the same…how to keep Frederick the Great out of the bar and going on with the show. Sometimes he just didn’t make it because he tried to mix the two worlds and they would, like a bad lab accident, create a cloud of mayhem.

They performed a large illusion surrounding a wooden coffin on wheels that my mother would lie down in and then the Great one would light the thing on fire and the audience would eventually see her skeleton ablaze, Frederick hunched maniacally over the charbroil, madly dumping more lighter fluid onto the remains. This was a real crowd pleaser and he would take bow after bow, the crowd cheering over my mother the ember.

The only problem was that, one night, in a less than sober state he had gone a little too theatrical with the lighter fluid and some had leaked into the chamber below where my mother actually was lying and her dress caught on fire. Frederick the Great wouldn’t notice this because he was still in the process of soaking up the adulation.

Fortunately for my mother, an off-stage hand saw the smoke and tore into the box, getting my mother out before she suffered additional burns and this, to my dad’s dismay, took a little of the sheen off of the illusion.

Another time, during an Elks Lodge performance, Frederick found the lounge before finding the stage and was so besotted that he, for one of the rare times, couldn’t go on. What to do? They’d already been paid, the audience was primed and so my mother, thinking quickly and taking stock of what she knew and didn’t know, assembled every trick she thought she could handle, made up a story about Frederick and went out on stage and did a show.

At this point in time, the fabulous 50’s, there were no female magicians on the circuit and her appearance got a little more attention than normal that evening. Not only that but she pulled off what she could with enough style, having watched my dad rehearse, that the show was a smashing success and the Lodge owner deliriously happy.

Several days later, the Lodge owner called our house, not to re-hire my dad but to check on my mother’s availability. This struck a mortal blow to the ego of the Great Frederick and he made my mother come up with an excuse why she couldn’t make it.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Frederick was hired to levitate a woman on top of a downtown building to celebrate the grand opening of a hardware store, my mother politely declined the gig and dad had to find another assistant for the day. She hasn’t lived a long life because of bad judgment. Yes, the fill-in survived but my mother recognized a gamble when she saw one; tall building, levitating on a  board, nearby tavern.

On those days, though, when all his brain cells were in line, for the relatively small man he was, his skill level was exceptional. His hands were so small that those tricks, like handling ping pong balls, coins or other small props, requiring such agile manipulation, were made even more impressive by the constant work he put in to making it look that good.

Although unintentional, perhaps his greatest moment was in Milwaukee at a large hall, opening for Jack Benny. He was in the middle of one of his tricks where a chaffing dish was lit on fire (a dangerous running theme), the top of the metal dish was put on to smother the flame then lifted off to reveal a live dove who would be taken out of the dish and quickly placed in a cage.

Nifty trick, except this time the dove, sensing opportunity, took off into the auditorium, eventually landing on a rafter at the top of the building. Since this wasn’t in the script, neither my dad or mother knew what to do to get the dove back to the stage.

Finally, just taking a stab in the dark, my dad pulled out his blank revolver and fired a shot in the direction of the dove. The bird jumped and, probably sensing familiarity, flew straight back to my dad and landed on his finger. The audience, amazed at Frederick’s aviary mastery, burst into tumultuous applause, thereby deifying what was essentially dumb luck.

Ah, the occasional randomness of show biz.

In later years when his lavish visions succumbed to the reality of his lack of motivation, a few cans of Stroh’s would get him to talking about putting together a traveling 1920’s style Chautauqua, complete with musicians, jugglers, magicians and other assorted entertainers and tour the countryside, moving through hundreds of little towns.

Even though he’d constantly revisit this idea when I’d go over to his house after my parents divorce, I think we both knew that it was never going to happen and the magic equipment would remain in mothballs.

In many ways it was ridiculous that he gave up so easily but he was a chain-smoking, full fledged alcoholic in a mind-deadening job and, regardless of his bravado, he would never give that up until the day he crapped out on his sofa at age 57.

If you’d seen him through my eyes when I was growing up, you’d have seen how great he really could have been. You’d have seen that his pretentious moniker had tremendous potential. He was Frederick the Great and if only he could have gotten past his own demons and not drifted into hopelessness, sky was the limit for that guy.

With the recent passing of my step-dad (father #3, more on him later), the inevitable barrage of morbid thoughts have been pouring into my brain. I’ve also ratcheted up my macabre humor to previously unheard of levels but that is how I’m personally dealing with his death. Everybody’s got their way.

So for the past month or more, my life (and the lives of my mother and my wife) have been forever altered and big changes are in order.

A short time beyond my dad’s service, something especially wonderful happened that was born, inadvertently, from his passing and something I shall cherish forever.

I died.

I have to tell you, I didn’t see this one coming…nobody did. O.K., I have the diet of a 15 year-old and I believe in the power of beer, but other than that who would have guessed that my demise was so imminent? Certainly not my wife, who received a greeting card in the mail two weeks ago.

When I walked in the door that evening, my wife handed me the card and said “you have to read this”.

Addressed to her only, it read: “Dear (wife’s name here), We are sad to learn of the death of (my name here). You our(sp) in our hearts and thoughts. Our Deepest Sympathies, (organization that shall remain nameless)”

I started laughing so hard that tears were running down my face and then we were both convulsing, and somewhere during all that I realized what a wonderful gift this giant faux paux was. We had been wound tighter than a drum through the deathwatch that was my dad’s final week and somehow the sheer absurdity of this card broke the tension right where it needed to be broken; a laugh in the face of our own mortality.

It had always been a dream of mine, and I imagine many other folks, to be able to read your own obit, hear your own eulogy or even attend your own funeral and eavesdrop on all the things people really thought about you. With this card, a bit of that fantasy was coming true. Of course, we felt it responsible to let the card issuing party know that I still had one foot in the land of the living and, of course, they were mortified. But my wife also told them what a tremendous comedic service they had done us (they didn’t quite get that particular point).

I understand why they were embarrassed but for me it was one of the coolest things. It’s amazing how much attention you can generate for the simple act of dying and this card has become the best party favor ever. The one-liners flow like an endless river and imagine the obligations I can get out of.

It seems so improbable that a mistake like this could have been made but the more ethereal theory is that my Dad put his sly sense of humor to work for one more fling from the cosmos. All I know is, it’s working for me.

Dead translates into pure success.

Michael Jackson’s record sales are through the roof, syndication fees for Charlie’s Angels episodes with Farrah Fawcett just went up, Ed McMahon clips from the old Tonight Show are probably being assembled into a triple disc DVD set as we speak, David Carradine ‘Kung Pao Chicken’ stands are opening all over Bangkok, loud TV pitchman Billy Mays is still so loud that he got an even better contract to project from the beyond and I’m going to suck every last ounce of humor from this sympathy card if, well, if it kills me.

At various times throughout my youth I had BB Guns, pellet guns, a machete, archery gear, an array of deadly fireworks that would rival a military ammo dump, and even a .22 caliber rifle, but for all of that I just didn’t have the heart of a hunter.

Tin cans I could brutally mow down with the conscience of a mercenary. A battalion of plastic army men were gone in the blink of an M-80 blast and, hearkening back to the stone age, dirt clods were lobbed like grenades at the neighbor kids. With all of that inherent destructive DNA on my side I still didn’t have the stomach for wantonly harming animals.

But there were incidents. Wrong place, wrong time, I don’t know, but there were a couple of incidents…and they were torturous for my psyche.

My ‘incidents’ took place in my large backyard and an undeveloped woodsy field just next to it. I’d be out back, armed with whatever was at hand (usually a BB gun), stalking my inanimate prey and then, bingo, there would be a bird or a squirrel just looking for trouble, seemingly dying to jump in my cross hairs in an effort to prove the cruelty of mankind.

Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to at least aim at the robin. What could that hurt? Aiming is alright as long as no living thing his harmed in the process but there was a breakdown and my curiosity, bolstered by the probability of a miss, got the better of me and I pulled the trigger.

Down went the robin out of the tree and, immediately, something stuck in my throat and I ran like a crazy person towards the fallen bird trying to access the damage I had done. ‘What did you shoot that bird for, dumbass?’ And by the time I got there I could see that the bird was unable to fly but still able to hop.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a bird hop but they’re not only very fast hoppers but they have more than enough energy (even wounded) to give a 12 year old boy a run for his money. As hard as I tried I couldn’t catch up to the robin and I felt like it was imperative that I do so. I had to know how badly it was wounded by the BB and I had to make sure that nothing else could hurt it while it was wounded. I had to catch that bird…I had to.

He eventually got under the fence in my yard and into the woods next door and, by that time, my buddy from a couple of doors down had joined in the chase and it went on and on and on. For the next 4 hours we tried to catch that bird and, as dusk settled in, I was worried that night time would finally end the chase and the robin would be lost and it would all be my fault. My fault! My stupid BB gun, my stupid BB gun aiming self!

Did the other animals put them up to this, like aviary Jihadists looking to enrage the animal kingdom into a counter-attack? You didn’t see that I had a BB gun and was capable of random violence? And now me and my buddy are running around like a couple of idiots trying to catch something that is traumatized and scared it will suffer more at the hands of these demons.

And then, at the point of exhaustion and the onset of night, we lucked out and caught the robin in a box and brought it back to my garage. I had an old parakeet cage that would become his temporary home and, with a pair of heavy duty gardening gloves, I held the bird in one hand while my buddy and I cleaned and dressed the wound.

It was like Doogie Howser meets Wild Kingdom. I had become hunter, tracker and nurse all in one long, grueling day.

Within a few days the robin seemed to be regaining its health and so we took it out and freed it near the original crime scene. Off it flew and I was off the hook for potential murder.

Now you’d think I’d have weened myself away from a life of destruction but, being a notoriously slow learner, I was back in the yard messing around with a bow and arrow. The arrow had a big, blunt, rubber tip that was used for whacking things. What things? I have no idea what the rubber tipped arrow was originally meant for but anything shot out of a bow is probably going to do some serious whacking.

I’m whacking this, I’m whacking that…cans, trees, old toys and then sitting in my line of sight like the profile of a buffalo nickel was…

…a squirrel.

For God’s sake wildlife, can’t you see this is a demiliterized zone? Did you just see me chase that robin around for 4 hours? And again I applied the same logic as before…very far away, it’s only a rubber arrow, I’ll probably miss by a mile, what could it hurt, and ‘thunk’…

I whacked the squirrel right in the side of the head and knocked it out cold.

“Oh no, oh no! What are you doing?”, I’m screaming all the way up there thinking I had now ended the life of an innocent fur-ball who was foolish enough to come in my yard and my heart is banging out of my chest. About the time I got within 10 feet of the relaxed rodent, he came to, jumped up and took off, scaring the shit out of me in the process. “Geez, I can’t take anymore of this.”

That would be the last time I put any animals in harm’s way, and how did I know I was cured? I went hunting about a year later. I mean REAL deer hunting, with other hunters, with real guns and bad intentions. But I went because my mother was going with her boyfriend and I was along because tin cans were said to be in the area.

The first day in camp I annihilated an entire village of Campbell cans with a Winchester .32 Special. They never had a chance and ended up labeless and full of holes.

Then came the next morning and I was supposed to go out and hunt deer, so they handed me a World War II issue 30-30 Carbine and off I went to ‘bag’ me a deer, except I just prayed (seriously, prayed) that no deer would get within a 1000 yards of me. I even walked loud and occasionally whistled and sung songs just so they’d know I was coming.

Then, as I walked out of a wooded area into a snowy meadow I caught something out of the corner of my eye and, oh shit, there was a doe standing completely still, sideways, staring at me. We were maybe a 100 feet away and I froze, never lifting my gun and just staring back at the doe until I just looked away, pretended that never happened and kept on walking.

Fortunately, there was no one else around to see my magnificent lack of hunting nerve and I went back to camp claiming  to have never seen a deer the entire time. The next day I went back to stalking soup cans and life was good again.

I never went hunting again and, to this day, when I see a spider in the house I capture it with a glass and a bar coaster, take it out on our balcony and let it free, albeit 5 floors up (did you know they float?). Whatever it is that makes me repulsed by killing something, it’s a pretty strong force.

Maybe I’m a pansy, maybe I’m a Quaker and don’t know it, but my constitution refuses to allow me to find fulfillment in hunting something that’s not hunting me.

I do, however, still get an itchy trigger finger everytime I go down the soup aisle at the grocery store.

From the ages of about 9 to 12 I used to go with my mother to visit my Great Aunt Louise at her cabin in Brainard, Minnesota. I loved Aunt Louise and looked forward to seeing her in the summer.

By the time I hit 12, two major things had changed my summer vacation plans…one being my hormones and the other being Aunt Louise’s marriage to Dan, a local farmer, so we spent part of the time at the cabin and the other at Dan’s farm which, city boy me, found charming for all sorts of odd reasons.

I liked the cows and I bought into the haircut with a bowl on my head, and I loved the hay bailer, even more so because I got to use a bailing hook to snag the bails. That bailing hook made me feel like a real roughneck because it took strength to grab those bails and haul them up on the wagon. If I could do that, I must be a tough guy, eh?

There was only one part of the farm that I just couldn’t deal with and all my good intentions at helping out Uncle Dan were no match for the reality of the silo. The silo was a repository for organic waste such as corn cobs and then, over time, it turned to compost and an effective fertilizer. What I was not prepared for was the odor.

It was stifling and the fact that we had to get inside the silo with pitch forks meant that you had to suck up that hideous methane smell the entire time you were working and stepping out of the silo to fresh air was like coming up, gasping for a breath, after an all-to-deep underwater dive.

Eventually, standing knee deep in what amounted to nature’s crap, I totally begged off the project and told Uncle Dan that I just couldn’t take it anymore and he, being sympathetic to my uncalloused urban life, let me off the hook.

Most people don’t consider the simple luxury of ‘air’ but spend some time standing in a silo and you will!

Of course, now, what to do? Aunt Louise was doing some ‘canning’ in the kitchen and Dan was braving the silo and I had squat for entertainment but things would soon get a whole lot better down on the farm.

Sitting in the front yard, contemplating the mystery of grass, my newly minted 12-year-old hormones couldn’t believe their crazy good luck when two neighboring farm girls rode up on their horses, looking like a pair of Elizabeth Taylor’s in National Velvet.

We exchanged queries about where they lived and where I came from and how old we were (they were the same age) and so on, until we agreed to hang out for the afternoon and scout out some of the nooks and crannies of Dan’s farm. Specifically, we fooled around in the barn hayloft, flinging ourselves down the mountains of hay bails and generally burning up excess energy, stopping occasionally to talk about what it was like living on a farm.

They were cute girls and, on this day, it was clear that this beat the shit out of hanging with my buddies back home. As I regaled them with my bailing hook adventures, hoping to score some ‘impress’ points, one of the girls asked if I’d like to ride her horse and so, faced with the cowboy imperative, I said, “Sure, I’ll take a spin”, spoken like I’d just finished a 13 city rodeo tour.

Naturally, as false bravado will do to a person, I was in trouble because I hadn’t a clue on how to handle a horse. The closest I’d been to anything resembling a horse was one of those Shetland pony rides that go ploddingly slow in a circle while a handler holds the reigns and the only way you could hurt yourself on one of those things would be to hurl yourself headfirst into a passing fence post.

This was not a Shetland pony and I was going to have to fake the whole thing because my new hormones expected a lot out of me and you don’t want to blow a chance to impress girls, especially on one of the first times out.

I’d seen enough Roy Rogers serials to know my first move was a foot in the stirrups but after that it got a little confusing because the horse took about 3 steps forward and threw my balance off. I didn’t recall Trigger pulling that stunt on Roy so I took another shot at it and, sure enough, the stunt horse took another 3 steps and I couldn’t get over the saddle and fell on my rear.

This was not going well but the girls seemed determined to help get me on the horse and so the prettiest one held the reigns while I launched myself into the saddle. O.K., it was seriously humiliating that she did that and my inner Roy Rogers had to have Dale Evans hold the horse still for him, but at least I was in the saddle and ready to ride.

She quickly handed me the reigns and the horse bolted like he’d been shot from one of those circus cannons and I was barely, and I mean barely hanging on to the saddle horn (I’d already dropped the reigns) as the beast headed for a low lying branch of a tree in a clear effort to dump my sorry ass off of his back. Saving him the trouble I jumped off the saddle about 2 seconds before I would have been forcibly removed and rolled about 15 feet.

Well, the girls were hysterical, laughing so hard they could barely make it over to see if I was alright and when they finally got there it was obvious from the looks on their faces that they knew the outcome of my ride even before I’d said, “yes”. The joke was on Mr. Bigshot and it had a punchline to remember.

Later that night when I was thinking about the time I’d spent with the girls and my inglorious ending, I had one of those childhood epiphanies that, if you’re paying attention, can help prepare you for the next phase of your life and my stream of consciousness went a little like this:

‘I really like girls…sometimes girls are tricky…I really liked those girls…my butt hurts…I liked those girls…I wonder why they…I like girls…this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought…why do I like these girls?…I like girls.’

Of the many experiences one can rack up over the years, sometimes it’s nature’s unexpected revelations that become the most memorable. Your first tornado, your first look at birth, your first foray into Poison Ivy, but it was the onset of puberty that gave me an unparalleled hormonal triumph that I would never forget.

You simply don’t see it coming. You’re strolling along, all little boyish, and bang, girls are suddenly on the map and life has a new complication. Pig Latin and mud pies should have been enough of a challenge but the gravitational pull of the female screwed up the calm that was my childhood ignorance and replaced it with a call to action.

If you’re going through puberty, the times, as Bob Dylan once said, “they are a changin’”. For a heterosexual boy, it’s not only your female classmates that look different, it’s every cultural and social bookmark and that definitely includes celebrities. My friend Charlie took a strong interest in young actress Haley Mills and, believe me, it had nothing to do with her thespian gifts. Personally, I was mesmerized by a television trailer for a new movie about to hit local theaters.

Gypsy

I used to go to the movie theater a lot on Saturdays, usually by myself because I’d had a rotten experience with a friend who kept getting up every 5 minutes to take a piss all through The Ten Commandments. Maybe it was the suggestibility of the Red Sea or maybe the kid had a bladder the size of a peanut, I don’t know, but it was distracting as hell and I decided that I’d be going alone from then on.

There were risks associated with that though and they came from groups of kids who thought it was hilarious to pop somebody in the back of the head with a Milk Dud or kick the back of your chair. If you were alone, then you didn’t have the power of the wolf pack so they preyed on your solidarity. I ignored their idiocy as best I could and was at least thankful that I didn’t have to deal with my ex-movie buddy, the pissing machine.

I watched that TV trailer with stealthy interest because I didn’t want my mother or anyone else to get the drift that I was heading over there on the weekend and plop down a quarter (that’s what it cost for the matinée then) to see the exciting conclusion of Natalie Wood’s stripper stroll across the stage.

I was just a boy without a complete understanding of what was going on with me sexually, and the lure of Wood’s character Gypsy Rose Lee singing “Let Me Entertain You” and possibly doffing her duds drew me like a moth to the flame. I had to get to that movie and find out what happened where the trailer tease left off!

In 1963 Natalie Wood was on the cover of every movie fan magazine around and already firmly established, in my mind, as a pubescent icon so the lure was almost bigger than Christmas except that I failed to understand just exactly what Gypsy was. From the TV ad I had it boiled down to the story of a stripper’s rise to stardom but, of course, it’s a tad more than that.

Gypsy is a musical that opened up on Broadway in 1959 and was adapted for the screen 4 years later with the aforementioned Natalie Wood and the venerable actress Rosaland Russell as her mother. Yes, Gypsy is about Ms. Rose Lee, the good girl turned legendary stripper but it’s more about the family as headed by the matriarchal ‘Rose’, played by Russell. The overriding point is, it’s a musical.

It’s about singing and dancing and drama and, for God’s sake, a lot of things that had nothing to do with the prurient interests of a 12 year-old. Still, there was Natalie Wood and, after getting there and having to wade through the ‘early years of vaudeville’, I focused on the eventual moment, as promised by the trailer, where Wood would let it all hang out and a young boy’s dreams would be realized.

I kept the troops patient but on ‘ready alert’ as the tale trudged on until that seminal moment in the story when one of the other strippers was unable to go on and there was Natalie Wood, volunteered by her own overbearing mother to come in off the bench and save the day. The anticipation was more than I could stand and the troops were antsy. It was finally going to happen.

Wood was a little hesitant but off she went and she hadn’t gotten more than 3 bars into the song when so did I.

To my complete surprise, with no encouragement, no go ahead command from the general; my troops had taken it upon themselves to charge ahead and now, as exciting as it all was, it was over in a flash…and I was left with a tricky logistical problem.

All through the remaining part of the film (yes, I stayed for the whole thing) I tried to figure out how I was going to stand up and walk out of the theater without a hundred kids pointing at the crotch of my Chinos and laughing. I couldn’t assess the extent of the visible damage in the dark but my imagination gave me cause for alarm.

It was summer so I couldn’t be helped by a winter coat and all I really had left was an empty popcorn box and a few Good n’ Plenty candies, so when the lights came up I moved quickly to the exit using the popcorn box as a shield; the rationalization being that I was taking the rest with me for the walk home (I always had to have an alibi that made sense to me and that one did).

By the time I had finally gotten in the clear, free from the groups of other kids and on my way back home I didn’t need the box anymore and it was time to try and place into context what had happened back there.

I had spent the afternoon watching a musical about a stripper but even though it wasn’t what I had expected, I had done something monumental, and I did it with no hands and a mouth full of popcorn.

I had pulled an ‘unassisted’; something rarely experienced by anyone over the age of enlightenment; something only the hormones of a crazed teen can do and while I was technically a pre-teen, it was close enough. My only concern was that I might have too loose a cannon and would this thing be going off every time a pretty girl walked by? Would I have to spend the rest of my life walking around with a popcorn box?

But that was it, a one and only unique event, never to be duplicated in my life and destined for my own mental scrapbook. The Stripper, starring Joanne Woodward, came along that same year (she even had balloons!), but it wasn’t the same, because it wasn’t Natalie Wood, whose presence I embued with almost mythical proportions for her powers to move me from the silver screen through a simple musical.

Let’s face it. You’re not supposed to be that excited about a musical that once starred Ethel Merman on Broadway, but that was Natalie Wood, master of seduction and temptress of young boys of the ’60’s.

I’m not sure at what point it became clear to my mother that my biological father (father #1) was not going to make good family material but a clear indicator might have been the occasion of my birth.

As my mother tells it, he was around briefly for the actual birth but sort of dropped the ball after that point. Why wouldn’t he? By this time, even though I was my mother’s one and only child, my father had already cranked out 3 others in a prior marriage, so I guess you might say that the novelty had worn off. You know; you’re in, you’re out and then chance lays a kid on you or not.

To prove to us that he didn’t have the ‘right stuff’, he left the hospital not long after I was hatched, with the words: “I’ll be back tomorrow”, and then, of course, he never showed up again and my mother was unable to get him on the phone for the next 3 days or so. In the meantime, she needed clothes for me and herself that were back at their house and and would be necessary when she was discharged from the hospital.

So, she did the only thing she could do and that was to enlist the aid of one of her brothers to perform a little B&E and crawl in through their bedroom window, get the clothes and bring them back to the hospital, which my uncle did.

‘Where is this guy?’, she’s thinking, and I’m just hanging around in my diapers thinking the same thing…’I've just about had enough of this hospital and I’m ready for my new digs’. Wherever he was, it was apparent that he wouldn’t be answering the phone. Distraught and befuddled that her newborn’s father went AWOL, she eventually transitioned from worried to pissed and on the day of her discharge, much to the consternation of the nurse on duty, she called a cab.

As hospital staff escorted us out of the hospital and into the waiting cab, ‘husband of the year’ appeared. Somehow, without ever communicating to my mother, he had found out the discharge date and worked us into his schedule.

By the time she opened the front door of our house it was clear what the problem was, since there were wall to wall musicians and their instruments to navigate over and around. My father had gone ahead and scheduled a jam session with his bandmates, effectively driving me and my mother straight into the bedroom for the evening.

As we slipped past the horn players and my dad’s drum set, my mother gave him the stare from hell, the guys in the band were looking at each other uncomfortably, and even I mumbled something like “asshole” as we passed by on the way to my new crib, although I hadn’t quite mastered the English language yet and perhaps it was just angry gibberish.

To add insult to insensitivity, while most of the musicians would finally leave, one of them, eighty-sixed from his own house, took over the guest room for the next month until my mother forced him out.

From then on, for the next couple of weeks, on those rare occasions when my dad was in line to change my diapers, I made sure there was a little extra chef’s surprise in the gift wrapping. None of it mattered though because, in his disengaged head, he was already planning the escape route and looking forward to the next conquest and knock-up.

He was just a guy who liked to make the babies but didn’t want to have much to do with any of the rest of it. You could sort of understand it if I was, say, a Bassett Hound or a goldfish, but seeing that he had no intention of caring for a small human like myself, well, it was pretty pathetic.

Barb moved in about a block and a half from our house when I was 16 and, because she was new to the neighborhood, slowly and shyly melded into our group of pals that included several other houses on our block.

We mostly hung out around my house because I had a yard big enough to play softball in or we just sat around and talked. Barb’s shyness didn’t stop her from having fun with us but she always seemed to be playing it a little on the guarded side.

She was very pretty, very sweet and also, seemingly, very fragile. Early on I didn’t know what it was that caused that fragility but I would eventually find out. We were friends at the start but, by the time my high school graduation rolled around, we started dating.

Somewhere in my head, I knew that our ‘all too young’ relationship would have a time limit since she would still be in high school when I would be going off to college in the fall. Whether we would progress beyond those months apart was speculation but I figured we would eventually drift away to our separate paths, and that’s pretty much what happened.

That summer leading up to my departure, however, we spent lots of time hanging out and she soon invited me over to her house and I met her mother who was as sweet and gracious as Barb but with that same odd fragility about her. That ‘fragility’ was really a profound sadness, but I didn’t get the full impact of it until I went to her house.

From the very first visit, there was something in that house that made me extremely uncomfortable, something unnatural and oppressive that made the very air feel confining. If I was there too long, getting out and walking home was a relief.

As far as I could detect, that ’something’ turned out to be her father, whose only discernible interests seemed to be The Jackie Gleason Show, booze, and a police scanner that was on all the time. I’m probably missing a few of his other interests due to faulty memory or lack of discovery but, suffice it to say, booze and the police scanner were two of his principal passions.

When I say that the scanner was on all the time, I’m not exaggerating because he, apparently, had a need to know where and what might be happening in the world of crime and law enforcement at any given time. Even if it was a Saturday night and Gleason was on, so was the scanner and if there was something better on the scanner than the TV, then it was in the car and off to the scene of the crime.

In and of itself that didn’t account for what I was sensing in Barb and what I felt in the house, so I asked Barb about her father. She was reticent to say much because it was embarrassing for her, but what little she told me said a lot about why I always felt strange around her dad. Of course, I would see her dad in the early evening and by the time I left to go home there was still plenty of ‘family’ time left at her house.

According to Barb, her father often drank to exhaustion and, in the process, morphed from tracking police violence to creating his own homegrown variety. While her mother was the primary target, Barb was occasionally in the path of a kick to the shins as well, and then it all began to fall into place; the sadness that permeated the rooms of her house was fueled by the unpredictability of her environment.

It was a troubled home that smothered her gentle spirit and it pained me to leave her there with a mother who, at least when I knew her, appeared resigned to tolerating the disorder. Having gone through some of this with my own family, I had a good idea of what she was up against. Still, my mother had been more proactive in eradicating the offending party, leaving me with some breathing room, whereas Barb had no real peace.

Barb and her mother had each other but that hardly guaranteed their safety unless they were suddenly moved to pick up that scanner and fireball it across his sleeping cranium. Short of that, they were sitting ducks who went about their days with as much normalcy as they could find.

By the end of summer I was gone to college across the state and our dating was essentially over with the exception of a couple of visits back to the neighborhood. A new phase of my life was taking me out of my childhood for good and, consequently, away from Barb. I thought of her from time to time and just hoped her survival skills would keep her going until she could leave home and find her own way.

Maybe it was the culmination of an insecure home life or maybe just bad luck that put her in the wrong place at the wrong time but, less than a year later, my mother called me at school and asked me about Barb and “what was her last name” and so on. Then she read to me from the local paper a story about a young woman who left a bowling alley late one night and took a shot gun blast to the face from close range.

It was all unclear as to who did the shooting or why, but it appeared deliberate and Barb did not survive.

Had she latched onto something eerily similar to the situation she was raised in? Was she bred to be a victim, eventually slain by some horrible, irrational act? My heart sank after my mother finished the story because I knew what conditions had paved the way for her demise and it was a sad ending to a sad life.

Barb was too young and too vulnerable to have been left to such a twisted fate and, if there is some sort of an afterlife, may she have the comfort and care she deserved all along.

I’ve always had a problem with cliques; the little exclusionary groupings that insulate people from one another for, usually, superficial reasons. Cliques are most common in school settings, even through college (although they’re usually on the wane there) and, hopefully, by the time a person enters the real world, these things are gone for good…but don’t bet on it.

My basic distaste for cliques started in grade school where the seeds are sown, junior high school where these divisions normally germinate, before coming to full bloom in high school. Everyone receives a random category and is expected to act accordingly, except that didn’t feel right to me and I crossed boundaries whenever and wherever, which likely caused some confusion among the various cliques as what to do with me.

The fact that I was as easily a friend to one of the nerdy kids as to one of the jocks or one of the popular kids, left my standing with all the groups a little murky, which is just the way I wanted it.

If I liked somebody, I never stopped to consider their status, only whether or not I liked them. Pretty simple, eh? Well, not so much when you’re a kid facing the judgment of a pecking order in school. But the kids who were comfortable with my approach were the kids that I ended up befriending.

I just didn’t give a shit about these various factions and so, ignored all of it. If it couldn’t be ignored and I was being required to be exclusionary by one group, I resisted.

In grade school I took the unpopular step of playing marbles with Cathy out on the playground. This was 2nd grade and Cathy was taller and probably stronger than all the boys, had a mouth like a longshoreman and was coming from the poorest of circumstances. Nobody much liked her but I wanted to play marbles with her because she was uncharacteristically bawdy for a 2nd grader and I got a charge out of her shtick. I even took it one step further and, God forbid, deliberately sat next to her in class! By doing this, of course, I got myself inadvertently pigeon holed by some of the popular kids but, at the time, I didn’t consider the social consequences.

I was like fucking Switzerland, lodged between partisans, having no compelling attachment to any of them.

In junior high I was an athlete but even though I had friends in that group, I avoided the social pack as a whole. I’m convinced that some kids got into athletics because it put them in a more elite class among their peers, especially if they were good at their sport, but I ran track and played football because I had lots of energy to burn off and was somewhat of a masochist.

At the same time I ran with the athletes, I was pals with the guys in the audio-visual room and AV guys were some of the most renown nerds in the entire school but I thought all that tech stuff was fun so I hung around those who knew it best. Ah, the sweet smell of mimeograph paper!

My random allegiances continued on into high school and eventually college, where I again played utility fielder with my relationships. By then, I was playing music professionally and when my music partner and I got together with friends for partytime and the inevitable ‘joint passing circle’, I always passed the joint to the next person, declining to partake.

What? You were a musician, in college, hair down to your shoulders, idle time galore, no reason to go to geology class, taking a 1 credit course in golf and you refused to get high with your buddies?

Yes, because they made it a ritualistic clique and if I passed on the joint I was no longer part of that inner circle and not properly partying and, I always felt, not trusted to even be in the circle. That pissed me off because these were my ‘friends’, so then I went from disinterested to radically committed to never smoking that joint with them.

You see the mental quandary here? Well, maybe you don’t and you just think I was a big weirdo and maybe you’re right but that’s how it played out in my personal code so I had to see it through.

About the same time, one of the sorority girls asked me to be her date at a formal dinner with another fraternity. I was a scruffy hippie/musician with a mustache in training, so it was not immediately apparent why she asked me, except that I knew her through other friends and she thought I was funny. Uncharacteristically, I accepted an invitation to the ‘clique of all cliques’ because, I’m afraid to say, she was kind of quirky cute, and I was terribly curious as to what this was all about, even though I was going to be pathetically under-dressed for the occasion.

When I went to pick her up, one of the first things she asked was if I had brought my guitar and then it dawned on me that this was the catch and it was hoped that I might literally be singing for my supper at the post-dinner party. Unfortunately for her, there was no guitar in her future as I was there for the food (musicians are like that) and to be her date and nothing else. Even though I was seriously out of my element with the frat scene, we still had a relatively good time, drank a lot, ‘made out’ in front of her apartment after the ride home and, as a night capper, she puked just outside my car door. Priceless.

I always understood, to some degree, why cliques naturally occurred in school settings. Young people are a little unsteady on their feet at that point and there’s comfort in something that walks and talks more like you, but it also denies you the chance to learn things outside your sphere of knowledge and, at its extreme, takes on that exclusionary role that can be a harbinger of social misunderstandings to come.

I don’t think I rebelled against cliques for any reasons that were particularly noble. I just didn’t like them and refused to, as Groucho Marx once said, join any club that would have me as a member.

If I had a child, I’d tell them the same thing: don’t get hemmed in by your own insecurities…it’s a big world.

At 16, when I started working at Jack’s music store, I didn’t really know Jack all that well other than to note that he was a divorced, forty-something, musician friend of my mother’s who owned a couple of stores in the area.

A professional organist himself, Jack set up a brisk business selling organs to churches, supper clubs, lounges and private homes. This was the ’60’s and it wasn’t all that unusual to find a Wurlitzer, Lowery or Hammond sitting in someone’s living room, although it was a bit unusual to actually see someone playing it.

It was as if putting this musical furniture in one’s home gave the illusion that its owner had talent.

Although this was Jack’s primary money maker, he also sold every other variety of instrument or music technology of the day. I spent a decent amount of my ‘in-store’ time playing the guitars and keyboards and, somehow, this lack of actual work never seemed to bother Jack all that much. Maybe he saw me as the music store shill, creating ambiance for all who would be interested in buying an instrument. Maybe he just appreciated my interest in music, who knows?

One of my early duties was going out on organ deliveries with Jack. We’d strap the organ onto a rolling dolly and wrestle it into the van and stabilize it with wheel chocks. Then we’d head off to some unknown physical challenge down the road. I learned something about Jack by going on these runs because a good many of his character quirks came out while driving.

Jack had the demeanor of a ferret, with little or no patience for anything that got in his way. Even when he wasn’t in a hurry, he looked to be; an illusion of motion that was probably his inner anxiety so desperate to get out that it became visible. Jack was purpose driven, talked fast and seemed, at all times, on the verge of a nervous explosion. So hopping in the van with him was like going on the roller coaster at Six Flags.

With the native frustrations that are a part of the driving experience, Jack was an intense madman behind the wheel and, as far as I could figure, everybody in his line of sight was a potential roadblock needing to be outmaneuvered. He yelled at other drivers, talked to himself about other drivers and wherever he was going it was never going to be fast enough.

Get the hell out of the way, asshole, people are waiting for this organ!

I just sat there in the passenger seat, using my inner-calming voice to weather the Jack storm until we arrived at our destination and then he would jump out of the van, whip open the doors and have the organ halfway out of the truck before I even had one foot on the ground. He reacted like a paramedic at an accident scene, and all of this just to make sure that somebody got their organ 5 minutes faster than originally estimated.

I wasn’t a slacker, I just looked like one standing next to the whirling dervish named Jack. I would have loved to be in the doctor’s office when the nurse read his blood pressure: “Oh Lord, 166 over 100! Everybody clear the building, he’s gonna blow!”

Even when he’d move the organs, I felt like he was one false step away from a massive coronary. Once, delivering to a home on a hill in an affluent neighborhood, we had to move an organ up an unbelievable number of steps to get to the front door. Parking at the bottom of the steep, winding ascent was like staring up at the most treacherous ski run in Vail, Colorado. It took 4 of us to pull it off and by the time we’d finally reached the top, Jack was wheezing and his face was beet red. “Look out, he’s gonna blow!!”

He was manic, intense and, to all his friends, a very sweet person.

My mother had every intention of pushing me away from my interest in music, based simply upon her own experiences with marrying two musicians and dating another, but it was Jack who talked her out of it with a little bit of logic.

He had listened to me playing his store instruments long enough to realize that I had a natural ability and, to him, it would be musical blasphemy to blunt that talent. Besides, he explained, I would find a way despite her efforts. Of course, he was right and she relaxed her objections and began to help me.

But back to the damned organs, as I often thought of them. Jack began to sell so many of them that he had me, the newly licensed teenager, doing some of the deliveries on my own. There were times when he had a gig or another delivery and I had to get the thing there myself.

Those organs and I did not get along and I could never quite get the wheel chocks situated properly so danger was always lurking behind my back. If I had to stop short, there was a decent chance that the organ was going to move. If it merely moved and smacked into the back of the driver’s seat, that was acceptable. But the other possibility was that the thing would come crashing over sideways and I’d have a Hammond shipwreck on my hands, searching for survivors, hoping that there was no permanent damage.

There were times when, BOOM, that organ would land sideways on the truck bed and the only solace I gained from that was at least it was now stable. Jack just had no efficient way of locking the beast down to the floor of the van so that wouldn’t happen and so every trip by myself was an anxious trek, wondering when the wrong turn would send it careening into the back of my head. My real fear was that it wouldn’t play when I got to the delivery point but they must have made those things tough because only once did I show up with an organ that was DOA and was forced to admit to Jack that it had taken a slight tumble in transit.

Even when I knew he was angry about it, he always had a gentle hand with me and never once chained me to the back of a Wurlitzer like he might have dreamed of doing. He was a friend to me and a friend to my mother, the likes of which I don’t believe she ever had again in non-husband form.

He was there for you if you had a problem or needed help, and it was the ultimate irony that he died because he didn’t ask for any himself.

Nobody had really seen him for a week or two and all that friends knew was that he was lying low in his apartment trying to recover from a nasty cold. Sadly, the ‘cold’ was pneumonia, and by deciding to ‘ride it out’ on his own rather than seeking help, he ended up succumbing to something that was eminently survivable with the right medical attention.

I believe he was 49 when he died, and it was the loss of a sincerely good human being.

It’s not much of a consolation for his early exit but I have personally memorialized Jack by carrying on some of his traditions: I’ve worked as a professional musician all my life, I’ve got a temperamental back from lifting loads of equipment for all these years, I’m kind to animals and children, sometimes I’m an impatient banshee behind the steering wheel and I’ve had pneumonia…twice.

So, here’s to you Jack. We hardly knew ye.