Advice to the Young Fry

Notes from the Jane Weir commencement speech, 2019.

Don’t be like Mister Hornblower, kids. Mister Hornblower had one little precious talent, which would have made him rich and famous if he had bothered to exploit it properly. So famous, in fact, that I couldn’t even write about him here, because you’d recognize him right away, the same way you’d recognize a thinly fictionalized version of Andy Warhol or Donald Trump.

But you see, Andy and The Donald early on learned to accept themselves, warts-and-all. And that was the secret of their success. Mister Hornblower by contrast is just as weird, or weirder, but he never owned up to his weird, unique talent or parlayed it into a career. His big special talent is pederasty: picking up teenage boys on the street: luring them to his lair with drugs and alcohol, and then ravishing them like the old-school pederast that he is. A secondary talent is sponging off friends, which enabled him to survive into old age with nary a nod to gainful employment.

He’s 75 now, so he’s got a half-century of juicy degeneracy behind him, and at least a dozen madly brilliant, but unwritten, novels or plays inside him. He fancies himself a writer, but has never written, let alone published, anything you’d ever care to read. Instead of writing pulpy, scathing dialogue with dirty old men and boy hustlers—the world he knows—he keeps cranking out talky, artificial plays about gentlefolk from the world of A. P. Gurney and John Cheever (a world he has never known). Or else he tries to write fluffy, whimsical essays in the style of a New Yorker magazine casual from many decades past. In college had an elderly, bowtied writing teacher, Mr. E. J. Gordon, who liked that jejeune style; so here we are, 65 years later, with Mr. E. J. Gordon long under the topsoil but Mister Hornblower is still writing to please him.

I’ve put the question to him, gently and tactfully: “Why don’t you write what you know, Hornblower? Why not write a stage comedy where an old guy is continually bringing little twinks into his tiny studio apartment, and everyone gets into a whole lot of mischief? Think of the possibilities!”

He makes a face and winces. Hornblower can’t see it; it’s just too perverse.

So Hornblower doesn’t put his genius into his writing; he puts it into his life. He has structured his whole life around his need to pick up boys on the street. He’s practically never had any sort of regular job. Fifty years ago, not long after college, he had his one and only fling with substantive employment. He went to Rockefeller Center every day and wrote questions and answers for a daytime TV game show.

This may sound like a dream job to you, because you don’t know anything. I mean, they paid him like $150 a week and he had to deal with dreadful people. Ron Greenberg Productions, my God. Or maybe it would be a dream job for you. Maybe for most people. It does sound sort of fun.

Anyway, Hornblower quit this after about a year, in which time he saved up a princely thousand dollars or two, and made contact with a couple of outlets for his proposed “freelance writing.” One of these was his college alumni magazine. He wasn’t looking very far and wide. He wrote an article in twinkling prose about a visit to the new “gay” club on campus, but it got killed. It was hardly lurid, but the Secretary and chief development officer of the university found the subject just too scandalous to lay before the alumni.

That’s pretty much where his “freelance” ambitions died. He was smoking too much dope to get off the ball anyway. When money ran out he inveigled a young friend of his to help him apply for Unemployment by claiming that he, the young friend, had employed Hornblower for a couple of months. This project likewise went nowhere.

Finally, out of desperation, he went back to the game show on a short-term basis, then lucked into another position writing for a television program, this time a kiddy show on Boston educational TV. He sublet his New York pigeonhole, took an overpriced studio on Beacon Hill, and moved to Boston. He lasted four weeks.

Hornblower didn’t understand children, or television, since he owned neither and the sum total of his kiddy-show knowledge in the area lay in memories of Andy’s Gang and Spin and Marty, circa 1955. Which weren’t much of an aid in writing educational kiddy fare in the 1970s.

Cowboy Duke’s Science Show was the name of the program. Actually it wasn’t; I’m hiding the real name from the search engines. But regardless of the actual name, Hornblower freaked them all out with offbeat ideas. They wanted to do a segment about sound, the physics of sound. Hornblower proposed showing a dog’s head slugged by a hand in a boxing glove; this would be played in slow-motion with a slow bum-bum-bum soundtrack. That’s how sound works, kids!

On another occasion the “science” angle was that people used to  believe in witches. The idea was that everyone should pooh-pooh the idea of witches, but Hornblower excitedly announced that he knew a real witch, a witch who was General Patton’s daughter and lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts, not too far away. She could come on the program and tell the kids what real witches were all about!

The rest of the writing and production staff were aghast. Hornblower was given his walking papers. Cowboy Duke, the host, told him nicely that with his great imagination he should go off and write a novel.

No novel was in the offing. This four weeks’ experience instead led him down a delusional path of imagining himself a kiddy-show producer-writer. For the next three years he lived by borrowing money from “investor” friends. Most of his days he still spent recruiting teenage boys, this time telling them they could become television stars. Because you see, he may have lived in a 100-square-foot flat (by now he’d moved back to Manhattan) but he was a genius and big TV show producer.

Hornblower’s kiddy-show project took a long time to die. He dreamt it up as he left Cowboy Duke’s show in mid-1972, and three years later he was still promoting it to anyone who wanted to hear. By this point he was so hard up his electricity had been turned off. He persuaded an upstairs neighbor to run an electrical cord through the windows, so he could still keep a couple of lights on, in the bathroom and at his writing desk. Friends at a brokerage firm gave him a little work rewriting sales materials, and one philanthropist ponied up the money to send him off to rehab. Poverty notwithstanding, Hornblower had acquired a daily habit of cocaine and vodka. A few years later he got into a drunken argument with some Jew in a gay bar (as Hornblower tells the story), and the Jew smashed a bottle into Hornblower’s cranium, so hard that Hornblower was rushed to Emergency, and ever after had a shallow crater in the crown of his head. But it was a lucky turn; he sued his assailant, a lawyer of some kind, and they settled for enough money for Hornblower to retire from his life of ease and move to coastal Maine.

There, as always, he managed to keep a string of boys around. Now the drugs of choice were heroin and freebase cocaine. (“I can make in three seconds in the microwave,” he boasted.) One of his boys got arrested for holding or selling, and Hornblower too had some minor legal strike against him.

He never had any interest in men his own age—not even when he was in his twenties—which made him sort of Odd Man Out back in the late 60s when he was first announcing himself as “Gay.” He would frequent rather tweedy, grown-up gay bars—Julius’ in Greenwich Village, Sporter’s on Beacon Hill—but never accosted the other patrons unless they happened to have a cute young trick in tow.

What a fascinating oeuvre Hornblower could have parlayed his cockeyed experiences into! Instead of pissing away his energies trying to pretend to be precisely what he was not: a polite writer writing polite plays about the upper bourgeoisie in the leafy exurbs of New England.

Other men with double lives will double-insulate the secret one: build an upright career beyond reproach, surround themselves with wife and kids; and then be free to go to town in the half-world. They might even preserve a measure of imaginative honesty, should they be creative sorts.

But not Mister Hornblower. Don’t be like him, kids.

Revised 4 December 2021

| Published in Intoxication, Television

The New York Times Book Review Caper

Famous Broadway columnist Mr. D. Runyon Smythe tells of the time he moved beyond his showbiz column and tried his hand at book reviewing—to his great regret!

So the year 1962 rolls around and I am fed up with the sort of horseradish that is now being presented in Broadway shows. Neil Simon is just getting started with his cascade of onstage sitcoms, but already I smell the rot in Shubert Alley.

You have straight plays like “Take Her—She’s Mine,” by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, two inveterate scribblers of bad movies. You probably cannot even name any of their scripts, but I assure you such things are in the books, and they are stinkers indeed. Such people ought to be banned for life from Broadway.

The only positive point about this piece of malarkey is a fetching young ingenue named Elizabeth Ashley, who in future days undoubtedly goes the sad way of other ingenues and starlets and debutantes. Although it also has Art Carney, who carries the ball.

Through the grapevine I learn that people do not read my “Lullaby of Broadway” column much anymore. They syndicate me in only 7 papers, including the Yonkers Herald-American, which doesn’t really count. So I decide to take a crack at the book-review game.

My good friend Alston Parker Ellis is the editor of the Herald-Tribune Book Review, which is the premier book rag in New York. Alston sets me up with a desk, and a phone, and a couple of drinks sessions with John Hay Whitney, who holds the purse-strings.  Before long I am whacking out three or four book reviews per week, on such grand titles as Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, Franny and Zooey, Ship of Fools, and Seven Days in May.

Alston informs me that I am very good at this craft, for I can fill up a 600-word column without saying anything actionable. I merely leave a pleasant fragrance behind. When publishers want to quote me in blurbs and ads, they pull something like,

There are a lot of pages in this book, even more than in By Love Possessed.
— D. Runyon Smythe, NY Herald-Tribune.

Because of this, almost every single one of the books I review receives an option for a Hollywood movie. So I am really cooking.

But now the Herald-Tribune Book Review falls upon some lean years, and it appears this pre-eminent publishing-rag-of-record must be cut back to free up budget for a new Sunday supplement called New York magazine.

This supplement publishes exciting, scurrilous articles by young turks such as Tom Wolfe and Gail Sheehy, however it does not add to the Herald-Tribune bottom-line, for the big old advertisers who support the Trib in its salad days are now going out of business. The retailers we all grow up on—Best & Co., DePinna, Peck & Peck, Rogers Peet—one by one they disappear, and so do their display ads in the front section of the New York Herald-Tribune.

As we like to say at Mindy’s restaurant, I see the handwriting on the wall.  Fortunately I never give up my famous “Lullaby of Broadway” column for the syndicate, so there will always be at least a little something in the kitty. Nevertheless I am now regarded a book-review guy, so I go crosstown to the lowlifes at the New York Times.

At the New York Times Book Review, I work for the editor Chuckles McGrath, who assigns me the “New and Noteworthy” column. Every day a hundred horrible books land on my desk, or rather to the side of my desk, as I have barely the room on my desk-blotter to swing a very small kitten. At random I pick out five or six of these doorstops. Then I pay very close attention to the dust-jacket blurbs and press release, and write witty summaries of what I think the book must be about.

One day a stocky, expensively-upholstered little Japanese girl comes down from Yale—for Yale is now coed, it being the 1970s—and tells me Chuckles McGrath has given her leave to start a column of her own, using the extra books I don’t have time to read. This is about a thousand books a week. So I let young Miss Michiko Kakutani (for such is her name) cart off my extras in a wheelbarrow.

Miss Kakutani finds gold amongst the dross, as they say. Overnight she discovers Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Brett Easton Ellis, all of whom would lie in my review pile forever if their fate hangs on D. Runyon Smythe.

 

| Published in Books

Bea Lillie and Bert Lahr at the Winter Garden

Ruth Anne Clairison of Upper Montclair, NJ, charms us with this embarrassing tale from 1936:

We had never heard of Beatrice Lillie or Bert Lahr (this was years before Just Around the Corner or The Wizard of Oz) but when our uncle told my twin brother and me that he had free tickets to their new revue at the Winter Garden Theatre, we were on it like a dog on a porkchop.

We had never been to a legitimate theater before, so didn’t know what to expect. Outside a newsboy was shouting: “Extree! Extree! Read all about it! Passenger liner goes down with all hands on board!” So it was a big night for a lot of people, and we knew the revue had to be even more exciting.

The theater manager came out in front of the curtain to announce that Mr. Lahr had been taken ill, and in his stead would be his understudy, the young Byron McBeardsley. My brother and I didn’t know the difference, but I could tell my uncle was profoundly disappointed.

A revue is a series of short plays with songs and music. Our uncle pointed out Bea Lillie to us. She was not a nice lady. She was very mean to the young man who was replacing Bert Lahr.

In the second scene he was playing a piano, and she closed the key-lid on his fingers, just to be mean. Then she laughed.

“I think she is drunk,” said our uncle. “Come children, we are getting our money back.”

But at the box office they said we couldn’t have refunds because they were free tickets. My uncle became very angry, and the manager had to bring in five policemen to calm him down. He ended up putting us on the train to Upper Montclair, but we missed the last one that evening and had to sleep on a bench in Penn Station.

It was not a fun night.

 

| Published in theater

Hankey-Poo for Bitty-Poo

Captain R. S. Wembsley, late of the North German Lloyd and White Star lines, shares with us this whimsical anecdote:

So it was 1914 and we had just finished building the grandest ship afloat, the SS Commander Triton. We were about to set sail for Southampton, when war broke out in Europe and we found we had a delay.

The fact that we were bringing 300 cwt of munitions to Imperial Germany, by way of England, meant that our ship was certainly liable for impoundment.

As executive officer of the ship, I declared that we would take a roundabout route through the Canary Islands, which at that time were owned by the Kingdom of Spain.

At the Canaries we would reflag ourselves as a Spanish ship, and thereby pass unnoticed direct to Hamburg.

Alas, I forgot to take down the Stars and Stripes at the Starboard Stern, and a German U-boat sank us off Cap Finisterre, although the Stars and Stripes were a neutral flag.

I survived, along with 17 members of the crew, but my face was very red.

The End.

| Published in History

Stephen King’s Lonely Man TV Dinners

I try to restrict my Twitter activity to less than 12 hours a day, because sometimes I need to work and sleep. However there are some obsessives you just can’t miss.

And then there’s Stephen King. He was a big, famous writer, some thirty or forty years ago. He was even more famous than Cathy Young. I think he even did one of those “Do You Know Me?™” American Express Card® commercials. Well now he’s old, and lonely, and eating TV dinners in Maine.

He likes the Hungry-Man™ line of TV dinners, apparently. Recently he tweeted about how he likes to eat the frozen brownie while he nukes the rest of the dinner. This is the proper way, he averred, to eat a Hungry-Man meal.

Recently I was dog-tired after a long day of writing and gymming, and I ended up guzzling vodka (in bed) at 11am the next day. Sun over the yardarm, you know. I got curious about these Stephen King TV dinners. I went to Amazon-dot-com and looked up the Hungry-Man line. Apparently the one with a brownie is the boneless-fried-chicken meal.

So I ordered two of those. You know, just as an experiment. But I felt foolish ordering two TV dinners, so I ordered another two, these with chicken-fried steak but no brownie.

Amazon/WholeFoods asks you when you want these things delivered, and I don’t know what I put down, but apparently I defaulted to the ASAP choice. Because at 5 the next morning, the concierge was calling up from the lobby to tell me Amazon Prime had delivered.

I dressed and went down. Two enormous bags, with boxes of dry ice inside. Two Hungry-Man TV dinners in each. I debagged them and stuck them in the freezer before the spouse woke up. How embarrassing!

Was my face red!

P.S. Stephen King is right about the brownie.

| Published in Intoxication

The Magical Space Fountain Pen

When I was little we couldn’t write with ballpoint pens in school; only fountain pens were allowed. Ballpoints would ruin our handwriting, we were told. And looking around today, I can see that this is so!

So I stopped at the stationer’s in Berwyn to buy a fountain pen before starting back to school, and the big featured item was the Esterbrook Fill’er Up No-Leak Space Pen. It was the same kind of fountain pen used in NASA missiles. The kind gentleman at the counter showed me how to fill it up from an ink bottle, using the little screw-plunger doohickey at the end.

“That’s right, miss,” he said, “once you fill up this pen, you’ll never have to fill it again.”

Then I took it out of the bottle and twisted the plunger again to tighten it. And I sprayed blue-black ink all over the poor gentleman’s face!

Was my face red!

| Published in school days

First Annual Boston Folk Music Festival, Featuring the Kingston Trio

Mr Jack Lipkis of Woodmere, Long Island enchants us with this embarrassing recollection from his “folkie” days in college:

When I went to Boston University I was in a little folk-music combo. This was back during the folk-music fad of the early 60s. We called ourselves The Bijou Folkies. The name was sort of an “in” joke. In those days the Harvard swells were supposed to call BU “Bee-Jew.” They stopped doing that some years later, when Harvard became about half Jewish. Big joke on them!

So we were The Bijou Folkies. We sang folk songs, or what were supposed to be folk songs. Songs about the joys of being a lumberjack, and how kisses were sweeter than wine.

There were three of us in the trio, except when one guy, our bassist who looked like the funny little guy in The Weavers, walked into a milk truck near Kenmore Square and had to drop out. What a spaz. That made us a two-man trio, which was really “bijou,” I mean in the other sense of the word, which means tiny and jewel-like. If you forgive the pun. Groan!

We weren’t all that good, but my friend Dave who played banjo and harmonica went on to run the Colony record store in the Brill Building in New York, so I guess he must have known something about music. We played mostly in bars and coffeehouses, when we played at all. Then we got this idea to start a Boston Folk Festival and play on the Boston Common. We got a couple of other combos and folk singers aboard, but we didn’t have a big name. We needed a big-name combo if we were going to do this right.

Everyone knew The Kingston Trio, and we thought maybe we could get them, since they were very popular in Boston for some reason. I wrote their record company, then I wrote the 7-Up company, then I wrote their agent, but never heard back.

Finally, around spring semester, I tried calling their agent. Long-distance, person-to-person! The agent told me they were all booked for the year, but might be able to squeeze in a set if this were a charitable event. I already told him it was a charitable event. And the agent said, “Okay, well the cost is $50,000, which they will donate to charity.”

I figured we could manage that, since it sounded like all we needed to do was give them an IOU for fifty thou, and then they’d push it back at us across the table. But it turned out the agent wanted a cashier’s check in advance so he could deduct expenses and his percentage. So to make a long story short, we didn’t get The Kingston Trio for our Folk Festival.

We’d already printed up our posters and flyers and they all announced The Kingston Trio in great big type, and The Bijou Folkies (that was us, remember) and other acts in really little type. I was bummed about the waste of money, but Dave, the guy who went on to run the Colony record store in New York, had another idea.

“Why don’t we get three negro singers, and say they’re from Kingston, Jamaica? Then we got a trio, and we can call them The Kingston Trio. And when people say, They’re not The Kingston Trio, we say—‘No, these are the real, original Kingston Trio, they’re from Jamaica and everything. They’re suing that white-boy group for using their name and stealing their songs. You don’t want some whitebread Pat Boone version, do ya? We got the real thing here!’”

I thought this was a great idea, a feasible idea.

Easier said than done, though. You wouldn’t believe the hostility that black people, or Afro-Americans, or negroes as we called them then, had for folk music. I went over to the Negro Table in the BU buttery (they always sat together) and tried to talk up the idea. They nearly pulverized me. “You muhfuh white people always stealing our culture, you and your Pat Boone honky tunes!”

I got out of there quick, but I was really mad. After all we’ve done for them!

So much for the Kingston, Jamaica, Trio.

Well our Folk Festival was now only two weeks away, and we had to find a solution or call it all off. Big waste of money on the posters. Then Dave remembered the Tingley girls, a pair of twins we knew. Real tough-talking swamp-Yankee broads—but they were from Kingston, Rhode Island! Or pretty close anyway. We teamed them up with a fat girl we knew. (She had a lovely voice, the Tingley girls couldn’t sing at all and mainly shook tambourines.) And there was our Kingston Trio, all set to go.

Not too many people showed up at our Folk Festival on the Common, though this wasn’t because we didn’t have the real Kingston Trio. Actually we had an electrical problem. Our amps all had grounded plugs, and we brought the wrong kind of extension cords, so nothing worked. We all did a set without amplification, then it started to rain and we packed it in. A few people stopped by to watch us, but mainly they laughed.

“It’s a learning experience,” Dave said to me as we left. We drove the Tingley girls and their friend to a diner on Commonwealth Avenue, because we owed them that much.

I was grateful it was the end of the school year, so people wouldn’t have much chance to make fun of us.

Next day, though, our Folk Festival was all over the Boston Herald. “Scam! Fraud! Schlockmeisters Promote Phony ‘Kingston Trio’ Combo! Can’t Even Sing!” And the paper said many worse things, but that’s the Boston Herald for you. I never found out who spilled the beans.

Was my face red!

| Published in Uncategorized

You Asked for It!

Skylaire Svenglad of Glen Ridge, NJ remembers the influential television programs of her childhood:


There was a strange television program when I was little, called You Asked for It, which was a kind of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” treatment of freaks and people with deformities. I think it ended before the whole Thalidomide thing began, but it definitely would have feasted upon those victims.

What we did see were a guy with no lower legs, but who played tennis successfully by bouncing around on springs attached to his stumps. And a guy who had no arms, but could shave himself every morning with a safety razor between his toes.

Watching this program brought me to a very embarrassing episode in my young life, because my little brother just assumed from this that crippled people and amputees loved to talk about their deficiencies and put on a show for you. Was my face red! But I’ll get to that in a moment.

I happened to remember that strange show recently because my husband and I happened upon a really gross cable series featuring Weird Body Modifications. One of the examples was a man whose dog was dying because of liver cancer (also the dog was old), and the man had the dog’s head and forelimbs sutured onto his own body. Like on his shoulder, you know. And this partial dog actually survived this way for a little while, so the man got to spend a few more days with his beloved pet. But the dog’s system and the man’s blood didn’t get along that well, and the dog paws quickly turned necrotic, and within a week or so the man woke up and found a dead dog-head on his shoulder. Then to make matters worse, the man came down with some serious blood disease that eventually killed him. He got buried with the (now detached) dog head.

Then there was a woman who wanted to be a Human Glove Puppet. She’d actually lost use of her legs, and bladder and bowel control through some progressive nerve damage, and the doctors wanted to remove the whole bottom half of her body. So she said, Why don’t you just hollow me out like a glove puppet, then I can be like Kukla and Ollie, and people can put their hands up me? This was not really medically feasible, since there were still vital organs in her thoracic cavity, but they did a little bit to make her happy. I think she died soon too.

I don’t understand people’s fascination with this stuff but obviously it’s been going on for many years. Getting back to You Asked for It, my brother Tim saw an episode with a quadriplegic artist. He could draw really well with a graphite stick or tortillon in his mouth. He did really good portraits.

So we are visiting some relatives in the city, and going up in the elevator, and this old woman in a wheelchair gets on. She’s got almost no hand control, because her fingers are all twisted from rheumatoid arthritis. She has to bang on a lever to make the wheelchair go and stop and turn. She’s getting on a lower floor, maybe fifth floor, and apparently going all the wall up to the penthouse, where our relatives are.

The elevator opens directly into my relatives’ hallway, because, as I say, it’s the penthouse, and they’re the only people on that floor. So we all get out and apparently this old woman in the wheelchair is this friend and neighbor they invited to dinner.

Throughout the evening, Little Tim keeps trying to get the old lady to stick a crayon or pencil in her mouth, and draw a picture of him. We’re all embarrassed, the old lady included, since she can’t draw. But Tim’s only five years old, so what can you do?

Maybe that’s not much of a story, but it was embarrassing at the time.

| Published in children

Uncle Moloch at the Supermarket

Mrs. Linsley Horgenrather of Hillsborough, California favors us with this hellish reminiscence of growing up in the 1950s:

Whenever Mumsy was in the insane asylum, I got sent to stay with Aunt Pudge and my cousins in Seattle. They lived in the U District, in one of those ugly brick houses that look as though they were built in 1840 but were probably built in 1930. I’m saying this just so you can picture it.

(If you’re wondering where my father was, it was probably Singapore where he trying to sell some deal to Jardine Matheson. At least that was the story we gave out, because it shut people up.)

Aunt Pudge was some kind of assistant dean or administrator in the University’s psychology department. Her job consisted of talking on the phone a lot, and signing memos. When I was really little my cousins and I spent a lot of time playing in the big anteroom outside her office. There were a lot of strange toys out there, like a mechanical bear that when you squeezed it would open its mouth, and a turtle would come out.

Sometimes psychologists would come in and watch us. They believed that the first toy a child chose in the room would determine your course in life. I always went for the bear, so they decided I was going to be a dental hygienist.

Aunt Pudge’s first husband died during the war, and she had a succession of men in her life afterwards. When I was about ten she was going with a guy name Moe. He was very exotic and foreign-looking. We called him Uncle Moe, though his real name was Moloch. He had pointy features and wore a goatée. He was going bald and often wore a beret, but he wasn’t French. Uncle Moe’s thing was trying to get you to undress, if you were a little girl. I don’t know what he did with boys. He was pretty creepy, so I didn’t like to be in his company unless Aunt Pudge was around. I don’t think she knew how creepy he was, because he seemed to behave himself around her.

One day we all went to the big supermarket in Wallingford. Aunt Pudge, Uncle Moe, my cousins Cecily and Curt, and me. Supposedly we were getting ingredients to make Cecily a birthday cake. She had very specific instructions for the cake. She wanted it to be three-layer, with the middle layer fudge brownie and the other two layers golden cake; with chocolate frosting that was colored orange, because her birthday was Halloween. Now, there was no Betty Crocker or Pillsbury or Duncan Hines cake mix like this, so we had to combine different mixes and ingredients.

Cecily and Aunt Pudge fussed over the mixes and frosting ingredients while Uncle Moe took Curt and me around the corner to the lobster tank. He asked us if we wanted a pet lobster. I couldn’t think of anything worse, but Curt actually said, “Oh yeah that would be keen.” This was an expression he picked up from Spin and Marty. “Oh yeah, that sounds keen!”

So Uncle Moe picked up Curt and held him over the tank and told him to choose a lobster. You weren’t supposed to put your hands in there. You were supposed to pick the lobsters up with a pair of long-handled pliers that hung on a hook above the tank. But Uncle Moe ignored that. Curt just reached in and grabbed a couple of lobsters and threw them on the floor.

This caused a lot of excitement among the ladies in the meat section, across from the lobster tank. One of them started to scream. There wasn’t anything to be scared about, because the lobsters had rubber bands around their claws. But when they scuttled across the floor it looked like they were chasing people.

The man in the white coat in the meat department came out of his freezer room to see what the commotion was. Uncle Moe tried to put him at ease. “It’s just the children having a little horseplay. You know how kids are!”

I don’t think the meat man believed Uncle Moe because, you know, with his beret and his pointed beard Uncle Moloch looked like a pretty shady character. But the meat man sighed and slapped his hands together and went over to fetch the lobster pliers.

What no one noticed up to now is that Curt was in the lobster tank. It was almost deep enough for him to swim in, and he was in all the way, kneeling on the bottom with the lobsters around him. Curt was making faces at us with his face pressed up against the glass.

I figured Uncle Moe was going to try to talk his way out of this, and he did, by saying it was me who put Curt in the tank. This was a sheer impossibility, but I always got in trouble if i talked back to grownups, so I stayed mum.

“I’m going to have a word with you when we get home, young lady!” Aunt Pudge said in the car when we stopped at the light at 45th and Roosevelt. I knew I was really in for it. Was my face red!

| Published in Birthdays

Temping in the Postwar Era

Genevieve MacDonald of Rowayton, Connecticut entertains us with her epic adventures in the bottom-feeding end of the Office Temporaries racket.

I was pretty sure I was going to be an opera star, so I did not bother to pick up any special career credentials that would help me to get by in life. I mean, beyond my musical education. My father was a partner in a big CPA firm, and encouraged me to become an accountant. “Something always to fall back on,” you know! But let’s face it, once you have the easy life of a CPA, you’re not going to exert yourself to take daily voice lessons or seek out piddly-straw roles with bus-and-truck opera companies, are you? That’s the way I saw it, anyway.

So I did not become an accountant, though I did a lot of accounting work during those long Postwar decades when I was struggling hard to become a star mezzo of the Metropolitan Opera. It was very easy to get a job as an office temporary in that Postwar Era, by which I mean roughly 1950 to 1990. All you needed to do was collect a lot of names of temp agencies from the classified ads, and go visit them.

Most of them were a block or two from Grand Central Terminal, because the buildings there were very old, usually had bad elevators and no air-conditioning, and the rents were cheap. To get a job from them, you basically just had to a) dress up and b) show up. If you were halfway presentable and not too old or fat (I struggled with this much of my life), they might send you out on an assignment immediately.

Dressing up of course changed as the years went by. Usually it meant a skirt and high heels. For a long time in the 50s and 60s it was also a good idea to wear a hat and white gloves. You could wear slacks, I mean trousers, later on, but that tended to send out the wrong message. There was a definite class-divide in the office world, between the women in skirts and the women in pants.

As for the men doing temp work, they were usually assumed to be homosexuals, even when they had wives and girlfriends you might meet at an evening get-together. They were a special case, so when I talk about temps I’m usually talking about female temps. The dress code loosened up as time went on, because it had to. In the early 80s I sometimes saw young women coming in wearing silver-lamé jumpsuits. This looked very weird, but they got work anyway. I guess because they were white.

We had a big influx of negroes, starting in the 1970s, and it was very hard for the temp agencies to deal with them. The clients did not want you sending them a negress for a receptionist or a secretary. Sometimes a Jew would ostentatiously order a colored girl to sit outside his office and be noticed, but that was a special situation. But the bottom line is, if you were white all you had to do was show up and the temp agency would try to find something for you.

| Published in Nostalgia