Contains “old” categories from before website rebuild.
"No, Spiardi. I bought myself a ring that's too big." This is how Miss S.T. sarcastically answered when I asked if her boyfriend bought her the yarn-wrapped ring she was sporting on her finger. It had never occurred to me that the fuzzy bands worn by the A-list girls began their lives as one-size-fits-all pieces of cheap metal, purchased by…
Ten-year-old kids shouldn't be worrying about the after-effects of unprotected sex, mind-altering drugs, and adult unemployment, but thanks to several artful public service announcements (PSAs) that aired on network television in the early 70s, I once considered pre-booking a room in a nunnery!
The Iron Curtain. That was a term I heard often as a kid growing up in the Cold War '60s. What exactly was this metallic barrier, and who or what was behind it, I wondered. Little did I know back then that British Prime Minster Winston Churchill had coined the term to refer to the ideological barrier that separated the…
A friend who had the misfortune of being born a bit too early to experience full frontal Beatlemania once said to me, "Ringo wasn't one of the more important members of the group, was he?" To a rubber-souled, revolver-raving, fanatical Abbey Roadster like myself, this was among the greatest blasphemies ever spoken. If you said that Chico wasn't important to the Marx Brothers, that Fredo wasn't important to the Corleones, that Donny wasn't important to The Big Lebowski, I'd simply overlook your lack of film savvy or question your taste. But to suggest that Ringo was less than essential is the ultimate fallacy. It is, in the jargon of the Brits, a complete load of BULLOCKS!
"Where the boys are, someone waits for me," Connie Francis once sang. And just where were they waiting in my sleepy little hometown in the slow, sweet summertime? Well, let's just say it wasn't at our old cracked-concrete tennis courts. But for me, it was someplace to go, and go I did - back in my pre-car, pre-cash teen years. Every night after dinner, my friend Ann and I would dress to impress and make our way up cemetery hill to the courts to see and be seen. Alas, not much came of our tennis trolloping. Once or twice a guy friend would offer us a ride home, but it was never the guy we hoped for. Weren't we pretty enough, clever enough, or popular enough? Such thoughts would consume our high school years.