Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms yearning to breathe free.
“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 … Read more
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!
“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.
August 25, 2015: I took a road trip with “Born to Run” yesterday. It’s the 40th anniversary of Bruce’s groundbreaking album, and there’s no better way to experience it than by blasting it in your car, with the windows open and the wind blowing back your hair. Cars and tunnels and backstreets and highways are … Read more
Snow came down like course sea salt on a big ugly Tupperware bowl of pale popcorn. It was January 1977, the coldest month in Pittsburgh history. I was a pint-size high school senior living in a small town 40 miles east of the steel city, serving my time and awaiting the day in late May when I would “commence.” I was, in the words of Paul Simon’s “My Little Town,” savin’ my money, dreamin’ of glory, twitchin’ like a finger on a trigger of a gun. I look back on the stay-at-home snow days of that brutal January – sheltered, sans-siblings, in the bedroom of our four-room apartment – as one of the most beautifully sad, soul-expanding periods of my life. With no actual school work, I was free to feed my psyche with all kinds creative matter. I was free to ponder the meaning of life — to dissect the mysterious beast of High School Land.