Book 'em, Betty. Murder Mysteries One.

One of the annual Rites of Spring in State College is the annual AAUW Used Book Sale. In our post-modern, sustainability-infused world, it’s the love child of Match.com and a recycling extravaganza where our old books go to meet new bookworms. In the process, the local chapter of AAUW raises a tidy sum to support its good works, of which, all kidding aside, there are quite a slew.

 

The AAUW (American Association of University Women) is an old fashioned women’s club. Well, not exactly. I am not sure that they play bridge, eat triangular tea sandwiches from which the bread crusts have been trimmed, and talk about genealogy. I mean, when would they have time? The book sale requires endless hours upon hours of work. But really, if they wanted to throw back a few in search of the perfect Old-Fashioned, no one would blame them. All those books can make a girl thirsty.  (Bess Truman's recipe for an Old-Fashioned: bourbon and ice. That's it. Skip all the fluff.)

What is old fashioned is the annual used book sale itself. Books? They're so last century. And the one before that. And the one before that. Well, you get the idea. The used book sale has been around since the dawn of time, and fortunately, seems to be holding its own against the Kindles and Brand X e-readers of this world.

The women of AAUW accept donations of books from anyone who can open a large plastic bin and put a book or even a box of books in it.  The AAUW-ers then price and review the donations and make sure that there’s not a hidden treasure map stuck between the leaves of a book no one has opened in forever. They recycle some books right away—they don’t think there’s much of a market at the sale for the 89th copy of the Fifty Shades of Gray.  They keep the decent books (and trust me, they have catholic tastes when it comes to decent) and then sort them according to category of subject matter. At the end of the intake process, the books are put into specially marked heavy-duty fruit and veg boxes that they’ve been saving for years.

Two days before the sale, the event committee arranges for a small army of volunteers and a fleet (OK, five or six) trucks to transport the books from the AAUW warehouse to Penn State’s Snider Agricultural Arena, several miles away. A crew of manly men at the warehouse location loads trucks, and then another crew of volunteers unloads trucks at the Snider Ag arena. I’m on the unloading crew.

 

The sawdust floor of the arena—where livestock usually trots around and so on—is covered with black Tyvek-like fabric. The arena is then filled with a sea of identical sturdy tables. Each table is reserved for a specific subject matter—the more popular subjects get more tables.

It takes about five hours to fill the arena with books.

Over five or so hours, my fellow volunteers and I unload trucks and gradually fill all the tables with books, toting each box to the table reserved for that subject matter. It's about a kabillion books by my math. Four-thousand and some odd fruit boxes of books weigh about what you think four-thousand and some odd fruit boxes of books would weigh: a lot. I work up a sweat. It’s hard work for an old geezer like me.

The women of AAUW never seem to get beyond a healthy glow as they unload the books from the boxes the volunteers tote to each table. One woman is in charge of less popular genres, such as biographies, while it may take a few to handle more popular areas like children’s books.

Back in the olden days, when I’d just started helping, there were PSU Navy ROTC students on the unloading crew. They were hard workers though they did spend a serious amount of time preening and flexing and trying to attract girls or perhaps boys if they were in a don’t ask/don’t tell situation. Even then, if you asked nicely they’d probably tell you, and perhaps even show off the resulting tattoos, all in the strictest of confidence, of course. 

Today much of the help comes from kids from the local alternative high school. Some of them are good workers, like the boy who carried boxes of books on his head, but others seemed to have cut the class about the Meaning of Work. They show up in flip flops and muumuus and aren’t really there to work, but instead come hang out with other kids in flip flops and muumuus and collect the community service hours necessary to earn a State High diploma. I’m sure some of them would be OK with close supervision (as in on a chain gang), but this year, there was no close supervision. Exasperated, I even resorted to exercising my first amendment rights by telling a gaggle of them to cut the tomfoolery and get back to work. Big surprise: it didn’t work.

Unlike the high school kids, some of the women of the AAUW aren’t so young. In fact, I’ve even heard them refer to each other as “old biddies” in a tone not reserved for terms of endearment. It occurred to me that a couple of the women might have dated Guttenburg, as in Johannes not Steve, but  some of them could have done Steve too. After all, according to Steve Guttenberg’s modestly titled autobiography, The Guttenberg Bible, he had plenty of conquests. I would not be surprised that at least one of the AAUW women had a moment with the star of Police Academy where she took off her glasses as she unpinned her bun and shook out her greying but not yet blue tresses. And then, in a voice redolent of Sanka, Dewey Decimal numbers, and an occasional Thursdays-only hit of Milk of Magnesia, purred “Steve, I don’t want you to think of me as just an old biddy from the cookbook section of the AAUW booksale…”

I thought about buying this for my college chum Peggy who used to buy all the books critical of the Kennedys--in hardcover--just to make Rose Kennedy ("Rose Toes, in Peggy-speak) mad.

Most of the women are the life of the party and are glad you’re there helping, even the quiet woman in biographies who always wears headphones as she works and has so far resisted my suggestion to create a special section devoted to Princess Diana. However, there are also women who aren’t very nice. I mean, they’re not exactly mean, but lots of them don’t say thank you and act as if it never would occur to them that the box toters read books, too. Lots of times I’ve walked to a table with a heavy box of books and the woman-in-charge, a who no doubt spent her senior year in high school as a state officer in Future Prison Matrons of America, will point and bark “Just put ‘er there.” When that happens I see her as her  film noir doppelganger who smells faintly of Vat 69, with the ever present cigarette balanced on her lower lip. As she sorts books, her Benson & Hedges menthol bounces up and down with each syllable, its impossibly long ash about to fall onto a well-worn copy of  Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter. Before her ash falls, the moment is gone. I chuckle to myself and go back for another box of books.

This year I overheard one of the women correcting someone. “That’s fewer, not less. Use fewer when it’s something you can count”. I shared with her that my mother's pet peeve was using the word "raise" when someone really meant "rear".  I don't think she shared my mother's sense of outrage.

Yes, this book was really written by Dr. A. Willy and "other authorities". I'm assuming one of those authorities is Dick Hertz.

Since I’m partial to history and bio, I asked the volunteers in history what the most unusual book they’d seen. “Something about Napoleon’s Privates. It was pure pornography!” “Oh my!” was all that I could manage as a made a mental note to go back to look for that. Once I found it, of course, I had to buy it. In case you’re wondering, in the index under John Dillinger, it says, "Penis as relic….p. 39”. According to Napoleon's Privates, 2,500 Years of History Unzipped by Tony Perrottet, the story about Dillinger's uh, big weapon, being stored in a shoe box at the FBI isn’t true. Yeah, right.

Once all the books are unloaded volunteers are given about 30 minutes to shop before the arena is locked for the night. Although I’m not typically in the mood for books after carrying so many, I do a jiffy tour through the histories, bios, and art/architecture books to see if there’s anything worthwhile.

Two days later the event opens to the public in a feeding frenzy that makes the Oklahoma Land Rush look like a slow moving line receiving line at Koch Funeral Home. When the sale is over a few days later, the AAUW has done State College a huge service. Lots of great and not so great books have found new homes, high school kids have completed some community service project, and the AAUW has earned a ton of money to fund its good works.  I have some sore muscles, and if I'm lucky, a few books to enjoy know that that some day they may go back to the plastic bins at AAUW where they will start their lives all over again.

The Blooming of the Moose

I went to Bloomsburg the other day to do some consulting. Yes, someone finally asked me to teach a seminar on how to put a Whoopee cushion under one's mother. Once they met my exorbitant price of dinner and some gas I was all over the offer like a cheap suit.  Let me point out that the gas was for my truck; gas from dinner is just a lagniappe that comes from a tasty repast of central Pennsylvania cuisine. 

I don’t know that I’d been to the heart of Bloomsburg before. For me, Bloomsburg was too far away to be a convenient jaunt and too close to be an exotic destination. However, I’ve driven by on I-80 and looked at placemats promoting the Bloomsburg Fair lots of times. Now that I’m older and wiser, well, OK, older, I’ve kicked myself a million times for missing all those opportunities to see the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show at the Bloomsburg Fair.  

For those of you who aren’t white trash conversant, back in the day when red blooded American males spent time souping up American muscle cars, Joie Chitwood and his pals had an automobile daredevil show that traveled around on the county fair circuit. In one of his more bizarre stunts, on May 13, 1978, Joie Chitwood set a world record when he drove a Chevrolet Chevette for 5.6 miles on 2 wheels. Like you, I didn’t know that there was a world record for driving a Chevrolet Chevette on 2 wheels, but since there is one, I’m glad the record holder is Joie Chitwood and not some Brand X daredevil. 

I arrived in Bloomsburg a tad early so I walked around downtown for a bit before my appointment.

I loved the neon sign at the Bill Hess Tavern. Someone opened the door when I walked by and wow, the smoke-belching steel mills of 1930s Pittsburgh had nothing on this place. I don’t think they allow you in there unless you  chain smoke, and not just anything, but preferably the Three Stooges signature cigar, the LaStinkadora or as Shemp said, “Oye, a Lasting Kadora!”). 

Smelling like an ashtray and a distillery seemed like a bad idea so I didn’t stop in for a restorative before my consulting gig.

A head shot from Michelangelo’s David definitely says top drawer to me. Interestingly enough, Michelangelo's David didn't wear any clothes, high fashion or otherwise.

 

 

Then there was the Arcus Brothers resale emporium. It may be a resale shoppe, but wow, it really feels like a performance art installation. I did a jiffy tour through the inside and had to get out before I asked if they happened to have Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls on 8 track tape, as read aloud by Merv Griffin. (I'm sure they had it.) It seemed like a treasure trove of weird sports memorabilia (no doubt there’s a Steve Blass bobble head in there someplace), used musical instruments, and old-fashioned flotsam and jetsam. Had I the patience of a born shopper I think I could have found the Village People’s movie on European format videodisc. (Just what I always wanted...How nice!) Just as I was leaving a woman brought a in laundry basket filled with stuff that Goodwill seemingly rejected. She seemed all set to cash in on her like-new Donald Trump Board Game  and Marie Osmond signature Sony Walkman cozy.  

My meeting was at a place called the Moose Exchange. It had been the Loyal Order of Moose Lodge No. 623, but the days of the Moose in Bloomsburg had long since passed. The Moose had been the ne plus ultra of Bloomsburg’s fraternal societies when it opened its mid-century modern lodge on June 1, 1950 in a gala attended by many of the Moose’s 3,000 members not to mention more than a few of the 500 Ladies of the Moose. (Isn't a female moose a cow?) The story of the Loyal Order of Moose brought back memories of Fred Flintstone and the Water Buffalo Lodge.

For quite some time Bloomsburg Moose Lodge No. 623 was the place to be. Its grand public spaces—including a big ballroom with a semi-circular bar—were the scene of many local proms and other events of note. But as the building aged, fraternal organizations lost their allure. The world passed Pennsylvania’s aging downtowns by, and guys found out that they could get laid without investing in a corsage, a couple of whiskey sours, and an evening of dancing with the GF to accordion music at the Moose.

The Moose hibernated for some time before being rescued by a herd of concerned locals. Now it’s the Moose Exchange, and has a more artistic slash Brooklyn-hipster identity. During my visit a gallery in the building was hosting the mandatory photo essay on the Marcellus shale, which I sort of skipped over.

The best stop on the tour was the hermetically sealed bowling alley in the building's basement. It looked as if nothing had been changed since the day the alley was installed in the 1950s. It had been cleaned up and polished just a bit when the Moose was unloosed not long ago. There were six lanes and it looked just like Amenara Lanes, where I learned to bowl as a kid.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My host, Oren, took me into the back of the alleys (as opposed to into the back alley, the place where illegal abortions take place) and gave me a quick tutorial on how pin setting machines worked. It’s all really very easy, the gizmo is attached to a thingy, and then this arm comes by and well, pretty soon the pins are all where they’re supposed to be. And nothing is computerized. It was quite the triumph of mechanical engineering and lubrication, kinda like a visit to a San Francisco S&M club.

As I watched the machine go through its motions, I felt as if I was in an old Industry on Parade newsreel, watching the widgets go along an assembly line while the narrator intoned about Yankee ingenuity and then moved right into the feel-good anti-commie message at the end of the show. Even today, I know that if a bunch of Ruskies came to the Moose Exchange to bowl a few frames, the Godless Commies would be no match for the happy, contented Protestant workers of Bloomsburg when it came to the seven/ten split.

There was a rack of bowling balls by the wall of the alley. They were completely unremarkable.  All of the bowling alleys I’ve been to have had racks of bowling balls. Oren, made sure that I saw them. 

“See those bowling balls over there?”

“Yeah.”

“In the business they’re called dead men’s balls. Guys left their bowling ball here and never came back for ‘em.”

He didn’t quite have the flat affect of Sgt Joe Friday or Clint Eastwood but he was close. He spoke as if he uttered the phrase Dead men’s balls every day, which given his situation, perhaps he does.

The business. I wasn’t sure what business he was talking about. Surely there weren’t enough people rehabbing old Moose clubs to qualify as "the business" but what do I know? 

I thought about telling him that when I was at Park Forest Junior High, Rich Ackerman swore to me that there was an article in Readers’ Digest called I Am Joe’s Balls and I pretty much believed him. Oren hadn’t bought my dinner yet, so I thought I was best to save that anecdote for the demitasse course. In the new, post-modern hipster online Reader’s Digest there’s probably an article called I Am Dead Joe’s Ball written from the bowling ball’s perspective. 

By the time dinner was over, I’d shared everything I knew about deploying Whoopee cushions in nice restaurants and even a little stuff about art festivals, too. Bloomsburg seemed like a pretty nice place, and as former Moose lodges go, theirs seemed to be one of the best. I’d spent a couple hours at the Moose Exchange and no one mentioned Captain Kangaroo’s friend, Mr. Moose, or even the practically local, Mike “Moose” Mussina, the former pitcher for the Yankees and Orioles. Then again, if I were in charge, I’d have called it the Moose (and Squirrel) Exchange, pronounced, of course, in a thick Russian accent. I chuckled at that idea repeatedly during the my drive back to Happy Valley. I’ve always been good at amusing myself, and that doesn’t stop just because I’m waiting to download I Am Dead Joe’s Ball onto my Kindle.

Out on the Town

Saturday night was the Penn State Graphic Design students’ annual Film Follies. I’ve been going for a long time—I think this might be the third venue I’ve seen them in—the first place has long since been demolished and replaced with something bigger and better. (Actually, just bigger.) It’s a fun marker of the end of the spring semester at Penn State, though each year I’m a tad more astonished than the last at how young college seniors are. It’s been a long time since I burned my candle at both ends at Dear Old UVa.  

Very few of the follies in the Film Follies are live action films—they’re typically slide shows or animations. And they’re brief too. Don’t go expecting an undergraduate’s take on The Ten Commandments or Gone with The Wind.

 

Generally speaking, the subject matter is about issues important to undergraduates—stuff like getting drunk, hooking up, and the bathroom, not to mention the combo platter of getting drunk and hooking up in the bathroom. But there are also projects about serious subjects like global warming and bullying. This year they were a little more serious than usual: there wasn’t a single project covering masturbation in the library or flatulence during a calculus exam. What is this world coming to?  But the kids are creative, some even have a sense of humor, and I marvel at the technology that they use. By the end of the show of digital extravaganzas I wondered if they even knew where to purchase an Xacto knife and a jar of rubber cement.

The fashion scene there is always quite something. Graphics students seem to be a fashion forward lot and so they’re in a lot of black, which is the universal uniform of artistic credibility. But this year the kids went out on a limb and did black and white. At the same time. Yowza.

After the FF, my chums and I met some friends we don’t see very often for drinks. They didn’t want to go someplace loud, and they were emphatic about that, since, of course, everyone knows that my first choice is always to go to a cavernous dance club with deafening music located between a stone quarry and the end of the main runway at O’Hare Airport. While I see their point (a bit), if I wanted to have a drink someplace quiet and boring, I’d stay home.

Working under the theory that it would be quiet enough even if the house drink wasn’t the Geritol martini, we went to Zola, State College’s upscale hipster restaurant. I wasn’t expecting it to be as full as it was, but it was quite crowded. The bartender told us that it was fraternity and sorority parents’ weekend, to which I replied, “Great. Two generations of assholes in town.” 

Since a bunch of seats in one place wasn’t happening, Pam and I sat at the bar while the others crowded around a small cocktail table out of earshot.  

On my right were three macho enough types. After I checked them out I checked out what they were drinking (for those of you keeping score at home, white wine is an instant DQ). I did a double take when I noticed that the guy in the middle was drinking something golden and frothy from a martini glass.  “Uh, excuse me, what’s that thing you’re drinking?”  And that was how we met Nick, Wes and Nick. Or maybe it was Wes, Nick, and Wes. My head was a little unclear on that the next day. One was a physician’s assistant, the second a former surgical equipment salesman now selling organic/artisanal hooch, and the third, the one drinking the beer, was an attorney. They were doing the rounds of State College bars, spending some quality time with their friend John Barleycorn and enjoying the parade of pre-cougar female pulchritude that is State College on a Saturday night. We listened to their elevator speeches and they seemed like good guys.

The golden and frothy drink in question was a Fig Kiss. Yeah, someone really invented that. Its claim to fame is that Lady Gaga ordered one. It’s made with something like limoncello but made with figs, so it might have been called figicello. Wes (or Nick) offered us a slurp and Pam pronounced it tasty. Although I’ve slurped on worse things, that cocktail wasn’t something I needed to try. 

After the three guys left, Pam and I joined our friends at their cocktail table and yakked about weddings, the Boy Scouts, foreign countries, and differential equations.

Zola isn’t a late night place, and when it cleared out the others decided it was time for their beauty sleep. Pam and I headed to Chumley’s, State College’s best bar, for a nightcap. Ellen, the manager, is a super host and makes everyone feel at home. It’s sort of like Cheers meets the Algonquin Round Table meets a gay West Virginia road house. In other words, what’s not to like?

It was crowded. And loud, though OSHA regs didn't require us to wear ear protection. The crowd was pretty jolly. It wasn’t a night for my usual M.O. of standing around and not saying much.

No, this isn't Kenny. It's not even in State College. But hey, if that guy in green trousers doesn't have a place in my blog, I don't know who does.

Kenny, a biology grad student slash foodie, greeted me with “Say Rick, that guy you were in here with the other day…is he gay? He gave me his phone number.” I thought of typing LOL into my phone and handing it to him. Instead, I did things the old fashioned way and laughed out loud. I said, “No, he’s not gay. I went to his wedding. To a woman. Definitely not gay. Knows no show tunes and wouldn’t know a pelmet from a peplum.”  

He asked if I were sure, all the while giving me that look that said, “You so do not know what you’re talking about.”  OK, maybe I’m not as sure as I thought I was. But I’m still pretty sure.

All the while I was thinking, “I can’t believe he’d pick Mr. X over me.”

Kenny was accompanied by a gaggle of guys. It included Jeff, who’s in toxic waste dumps and is from New Jersey but claimed not to know which exit. (As fibs go, it ranks right up there with I’ll respect you in the morning, and I won’t, well, you know in your you know.)  In discussing Mr. X, Jeff claimed to have great gaydar, and I said that I wished that he could give me some pointers, since I was well into Season 2 of Will and Grace before I figured out that Jack was gay. In quick succession I met Dan the nuclear engineering student, Kyle the accounting major, and Ryan who did something else. And then there was a second Pam who was with Steve. Pam works at a social service agency with one of my friends and Steve, well, he did something else too, though probably not the same as Ryan’s something else. I gathered, however, that he probably wanted to do Ryan. The guys were bright and witty—Fred Flintstone would have let out a yabba dabba doo or two—and much more fun than a quiet drink at home. 

Mindful of the show biz adage that you always have to leave them wanting more, and before someone bought me a Geritol martini (once ordered by Lady Gaga's grandfather), I decided that it was time to head home. I had to usher in church the next day and that’s the sort of date on which you need to smell like Old Spice rather than Old Grand Dad.    

Bunny Club

I went to an Easter egg hunt yesterday. I don’t get to do that every day—even in the Easter season invitations to egg-centric fêtes don’t grow on trees. Of course, there’s the public one sponsored by the Centre Region Parks and Recreation—7,000 eggs (seriously!) in Orchard Park. It seems like The Bigs in terms of egg hunts, but as a childless person in State College…well, let’s just say that it’s not really a receptive climate for single, middle-aged men to hang around at public egg hunts, even if, weather permitting, it would be a good place to meet and greet some MILFs and DILFs.

The Easter egg hunt I went to was at my friend Donna’s house. Donna makes the run-of-the-mill Tiger Mom look as if she lies around all day watching television, scarfing down Ho Hos, and reading Harlequin Romances. She’s a successful professional in a field I'm too thick to understand, a mom who makes parenting look easy, and she throws a great party, too. So it’s not really a shock that Donna’s egg hunt is practically camera ready for the editors of Martha Stewart Living. She’s got an adorable kid, a beautiful house, and puts on an unreal spread. If Banana Republic or J. Crew would style the guests there'd be a magazine spread in her future. Yes, Donna’s doing her part, while her guests, well...most of us dress for State College and not the pages of a glossy lifestyle rag.   

 

This year Donna asked me to come over to hide the eggs before the guests arrived. When I got there, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Donna and her sidekick Aunt Patti had sealed the driveway, installed geothermal heating in the house and garage, and laid out a brunch spread that not only would appeal to little kids, but also just begged to be devoured by bunch of guys with sweaters tied around their necks as they discussed if they would check luggage or just do carry-on if Ryan Gosling were to run off to Belize with one of them that very afternoon.

Donna had a large shopping bag filled with colored plastic eggs, each with a prize inside. My job was to hide the eggs in the backyard, remembering that the most of the customers were going to be preschoolers. In other words, hiding eggs in the downspouts or behind the weed killer in the garden shed were bad ideas.  

I no sooner had the eggs in place when the first guests arrived. And then the second set, and the third, and so on. Donna had said that she’d invited lots of kids, and she was right. The only one missing, as far as I could tell, was Bruno, my Starbucks chum. He had a better offer with his out of town grandparents.

Most of the guests were prompt so there was an intense burst of “My! How you’ve grown!” “This is the new baby? He’s adorable!”  When that was finished we all went to the backyard patio to wait for the official opening of the egg hunt. Eagle-eyed kids scoped out the yard for low-hanging fruit while the parents chatted each other up. Donna’s daughter and co-host G. made sure that each guest had a sticker, while Donna, using her best teacher voice, put the egg hunters under starter’s orders.

Donna explained that kids had to collect the whole rainbow of smaller eggs and one larger egg which could be any color. While she may have meant it to be a simple modification of last year’s rules where kids were assigned a particular color (“Jimmy, you’re peridot; Suzy, you’re cerulean; Max, you’re that purple that men wear.”) I took this to be silent commentary on the Supreme Court’s recent double header of the Hollingsworth v. Perry and U.S. vs. Windsor. Perhaps that was just a happy coincidence. Perhaps not.

As soon as Donna had explained the rules, the kids raced into the backyard, like thoroughbreds bolting from the starting gates at Churchill Downs. Unlike the three-year-olds at Churchill Downs, lots of the children had parents in their wake, viewing the action through the lens of their iPhones. Au courant parents clearly do not subscribe to my parents' notion that there were no childhood events worth photographing that did not involve a new car, a recently caught fish, or fun with guns, or better yet, all of the above.

When all the eggs had been collected, Donna had the kids gather around her to check out their haul of eggs. She called out each kid’s name and gave them all personalized gift bags. There wasn’t a Rick, Bill, Bruce, or Chris in the bunch. All the names sounded like Jackson, Maxon, Claxon, and Flaxen to me. I think Piper was a no-show. This robbed me of the chance to see if Piper was a boy or a girl, and if he or she had a brother or sister named Cessna. I suppose I should have been grateful that one of the boys wasn’t named Mr. Darcy. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that someone, someplace, did that to their kid.

The girls’ bags each held a Hermès Kelly bag while the boys got a 72” flat screen TV. OK, maybe not that exact stuff, but the looks on the kids’ faces told me that it was something like that. During my childhood gift bags were a present for the Electrolux. Oh my, times have changed!

After the bags were passed out, the Easter Bunny just happened to stop by for a photo op. I’ve got to admit, I don’t exactly get the Easter Bunny. He’s a large bunny who wears a vest and hands out colored eggs? Since when have bunnies laid eggs? Oh and he also hands out chocolate bunnies and if you’re Catholic, maybe a chocolate cross on a stick. Got it. How many times has the Easter Bunny seen Harvey? Does he (or is he a she?) have a life partner? If so, are they multiplying like rabbits? How is he (or she) related to Beatrix Potter's bad boy Peter Rabbit? As I’m sure you recall, Peter Rabbit was a snazzy dresser (blue jacket, shoes, his own fashion Tumblr) and an early proponent of a locally-sourced vegetarian diet. He had sensibly shod sisters, Flopsy and Mopsy, and a trashy sister, Cotton-tail, now working for Hef in the Playboy Mansion in L.A.

Kids don’t seem to have a problem with the Easter Bunny or his (or her) New Normal relations. Perhaps there is something to running around the backyard looking for eggs. It might not be going to Belize with Ryan Gosling and a carry-on, but as something magical, it's good enough for me.

But It's A Wet Cold

I can’t pinpoint the moment that I decided that a dip in the ocean in New Jersey in early March was a good idea. Perhaps it was during an episode of wistfulness at not having dressed up as Richard—or better yet Pat—Nixon to run in the Phi Psi 500. It also might have been the result of my regretting not wallowing (still in Wahoo regalia, of course) in the red Virginia mud during Easters Weekend at UVa. No matter the motivation, the moment they announced the date of the 2013 Stone Harbor Shiver, I was in. And so were my chums Bruce, Martha, and Pam.

Interestingly enough, the Stone Harbor Shiver—a winter dash into the ocean— raises funds for a Cape May County mental health agency. Doing something crazy in the name of mental health is apparently The Garden State way.  

Since there aren’t many tourists in Cape May County in March, the Stone Harbor Chamber of Commerce puts the pedal to the metal with events like this to provide a little economic stimulus while giving the locals (and tourists) an outlet for a winter’s worth of pent up tomfoolery. So it wasn’t just skip into the briny deep and call it a day, but the event included a couple of meals, a costume contest, filming of the obligatory Harlem Shake video, and so on, all in the name of mental health and tourism.

The weekend’s festivities started with Friday night buffet supper at the Yacht Club of Stone Harbor. I don’t think of Stone Harbor as a yacht-y sort of place, but nautical types have enjoyed the club for years. The YCSH is located in a small, old-fashioned frame building on the bay—think country club in a town that you didn’t think would have a country club. Even the casual passersby can tell that it’s a yacht club since there are reserved parking spots for the Commodore, Vice-Commodore , Future Imperfect Commodore, and Visiting But Not Staying Too Long Commodore. Unlike the rest of the Commodores, Lionel Richie did not rate his own reserved parking space.

The building is decorated in the way you’d expect, with nautical touches here and there. There were a couple of big reception rooms with a long narrow bar facing the bay. At least I think the bay was out there, it was dark at the time and I didn’t feel the need to take a long walk off a short yacht club deck.

Stone Harbor’s Mayor-for-Life Suzanne V. Walters came by our table to chit chat. We told her that our costumes for the parade were inspired by the anecdote she told us eons ago during one of her star turns as a waitress at the annual Lions Club Pancake Breakfast. While she was shoveling out the short stacks she told us that shortly after she moved to Stone Harbor, the cliff dwellers on the Stone Harbor Borough Council accused her of being an "itinerant speculator" when she went before them to get a zoning variance in order to add a dormer to her home. After a couple of chuckles, well, shouting chuckles, it was loud in there, she set us straight that she was accused of being a transient speculator rather than an itinerant speculator, meaning that we (as in Martha) had to re-logo our costumes.

Saturday’s events kicked off at 9:30 with Kegs and Eggs at Fred’s Tavern. We chowed down on our eggs at home, but managed to get our stuff together and in plenty of time for a spin through Fred's to see what the bar flies were wearing and the the costume parade down 96th St. to the beach. We would have been even earlier except for the slight delay caused by my shutting Pam’s hand in the car door.

There were about 25 different groups in costumes, from Dr. Seuss characters to some folks dressed as skunks toting signs that said “We Skunked Superstorm Sandy”.

Someone should tell this fellow that if you are going to dress in spandex you should have a bigger dachshund.

Pam, Bruce, Martha and I dressed as construction workers and called our group Demo Sale. A demo sale is what takes place just before a modestly-sized house is demolished (hence demo) and a McMansion put in its place. Builders try to squeeze every ounce of moola out of the house before it’s demolished so everything is for sale. And I do mean everything. You’re quite welcome to make an offer on the kitchen, the bathroom, windows, or anything else you can saw away from the carcass of a perfectly nice 1960s cottage. Otherwise, the contractor is going to have to pay to dispose of it next to a long lost mafia don in one of the Garden State’s finer landfills. In a way it’s like going to the dog pound: whatever you don’t take home doesn’t have much of a future.  So we dressed as construction workers and all wore cardboard signs around our necks, just like the signs you see at the street corner with an arrow pointing at the house that’s about a day from the wrecking ball.  On the back of our signs, we’d written a somewhat political message. There were four signs and so they said in order, Tearing Down, Building Up, Cashing In, and Moving On. Just like real itinerant, no, transient speculators. Tableaux vivant, meet performance art.

 

 I love women (and men too) in nun costumes as much as the Protestant, but wearing a rented costume is a big fail in my book. But these nuns were jolly and boozy and smoked up a storm. They had the whole nun thing going on expect for rapping boys on the knuckles with a ruler. Somehow I never got around to asking them if they knew the joke about the Mother Superior’s constipation. There was one solitary guy in bad drag. He didn’t seem to have any friends so I wondered if he was just using the opportunity to get his freak on in a kicky thrifted number from the Jacklyn Smith Collection at K-Mart not to mention bone colored heels (before Easter—egad!). There were stogie chomping golfers wearing several different kinds of plaid, and hula skirted folks also pretending to enjoy a La Stinkadora. It’s interesting how many people think a big stogie makes any bad costume so much better. I always wonder how often those folks dream about trains going into tunnels.

The local ice company created a rudimentary truck-mounted ice throne for the King and Queen of the Shiver. I could tell that they were the King and Queen since they were wearing crowns and he was carrying a scepter; his orb must have been at the shop. Shortly after I said hello to the King of the Shiver he laid into me like nobody’s business for wearing a nail apron from Lowe’s instead of the just down the street Seashore Ace, which, he pointed out with a snarl was having Free Paint Day. I didn’t take the time to point out to Good King Frozenballs that free paint didn’t do me much good when I really wanted a nail apron. As my inner Madame DeFarge started telling me “knit one purl two”, I walked away thinking that this jerk never heard of getting more flies with honey than you do with driveway sealer.

After the Kegs and Eggs were kicked, it was time to process to the parking lot of the Women’s Civic Club parking lot where the costume judging would take place. 

The two sets of judges, King Frozenballs and his Queen, and Mayor for Life Walters and another local nabob, sat in lifeguard chairs, just like real lifeguards except not as hot. I mean, not hot at all. In fact, as far as fantasy constructs go, they were probably colder than the Atlantic Ocean. But that’s just me, there is probably an adults-only web site devoted to hot Garden State costume contest judges.  I took pains to point out to King Frozenballs that I’d turned my nail apron backwards so that the Lowe’s logo didn’t show he said that it was a good thing or else we’d have gotten a one from him.  All class that guy.

Some of the costumes were cute but lots were well, bad.

Alas and alack we didn’t win. We were beaten out by a group dressed as a turtle crossing. And they deserved to win, they had a great costume and a little performance too.

After the costume contest, it was time to do the Harlem Shake (naturally) and then time to head to the beach, where there were even more people milling about. There were also a bunch of emergency vehicles parked on the beach. Not so reassuring. As soon as we got to the beach people started to strip off their layers of clothing, and someone stood on a lifeguard stand to read instructions through a megaphone to the crowd. At least I am guessing they were instructions. They sounded a bit like an announcement at the airport that your flight to Omaha is delayed or maybe at a different gate or did they say it was cancelled or was that is now ready for boarding?

 

Then there was a whistle and suddenly everyone made a mad dash for the water. That is, everyone but Bruce who stayed behind to hold our towels.

The water was cold, alright. Forty-one degrees Fahrenheit to be exact.  But I ran all the way in, and once I’d dunked myself entirely I ran out just as fast as I could.  I think I might have been in the water a minute, and well, there was about a year’s worth of shrinkage in that minute. I figure I’ll move from soprano to tenor in time for the Arts Festival in July. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get back to my pre-shiver baritone.

After we finally warmed up and changed clothes, we went out for a celebratory dinner, a postprandial kerfuffle with an unmanned toll booth on the Garden State Parkway, and a victory lap at Fred’s Tavern. Of course, we could have done those things any weekend. But this time I, at least, was secure in the knowledge that while I might not have been dressed as Richard —or better yet Pat—Nixon, or covered in the red earth central Virginia, I was still stupid enough to run into a really, really cold ocean just for fun.