Quotes by People Way Smarter Than Me #2 - Flannery O'Conner

Originally Posted March 26, 2015

Every now and then I slip back into my old "Literature Geek" mode and remember what used to make me so excited about American Literature back in the day.

One of those "Giants" of the cannon was Flannery O'Conner, who had a birthday yesterday that totally flew over my head. She was the one who kindled my love of distinctly "Southern" American Literature which continues to be a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine to this day.

O'Conner was one of AmLit's great wits - so to that end, let me step away and let the late, great writer take it from here:

- “When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. [...] Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

- “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

- “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce much out of the two hours. Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away, but I don’t think any of that was time wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the fact is if you don’t sit there every day, the day it would come well, you won’t be sitting there.”

 

Inexplicable Things on the Internet I Find To Be Funny #3

Running Thoughts #4 – Chasing Barry Windham (or, “What the Hell is Up with All That Wrestling Crap on Your Facebook Page?”)

Part 1 of 3

For those of you who may have been self-injurious enough to have checked out the first post I made on my blog (“Greetings & Salutations” posted 5/14/15), you already know how badly I misused my Facebook page when I first began posting things on it.  The Cliff Notes version of this account is that I fired Facebook up sometime last summer, reached out to 3 – 4 friends, didn’t bother connecting with anyone else and started posting 5 – 6 page missives on things “near & dear” before a few old friends found me and demonstrated through example how the damned thing is supposed to be used.   I was using it as a blog instead of the dynamic medium for reconnecting (and staying connected) to people that it is intended to be.  As a result, in the recent past, I began moving most of those long-form musings that I originally posted on Facebook to this very blog, which is where such things are right and properly pastured.

However, another thing I didn’t realize back during those early, ignorant days was that all of those other articles and entries that I “liked” or commented on with Facebook were often popping up on my friends’ pages too.  As a result, all of my “likes” and most of my comments were being advertised for all of my friends to see.  That, in and of itself, was not such a bad thing.  The problem was that, during those early days, many of the articles and posts I “liked” and commented on had to do with a very guilty little pleasure of mine, one I had thought I was keeping secret.  The long and the short of it was that I was broadcasting my love and interest in the business of professional wrestling for all of my Facebook friends to see.

You see, one of the first things I discovered about Facebook (correctly, as luck would have it) was that there are oh-so-many Facebook pages dedicated to professional wrestling topics, many of them maintained by people who ran promotions or performed in the ring themselves – so if you’re into professional wrestling, there are some great sources of information for it on Facebook.  After “liking” one or two of those pages, Facebook did what it does so well and kept directing more and more of those types of pages to my attention.  As a result, I spent a lot of my early time on Facebook “liking” and commenting away on professional wrestling posts to my little heart’s content.  Little did I know that with each “like” and with each comment, I was broadcasting my interest in professional wrestling to the few Facebook friends I had at the time - people with whom I was very self-conscious about how I came across.

Oh brother.  I’m amazed I didn’t end up getting “unfriended” by at least a few of them.

You see, I’m very aware of the disdain in which non-fans and folks who are not into “the business” hold professional wrestling.  Hell, for most of my life, I was one of those people.

 

So why do I like professional wrestling so much at this late point in my life?

 

The truthful, if somewhat surprising answer is:  I don’t.

 

I can’t stand to watch a match these days.  And while it would be easy of me to chalk that up to the fact that pro wrestling is pretty much dominated by one nationwide promotion these days (WWE, previously WWF, whose brand of wrestling didn’t appeal to me much even back during its two “golden ages”), the fact is that I don’t even enjoy watching the older matches all that much.  I’ll watch them out of historical curiosity, or to get the low-down on a wrestler I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t seen in action, but rare is the time when I actual “enjoy” watching a match for its own aesthetic purposes. 

 

So why do I spend so much time paying attention to professional wrestling (as my older Facebook friends witnessed first-hand)?

Because I’m fascinated by the history of the business. 

Professional wrestling is a unique phenomenon in the landscape of human entertainment.  Nowhere have I ever seen a business where theater and pageantry, cheap drama and outright pandering, has been so deliberately blended with athletic endeavor to yield such a strange, bewildering product.  It has its own lingo, its own culture and own unique history.  How wrestling evolved over so many years from being a legitimate sport, to being a sideshow attraction, to being an association of regional promotions to, finally, becoming an international phenomenon able to fill world-class arenas and capture millions of dollars in pay-per-view revenue is, to me, a fascinating line of inquiry that one could easily spend a lifetime tracing and studying.  Scholarly interest aside, I also find that studying the history of wrestling is immensely entertaining – much more entertaining, in my humble opinion, than the actual product presented in the ring. 

Don’t believe me?  Assuming you have a library card, go to your local library and look up any book by any professional wrestler who lived, breathed and worked at any time over the last thirty years.  Then actually read the damn thing.  Go ahead, you won’t be disappointed.  I don’t care if the wrestler you’re reading about was a lifelong “jobber” (i.e. – someone who lost consistently in the ring to make the “stars” look good) or a 16-time world heavyweight champion, I guarantee he/she will have more than a few behind-the-scenes stories about their wrestling days that will make you howl with laughter, or your jaw drop in astonishment, or some combination thereof.  There are simply no stories more entertaining than “wrestling stories”, which is why the writing, publishing and sale of books about wrestlers has become a very lucrative side-industry in its own right. 

So while at this point in my life I feel confident characterizing myself as fairly well-informed and knowledgeable about professional wrestling, I didn’t come by that knowledge the way most people do (i.e. – by being a lifelong fan and witnessing the “sport” firsthand over many years).  My “path to knowledge”, so to speak, was forged via my interest in one man – a wrestler by the name of Barry Windham.

To begin at the beginning . . .

As most of my long-time friends know, even though I was born in Pennsylvania, I spent the vast majority of my early childhood growing up in the State of Florida.  We lived down there from approximately 1973 to 1983, give or take a few months in either year.  I was a one year-old when we took up residence in what was then a small town called Fort Pierce, an old naval outpost situated on the east coast of the state, approximately equal distance between Daytona Beach and Miami.  Now most of us nowadays naturally think of Florida as being a fairly populous, urban and well-developed state.  However, most of the growth in Florida has occurred rather rapidly over the last 20 – 30 years or so.  Back in the seventies, Florida was still pretty much a “redneck” state.  Sure, Miami was well on its way to becoming the sophisticated metro/cosmopolitan destination it is today, but that was a relatively recent development by the time my family lived down there.  Much of the rest of the state, even the urban centers, were far from cosmopolitan, and the vast majority of its population would proudly consider themselves either “redneck fishermen” or “redneck cowboys”, or both.  Other than for its beaches and its citrus industry, Florida really wasn’t renowned for much of anything on the national level until the Miami Dolphins suddenly became a force in the NFL with the first and only undefeated championship season in 1972 (the year before we moved there).  Other than that, there really wasn’t much going on in the state as far as sports were concerned.  The then-fledgling Tampa Bay Buccaneers were birthed a few years later, and then very quickly made everyone wish they hadn’t been as they rapidly set new marks for failure and futility.  The Miami Heat Basketball Team, the Florida Marlins Baseball Team, The Tampa Bay Devil Rays Baseball Team, Tampa Bay Lightning Hockey Team and the Jacksonville Jaguars Football Team were far in the future and the prospects for such teams were just simply not on anyone’s horizons back in those days.  Even the University of Miami’s college football team, the championship-laden Miami Hurricanes, had yet to rise to national prominence in those days, their first national championship being about a decade away.  No, what really ruled the Florida sports scene back in those days were two grimy, fledgling, and distinctively “southern” sports which were just not generally appreciated on the national level.  I’m talking about auto racing and professional wrestling.

Back then, professional wrestling existed as a series of loosely-affiliated regional wrestling promotions, organized nationally through the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA).  These regional promotions or “territories” were allowed to operate with a great deal of independence and autonomy provided they:  1.) limited their reach and operations within the geographical areas allotted to them, and; 2.) recognized only one true “World Heavyweight Champion” who was a wrestler sanctioned by the NWA who continually travelled around to all the territories taking on each promotion’s top talent.  This was a decidedly different arrangement than what one saw with wrestling since the nineties, where there existed one or two wrestling promotions that operated on a nationwide-level and competed against each other with completely different wrestlers, titles, storylines and champions.  Of course, nowadays, there really is only one game in town on the national level, the WWE.  But back in the day, the wrestlers you saw on TV were the same ones who lived in your community, shopped in your grocery stores and performed, almost exclusively, in your state or geographical area.  The wrestlers you became familiar with largely depended upon which “territory” you lived in and which promotion had rights to that area. 

Where I lived in Florida, that promotion was Championship Wrestling from Florida (CWF), run by its legendary promoter, Eddie Graham. 

My "Territory"

Eddie Graham effectively began what became known as CWF in the late sixties when he rode into Tampa and bought into what was essentially a part-time, seasonal wrestling promotion owned and operated by a character named Cowboy Luttrell.  Graham had a reputation for being a genius in the business and a master of “finishes” (i.e. – the creative ways in which wrestling matches come to their conclusions). Through a combination of business acumen and sheer creativity, Graham turned Luttrell’s part-time operation into a thriving, statewide spectacle and turned CWF into one of the “crown jewel” promotions in the NWA. 

In addition to Graham, CWF was known for two other prominent wrestling figures who obtained that oh-so-rare status of becoming so popular they gained acclaim on a national level – “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes (one of maybe five personalities in the history of wrestling who became recognizable to fan and non-fan alike on a national level), and “The Dean of Wrestling”, Gordon Solie, whom many consider to have been the finest professional wrestling announcer even up to this very day.  In addition to these bona fide CWF stars, CWF also proved to be a developmental ground for wrestling personalities and talents who went on to achieve considerable fame and success beyond CWF’s border.  By my unofficial count, CWF spawned no less than five wrestlers who went on to become either World Heavyweight Champion or WWF/WWE Heavyweight champion on the national level.  Perhaps the most notable of these was a tall, blond kid by the name of Terry Bollea, the man who went on to become arguably the most popular and famous character professional wrestling has ever spawned – Hulk Hogan (though the lion’s share of his fame and fortune was earned outside of CWF’s borders). 

So while CWF was a local, regional wrestling promotion in every sense of the term, it offered national-level entertainment to an eight year-old me growing up well within its sphere of influence.  The larger-than-life personalities, the carnival atmosphere when they rode into town for a live show, the easy-to-understand good versus evil dynamic between the “faces” (i.e. – wrestler portrayed as “the good guys”) and the “heels” (i.e. – “the bad guys”) all appealed to my child’s eye view of the world.  This was probably the one time in my life when I was a true, dyed-in-the-wool, professional wrestling fan. 

While the talent was national-level in CWF at the time, what I remember most about wrestling in those days was just how damned local it felt.  It really was a part of the community.  Their weekly, late Sunday morning TV show was sponsored by local businesses (most notably, Janie Dean Chevrolet in nearby Vero Beach).  They didn’t just stick to the big metro arenas, but they also came to your town or the next town over and had matches in civic centers and rec halls and National Guard armories all over the state.  Plus, it was right there on the banner – Championship Wrestling from Florida.  This wasn’t the WWF here, which purported to be a worldwide organization even back when it, too, was just a regional promotion.  CWF was distinctly Floridian in its approach and feel, and whenever I think back to those now so misty early childhood memories in the Florida heat, those memories are inevitably wrapped up in CWF and how it made me feel.

One of the other distinctly CWF (and perhaps more widely, NWA) attributes that I think are noteworthy was the fact that, at least back then, CWF still took the time and effort to portray professional wrestling as a legitimate sporting endeavor.  Sure, it was still wildly dramatic and exaggerated, and any mature adult who took the effort to take an objective step back from the product and see it for what it truly was could see that CWF was more theater than it was true sporting competition.  But I loved that they took so much time and energy to portray it as a true sport.  Instead of just yelling with bombast about how strong the competitors were or that such-and-such move has “busted” such-and-such wrestler “wide open”, Gordon Solie actually called each move, counter or hold as it happened in his professional, deadpan delivery.  Solie may have been the only wrestling announcer I know of where you could have listened to him on the radio (or with your eyes closed) and still have had a good idea what was happening in the ring from moment-to-moment.  The wrestler’s names, height, weight and city-of-origin were all announced in the ring immediately before each match occurred, and they even occasionally had good old “Coach Shaffer” sit in every now and then and explain how such-and-such move evolved from the Greco-Roman tradition, or that so-and-so wrestler trained under such-and-such coach at, say, the University of Oklahoma, and explained how this effected that wrestler’s style and track record of success.  Now 85% of this explanatory information was complete fiction, but it added so much to the illusion that what you were seeing was real (that concept is known as “maintaining kayfabe” in the lingo of the business – seemingly a lost art these days).  Plus I just loved how the wrestlers were just portrayed as wrestlers and actual human beings – good old “Terry Allen” or “Steve Keirn” or “Brian Blair”, not “Mr. Perfect” or “The Birdman” or “Hillbilly Jim”.  Don’t get me wrong, CWF had a share of gimmicky wrestlers on their roster, but it was the exception, not the rule, and I just appreciated how wrestlers were allowed to be portrayed as competitors and not repackaged as superheroes or supernatural characters at every step and turn.

And of all these wonderful, athletic, larger-than-life personalities, somehow I ended up fixated on some young, exceedingly tall, somewhat gawky young kid of a wrestler named Barry Windham.

A Very Young Barry Windham

 

I’m not sure why, of all the characters to choose from on the CWF roster, I chose Barry Windham to be my hero.  There were, especially at that time, much tougher and stronger characters to go with.  There were wrestlers who were flashier, gaudier, more experienced, with more style, more personality, more muscles, and more pizazz than the young Barry Windham.  But there was something about Barry that just stuck out to me.  One, he was probably the single youngest person I had ever seen in a wrestling ring at that time (Barry was about nineteen when he had his first CWF match, and probably about 21 or 22 by the time I discovered him), so the fact that he was the closest thing wrestling had to a competitor my own age (all of 8 – 11 years old) may have appealed to me.  In addition, there was the fact that he wasn’t a flashy wrestler or a “gimmick man” as well.  All through my life, and even to this day, it has always been the athletes that just go out and put their heads down and work hard that appeal to me most.  Athletes who worried more about putting in the hours training than with coming up with a catch-phrase or an image.  Athletes who put performance ahead of reputation, and Barry, at least with how he was “packaged” back in those days, definitely fit that mold.  But in addition to those things, there was just something intrinsic in Barry’s look and his in-ring performance that appealed to me.  It would have been largely nascent and still-to-be-developed back in those early days, but there just was really something noteworthy about a six-foot-seven kid who could go into the ring and take the punishment he seemed to be taking and move the way that he could move that amazed me.  There was a fluidity and grace in him, even during these earliest days of his career, that I just found compelling.  Back then, you just didn’t find athletes above the height of 6-2 who could move the way he did outside of the NBA, and as I indicated above, Florida wasn’t going to have a pro basketball team for another decade-and-a-half yet.

So Barry was my guy.  And boy did I love watching him.  I loved watching him be terrorized by, and eventually overcome, the much savvier and much more experienced Don Muraco.  I loved his early feud with an equally young and developing Jake “the Snake” Roberts.  I vividly remember being shocked and outraged when Roberts put young Barry face-first through the wooden ringside partition.  And I also remember the excitement of anticipation as I waited for Barry to come back the following week and wrestle Roberts again with a broken nose.  I loved how he was portrayed as being Dusty Rhodes’s young protégé, and how he always gave the travelling NWA champ the fight of his life whenever he rolled into town.  He was 6 – 7, he was billed as being from Sweetwater, Texas, he took what appeared to my young eyes to be some of the worst beatings I had ever witnessed, but he always came back up swinging with those long-assed lanky arms of his.  And more often than not, he ended up putting the bad guy’s shoulders onto the mat for the three-count.

 

Oh, and then there was the “Flying Lariat”. 

 

Or, more accurately, the “Flying Freaking Lariat”. 

 

That was Barry’s finishing move.  Again, in the parlance of the biz, a “finishing move” is a wrestling move that is used, usually at the end of the match to finish off your opponent and cause him to submit or otherwise render him incapable of resisting a pin.  When you saw a wrestler perform his or her finishing move, you knew the match was likely about to end.  Most famous wrestlers had a finishing move of some sort which often became their calling cards.  Hulk Hogan had the “Guillotine Leg Drop”.  Ric Flair had the “Figure Four Leg Lock”.  Stone Cold Steve Austin had “The Stunner”.  And Barry, at least at this point in his career, had the “Flying Freaking Lariat”.

 

First off, a Lariat is a term normally used to describe the rope a cowboy uses to catch livestock.  In the wrestling biz, a Lariat is really just another term for a clothesline, where a wrestler catches his opponent with the length of his arm across his opponent’s neck, usually while one of the two wrestlers are moving towards each other off the ring ropes.  What makes a Lariat different from a standard clothesline really has more to do with the wrestler using it than it does with the move itself.  “Cowboy Characters” are usually the ones who use Lariats over clotheslines as it is more in keeping with the mythos of their image.  Stan Hanson was a famous cowboy-wrestler who used the standard Lariat with great success both in the States and overseas.

 

The “Flying Lariat” was different.  In describing this move to you, it will be difficult to do it justice.  First, Barry would push his opponent against the ring ropes and then launch them across the ring into the ropes on the other side.  After launching his opponent in this manner, Barry would then launch himself into the ropes opposite his opponent, spring boarding himself toward the center of the ring where he would be, for all intents and purposes, on a collision course with his opponent.  However, a step or two before crashing into his opponent, Barry would instead launch himself into the air and somehow position himself to his opponent’s side, his own body a good four feet in the air and parallel to the mat, and stick out that long-ass arm of his where it would come down on his opponent’s neck/chest area and literally knock him flat.  It has to be about the coolest looking wrestling move I had ever seen and must have taken an amazing amount of agility and dexterity to perform properly.  Quite frankly, I’ve never seen another wrestler even try to perform it, and I can’t imagine it looking quite right unless it’s being performed by a six-foot-seven-inch lanky kid from Sweetwater, Texas. 

So, again, Barry was my guy.  To sum it up, he was a childhood hero of mine, and while childhood heroes are always the most special and most enduring kind of heroes we have, it’s very difficult to explain exactly how and why they mean so much to us. 

They just kind of do. 

Suffice it to say, my childhood heroes became even more important to me during some very dark years my family had in Florida.  My parents separated on two separate occasions while we lived down there and there were times when I didn’t think my family would ever be whole and healthy again.  During those times, my heroes provided a very important avenue of escape for me when I could forget those suffocating troubles and relax and feel like a kid again.  I had exactly two heroes when I lived in Florida.  One was Spider-Man.  The other was Barry Windham.  However strange and groan-inducing it may sound all these years later, that should give you an idea of just how important the young Barry Windham was for me in those days.
 


Barry - Staring Down Danger

Now as 1982 went on, my family, back together and whole again, made the monumental decision to move wholesale back to our “home state” of Pennsylvania.  While this was a move that I, and my family as a whole, were largely in support of, it did occur to me that I would be leaving behind at least one of my childhood heroes.  You see, Barry wrestled for Championship Wrestling from Florida.  Quite frankly, I didn’t know what kind of wrestling they would have in Pennsylvania.  I suppose I could have asked my Dad at the time, but Dad was one of those people who held wrestling in mild disdain.  Being a transplanted Northerner, he just didn’t get why all of his southern friends and co-workers got so much into what to him were badly-staged theatrics.  And the more his neighbors and co-workers go excited about wrestling, the more it grated on him.  Since I was a kid, he tolerated the fact that I enjoyed it (and, to his credit, he even took me to a CWF match once at the Fort Pierce Civic Center).  However, as the years passed he became increasingly impatient with my fascination with the business, and I didn’t want to risk his ire by asking him if they had wrestling where we were moving.  Regardless, whatever they had up in Pennsylvania, I was pretty sure it wasn’t CWF wrestling and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to see Barry Windham up there.

 

Turned out I was wrong.  Who knew?

The process of moving from Florida to Pennsylvania proved to be a long and tortured one.  We didn’t do it the way most people would – by actually securing a house and location to move into immediately upon arriving.  No, Dad’s big plan was to spend time with relatives in West Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania while scouting out a new house and location in some rural part of Pennsylvania he wasn’t familiar with.  So, not only did I have the usual burden of having to get used to a new state, a new geography, a new culture and new friends, all of that was preceded by a good solid three to four months of living on the sufferance of relatives and long-ass drives in the family van as we looked at homes a good hundred or so miles away from where we were staying.  Quite frankly, in retrospect, I’m amazed we got through it with our sanity intact.

But the details of that little adventure are better left to another column.  Suffice it to say that, due to more pressing concerns, professional wrestling didn’t bubble back up on my radar for a good year or so when, finally settled into a new house and well into the first term at a new school, conversation on the school bus inevitably turned to professional wrestling.

It turned out they did have professional wrestling in Pennsylvania, and while its fan base may not have been as pervasive as it was in the deep South, the fans it had were every bit as excited and enthusiastic about it as they were in Florida.  I sat quietly at first and listened to my schoolmates go and on about wrestlers I had never heard of before.  Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka.  Ivan Putski.  Tito Santana.  And there was also this dude named Hulk Hogan everyone seemed so excited about. 

I also heard names that were familiar to me, as some of the then-current WWF wrestlers had spent time in Georgia and/or Florida in recent years.  Roddy Piper.  Bob Orton, Jr. (though he was apparently going by “Cowboy” Bob Orton now).  Barry’s old nemesis, Don Muraco, was apparently up north at that time too, engaged in a long and bitter feud with Tito Santana over the “Intercontinental Championship” (whatever the hell that was).  And also the Iron Sheik, who was pushed as absolute badass heel in Florida for a good eight months or so before disappearing for parts unknown.  Well, apparently he had showed up in the WWF by that point and had a run as their champion.  Heady stuff indeed.

When finally the conversation turned to the new kid (me) and I was asked the question of whether I liked wrestling and who my favorite wrestlers were, I asked with some trepidation, and not much enthusiasm, “Have you guys ever heard of Barry Windham?”

Had they heard of Barry Windham?  You bet your sweet ass they had heard of Barry Windham!  The “U.S. Express” baby! 

Turned out that in the year or so while I was dealing with the weightier issues of transitioning between Florida and Pennsylvania, Barry had made the move, along with a relatively “new” wrestler who was matriculating in Florida at the time named Mike Rotundo, up north to the brighter lights and larger arenas of the World Wrestling Federation (the WWF, now known as WWE).  And, what’s more, the team of Windham and Rotundo were the current WWF Tag-Team Champions, and about to engage in a historic and bitter feud with the Iron Sheik (as soon as he had finished dropping the WWF Championship to the soon-to-be-mega-star Hulk Hogan) and that damned Soviet “commie” Nikolai Volkoff.  It was the down-home, salt-of-the-earth, young American good old boys versus the evil international forces from Iran and the then Soviet Union.  It was a classic wrestling “angle” and apparently had had the intended effect of whipping the fans into a froth over the upcoming matches. 

I was floored.  Barry Windham was up here wrestling?  Who’s this Mike Rotundo guy he was with (apparently he hadn’t crossed my radar by the time I left Florida).  And, wow, he was one-half of the tag-team champions right now?  And feuding with the badass and scary Iron Sheik (I had no idea who Volkoff was at that time).  What’s this wrestling show called?  WWF?  When’s it come on?  Early Sunday afternoon’s (right around the time my old CWF show used to come on)?  You bet I’ll check it out!

So the by the time the next weekend rolled around, I had convinced my Dad to tune in to this new-sounding WWF TV show and see my old hero in action.  We had only one TV at the time, so if my Dad was going to commit to allowing me to watch wrestling, then the whole family was watching it or finding some other way to spend their time.  It also didn’t help that the WWF show was on one of about three channels we were getting at the time (oh how I missed the cable TV we had in Florida!), and wouldn’t you know it was the one channel that came in fuzzy and required us to move the antenna rotor (a concept and device I was completely ignorant about as even regular network TV through an antenna didn’t require an antenna rotor in flat-as-a-pancake Florida).  But those obstacles were quickly surmounted and I tucked myself into the couch and glued my eyes to the TV for my first look at my childhood hero in over a year.

And, thank goodness, he was booked to appear on the show that week.

What the hell?  Is that Barry Windham?

Barry Windham (Left) & Mike Rotundo (Right) - The U.S. Express

End of Part 1

Part 2:  http://epp101.blogspot.com/2015/06/running-thoughts-chasing-barry-windham.html

Book Review: The Enchanted – A Novel, by Rene Denfeld

I plucked a copy of The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld off the new Science Fiction/Fantasy shelf at my local library thinking, “Hmm, here’s a science fiction author I’ve never heard of before”.  About fifty pages into the novel, it became apparent why that was – The Enchanted is neither a Sci-Fi nor Fantasy novel, but during the first dozen or so pages it does a damn fine impression of one.  In these opening passages, we become acquainted with our narrator (for at least part of the book), a lifer in an ancient stone prison who describes his environment as “enchanted”.  He goes on to describe the sub-basement where he resides with a select few other inmates as a “dungeon” constructed of ancient stone, where little men with hammers reside in the walls and golden horses stampede underground.  This narrator quickly introduces us to the Lady, described in near allegorical terms as being the recipient of almost devotional love by our narrator and the other inmates.  The Lady’s association with the Fallen Priest continues the illusion that we’re dealing with archetypical characters in a surreal, dreamlike fantasy.  The time period in question is ambiguous at best.  All we know is that the prison is ancient, enchanted, and populated with characters that are described in heavily symbolic, as opposed to human, terms.

It is only after the scene shifts away from the “dungeon” and the narration bleeds into third-person omniscient that we perceive that this is not a tale from some long ago era of virtuous maidens and hero priests.  Rather, the action takes place in the modern era, complete with telephones, automobiles and modern medicine.  The novel is about a very modern topic – execution as a viable punishment in our modern criminal justice system, and our inmate-narrator who opened the book is one of those death-row denizens, and likely mentally-ill to boot.  The Lady turns out to be a death row investigator – those professionals who investigate the backgrounds and circumstances of those inmates sentenced to execution with an aim toward obtaining mitigating or extenuating information that can be presented in court to commute their sentences to ones of mere “life in prison”.  The Fallen Priest is a Catholic Priest who has voluntarily given up the cloth while he sorts out his own “crisis of faith” stemming from his tragic relationship with an underage stripper.  In due time we are introduced to the Warden, the natural nemesis of the Lady, who turns out to be a good man struggling under the burden of a wife who has a terminal cancer diagnoses.  We are also introduced Conroy, the corrupt intelligence officer, Risk, the big-shot inmate who runs a criminal enterprise behind the bars of the prison, the Fair-Haired Boy, a new arrival at the prison and the latest victim of the corrupt Risk/Conroy partnership, along with Striker and York, other residents of the death row dungeon, the latter of whom is the Lady’s latest client.

While I think my library erred badly in classifying the novel as Sci-Fi/Fantasy, I do not think that the author was deliberately deceptive when she opened the novel as a light, dream-like fantasy – an illusion that she masterfully maintains throughout key passages in the novel.  It takes a deft touch to maintain the light, airy nature of the prose when dealing with such weighty issues as mental illness, sexual abuse and the death sentence.  Since the book largely revolves around the Lady and her attempts to liberate York from death row (an endeavor that York himself resists), it is easy to walk away with the impression that Denfeld is an opponent of capital punishment.  However, it became apparent to me that the novel is not so much about condemnation of the death penalty, either explicitly or by inference, but rather about each individual character’s question for salvation from their own unique circumstances.  York seeks to liberate himself from his damaged life through the very death sentence that the Lady seeks to commute.  The Lady seeks to liberate herself from her own damaged past which shares many similarities with those of the men who sit on death row, while working so passionately to save an inmate who is in favor of his own execution.  The Fallen Priest seeks to learn an entirely new way to live now that the only life he knew, that of the cloth, is no longer viable.  The Warden seeks to reconcile how to live in a seemingly contradictory universe where the death comes hard to the death-row denizens under his care but comes so tragically easy to his dearly beloved wife.  Meanwhile, in the background, the prison itself undergoes its own Shawshank-like redemption as the corrupt dynamic between Conroy and Risk is purged at its very roots by the Fair-Haired Boy who undergoes his own painful metamorphosis into a man.

The novel achieves its ends deftly and masterfully, however, it is not perfect.  I found the harshness of prison life to be exaggerated somewhat, perhaps purposefully to make a more compelling read.  For instance, descriptions of prison food as being nothing more than the expired cast offs from grocery stores and restaurants is at odds with my own limited experience with the State Prison System, where unconfirmed rumors abound of employees being treated to the expired food stuffs so that the fresher food could be saved for the inmates.  Meanwhile, it seems lost on the author that the blue-forested backwoods where the Lady seems to find solace was simultaneously the setting that enabled the rampant abuse that scarred York’s soul to occur unabated.  However, these are minor gripes at best, and may have resulted from an overly-heavy editorial hand.

Again, those who are quick to see a critique of the death penalty in this novel would do well to note that not only does the Lady fail (quite deliberately) to save York from his sentence, but that every death row inmate we are introduced to ultimately meet their fate in the prison’s execution chamber.  However, it would be equally foolhardy to read the story as a defense of the system.  Rather, the story is an act of resignation to the idea that all systems are flawed, that our world is in some ways irrevocably broken, but that avenues of salvation are open to even the most destitute among us.  Our death row narrator, whose identity proves to be somewhat of a surprise by the novel’s end, ultimately champions love as the means to salvation, and continues to champion it despite being virtually unloved himself at the end.  While I still maintain that the novel is mislabeled as Sci-Fi or Fantasy, the author’s ability to maintain the allegorical and dream-like quality of the story up to the very end is both noteworthy and effective.  At most, the novel seems to be without and easy categorization, and its ability to defy labels harkens back to a point made earlier in the novel when the Lady learns from an ancillary character that, well, “some things just don’t need names”.

I would give the novel 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it to anyone who, needing a break from their normal reading fare, may be interested in the seemingly “light” handling of undeniable “heavy” subjects.

Blurry Recollections (That Somehow Seem Significant) #1 – Where the Hell are All the Singing Cats?

With David Letterman’s run on late night television coming to an end this week, it reminded me of just what a huge deal it was when Letterman, upset at being snubbed by NBC when they went with Jay Leno to be Johnny Carson’s replacement on the Tonight Show, pulled up his tent stakes in the early 1990s and moved his show to CBS.  Or, at least to me at the time, it seemed like a big deal.  Staying up late was what I did back then, so the landscape of late night TV was both well-known and important to me.  And Dave, well, I always thought of Dave as being our generation’s answer to Carson, an ironic, sometimes caustic, personification of our current, more sophisticated sense of humor (yes, I know, it sounds obnoxious now but I had the typical self-infatuation that came with being young back then).  So when Dave’s new show hit the airwaves for the first time on CBS, it really was appointment viewing for me and my seeming twelve roommates at the time (we numbered more like 6 – 8, but those guys could fill a room and seemed like a small throng even when well behaved). 

Dave’s first show on CBS didn’t disappoint.  It was a completely entertaining slab of television with nary a lull in the laughs for the entire length of its running time.  Of course, as an inaugural broadcast, the show was replete with celebrity cameos.  The one that I always remember the most was, about 20 minutes in, Paul Newman stood up in the audience and asked, “Where the hell are the singing cats?”  After Dave informed him that there were, indeed, no singing cats, Newman indicated that he was in the wrong theater and walked out of the show with an air of dejection.  It was a classic WTF Letterman moment and pure comedy gold as far as I was concerned.  There used to be a clip of it on YouTube but it was pulled down several years ago, probably at the insistence of Letterman’s attorneys, otherwise I would have posted it on here for you to see for yourselves.  If you didn’t see it during the original broadcast, trust me, it was a bit that came off perfectly and the audience loved it.

However, the reason I remember it so well is that I pirated it for my own comedic purposes later that week.  I was a junior at Penn State at the time the show aired, and the following Saturday afternoon, the football team had a home game that I had a ticket for.  By this point in my college career I had a job on weekends, and wouldn’t you know I was scheduled to work that Saturday.  However, my shift was late enough where I could catch the better part of the first two quarters (the first half if I was lucky), so I resolved to go for as long as I could and then depart for my shift when the time came.

I can’t even remember who we were playing that day, but it was a great, crystal clear and sunny Saturday afternoon, perfect for an early season football game.  Unfortunately, the game lagged a little more than I hoped it would, and by midway through the 2^nd quarter, I was coming up upon the time where I needed to get the hell out of there if I was going to be at work on time.  However, as I was biding my time for a break in the game, a sudden inspiration came to me.  Now, at the time, Beaver Stadium held somewhere north of 80,000 or so people (it’s actually significantly larger now), and even though I knew that only a hundred or so would notice me if I did something stupid, the prospect of inviting attention to myself in front of that many people was still daunting.  As such, I leaned over and whispered my plan to my one roommate who was sitting next to me.  He thought it was a great idea.  So, once I had a break in the action, I stood up suddenly, and with all the adrenaline of performing live in front of thousands of people, I yelled at the top of my lungs:

“Where the hell are all the singing cats!?!?!?!?!?!!!”

I then waved my arms at the field in a dismissive gesture of disgust, and walked my ass right out of that stadium.  I have to admit, I didn’t give myself time to notice the crowd’s reaction in great detail, but I could hear my roommate laughing, and I got the general impression that roughly half of the people in my section got the reference and thought it was funny.  The other half looked at me in confusion like I was some kind of psychotic who went off his meds and was having an episode.  Either way, what really sold it was the fact that I apparently was willing to walk the hell out of a major college football game to get my joke over with the crowd.

So I left the stadium, went to work, and in the haze and activity that was a college weekend in my 20s, caught up with my roommates again maybe two or three days later.  According to them, the gag went over like gangbusters.  Of course, they may have just wanted to make me happy, or they may have been in that happy state of intoxication where everything seems funny, but either way, that was my tribute to Dave after his first show.  Recollecting it all these years later is my tribute to him after his last.  From what I understand, the quality of his show varied somewhat over the years, but he truly was my generation’s more acerbic, more sarcastic, more wickedly humorous answer to Johnny Carson.  We’ll miss you Dave.  Enjoy that sunset you’re riding off into.

And keep an eye out for those singing cats . . .

Inexplicable Things On The Internet I Find To Be Funny #2

Originally Posted February 3, 2015

This one just made me laugh and laugh and laugh . . .

Running Thoughts #3 – A Few Words About S-E-X

Originally Posted January 28, 2015

Wow, was I clueless in my youth.  And I’m not just talking about those crazy/scary teenage years when everyone is hopelessly clueless and the ones who seemed to “know where it’s at” are just the ones who were best at faking it.  I was pretty damned clueless through most of my twenties too – the time when most people are usually solidifying their identities, finding their vocations and having more sex than they’re likely to ever have the rest of their God-given lives.

You see, this column is going to take more than a little courage on my part, because while I was ignorant about a whole lot of things through my twenties, the thing I was simply the most clueless about was sex.  I’m coming clean here folks.  I’m going to reveal the full scope and depth of my ignorance for all to see – my only saving grace may be the fact that virtually no one bothers to visit my Facebook page to begin with.  But I feel compelled somehow, because, blessedly, later in life, I came to terms with sex and what it’s all about and it is only against that backdrop that I can meaningfully diagnose just why and how I was so confused about the topic to begin with. 

I realize that I am somewhat lucky – some people never come to terms with sex and spend their entire lives completely screwed up about the topic, and punishing themselves because of it.  Perhaps in disclosing just how pathetically ignorant I was about it, it may help someone else out there who is struggling with the same things I did.  Then again, maybe I’ll just be opening myself up to ridicule just because I feel compelled to post something meaningful on my Facebook page.  Fine.  Do your worst. 

Fact is, I’m OK with where I’m at with the big “S” word at this point in my life and nothing anyone is liable to think or say is likely to mess that up for me.  Also, I think it’s somewhat cathartic for me to do this.  I spent much of my youth beating myself up because of just how screwed up I was on the topic and it feels healthy and clean to look back at it now from a more informed position and see just why I was so messed up to begin with.

First things first – my illusions about sex had nothing to do with my sexual identity.  If we’re all situated somewhere on a continuum between heterosexual and homosexual (like many experts seem to agree), then I was situated pretty far down the hetero end of the neighborhood.  I really had no confusion on that score.  I loved women and their bodies.  I was quite infatuated with them.  And while I admired all parts, I really was (and remain) more of a boob man than anything.  I never had any confusing feelings about, say, my college roommate or my best friend in high school or anyone I happened to share a locker room with.  When the hormones hit the blood stream, and the hot steamy fantasies began, it was always about a woman.  And her boobs.  A woman and her boobs for sure.

But despite this clarity of preference, I was so confused on the actual topic of sex, both intellectually and emotionally, that I spent much of my youth actively avoiding situations where I might, God forbid, be faced with the prospect of having sex with someone.  Now why the hell would that be?  Some of it was from the fact that, quite frankly, I think I was emotionally behind many people my own age.  This was exacerbated somewhat by the fact that I was always one of the youngest people in my class – I was born in late July, so I was always the better part of a year behind my classmates age-wise.  As a result, I was always a little bit behind everyone else when it came to physical, mental and emotional development.  There were things my classmates were getting into that I just wasn’t ready for.  However, even when compared to people who were exactly my own age, I think I just lagged a bit behind them.  Which is OK, I realize now.  Some people take a little longer, but we all end up the same place eventually.  I’d be lying, however, if I claimed that this fact (which I was in denial about at the time), didn’t bother me.  Why in God’s name did everyone seem so comfortable and casual about the idea of having sex while it only seems to terrify me and eat away at my confidence?  The answer to that question, besides my relative immaturity in comparison to my peer group, was due to a basic misconception I had about the nature of sex.

You see, I saw sex as being inherently a selfish act.  I was so damned infatuated with the idea of it, and so very hyperaware of just how much I would enjoy it, that it was completely lost upon me that it’s supposed to be something the other person enjoys too.  I really thought that if a woman would deign to have sex with me, that it would be something solely designed to please me, to bring me pleasure, and that if it presented anything to her it would be a sacrifice, an inconvenience, quite frankly a hassle.  I mean she would have to get all naked and then she’d have to see me naked, and then we’d have to get all physical and then sweaty and then sticky and oh by God even though I know I’d be enjoying it, my Lord, what an utterly distasteful pain-in-the-ass for her!

Now I had no misconceptions about the fact that I wasn’t exactly a “catch” for anyone.  I mean, I didn’t think I was hideous but I knew I wasn’t so damned handsome that girls would be compelled to throw themselves at me.  And, as a result, I never felt I “deserved” sex from a girl.  I mean, what’s in it for her?  She won’t enjoy it.  And I’m not so damned attractive as to make up for that fact.  I was never the kind of person who felt entitled to the kindness of others, or that I deserved to have other people be inconvenienced for my sake.  And this lead, inevitably, to me being very uncomfortable about the idea of a woman deciding she would have sex with me.  When I sized myself up in my own mind against the backdrop of how little I envisioned the woman being able to enjoy it, the inevitable conclusion I came to was that I just wasn’t worth it.  I mean, Brad Pitt, I can see where he’d be worth it.  But not me.  My honest-to-God emotional reaction to the idea of a woman offering to have sex with me would be, “Oh shucks!  You don’t have to do that for little old me!”.

And you can see why, with that attitude, I wasn’t exactly a sex magnet.  Whether it was women just sensing how fundamentally uncomfortable I was with the idea, or them getting the vibe that I wouldn’t be spending a lot of time and energy attending to their needs, turning down women was never a big problem for me.  I was, or I would have been, an extremely selfish lover.  Not because I’m inherently selfish by nature – just the opposite.  But I just so fundamentally misunderstood what sex was all about that it was completely inconceivable to me that the other person would enjoy it.  So when I did steel myself up to go seek sex (which, after all, was the “normal” thing to do at that age despite how woeful I was at it), I wasn’t looking to give pleasure.  I was looking to take pleasure.  And thus, it’s not a surprise that I managed to turn off women wherever I went.

Now through a lucky or miraculous set of circumstances that occurred in my late twenties, I finally got my head on straight, and got on a path where I learned, over time, that sex is at least as much about pleasing the other person as it is about yourself.  In fact, I would argue that some of the most satisfying sexual experiences I’ve had in my life is when I know, I just know, that I’ve rendered as much pleasure to the other person as I’m physically capable of rendering - sometimes more than I’ve even received myself.  And not only is that a boon to the other person, but it turned out to be a huge relief to me.  IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT ME!  The fact that I was in a position to render pleasure to somebody else completely changed the nature and scope of what sex was all about for me.  I was no longer uncomfortable about seeking it or providing it because it was no longer an essentially selfish act.  I can’t begin to effectively convey to someone what an absolute revelation that was for me!  The whole “do unto others” thing we learned in Sunday school actually had practical application in the bedroom!  It was no longer about whether I deserved it or not, it suddenly became about – “what can we do for each other”, and I was a whole lot more comfortable getting undressed and physical with someone when that was the endgame as opposed to it being limited to my own carnal gratification.

Well, where does that leave me all these years later?  First off, it thankfully leaves me in the right place when it comes to sex, and it occurs to me that some people never get there.  However, it is undeniable that when I look over the sexual wasteland that was my twenties, I can’t help but feel there was a lot of wasted time and a lot of wasted opportunities.  The twenties are when we’re supposed to be at the height of our sexual prowess.  It’s when we’re our youngest and most attractive and most energetic.  It’s when we are relatively unshackled by the burdens of life that inevitably come later and can really branch out and experiment with all kinds of people and partners.  So in that sense, I do feel regretful.  Worse, I feel like I put myself through a lot of unwarranted psychological pain and consternation.  The fact that I was so uncomfortable about seeking sex lead me to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with me when, in reality, I was just fundamentally wrong on how I was thinking about sex.  A lot of unnecessary pain and angst resulted.

But on the other hand, I realize that in many ways I was lucky.  I wasn’t exposed to disease.  I wasn’t at risk of getting someone pregnant and becoming obligated, both emotionally and financially, to someone I may have been ill-suited for.  Also, for such an enjoyable act, sex can bring a lot of emotional pain sometimes, and I was spared the additional angst of having to jilt someone to whom the sex meant more than it did to me, or to be jilted by someone to whom the sex meant less, and all the other various incarnations of that painful little drama. 

And in the end, I kind of have to laugh at all the time, energy, angst and emotion we spend on this inexplicable little act we call sex.  I mean, when you come right down to it, we’re talking about nothing more than humankind’s fascination with mucus-covered orifices.  I’ve seen people wreck their lives, and their families, simply because they couldn’t make good decisions about this banal act.  There’s no doubt, when our biological drives in this regard overrule our minds and hearts, a lot of pain and tragedy can ensure.  Hearts can be irrevocably scarred and broken.  Families can become irrevocably split apart.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth that.

But there’s a lot of beauty in this carnal little act too, and I would challenge anyone out there who has been confused about it, unlucky at it, tired of it, at their wits end about it, to approach it instead as something they can do for somebody else.  As a selfless act.  As an act of generosity.  As an act of contrition.  As an act of grace.  Pick up a book if you have to.  Learn some pointers.  Be so otherly-focused that the next time you engage in this act that you’re not even thinking about yourself.  Be so otherly-focused that your one burning desire is to render pleasure to somebody else.  I guarantee it will change how you feel about the act.  It will change your luck.  It will change how other people react to you about it.  I’ve found it to be one of the truisms in life that if you seek to be happy, you cease to be so, and that if you seek to serve others, happiness takes care of itself.  Who knew it would work for sex too?  Not 25 year-old me, that’s for sure.

So I look back on my twenties now kind of like I would watch an old Simpson’s episode.  I watch the 20 year-old me of my memories like I would one of those beloved characters – being stupid, but loveably so.  Ultimately, I was a well-intentioned fool, uncomfortable seeking what I ultimately saw as a selfish goal, and as a result, no one ever really suffered but me.  Who else can look back at their wanton, misguided sex lives and make that claim?

And if by some miracle there is a woman or two out there who may have been disappointed when, in my ignorance, I rebuffed or ignored a sexual advance or two, know that I was ultimately looking to spare you the trouble, and that I’m sorry that I failed to realize the pleasure I could have provided you at the time.

Inexplicable Things On The Internet That I Find Funny #1

Originally Posted January 16, 2015

This perfectly encapsulated me in my late teens and early twenties . . .

Quotes By People Way Smarter Than Me #1 - Sakyong Mipham, from “Running with the Mind of Meditation”

Originally Posted December 4, 2014

“One could say that life is at least 50 percent pain. If we do not relate to pain, we are not relating to half our life. Everything is fine when we are happy, but when we are in pain, we become petrified. The inability to relate to pain narrows our playing field. When we are able to work with pain and understand it, life becomes twice as interesting. Relating to pain make us more fearless and happy.”

Running Thoughts #2 – Is “Schlock” Still “Schlock” if Robin Zander Sings the Living Shit Out of It?

Originally Posted December 10, 2014

Cheap Trick.  A legendary rock band who probably summons images of the 1970’s rock/party vibe.  “I Want You To Want Me”.  “Surrender”.  “The Dream Police”.  One of those songs is probably running through your head while reading this.  They were catchy, well-crafted rock and roll songs with a little bit of a “hard” bight from Ricky Nilsson’s crunching guitar riffs.  If your parents were young within a stone’s throw of the 70’s, they’ve probably partied to Cheap Trick, engaged in mild juvenile criminal activity to them, hell, maybe even lost their virginity to them.  You, yourself, may have been conceived to one of their songs.  And if you lived through the late 80’s/early 90’s “classic rock resurgence” that bridged the gap between hair metal and Nirvana’s grunge/alternative wave, then you’ve heard them on the radio – probably one of the three hits songs mentioned above.

Ok – are you ready now.  “The Flame”.  What’s that you say?  “The Flame”?  That late 80’s sappy power-ballad that soared to #1 and dominated the airwaves on the crest of hair metals’ popularity?  If you’re not “in the know”, you’re probably thinking, “what in the hell does that song have to do with Cheap Trick?”  And if you know what I’m talking about, and have had any affection for Cheap Trick over the years, you’re probably groaning.  Why is this, you say?

Well, Cheap Trick was the band that performed and released “The Flame”, a made-to-order “hit” that showcased the band’s 1988 album, “Lap of Luxury”.  It made the girl’s swoon.  It was the song that your 14 year-old male, in burgeoning adolescence, worked up the courage to ask his crush out on the floor to dance to in the school gymnasium.  Hell, it was probably the theme of several proms during that time period.  It was wildly successful.  It was everywhere on the radio and MTV.  So what’s the problem?  The problem is that it wasn’t your typical Cheap Trick kind of song.

Cheap Trick earned the bread & butter of their success and legacy throughout the 1970’s.  They started slow out-of-the-gate in the States, but were wildly popular in Japan where they were often referred to, and treated as, the “American Version of the Beatles”.  To that end, they toured Japan extensively, and when their seminal live album “Live from the Boudakan” was released in the States, Americans finally caught on to the band’s vibe and bought several million copies of that album.  They followed this success up with the studio release, “The Dream Police”, whose catchy, infectious title-song kept the band’s momentum going.  “The Dream Police” became a true classic that remains a staple of the band’s live set to this day.  However, when the 80’s dawned, the band, as competent and prolific as ever, just failed to stay on the airwaves.  Their songs (especially the newer releases), failed to garner any radio airplay, and they fell, very quickly, into obscurity.  And then when 80’s hair metal began its ascendancy in the mid-80’s, Cheap Trick was left out-in-the-cold, as bands younger and far less competent than them began racking up the album sales and both audio and video airplay.  They offered a more hard-rocking version of what Cheap Trick had laid the groundwork for a decade earlier, and though, in their defense, the hair metal stars were often vociferous in their praise of Cheap Trick and the influence they had on the music scene, Cheap Trick languished in obscurity.  I have a distinct memory of a 14 year-old me, complete with mullet and Ratt T-shirt, asking an incredulous senior in the high school cafeteria what the hell “Cheap Trick” meant on his own T-shirt.  They were so far off the radar at that point, that deep-penetrating sonar couldn’t have registered them on the younger generation’s consciousness.

Then “Lap of Luxury” came out in 1988.  The band’s record label, tired of the moribund sales of the band’s recent albums – gave them an ultimatum:  either let professional song writers write this album, or cool your heels and hope that the royalties on your past hits provide enough income for you to comfortably retire on.  The choice being not much of a choice, the band naturally yielded – this was an era where recording contracts were hard to get, and if your label dropped you, you may never get a whiff of real recording success again.

Given those particular ground rules, it’s no surprise that “Lap of Luxury” does not sound like a typical Cheap Trick album – it sounds like a collection of songs that record execs think sounds like a typical Cheap Trick album.  That’s not to say it’s complete shit – there are a few highlights (a stirring cover of “Don’t Be Cruel” where Robin Zander gives the King a run for his money on vocals being the most notable), but for the most part, it’s pretty weak tea.

Except for “The Flame”.  “The Flame” neither sounded like a typical Cheap Trick song, nor could it fairly be considered “weak tea”.  I mean, come on, the song made an impression.  It rose to the tops of the charts as the band’s first and only #1 hit, and dominated both MTV (which was a real force in the music industry back in the day) and the airwaves on virtually any channel not dedicated to classical music or country/western.  If you were around in the late 80’s, you couldn’t escape it.  You heard it multiple times, whether in the background at the mall, on your friend’s car radio on the way to school, or in the middle of a standard block of videos on MTV.

And where did I stand on the song at the time?  It was OK.  Honestly, it failed to appeal to me but it definitely wasn’t in the category the garnered my active hate and scorn.  I was pretty much in the middle of my heavy metal phase at this point, so it wasn’t the type of music that appealed to me.  However, by this point I had learned about Cheap Trick and had a grudging respect for them as a band, and while this kind of ballad wasn’t my thing, it didn’t elicit the kind of disdain I normally reserved for Richard Marx, Whitney Houston or the New Kids on the Block.  So it played incessantly in the background and I barely paid attention to it and apparently it wormed its way deep into my subconscious where it hibernated for nigh on 25 years before re-emerging like a cicada to the forefront of my attention.

Why do I characterize it that way?  Well, a couple of months ago, I had a dream.  At that point, I was at the height of my long overdue “get my ass back into shape” phase and it truly was not an exaggeration to say that not only was I working out at the gym nearly every day, but I also spent several nights a week working out in my dreams.  This one was a little peculiar though in that while I was running (which is my normal “dream exercise” seemingly), I was passing all these memories of people and events from high school, like I was slowly jogging my way through a long, ethereal dream-tunnel of memories from the eighties.  And can you guess what the soundtrack of this dream sequence was?  You betcha.  Cheap Trick’s, “The Flame”.  The song I barely paid attention to.  The song I probably hadn’t heard in well over a decade-and-a-half.  And as sometimes happens to me while slumbering (maybe once or twice a year), I felt oh-so heroic in that dream.  Not that I was doing anything particularly heroic in it, mind you.  I’ve found over the years that dreams are not so much about what’s happening in them, as they are about what you’re feeling while the dream events are happening.  And I felt like I was straining heroically through my jog.  Like all these people from the past, all these friends and loved ones, adored me and counted on me to get through this jog for some monumentally important purpose that nonetheless remained undefined.  It was like one of those training sequences from those interminable 80’s action movies where the nominal hero, having gotten kicked around in the first part of the movie, undergoes a stirring training scene with Survivor or Journey playing the background only to overcome all odds at the end and emerge triumphant.  Except, in my dream, it wasn’t Survivor or Journey providing the soundtrack.  It was Cheap Trick, and the song was, “The Flame”.

So, upon waking, I found myself suddenly paying attention to, and having all these seemingly profound emotions about, a song that hadn’t crossed my radar in ages.  So, of course, I had to look it up on YouTube and listen to it – which I did.  The lyrics are typical made-to-order, appeal-to-the-mainstream pap, custom designed to sound inspirational and meaningful without actually having any meaning what so ever (ala Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”).  Musically, it was nothing special either.  A very simple opening note progression played on an acoustic guitar (quietly – so as to show how sensitive the artist is being), builds to soaring choruses punctuated with intermittently-placed power chords to emotively demonstrate that, yes, while I’m being loving and sensitive here, my feelings are so damn strong they deserve to be punctuated by power chords damn it!

But I loved it.  And I was eating it up.  And I was playing it over and over while at the gym doing my cardio on my favorite running apparatus, and it was inspiring me to new personal bests in terms of time and distances.

What the fuck was going on here?

Well, as time passed, of course the shiny aura that my dream placed over the song began to fade and I’ve been able to look at it a little more objectively since.  No doubt, my dream, and the feelings that accompanied it, was largely responsible for my sudden obsession with the song that flared out brightly over a couple of weeks.  That aside, the song is not completely without merit.

To whit – Robin Zander, Cheap Trick’s vocalist and sometimes second guitarist, sings the living shit out of that song.  I say this objectively in a manner completely devoid of bullshit.  He.  Sings.  The.   Living.  Shit.  Out.  Of.  That.  Song.

I could just end there and let the video roll, but I feel compelled to punctuate this with a few more emphatic statements before closing.  I always kind of knew, but only more recently have I adamantly felt, that Robin Zander is a fantastic vocalist.  In fact, I would go out to say that he is probably the single most underrated rock and roll vocalist of all time (which is a fitting destiny considering he sings for one of the most criminally underrated rock and roll bands of all time).  Above, I alluded to the fact that he gave Elvis Presley himself a run for the money on his version of “Don’t Be Cruel”, which, not ironically, was also a very successful single off of the “Lap of Luxury” album.  You can say what you want about Cheap Trick and what you think of their music and what you further think of the executively-produced “Lap of Luxury” album.  But one thing you can’t say is that they didn’t have a singer who could, and routinely did, sing the paint off the walls.

So it brings me back to the titular question of this installment of “Running Thoughts”, is “The Flame” still schlock despite the excellence that Robin’s vocals bring to the song?  That, of course, is probably a matter of opinion.  However, if one were to hold a gun to my head, I’d have to admit that yes, objectively speaking, the song is every bit the contrived piece of pap I described it as.  However, there are times when, through the efforts of a true artist plying their craft, even pap can reach heights and obtain worth it never should have normally aspired to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ready to put “The Flame” up there with “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Stairway to Heaven”, but, through the heroic efforts and divinely-bestowed talents of Robin Zander, it merits more consideration than a throw-away pop ballad from the 80’s normally would.  If nothing else, it is worthy of being a “guilty pleasure”, as it has for me late in life.  Though in this case, I think it’s a completely defensible “guilty pleasure” and shows that, even in the most contrived, artistically devoid situations, true worth can be brought to the table by a phenomenally gifted artist giving it their all.

So I’ll leave you with this clip of Cheap Trick playing “The Flame”.  Keep in mind that this particular clip is done live at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach Florida, and not in the sterile confines of a recording studio.  This song isn’t being filtered through a mixer to iron-out the rough spots.  And this long precedes the era of auto-tuning where even chumps like me can have their singing wrung through a computer to ensure that all the notes are hit at the right times.  Nonetheless, Robin gives a nearly flawless performance with this song, hitting every note in a way that today’s audio-enhanced artists can only dream of.  Give it a chance.  Listen to the whole damn thing.  And keep in mind that this is live in every way, shape and form.  I increasingly believe that live vocal performances of this nature, at least in popular music, are slowly becoming a thing of the past.  In which case, I would say this clip should be preserved in the Smithsonian someday.  Stand up and take notice kiddies, this is how it used to be done.

 

And if you just can’t stand this version of Cheap Trick, fine then you cold, unfeeling excuse for a human being.  Here’s “Surrender”: