BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Well, when it comes to “age” the proverbial Big Three Oh is languishing somewhere in a valley well behind a mountain range that is rapidly shrinking in my rear view mirror. That is to say, 30 was a long, long time ago… An entire voting and drafting age adult ago, in fact. However, if you do the math it works out that I took my final bow at Ritenour Senior High thirty years ago this past June. And, like most high school alumni association type folks, mine tossed a shindig to celebrate this milestone.

The party – or parties, I should say – in question occurred this past weekend (July 16 & 17), at two different locations, beginning with a “Multi Year Happy Hour” at the Lemp Mansion on Friday evening, which saw graduates spanning ’73 – ’84.  (Yours truly was a member of the “hosting class” for the shindig, 1980). Much fun was had, many old faces seen. Some old faces with new construction. Some old faces that hadn’t changed. But mostly, we were all just old. I visited with friends I hadn’t seen in 30 years, and some I hadn’t seen in 5. I even visited with people I didn’t know that I knew and am still not entirely certain that I know, if that makes any sense. As a rule, it seemed a healthy chunk of the folks knew me – or of me – whereas I had a passing familiarity with a much smaller percentage, and am friends with an even smaller number than that.

This can be a little disconcerting, but beer helps. Several beers helps even more…

Night two was the “Class of 80 Reunion Proper” and it was held at the Missouri Athletic Club – a posh private club in downtown Saint Louis with fancy ballrooms and high end food. Suffice it to say, when the elaborate appetizer table features plenty of Stilton and Brie among the countless selections, you definitely aren’t talking “supermarket cheese tray” here. This is some upscale digs.

At any rate, the evening was filled with more chatting, old faces, new old faces, old new faces, and as always seems to be the case with me, a bit of the bizarre. What follows here is a Facebook note I put out there to recap the evening. Since many of my blog readers aren’t on FB, I thought I’d re-run it here:

RHS Class of ’80 30 Year Reunion Recap…

...from the perspective of a satire slinging suspense-thriller author, of course.

Drive… Drive… Drive.
Park
Walk… Walk… Walk…

Check in table…

Kathy (Not EK): MURV!
Me: KATHY!
Teri: Here’s your nametag.
Me: I have a nametag? YAY! I’m SOMEBODY!!!
Teri: Have fun.
Me: We’ll try. But if we don’t it’s your fault and I’m going to come looking for you.
Teri: SECURITY!

Mingle… Mingle…

Me: Yeah, the redhead will have a tonic with a twist. What kind of beer do you have?
Bartender: AB this… AB that… AB the other… AB… AB…
Me: What, no C?
Bartender: AB this… AB that… AB the other… AB… AB…

Random Classmate: Hi.
Me: Hi, ummm, do I know you?
Random Classmate: I don’t know, but I know you.
Me: Sorry… I just can’t place you.
Random Classmate: You’re that guy.
Me: I am?
Random Classmate: Yeah.
Me: Oh, uh, okay.

Mingle… Mingle…

Random Classmate: Hi. We went to school together.
Me: Ummm, yeah. I think that could be said for most everyone in the room. Here’s your sign.

Random Classmate: Picture, picture. I need a picture.
(smile) {flash}
Random Classmate: Me too! Me too!
(smile) {flash}
Random Classmate: Over here, Murv!
(smile) {flash}
(smile) {flash}
(smile) {flash}
{little floaty spots in front of my face}
Music in my head: BLINDED BY THE LIGHT, REVVED UP LIKE A…

[hug]
[hug}
[handshake]
[hug]
[handshake]

E K: Who was that?
Me: I have no effing idea.

[hug]
[hug]
[handshake]

Random Classmate: Murv! How are you? Remember that time when we blah blah whatchmacallit blah?
Me: Ummm. No?
Random Classmate: Oh come on. We blah blah, then bla… Oh… Wait… That wasn’t you. Sorry.
Me: No problem. I get that a lot.
Random Classmate: Ummmm… I hear you write books now.
Me: That’s the rumor.
Random Classmate: You’re going to put this in a book aren’t you?
Me: (nodding) Yeah. Probably. At the very least I’ll make fun of you in a blog or something.

Random Classmate: Hi.
Me: Hi.
Random Classmate: Do you know me?
Me: Hell no, I don’t even know myself.
Random Classmate: You’re that guy, right?
Me: That’s what I’ve been hearing.
Random Classmate: No. Really. You’re that guy.
Me: Okay, you got me. I’m that guy. But, sometimes when I’m feeling pretty, I’m that girl.
Random Classmate: O_o.
Me: Yeah, kinda scary, huh? (Especially since I look nothing at all like Marlo Thomas.)

BUFFET LINE…

E K: Woohoo! VEGGIES!
Random Classmate: (pointing) Ummm… What’s that?
Me: (pointing) Grilled eggplant, grilled zucchini, grilled asparagus, grilled portabello mushroom, grilled peppers…
Random Classmate: Oh… those are vegetables, right? I’ll pass…
Me: You’d have a much easier time with that if you actually ate some of the veggies. Fiber, ya’know.
Random Classmate: O_o

Eat… Eat…Eat…

DJ Jazzy J And The Funky Bunch – YO! {{{feedback… buzzzzz… squeal… feedback}}}
[MYOO-ZIK – Thumpita Thumpita TWANG THUMPA]

Random Classmate: HI!
Me: WHAT?
Random Classmate: HI!
Me: WHAT?
Random Classmate: YOU’RE MURV, RIGHT?
Me: OH, I THINK IT’S JUST DOWN THE HALL.
Random Classmate: WHAT?

Me: (relating an anecdote to friends) …And then at my last book launch I had someone who actually believed she’s a “REAL vampire slayer” and wanted to “slay” my fans when they showed up.
Steve, Cathy, and Nathan: You actually get crazy people showing up?
Me: At least one at every event. Sometimes more…
(frantic high heels coming closer – clickity, clackity, clickety, clackety…)
Random Classmate: You don’t know me, but I know about you!
Me: What will it take for you to not call the police? I really can’t afford another strike on my record right now.
Random Classmate: O_o… Ummm… I know who you are.
Me: I’m glad someone does, because I lost my wallet.
Random Classmate: No… You don’t understand… I know what you do.
Me: Like I said, how much for you to not call the police?
Random Classmate: No… You write books.
Me: I’ve heard that about me.
Random Classmate: Well, have I got a story for you!
Me: Really? What is it?
Random Classmate: I can’t tell you because you’ll steal it.
Me: Yeah, I don’t blame you. Just can’t trust us author types.
Random Classmate: But I’ll sell it to you.
Me: Sugar, no offense, but I have more ideas running around in my head than I’ll be able to write in my lifetime, so I’m not going to steal it or buy it.
Random Classmate: But this has never been done before and it will make a great movie.
Me: So, what is it?
Random Classmate: I can’t tell you. You’ll steal it.
E K: [giggle]
Steve, Cathy, Nathan: Crap… You weren’t kidding, were you?

{flash} {flash}
[hug hug]

Random Classmate: Hmmnimmm… Wharz baffoom?
Me: Hall to the left.
Random Classmate: Hmmmnim.
clickety, clackety, clickety, clackety, CRASH!
Steve, Nathan, Cathy, EK, Me: (checking on the noise) Are you okay?
Random Classmate: Hmminnmm rmmm hhmminnimmmmm…

(frantic high heels coming closer – clickity, clackity, clickety, clackety…)
Previous Random Classmate: I’ve got a story… I’ve got a story… I’ve got a story…
Steve, Cathy, and Nathan: This is going in a book, isn’t it?
Me: Probably.

Various Classmates: Bye… See you in five years.
Me: Bye. See you on Facebook.

Many of my friends keep telling me that my experience has something to do with celebrity. I think they’re wrong, because we didn’t have any celebrities at the reunion, other than the folks who worked so hard to put the shindig together.

Rumor has it the 35th is going to be a 4 day cruise. I have to wonder if I’ll be hearing clickity, clackity, clickety, clackety… stumble… gaaahhhhhhh! SPLASH!

I hope not, but if I do I’ll have no choice but to put it in a book. After laughing so hard that my drink shoots out my nose... Why? Because I’m that guy.

More to come…

Murv

(Pictured: Photo 1 – Dave Perkins, M. R. Sellars, E K… Photo 2 – Kathy Patterson Inkley, M. R. Sellars…)

If you have been following me on Facebook in recent months, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I posted a whole slew of pictures from my high school years. This was brought about by the fact that I happened to stumble across a Facebook Group devoted to KRSH FM 90.1, (Now KRHS FM) the school radio station where I cut my teeth on broadcast media and moreover real, hardcore Journalism, at the direction of a fantastic teacher and faculty advisor, Martha Ackmann. But, I’ll babble on about that in a different blog. (Yeah, just gotta love chasing those chickens, eh?)… You see, the only reason I even brought that up is that it ties in with the fact that I was an avid photographer as well and I worked for the school newspaper and yearbook in that capacity… But, now we are running after a rooster… The deal is, I actually made myself a side business out of photography in the early to mid 90’s.

E K and I were partners with some other folks in a Saint Louis based sound recording studio… Yeah, yeah, I know… What does sound recording have to do with photography? Well, actually that’s an easy question to answer. Recording studios draw in bands; bands need publicity photos and CD artwork. See where I’m going? Yeah, it just sort of made sense… Therefore, we came up with the idea that having it all under one roof just might work. So, I dusted off and reassembled my darkroom, invested in a bit of updated equipment… Well, it was updated back then. Now, not so much. But, I digress… Anyway, back to the story, toss in setting up a couple of wholesale accounts for supplies, and there you go. We had ourselves a part-time photography business.

Well, the story behind the studio and how it eventually fell into financial ruin is a blog unto itself, which in order to protect the innocent will probably never see paper, electronic or otherwise. Suffice it to say, we had ourselves a good run while it lasted, and we actually did quite a few unique, fun, and even at times profitable, photo sessions in conjunction with recording sessions, bands, and even their groupies.

But, here’s the thing… I had pretty much pushed a lot of that completely to the back of my mind. I honestly hadn’t remembered how many shoots we had done until the other day when I was searching out pictures to scan for the whole KRSH thing I mentioned earlier. The whole mess came flooding back to the forefront when I found myself sifting through a 4-drawer file cabinet full of contact sheets, stripped proofs for publicity photos, and tons of negatives.

Yeah, a lot of pictures, both printed and unprinted… Fortunately, they were organized and labeled, which is obviously something I did back before I returned to my natural state of “messy desk habitat”…

Now, just to be annoying, I’m going to switch gears on you. Chase a different feathered fowl so to speak… Trust me, the rooster and the chicken eventually meet up and make cute little yellow chicks. Just give the egg a minute or two so it can hatch… I promise, it really will…

Some of you may remember from the “Mahwage” series of blog entries that I had mentioned E K being on the drill team when she was in high school. Well, because of that I have a tendency to refer to her as having been a cheerleader, to which she always replies, “I wasn’t a cheerleader, I was on the drill team.” It’s not that she has anything against cheerleaders… She just likes to clarify things.  She’s very direct like that… And, she’s evil… Anyway, it would seem that at her school at least, there was a hierarchy. Cheerleaders first, followed several rungs down the ladder by the Drill Team. Kind of a “cool kid caste system”… Okay, I’ll give you that… We had our own “caste system” when I was in high school, and I was right near the bottom of it… Actually, I don’t think I even qualified to even be on it… I think I was on the waiting list to get on the last line of the caste list, or something like that… So, what I am saying is that I get it. Cheerleaders were apparently “cooler” than the girls on the drill team.

Still, when you get right down to it, E K was way up on the ladder in relation to where I was. If I can use my high school experiences as a benchmark, she was in the top 5% of coolness, whereas I was overheated in hell. And, by the same token, the young ladies on the drill team wore uniforms… And, what were those uniforms? Fuzzy sweaters, really short skirts, and saddle oxfords… Or, those little mini-dress looking things in the summer… Anyway,  I rest my case.  The simple fact is, to a zit-faced outcast nerd like myself, if it looked like a cheerleader, wore clothes like a cheerleader, and bounced around like a cheerleader, then it was a cheerleader… And, of course, was therefore the object of many an adolescent fantasy.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be pornographic here… I’m just telling it like it is. But, since pornography has been mentioned, anyone with two brain cells in their head can look at popular media references and see that the whole cheerleader fantasy extends to the adult male as well. Therefore, I really and truly am making an objective observation here…

So, my initial point being this… I may have been a zit-faced nerd in high school, but I married myself a smokin’ hot cheerleader, so bite me! Neener, neener…

Just kidding… Well… A little bit, but kinda serious too… In any case, that right there would be the subjective observation…

Okay, now let’s see if we can get that chicken married off to that rooster…

As I was going through the stacks of negatives in search of nostalgic shots of 16-18 year old journalism students collecting MIPA awards, prattling nonsensically into microphones, or just generally being teenagers who happened to have to good fortune of working at a high school radio station, I ran across a manila folder labeled “B&W Proofs – Kat in Advertisement“.

You see, during the old recording studio/photo studio days, one of our partners actually worked in the darkroom at a local advertising agency. Whenever they would have a local job we had the opportunity to bid on it. And so, one Saturday morning, I received a phone call from my friend, telling me the agency needed an “emergency product shoot with a model” for a big client. They needed proofs and slides by that evening and on top of that they had not yet hired a model. As it turned out, models and photographers were apparently hard for them to come by at the last minute, so they wanted to know if we could handle it. The specs were fairly simple… They wanted us to shoot a roll of Black and White Negatives and a roll of Color Transparencies, (AKA – slides), of a pretty woman, clad in business clothing, filling a tire on a nice looking car, using the client’s product. That product was, of course, a fix-a-flat in a can sort of thing.

So, we loaded up the equipment, ran my relatively new Cutlass Supreme through the car wash… The Cutlass was a company car provided by the computer repair outfit for which I worked full time back then… and then set up a shoot on the parking lot of the studio with our model….

And, as you can see from the pictures, our model was none other than E K herself. Yes… E K… In a matter of a 60-minute shoot and about 2 hours in a darkroom, the Evil One became the hands, face, and legs of “The Pump,” Pyroil’s fix-a-flat in a can. Yep, she was the “Tire Babe” in advertisements and promotional materials around the country. I often wonder if they did up one of those life-sized cardboard cutouts to use as a display in auto parts stores. If they did, something tells me some grease monkey somewhere has one tacked up on the wall in his garage…

At least, let’s hope it’s just the garage…

So, why am I telling you all this? Simple… Besides being one of those little bits of nostalgia that just happened to slap me in the back of the head, there’s an even more important point… An extremely important point, in fact, even if it is purely selfish and a tad bit juvenile… But hey, I’m a guy and it’s my job to be juvenile every now and then…

At any rate, the point would be the following… Not only did this zit-faced, klutzy, outcast nerd marry a cheerleader, he married a model… Yeah… Bite me again.

So, can I get a big ol’ “neener neener” from the crowd?

Yeah, life is good… And, I’m one hell of a lucky bastard… I know that.  But, it really is too bad E K doesn’t have that drill team uniform anymore…

More to come…

Murv