♬ Hello my honey ♬ Hello my baby ♬ Hello my ragtime gaaaal! ♬
I like frogs.
Not real frogs, in a terrarium as pets. They aren’t exactly cuddly. I do like frogs’ legs, though. They aren’t cuddly either; just delicious.
It’s just something I like collecting. Frog stuff: Frogs on T‑shirts; Far Side cartoons that feature frogs; ceramic frogs. Some folks collect Matchbox cars; some folks collect comic books. I collect frogs.
I was in Topeka, KS—my home town—last week. And there’s a sports bar in Topeka called Jeremiah Bullfrogs. They have a cool frog statue at the door and framed Far Side comics and lots of other frog stuff. So whenever I visit Topeka I have to visit Jeremiah Bullfrogs.
JBs recently moved to a much larger building, which I was glad to see, what with all the locally owned businesses around the country driven out of business by the pandemic.
With the added space came more frog bric-a-brac, including an amusing sign for Gooch’s Best Bullfrog Feed, and this movie poster:
Yes, you read that right: It’s a movie titled Frogs, and it stars Sam Elliott and Joan Van Ark.
What kind of movie would you expect based on this poster? We’ve got a couple lurid taglines: “TODAY—The Pond! ; TOMORROW—The World!” and “It’s the day that Nature strikes back!”
We also have a frog with a human arm dangling from its mouth like a cigar.
An even more turgid poster for Frogs reads “A TIDAL WAVE OF SLITHERING, SLIMY HORROR DEVOURING, DESTROYING ALL IN ITS PATH! A terrifying story of times to come when Nature strikes back!”
It looked like a really cheap horror flick to me, and when I looked it up—yep, it’s a bad horror movie released in 1972 with a budget of about $37.
Based on the posters you’d expect giant frogs to be running around eating people, like Night of the Lepus with frogs instead of rabbits:
Or frogs hijacking an airport control tower and making planes crash like Die Hard 2. Maybe frogs killing people and assuming their identities, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or stabbing women in the shower à la Psycho, or even zombie frogs.
Shoot, they could have gone for a microbudget horror flick with some interesting new ideas, even if it was dirt cheap: Like Phantasm, with the flying brain-slurping metal balls and the extremely cool Hemi ‘Cuda; or Evil Dead, with Army of Darkness and the S‑Mart boomstick, both of which spawned franchises despite budgets that wouldn’t even fund a high school cafeteria for two days.
They clearly weren’t interested in breaking any new ground on this, and anyone they plagiarized would be too embarrassed to sue. So I expected Frogs to be so bad it was fun to watch.
Alas, Frogs was instead so bad it plummeted WAY past “so bad it was good” territory and was just really, really bad.
I found the whole movie on YouTube for free. Apparently none of the streaming services will touch Frogs. Maybe they’re embarrassed by it, but I think it’s more likely they’re incapable of scruples or embarrassment; they just realized they’d never make a penny by streaming it.
So I watched it. Now you don’t have to. No, don’t thank me. I’m just doing what any selfless hero would do.
Here’s the “plot”: Sam Elliott plays Pickett Smith, a photographer paddling around a swamp in a canoe and taking pictures of trash in the swamp. (Here’s how brainless this movie was: They missed a perfect chance to have a Native American guy standing there crying, but they blew it.)
His name was Iron Eyes Cody. Meeting President Carter ruined Cody’s career: He couldn’t stop smiling.
Pickett Smith is the only character name I can remember, and that’s only because, while I was struggling not to slip into a coma, I thought his name was Wilson Pickett for a minute, which reminded me of “Everybody Needs Somebody” from The Blues Brothers, which in turn gave me a few seconds of fond nostalgia before I realized I was totally off-track, which led to the kind of bitter disappointment we all felt when George Lucas was smart enough to hire Lawrence Kasdan to write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and part of Return of the Jedi, so we were all pumped to see The Phantom Menace until we discovered Lucas decided he could just write all the screenplays without Kasdan’s help, which led to ghastly abortions of dialog like Anakin Skywalker, trying to suave his way into Padme’s pants by saying “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere” and WHAT THE HELL WAS LUCAS THINKING?!?
Sorry. I swear, by Crom’s crunchy crotch croutons; so many fond hopes and dreams scuttled by a badass Jedi knight and heartstoppingly powerful and evil Sith lord who whines, literally, about sand in his boxers.
Where was I? Joan Van Ark plays a simpering airhead who does nothing. I mean that literally: For the entire movie she just stands around doing nothing. Nothing at all. I suspect they paid her enough to show up but not enough to make her want to do any acting.
There are some other characters, but they’re all as lifeless and useless as Joan Van Airhead.
Anyway, Elliott comes across a family living in an old antebellum mansion on an island in the middle of the swamp. I’d say it looked like an old plantation house, but in a swamp? I mean, if you’re running a plantation you need to have cotton or tobacco or something to harvest. What would they harvest in a swamp?
The minute Elliot shows up, weird things start happening; from there on out they apparently couldn’t decide between ripping off a teen slasher film, with idiot teens being murdered one by one, or ripping off Hitchcock’s The Birds, except with frogs.
I say that because there were dozens of cutaway scenes of the lawn outside the house swarming with frogs, which were obviously being thrown in front of the camera by offscreen frog wranglers.
Here’s where the fun starts: The characters start disappearing and winding up dead. The frogs are here! TODAY, the World!! A TIDAL WAVE OF SLITHERING, SLIMY HORROR!
Wanna know how many people the frogs kill? I kept track. Here’s how many people the frogs kill:
Zero.
Oh, the movie does have a respectable body count: About a dozen people, plus hints about this being a worldwide frogpocalypse. Here’s how the idiots die:
Idiot 1: A guy goes fishing and gets killed by a rattlesnake.
Idiot 2: Next a guy looking for the first dead guy gets offed by—I’m not making this up—a rattlesnake bite, followed by fronds of Spanish Moss on a weeping willow: The fronds come to life and strangle the poor bastard. This is followed by him being devoured by scorpions (scorpions? In a swamp?), a bunch of lizards and baby crocodiles, and finally tarantulas, which set about eating him and covering him with webs.
Idiot 3: A matronly old ninny wanders around in the swamp trying to catch butterflies. She also gets a rattlesnake bite followed by other critters devouring her.
Idiot 4: Meanwhile, one of the other stupid adults is wondering if the missing matronly ninny is in the greenhouse. While he’s looking around in the greenhouse, a gecko starts knocking things off a shelf like an ornery cat.
It goes beyond cat mischief, though: Someone has thoughtfully left a dozen or so large, fragile glass jars of various poisons stored on flimsy shelves. They ooze all over the place, dissolving stuff faster than Alien blood and filling the room with toxic gasses; the dumb guy in the greenhouse dies about 3 steps from the door, through which he makes no attempt to escape.
Idiot 5: Another idiot takes his boat to a marina across the lake. He stop to gas up the boat, whereupon a Komodo Dragon (in an American swamp?) bites the rope tether, making the boat drift off. The idiot jumps in to swim out to the boat an gets attacked by Anaconda-size snakes, which, unlike Anacondas, live in an American swamp and which also, unlike Anacondas, are venomous.
Idiot 6: Idiot 5’s wife sees him leaving, runs down to the shore to beg him to come back, gets her feet stuck in the mud, and winds up feeding alligators.
Meanwhile, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, a couple of useless kids and an old fart in a wheelchair barricade themselves in the house. Elliott says, “We should leave.”
The old fart in the wheelchair says, “I ain’t leaving!.”
So Elliott and Van Ark and the useless kids paddle Elliott’s canoe across the lake. There they discover what happened to the plantation house’s servants, who fled earlier:
Idiots 7 thru 11: Well, actually, they just find a couple of suitcases in a parking lot, so we don’t know what happened. This must have been scary back in ’72, because when they spot the suitcases the soundtrack plays a scary crash sound thingy like King Kong just showed up.
Idiot 12: And finally, we see the old fart in his wheelchair looking around in terror as the off-screen frog wranglers start throwing frogs through the windows instead on the lawn outside.
So the old fart keels over dead, even though none of the frogs touched him.
Thus endeth Frogs.
Most actors have an embarrassing commercial or short-lived sitcom role in their past that they’d rather forget. Sam Elliott has been in a couple bombs and weird movies, such as The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (I’m not making that up either).
I bet Sam Elliott wishes he’d been in a cheap porno rather than Frogs.
Here’s the whole movie if you’re a glutton for punishment:
And now, children, hear and remember the tale of me, Billy Paul, Mrs. Jones, my friend Rob, and my dog Meatball:
Long, long ago, in a little state named Kansas, which no one wants to admit coming from except the classic rock band Kansas and possibly Bob Dole, two young men and a dog were tooling around town in the legendary muscle car Charles the Deep Breather, which probably sounds silly because you weren’t there, but which would make perfect sense if you were there, because Charles breathed very, VERY deeply indeed, and communicated in a subsonic, almost heavenly, rumble that made fans of glasspack mufflers sneer, fans of turbo mufflers weep tears of pure joy, and everyone else say, “That car! It—it spoke to me! It made my panties moist and/or my jeans tight “(depending on their gender)”, and I want to run after it to hear and understand and remember its teaching, but I can’t because I have nothing but two legs, while Charles the Deep Breather boasts 8 cylinders and 318 wholesome, part-of-this-nutritious-breakfast Detroit cubic inches (plus a .30 radius of bored-out glimmery smooth cylinder walls, rebuilt 340 heads, a 60,000-volt Mallory racing ignition coil, graphite ignition wiring, an aluminum Edelbrock intake manifold, a 600 CFM Holley four-barrel carburetor, a bunch of other racing parts no one gives a shit about, and the most important component of all: the storied underdash Pioneer Supertuner pumping its juicy American-made stereophonic DNA through a 60-watt graphic equalizer and finally into the Holy Grail of mobile tunes: a pair of 6x9 Jensen triaxial speakers!”
And on this long ago night, my friend Rob, my dog Meatball, and I were engaged in the…
Anyway, Rob and Meatball and I were—okay, now what? Oh, you think it was cruel to name him Meatball? Look here: People should not name animals. We should instead listen to our animals and use the names they choose. Meatball was named Meatball because that’s the name he wanted me to use.
So! We were observing the time-honored tradition of getting drunk via a cooler of beer in Charles the Deep Breather’s back seat as we drove around, which also sounds silly (if not downright irresponsible) if you weren’t there, but if you were there it made perfect sense that two friends, a dog, one car, and some beer all had to be enjoyed simultaneously, because that’s just the way it was and get off my lawn.
Rob, Meatball and I had been drinking, driving and rocking out for a couple hours and had just finished listening, on cassette, to Queen’s 1975 album “A Night at the Opera,” with punishingly high decibels, and for some reason we couldn’t agree which cassette/band/album we should listen to next, so I just flipped the Supertuner’s switch from cassette to radio and we started listening to KDVV, aka V‑100, to see if anything good popped up.
And it did. To an exponential degree, it did.
The moment we switched over to V‑100, Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” had just started. And Rob and I (and, I am convinced, Meatball), we all loved “Me and Mrs. Jones.”
Meatball generally showed his approval by wagging his tail, while I, carefully and wisely, avoided trying to sing along with music if anyone else was present, even if it was just Meatball. To do otherwise would probably violate the Geneva Convention.
Rob, on the other hand, was and is an excellent vocalist. Meatball and I were both delighted to delegate the mouth music to him.
Billy Paul had just finished the first stanza from “Me and Mrs. Jones,” and was gathering his strength to explode into his famous refrain: “Meeeyeee aaaayaaand… MISSUS! Mrs. Jones Mrs. Jones Mrs. Jones Mrs. Jones! We got a thing going on!”
And Meatball and I were happy to be The Pips to Rob’s Gladys Knight, reasoning that with Rob bellowing out the chorus along with Billy Paul’s ear-shattering voice hammering out of the Jensen Triaxials, we could add to the overall volume without drifting too far off-key.
And the moment arrived: Billy Paul’s thundering “Mee-yeee aaayaaand MISSUS! Mrs Jones!” plus Meatball and I uttering an unreasonable facsimile thereof, and the other cars and traffic sounds and other urban background noises, all setting the stage for and pumping up Rob’s better-n-average contribution, and the whole world screeched to a halt and cocked its ear to see what Rob’s contribution would be, and he did not disappoint:
Verily did he openeth his lips, and he sang with all his might, and he utter—uttereth, no, utteredeth… SHIT! Okay, he proclaimed to the heavenly skies above and the rest of us mere mortals, and he sang:
“Weeeyeeee aaaaayand MISSUS!” and then he paused, realizing he was having a little pronoun trouble exacerbated by beer, because “Meeeyeee” and “Weeeyeee” are radically dissimilar, even as I was wondering why he paused, and then Meatball whispered to me “Who’s this ‘we’? You got a mouse in your pocket?” and I blurted out “ ‘WE?’ Ooh! Menage a trois!”
And Meatball started laughing, as did Rob, and I started laughing as well but then belatedly realized hey, maybe I shouldn’t veer left and kill us all.
In conclusion, we all got home in one piece even though we all laughed so much no court in the nation would have convicted us for being unable to drive, and then I ran away and got married to an unreasonably beautiful and amazing woman who by all rights could have landed Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt but instead she chose ME, and had two kids, and somewhere along the way also Rob got married and had a kid, and I bet him feels the same way about his wife and son too, so I’m pretty sure I don’t need to threaten him with telling his wife about our stupid juvenile behavior and hey Rob, I love you and thanks for giving me so much of your time way back then.
Back in ’82, I went over to my friend Rob’s house one summer day, and for some reason he had a black laundry marker and a bunch of letter stencils, and he wanted to put some slogans on some shirts.
For some reason—quite possibly the same reason Rob had a black laundry marker and a bunch of letter stencils—we were wearing identical gray tank tops, and this all reeked of portentous foreshadowings.
Alcohol may have been involved.
We had one T‑shirt each, so first drafts and revisions were out of the question. Despite alcohol’s possible involvement, we had to do some adulting and settle on our shirts’ messages.
So we sat down and watched an Incredible Hulk rerun titled “Metamorphosis,” in which Bruce Banner lands a sound engineer position for a punk rocker played by MacKenzie Phillips, because if you need a sound engineer, everyone knows you look for an expert in gamma rays and cellular biology.
Someone slips Banner acid, so of course he gets scared, and we get to enjoy the Hulk staggering around trippin’ balls while MacKenzie Phillips sings her earsplitting hit song “Necktie Nightmare” in front of a gigantic pair of high-voltage electrodes shooting perfectly safe 50-foot lightning bolts across the stage, and the also-stoned fans think it’s part of the show, so MacKenzie Phillips ditches her punk bonafides to turn into Amy Grant.
Meanwhile, we got to laughing so hard Rob fell off the couch and I almost wet myself.
After the Hulk was finished with “Necktie Nightmare,” and after more contemplation and discussion, along with more of the possibly involved alcohol, we settled upon messages to stencil on our shirts, making them T‑shirts that would have helped Bill and Ted’s music to bring harmonic balance to the universe much earlier if Bill and Ted had been wearing shirts with the most totally excellent and bodacious stencils we created
With our new world-changing T‑shirts finished, and after some more possibly involved alcohol, we decided we needed to get out there and let the world see them. The T‑shirts, that is. Not the impressive pile of empty beer bottles.
So we hopped into my car, aka the legendary Charles the Deep Breather, and engaged in one of our favorite pastimes: Driving around and drinking beer while enjoying music generated by the vigorous pelvic thrusts of the renowned Pioneer SuperTuner and lustily pumped out through the inimitable Jensen 6x9 Triaxials.
As we cruised up Topeka Boulevard, we saw that the Kansas State Fair was underway, so we parked and wandered around with a couple of warm, overpriced state fair beers rather than the cooler full of ice-cold reasonably-priced beers waiting for us in Charles the Deep Breather’s back seat.
As we passed all the rigged games, a carny guy looking for someone to blow $80 to get a nasty-smelling imported teddy bear that was probably stuffed with asbestos accosted us.
Seriously? I mean yes, this is played for laughs on a TV show where everyone was in on the joke. But while teenagers can be abysmally stupid (watch any horror movie), no one would think an unshaven middle-aged carny with B.O. that could kill Godzilla was a nice fellow teen who wanted to discuss T‑shirts. Yeesh.
“Hey there, fellas!” he said.
Rob lit a cigarette and crimped an eye at him. “Yo.”
“Those are nice T‑shirts!” the carny guy said, looking as convincing as that “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme with Steve Buscemi, no doubt thinking the fellow kids said, “Why, there’s that groovy cat with the skateboard (or nasty-smelling teddy bear)!” rather than “Here comes Chester the Molester again–run!”
“DENTAL FLOSS TYCOON?” he said, pointing at me. “What does that mean?”
“It means I might be moving to Montana soon,” I replied.
“Oh, cool!” he said, the way you would say “Oh, cool!” to a guy carrying a chainsaw and wearing a space helmet who told you he was the lovechild of Carl Sagan and an alien from Proxima Centauri V, hoping to distract him long enough to make a run for it. “Does th—“
“Just to raise me up a crop of dental floss,” I interrupted.
“That’s inter—“
“With a pair of heavy-duty zircon-encrusted tweezers!” I interrupted again.
He gave up and turned to Rob. Apparently he wasn’t a Frank Zappa fan. The carnival guy, that is. Rob was a Zappa fan. Still is.
“What does PRO mean?” he said, sounding desperate.
Rob squinted at him again, taking another drag of his cigarette.
“Prostitute,” he drawled.
The carny guy turned on his heel and stomped away. I don’t know what got his dudgeon up; you’d think someone who travels with a carnival wouldn’t get offended at the word prostitute.
It wasn’t always like that, though. If you’re bracing yourself for a story about how I had to walk 10 miles to school barefoot, relax. What I mean is that you could buy T‑shirts when I was a kid that these days would make woke people pass out.
Take this charming, whimsical 1970s T‑shirt ad, for instance. Before Rohypnol, Jethro Tull T‑shirts were, alas, the only way a lot of guys could get laid.
The struggle is real.
Here’s the text:
Reprise leeringly invites you to win a T‑shirt that will
DRIVE THE GIRLS WILD WITH DESIRE!
You say you’re not making it with the local lovelies? That when you make Paul McCartney eyes at alluring little honeys in violet hip-huggers they respond by frowning and suggesting, “Jerk off, loser”? That even the offer of a seat next to you at a Led Zeppelin concert is insufficient inducement for a far-out nubie to spend part of the evening with you?
Then, fella, whatchoo need is a SUPER-OUTTA-SIGHT-JETHRO-TULL-T-SHIRT of the sort worn by the fullest-handed rakes everywhere.
These eye-catching sartorial groovies, which are guaranteed to reduce even the haughtiest of lovelies to a mound of hot pulsating flesh, are a divine shade of yellow designed to to flatter even the swarthiest of complexion, are the three-buttons-at-the-neck style recently made all the rage by your sharper English groups, appealingly reveal the wearer’s fashionably skinny arms (being short-sleeved) and feature an enticing likeness of sexy Tull leader Ian Anderson somewhere in the vicinity of the right boob. Available in the splendid sizes of medium and large, they may be worn with equal success by members of any sex.
We, in our customarily fiscally unsound way, are giving 1,000 of these wonder away. Free!
All you have to do to win one of your very one is: 1) fill our coupons below; and 2) give it back to us complete down to the exact playing time of the first side of Jethro Tull’s latest hysterically acclaimed album (surely you don’t expect us to give you something without first trying to trick you into buying something first), which information may be gleaned from the album’s label, which you have to remove the cellophane to get to.
So why don’t you in a real hurry send us the required so that we can rush you a Tull T‑shirt that’s certain to transform you overnight into a churning urn of burning funk.
I like Jethro Tull and I do have fashionably skinny arms, but I’m not sure I’d like Ian Anderson sitting on my right boob. Also, do I want to be a churning urn of burning funk? I honestly don’t know. A churning urn of burning funk might be a slick-talking studly chick magnet.
A churning urn of burning funk could also be an overflowing Porta Potty doused with gasoline and set on fire.
In ’77, when I was in Catholic high school—and I must emphasize that this was not just any Catholic high school, but Hayden Extremely Catholic High School—the math teacher, Sister Rose Celine, called a guy named Brian up to do a problem on the chalkboard.
Awww–how adorable!
Now Brian had been wearing a hoody all day because he was wearing a T‑shirt that said “Your Problem Is Obvious” on the back, along with a drawing of someone with his head stuck up his ass. He’d been collecting snickers and giggles all day from other students.
But now it was the last class for the day and it was pretty warm out, so he shrugged off the hoody and left it draped over his chair.
And when Sister Rose Celine called him up to do a problem, Brian forgot about the hoody.
Just as he was about to pass by Sister Rose Celine, he realized why the rest of us were stifling giggles and whispering “Pssst!” at him, and without missing a beat he pivoted 90 degrees to the right, facing Sister Rose Celine, and sidled up to the board. He filled out the math problem with his left hand, facing Sister Rose Celine all the while.
“Very good, Brian,” Sister Rose Celine said. “You may sit down.” Brian began sliding sideways back the way he came as the muffled snickers neared a crescendo. Sister Rose Celine glanced up at us, then at Brian. Being a math teacher, she put 2 and 2 together and stood up.
And because nuns are terrifying, Sister Rose Celine didn’t yell or throw things or grab a ruler or anything like that. All she did was to quietly say, “Stop.”
Brian froze in place; everyone else stopped giggling. We stopped breathing, in fact.
“Why are you walking sideways, Brian?” Sister Rose Celine said.
Brian said, “…eep?”
“Turn around,” she said.
Brian turned and showed her the back of his shirt. She studied it for a moment and said, “Class, you will work on the rest of the problems in your books until the bell rings and class is over.”
She walked to the classroom door, opened it, and waited. Gulp. This meant Sister Rose Celine and Brian were about to visit the principal, Father Ax, a visit. Dead man walking.
No, that’s not a joke. His last name really was Ax. Father Ax was the principal and the school’s boxing and wrestling coach.
Clarification: Father Ax was principal of Hayden East, which was in downtown Topeka, across the street from the state capitol. Hayden East was for 9th and 10th graders.
11th and 12th graders, on the other hand, went to Hayden West, which was across the street from Gage Park. And the Hayden West principal was (I’m still not making any of this up) Father Santa.
And I just realized Father Santa looked an awful lot like Principal Carter in the movie Porky’s, and that the actor playing Principal Carter was named Eric Christmas.
Okay, I’m having a panic attack here. I’m gonna go lie down.
Don’t let the teeth fool you. He’s not smiling; he’s baring his fangs.
I didn’t attend Hayden after 10th grade, so while I have no direct 411 to share about Father Santa, I suspect he was even scarier than Father Ax. But let’s get back to Father Ax:
Father Ax was about 5 1/2 feet tall, 3 feet wide, and weighed about 220 pounds, all of it solid muscle.
Father Ax was not the kind of guy to have an avuncular chat with a wayward student and invite the wayward student to come see him if he ever wanted to talk.
If Father Ax answered the phone instead of Liam Neeson in Taken, Father Ax would not threaten to kill the kidnappers. The kidnappers would drop dead the instant Father Ax picked up the phone.
The reason you hear all those jokes about Chuck Norris being so tough and also about how Bruce Lee killed Chuck Norris in a movie is only because they were both way too smart to even joke about fighting with Father Ax.
Father Ax had a large paddle in his office made of 3/4‑inch oak. It was labeled “Board of Education.”
Father Ax was a Vietnam vet, but he was not rumored to have been a Navy SEAL or in Special Forces or a sniper. Father Ax was rumored to have taken the Board of Education to Vietnam and singlehandedly ended the war in less than a week.
Father Ax had no interest in, patience for, or mercy upon any wiseass churnin’ urn o’ burnin’ funk T‑shirt, and even less for the student wearing it.
The next morning, everyone was whispering about poor Brian. No one knew what transpired in Father Ax’s office; Brian wasn’t talking about it and everyone else was afraid to ask, although we did notice Brian wincing whenever he sat down, so we assumed Brian had had a talk with the Board of Education.
Anyway, Mom and Dad had 4 children, but I was the only one they sent to Catholic school. I have no idea why.2
First Sister didn’t care; She’s three years older than me, so we never saw each other in school.
Thing 1 and Thing 2, on the other hand, are a year younger than me, so when I was sent off to Extremely Catholic school, they welcomed not having to say yes, that weirdo is our brother but he was adopted because his birth parents dropped him on his head a lot.
A little Extremely Catholic high school wouldn’t have hurt them, though. I mean, thanks to Sister Rose Celine and Father Ax and Father Santa, I stayed out of trouble (or was careful enough not to get caught). And thanks to Brian’s terrifying fate I especially avoided provocative T‑shirts (at least until after graduation).
Secular public school, on the other hand, deprived Thing 1 and Thing 2 of important, nurturing, eternal values; values like corporal punishment, sheer terror, and fluency in raunchy slang and raunchier T‑shirts.
And so one summer when they were maybe 13 or 14, Thing 1 and Thing 2 went to Worlds of Fun with some friends. Worlds of Fun was okay, but it was really just Acres of Fun.
Be that as it may, it was still fun, and that evening their friend’s mom dropped them off; they were sweaty, dirty, sunburned, overstimulated, greasy, and sugary from eating junk food all day. Job well done, Worlds of Fun.
Mom was sitting on the couch reading a magazine while Dad and I watched a movie. She said, “Go get a shower before you sit d…”
She trailed off as she glanced up and saw what Thing 1 and Thing 2 were wearing. They’d saved up their money and bought matching T‑shirts. And this is what was printed on their matching T‑shirts:
I laughed so hard it made me snort and then hiccup; Dad was shaking his head and trying unsuccessfully to look stern.
Thing 1 and Thing 2 were still looking happy, but a little puzzled.
Mom folded down the page she was reading, set the magazine down gently, and said very quietly, “Where did you get those shirts?”
Uh-oh. She sounded just like Sister Rose Celine. I’d forgotten: Mom and Dad had both graduated from Hayden Extremely Catholic High School in 1958. Back then, things weren’t as kind and forgiving and touchy-feely as they were 20 years later when I was there.
“We got them at Worlds of Fun,” Thing 2 said. “Um… is something wrong?”
“They had those shirts at Worlds of Fun? They let you buy those shirts at Worlds of Fun?”
Thing 1 and Thing 2 have this thing they do. They’ll glance at each other; maybe one of them will raise an eyebrow and the other one will shrug. It’s like all the hand signals in baseball, except instead of a short message like “Walk this asshole,” they exchange an ocean of info in the blink of an eye.
“Didn’t your friend’s mom say anything?” Mom asked.
Thing 1 and Thing 2 glanced at each other to discuss their strategy. It’s important to note here that Thing 1 is a practical, take-action type, while Thing 2 is more introspective and philosophical.
“Well, no,” said Thing 2. Meanwhile, Thing 1 quietly left the living room and headed down the hall.
“I see. Do you know what that means?”
“What what means? Oh, on the shirt? It’s, uh…”
By now Dad and I were desperately trying to keep straight faces. Mom glared at us for a second, and looking back I just now realized this situation was eerily similar to a famous scene in the movie Porky’s:
A group of horney—I mean, horny—guys were caught peeping into the girl’s locker room showers. One them sticks his, um—can we please call it a tallywacker?—he sticks his tallywacker though the peephole and almost gets caught by Girl’s PE Coach Beulah Balbricker.
Balbricker wants Principal Carter to arrange a lineup of naked teen boys so she can identify the scoundrel. Meanwhile, the Boy’s Coaches Goodenough, Brackett and Warren are desperately trying to keep straight faces as Principal Carter says no, a short-arm inspection is absolutely out of the question.
Coach Brackett says, “Mr. Carter, we can just call the police, and we have ’em send over one of their sketch artists. And Miss Balbricker can give a description. We can put up Wanted posters all over school: ‘Have you seen this prick? Report immediately to Beulah Balbricker. Do not attempt to apprehend this prick, as it is armed and dangerous. It was last seen hanging out in the girls’ locker room.’”
At which point everyone, including Principal Carter completely loses it, and Miss Balricker stomps out. I still admire Nancy Parsons, who played Miss Balbricker, for keeping a straight face. I would have had a stroke.
This all happened years before Porky’s was released. And it’s worth noting that Thing 1 liked Porky’s so much she had a personalized license plate saying “PORKY1” for a number of years.
But I digress. Thing 2 was trying to come up with a definition for horney that would would keep her and Thing 1 out of trouble, especially since they didn’t know what it meant anyway.
“It means,” Mom started. “It means, uh, well.. *ahem.* When someone is “horney,” it means they’re… um… sexual. I mean, excited in a sexual way.”
Thing 2 ruminated on that for a few seconds. “Sure, I’ve heard that,” she lied, “but it’s kind of like the word ‘crazy.’ There’s ‘crazy,’ where you see things and stuff, but it’s also like, you know, ‘wild and crazy guy.’”
“So what’s the other meaning of horney?” I managed to choke out between snickers. Mom glared at me again, and I realized I might have to explain how I knew what horney meant if I didn’t shut up. So I shut up.
Thing 1—who is, as I said, the practical take-action type—came back down the hall, saying, “Hey, what if we just wear them like this?”
She’d hitched her jeans up as high as she could, then tucked in the Smile If You’re Horney shirt so tight it was stretched out of shape, so instead of this:
It looked like this:
And we all—Mom, Dad, me, Thing 1 and Thing 2—we all lost it as thoroughly as the coaches in Porky’s.
It’s not fair. Whenever Thing 1 or Thing 2 got into trouble, they’d do something to make Mom or Dad laugh and they’d get away with it.
“Go take a shower,” Mom said, picking up her magazine. “Change clothes and bring me those shirts.”
Thing 1 and Thing 2 surrendered with dignity, glad they were off the hook.
And by “surrendered with dignity,” I mean “executed a strategic retreat to discuss flanking maneuvers.”
The next day, when we were all called to the kitchen for dinner, Thing 1 was last to arrive. She strategically executed a not-quite-late arrival, during which she showed up just as Dad was about to repeat Mom’s chow call, meaning everyone would be waiting to see what was going on.
She stepped into the kitchen, wearing the “Smile If You’re Horney!!” shirt that she’d been ordered to destroy, and said, “Hey Mom! How about this?”
She’d secretly rummaged through Mom’s sewing supplies and found some embroidered letters, one of which she’d sewn onto the offending shirt. And this is what it looked like:
Dad, who heroically managed to keep a straight face, said, “Smile if you’re CORNEY?”
Golf clap to Thing 1. I’m still in awe.
I don’t remember if Mom and Dad let Thing 1 and Thing 2 keep the shirts.3
You’ve heard this saying: “If you don’t like the weather in (wherever you are), just wait five minutes and it’ll change!”
This, my friends, is Fake News. I’ve lived in, or spent enough time in, enough states to get an idea what the weather is like: Oregon, Washington (State and DC), Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Florida (and Akumal, Mexico and Guangzho, Changsha, and Hong Kong).
But I grew up in Kansas.1 Kansas is the only place where the “wait five minutes and the weather will change” joke applies. In fact, Kansas is the only place I’ve ever lived that has weather at all, and I can prove it. To do so I need to talk about coffee:
Back some mumbledy-seven years ago, I worked afternoons at the state hospital and got off at 11. Depending on how much money we had, my friend Rob and I would either drive around and drink beer till the wee hours of the morning, or go downtown to Pore Richard’s, pay for one bottomlesscup of coffee each, and drink coffee till the wee hours of the morning.
Pore Richard’s was a restaurant and café where you could spend a lot of money on steak or lobster or other pricey munchies, or you could spend $1.25 on a cup of coffee and get refills until you started to vibrate.
Being broke, and given that Nintendo and iPhones and Android and X‑Box and restaurants with dozens of TVs showing every channel there is at ear-shattering volume were all years in the future, we had to find something else to do. So we’d talk and argue and talk with the servers and argue about things with them, all of which are alas becoming lost arts.
But most often we would whip out Road Notes and get busy.
Road Notes was a big 200-page college-ruled spiral notebook (several, in fact; I still have about 10 of them and I’m pretty sure there were more).
And upon the pages of Road Notes we would inflict song lyrics; goofy drawings; vignettes; short stories written back and forth between us, two paragraphs apiece; all manner of things.
One night I was noodling around in Road Notes and the Wham song—oops; I mean the WHAM! song—“Careless Whisper” came on our table jukebox, which meant someone at one of the other tables had dropped a dime in their table jukebox.
Then it came on again. And again. And again. Now, I like this song and I liked it back then. It wasn’t as bad as someone playing “What’s New Pussycat?” 21 times in a row, but it was wearing thin. I sacrificed a dime from petty cash (aka the server-tipping cash) to play something else, but someone in the restaurant had just broken up with someone else and was drowning his or her sorrows in a tsunami of dimes to hog the jukebox.
Rob grabbed Road Notes from me and started drawing. A minute later he handed back a pair of drawings. One was a credible forgery of the old “Loose Lips Sink Ships” poster labeled “Careless Whisper,” except the soldier gabbing at his girlfriend had a bullhorn aimed right at Hitler and was blowing his hair and mustache off.
Next to that was a drawing of a bald woman, labeled “Hairless Sister.”
I said, “Hairless Sister”? Rob said, “Wait; don’t tell me you haven’t heard this. The Hairless Sister song? On Dr. Demento?”
I hadn’t, but I did later: Hairless Sister was a spoof of Careless Whisper, in which a high school guy’s sister shaves her head, and her brother is singing about how he’ll never go to school again, because an embarrassed mind can do no learning.
So I grabbed Road Notes back and drew an old woman yelling “Get me some pears!”, labeled “Pearless Spinster,” which set off a pretty damn good pun war, which ended like this:
After several more rounds, Rob drew a picture of Dee Snider with a corkscrew sticking out of a big lump on his arm. It was titled, “Twisted Blister.”
I looked at him and said “Twisted Blister”? You HATE Twisted Sister! What song is this, We’re Not Gonna Lance It? He snickered and said, “Your move!”
I made a few false starts and then inspiration struck: I drew a picture of a house with a tornado heading its way. There was another tornado on the other side of the house.
The first tornado was saying, “Help me wreck this house!” The other tornado said, “Sure!”
I titled it Assisted Twister.
I pushed Road Notes back at Rob. He looked at Assisted Twister and started to laugh. So did I.
Before long we were both howling and falling out of the booth and trying very sincerely not to wet our pants and/or have asthma attacks.
Assisted Twister. Coming soon to a restaurant near you.
So I—yes, I know it’s a horrible pun. But that was wh—What? Look, you had to be there. Anyway, we—okay, shut up and sit down. You don’t have to like a bad pun. You just have to respect its courage to be seen in public.
So let me abruptly change the subject:
I mentioned earlier that I lived in Oregon for a while. I went to college in Oregon, in fact. One day I was walking to a class with someone, and he said, “You’re from Kansas? Weren’t you alla time scared of tornadoes?”
I said, “You’re from Portland in spitting distance of five volcanoes; ain’t you alla time scared of the floor being lava?”
If you live in Portland, you can’t wait five minutes for the weather to change: Portland doesn’t HAVE weather. All the weather folks on the news have to say is, “Forecast: Damp. Current conditions: About to Rain, Raining, or Just Stopped Raining.”
Arizona’s just the opposite: The weather in Prescott Valley is always mild and sunny (unless you’re in Phoenix, where the weather is always boil-your-eyballs hot and sunny), except that in Prescott Valley it rains a few weeks late in the summer, which they call “Monsoon season,” like they’re in Tahiti.
But Kansas—Kansas, my friends, has WEATHER. Back in about ’91, I remember trying to drive to work one morning, but it was so cold the transmission fluid was like molasses and the car couldn’t move an inch.
Later that same winter, on New Year’s eve, I left work at 11pm and it was a balmy 75°. When the sun came up on New Year’s day it was 20 below zero, and a lot of people couldn’t get to work because the temperature extremes made a grain elevator explode, covering I‑70 with a 30-foot-high wheatdrift.
Later that spring I was attempting to dash from my car to my house during a nasty thunderstorm, and I took a racquetball-sized hailstone to the noggin that almost knocked me unconscious.
I’ve seen it cold enough in Kansas you could spit and it would freeze before it hit the ground. I’ve seen it hot enough that recently resurfaced roads softened up, leaving cars mired in asphalt.
Kansas folks are tough enough to deal with apocalyptic weather, but Kansas just doesn’t get any respect.
In Diamonds Are Forever, the evil villain Blofeld asks Bond, James Bond, how he should set about extorting the world with his giant space laser.
“I suppose I could destroy Kansas,” Blofeld says, “but it would take years for anyone to notice!”
Hyuk hyuk hyuk. But consider this: If Kansas was destroyed, all that real weather—frozen spit, boiling asphalt, Mama-said-knock-you-out hailstones and tornadoes, oh my—would have to happen in other states, where people talk about how the weather changes every five minutes but don’t have a clue what’s in store for them.
Think about that the next time you’re mocking Kansas with your hilarious Wizard of Oz jokes.
When I was 4 or 5 my parents had some friends over for a barbecue. Everyone was milling around in fine barbecue fashion, and then the radio played a song I’d never heard before. It was amazing! There was somebody laughing and then helicopter sounds, but it didn’t have any lyrics.
I planned to ask Mom and Dad what the song was, but they were busy doing things and I forgot.
A couple of days later Mom was putting something on the record player, and I remembered the barbecue and said, “Play The Helicopter Song!”
“The what?” Mom said.
“The Helicopter Song! There was a guy laughing and helicopters! And there weren’t any words!” Mom had no idea what I meant. I did, but I couldn’t describe it well enough. I gave up, frustrated.
A couple days later we were driving somewhere and the helicopter song came on the radio.
“That’s The Helicopter Song! That’s The Helicopter Song!” I yelled.
“That’s the song you meant?” Mom asked.
“Yeah! It’s The Helicopter Song!”
And it turned out that the helicopter song was… (drum roll])1
“Wipeout,” by The Surfaris.
Lemme ‘splain: When I was a kid in the early 1960s, we lived in Topeka, KS, about 7 miles north of Forbes Air Force Base. Aircraft often flew right over us coming to and from Forbes; usually heavier cargo aircraft. Once, in about ’89 or ’90, everyone in Topeka got to watch a brand-new Air Force One land at Forbes for the first stop in its inaugural test flight, fuel up, and take off again.
This was much earlier, though; maybe 1967 or ’68. The war in Vietnam was raging along full blast, and we often heard large choppers flying thumping along overhead: long-range special-ops copters like the Sikorsky MH-53, aka the Jolly Green Giant, or Boeing CH-47 Chinook dual-rotor heavy cargo helicopters.
It happened often enough that I didn’t consciously listen to them, but they still made a hell of a lot of noise.
And so it happened that when I heard “Wipeout,” the long drum breaks, heavy on the bass and toms, reminded me of all the big choppers flying overhead.
I didn’t know how to explain this when I was so young. So years later, when I was in my early 20s, a friend of mine was showing me how to play “Wipeout” on guitar, and I suddenly remembered: THE HELICOPTER SONG!
I told Mom and Dad about it, but they didn’t remember any of this.
So either I’m hallucinating or The Surfaris tricked me.
JBs recently moved to a much larger building, which I was glad to see, what with all the locally owned businesses around the country driven out of business by the pandemic.
Here’s the text:
