Dan Riley's Blog, page 31

Dan & Lorna's Excellent Adventure, The Musical

Once again, the keeper of The Nob asks his readers' indulgence as he posts what is commonly known as a "home movie." This one is of our recent journey to Rome through Cape Town to London. But it's no ordinary travelog in that it chronicles some rather momentous events. In Rome we reconnect with Manu & Ricky (and Manu's parents), who you read about here. Lorna's blended e-learning company went global in Cape Town. And when we arrived in London, we received word that we had become grandparents to Nico, born to daughter Gillian in Savannah. The trip didn't just touch on blog posts of the past, but will inform blog posts of the future…starting next week with Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in South Africa. 'Til then, enjoy the journey. 

How the Boston Red Sox Won the 1975 World Series, Part II

The winningest 3-cushion couch in the majors
(This year marks the 40-year anniversary of the epic clash between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox in the 1975 World Series. Since neither team has accepted the invitation for a repeat this October, The Nobby Works commemorates what is often called the greatest World Series ever played with this look back at how one lonely fan tilted the odds in favor his underdog team.)

The World Series of 1975 stacked up as a classic match-up. On the one hand there were the good-fielding, hard-hitting Reds of Cincinnati; on the other hand were the good-fielding, hard-hitting Red Sox of Boston. The only difference between the two teams could be found in my living room. It's not that I have an exclusive monopoly on THE POWER, because I don't. It wouldn't surprise me if variations on my power could be found throughout the American and National Leagues…although not in every city. There are some places--Cincinnati, for instance--that just don't have that mystical quality about them. The nickname “The Big Red Machine,” like “The Bronx Bombers” of old, rings more metallic than magical. Karma simply doesn't mix with machines big, red, or otherwise.'
If the series had matched the Sox with one of the more unearthly teams in the National League, however, we really would've had our hands full. My PC could've been neutralized if the Sox had met, say, the Cubs or the Phillies. Every time I occupied my POWER CENTER, some guy in Chicago or Philadelphia could've checkmated me. Mana a mana, as it were. The entire series then would've been decided by the ephemeral talents of so many infielders and outfielders - naive youngsters and cynical veterans - with no deeper understanding of the transcendent aspects of their calling than the unwitting belief that they should not leave their bats crossed in the on deck circle.
Cincinnati was just arrogant and haughty enough a city, just Aryan enough, to preclude the possibility of any supernatural intervention in the Reds' favor. Therefore the Boston-Cincinnati series shaped up as a good one, with the intangibles clearly on the side of the Sox.
Or were they?
Defying every law of probability known to man, the PC for the first game of the 1975 World Series was, believe it or not, located on my living room floor again! At the moment of what should've been my greatest triumph as a Red Sox fan, I found myself mired in anguish and despair. I looked longingly at my couch. I'd expected to ride it to at least half the post-season victories needed for the World Championship, yet I hadn't watched a game from it in over a week. If my power had indeed come from the gods, I decided in those grim moments before the start of game one, then those gods must surely be Yankee fans. This was just the kind of sick, demented trick I'd come to expect from New Yorkers.
I was all the more determined to stick it out now. Hip in place - arm cocked - head in palm. The clean-up man in the Sox order hadn't even come to the plate when all the hurt from the previous week came driving through my body again, only more wrenching than before. I wanted to scream, to cry, to whimper at least. The slightest hint of a Reds' rally would've broken me. I would've abandoned the floor - PC - TC - the whole POWER trip. But El Tiante was pitching - brilliantly again - and it was evident from the start that to cinch victory in the first game of the 1975 World Series I had to do one simple, solitary thing: endure.
Endure I did, and the Sox humbled the vaunted Big RedMachine, 6-0.
Any jubilation I may have felt over winning game 1 was severely dampened by my deteriorating physical condition. My right arm had become limp and practically useless. My awkward attempts at shaving with my left hand had turned my already ghastly face into a pitiful visage of scar and stubble. Worse still was the wretched condition of my hip. It'd become black and swollen, and I feared that the infection was spreading down to the lower regions of my leg. I shuddered at the thought of gangrene.
Sleep was impossible. A nightmarish vision materialized before my bed. The world had become floor. I could see nothing but linoleum clear to the horizons - no mountains, valleys, or streams - just floor. And I stood on it, trembling and alone, except for a black and white portable Sony, its rabbit ears pointing off in the direction of the eternal ballgame.
Game 2 was scheduled for a Sunday. I stayed in bed through breakfast and church, the Sunday paper and Meet the Press. Hiding under my covers, I wanted nothing more than that the world would pass me by and take its debilitating series of champions with it. But as game time approached, I was seized by a paroxysm of greater terror. If I turned my back on the Sox now, if I gave up on THE POWER now, I'd be making a mockery of my entire life. All the effort, the endless. manipulation of body and furniture, had been in pursuit of one goal: a World Championship for the Boston Red Sox.
I had faltered once before. In '67, after playing the PC flawlessly and guiding the Sox through a four-team scramble for the pennant, I went astray as the Sox met the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. It was a woman, of course, filling my head up with so many crazy ideas that I couldn't achieve TOTAL CONCENTRATION and I stopped caring where I sat and how. By the seventh game of the series, the animal in me completely dominated the spiritual - and the Cards dominated the Sox, 7-2.
It took me seven penitent years to find my soul again. If those Yankee gods had designated the floor as the POWER CENTER, then the floor it would be. After all, it was their ballgame.
I dragged my bashed and beaten body out of the bed and down the stairs. I could barely do better than crawl across the room. Indeed, I didn't have to because there on the floor in front of me was the PC again, manifest now as a grinning, hollow-eyed, she-creature who raised a long, crooked finger and beckoned me to her side. Could this alluring lamia be Lady Luck, I asked myself,
She pulled graying, withered hairs from her chin and belched into my face. The lower part of my body from the hip down went numb. Sustained by a slight Red Sox lead, I maintained TOTAL CONCENTRATION as long as I could. Then, in the seventh inning, it started to rain. They held up the game, and I grimaced as I watched them roll the tarp over the diamond. It was the last I would see of any of it that day. I blacked out before the game resumed and the Red Sox lost.
I've seen the hit that beat the Sox a dozen times since then. It was an infield bouncer up the middle that Denny Doyle grabbed behind second but couldn't convert into an out. Doyle can be forgiven. There are limits to what the body can do. As for my own lapse, there can be no forgiveness. A man's spirit should be limitless. Two more innings from me is all they needed and they would've had the Reds on the run. But I cracked. My faith died in a little cloudburst.
But as in all matters of the soul, that which can die can always be reborn. And my faith was reborn for game three. With the loss in game two, the spell on the floor had been broken. Euphoria pulsated through my rejuvenated organs and limbs. I even managed a modified jig around the room when I felt the unmistakable pull of the PC drawing me toward the couch. POWER and couch were united again. Dismantlement to the Big Red Machine! Gloria in Excelsis to the Boston Red Sox!
It was going to be easy. The vibrations were indicating I could take the couch on my back - my very best all-time position. It seemed certain now that the Big Red Machine was doomed to stutter and stop right before its own deluded fans.
The Red Sox took an early lead, and I was ready to takea three-day romp through Cincinnati lying down when, in the fourth, with Rick Wise pitching to Tony Perez, a faint knock-knock-knocking intruded on my chamber door. At first I dismissed it as a local woodpecker or the failing engine of some distant plane. But it persisted, breaking my TC, and Perez walked. I knew I had to find the source of the noise before any more damage was done, so I moved quickly to the door. Perez stole second. I answered the door. Bench hit a two-run homer. The Reds were ahead, 2-1.
She was shorter than I remembered her, older too. A gray ambience hung about her face like a shroud, and the shock of seeing her there in my doorway was given added voltage by the sight of baggage she clutched in her hand. It was my mother.
"It's your father!" she cried. "He's thrown me out at home!"
My dad knew a thing or two about THE POWER himself and taught me everything he'd ever learned about it. He was on the road a great deal selling St. Christopher medals and rabbits' feet, but whenever he was home the two of us worked out together. After supper he would take me down into his den, and we would practice moving furniture around. It was Dad in fact who helped to make me a switch-sitter, teaching me how to shift my weight from one cheek to the other while holding the PC in a particularly uncomfortable chair. He's a clothes man himself and not much into furniture, but he's got good natural instincts for THE POWER. Many evenings after our furniture sessions together he would take me up to his closet and show me some of the clothes in which he found THE POWER during crucial moments in history. There was the tuxedo he wore throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Your mom and I were at the Lions Club Harvest Ball when JFK gave his speech," he told me, "and I just knew that if I took that outfit off the whole world would be a-goner." There was the pork pie hat he wore during Ike's heart attack. "Back then," he'd say, "that hat's the only thing that stood between Nixon and the White House.”  Then there were the Bermuda shorts and the polo shirt he wore while Ted Williams was off fighting the Korean War. "Good thing it was a short war," he confessed, "the winters nearly killed me. "
Dad is a true believer in THE POWER, so it didn't surprise me at all to hear that the falling out between him and Mom was over her meddling in his power. "He said I lost the second game of the World Series," she sobbed into my sweater, "but all I did was wash his underwear. "
"His underwear!" I exclaimed, knowing now what hadshe’d done.
"His underwear," she repeated tearfully, "his unsightly tops and bottoms which he hadn't taken off in over a week. He called them his lucky undies, but they were making me gag. So I took them and washed them last Sunday while he showered, and he went out of his mind. He called me a debunker and an iconoclast and told me to get out of the house. 'You did it!' he screamed for all the neighbors to hear. 'You lost the second game of the World Series and I won't have you in my bed another night!' " She choked back another flood of tears and raised her baleful eyes to mine. "How could he say that? How could he say I lost the second game of the World Series?"
How indeed.
I looked over at my TV screen and the how was most clear. The Reds had gone ahead 5-1 since she had crossed my threshold with her tale of woe. I staggered against the wall, weakened by the score. My mother, meanwhile, unloaded herself and her sorrow right in the middle of my POWER CENTER.
"You can't sit there!" I blurted out. "That's my lucky spot." At that she began rocking back and forth, bewailing and bemoaning as only she could. "Oh my, my. Oh my, my. This can't be. This can't be. First my husband and now my son - my only begotten son, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood." She stopped shaking long enough to cast a cold, hard look in my direction. "I endured a C-section for you, ingrate."
She had me. She had the couch as well. You can't throw a mother off your couch after she's gone and done something like that for you.
"Wanna beer?" I asked, resigning myself to the fact thatthe Reds were about to be up in the series two games to one.
She blew her nose and nodded yes.
As I reached in the fridge for a couple of brews, however, the bracing chill of inspiration blew over me. It was a million-to-one shot, but the Sox were down by four runs anyway and I had nothing to lose. It seemed slightly crazy at the time, but if I could get into TOTAL CONCENTRATION and if the POWER CENTER would accept my mother's body in place of my own, I just might pull off a baseball first - a cross-body transference.
The beer was the vital element in my scheme. I had to mellow my mother out so that she wasn't disturbing the PC, dusting things with her forefinger and whatnot. When I got back to the living room, she was arranging my magazines in chronological order. "Here, Mom, drink this," I said, trying to conceal the sense of urgency, "it'll make you feel better. "
Two swigs into her Gansett and she started to calm down; halfway through the bottle and she stopped muttering about my father and kicked off her shoes; a couple of inches short of empty and her eyes were sagging to a close and her head was sinking to repose. She was out, and the Sox were up!
Two walks, a wild pitch, and a fly to center got them one run. A pinch-hit homer got them another. It wasn't the Miracle of Coogan's Bluff, but it was a rally just the same and the cross-body transference was working! The PC was operating at full capacity in the ninth when Dwight Evans rocketed a two-run homer over the left-field fence to tie the score. Delirium swept through my parlor. I shot out of my chair with a mighty, joyous whoop!
Mom stirred. I eased myself back down into my chair.Polyester to Herculon, I hardly made a sound. If she awoke, the whole psyche-sphere would be upset. The game would fall out of control again. We'd come too far for that.
I maintained TC through the ninth and into the tenth. I was milking her recumbent body for all it was worth while keeping the Sox even with the Reds. It was remarkable.
And then, as the Reds came to bat in the bottom of the tenth, she stirred again. "Where am I?" she mumbled.
"Sleep," I intoned softly. "Sleep. You are very, very sleepy."
A deep, violent burp broke the hypnotic spell of my voice and she sat up.
Geronimo of the Reds singled.
"I must relieve myself," she said, rising. "Not now!" I begged.
"Yes, now," she said, as Armbrister turned to bunt.
"Get back!" I shouted.
"I must relieve myself, " she said, as Fisk went for Armbrister's bunt.
I dove for the POWER CENTER. Collision!
Kubek beat the rulebook crying foul from the broadcast booth and NBC replayed the Fisk-Armbrister collision as America, land of the grassy knoll and home of the Zapruder film, looked in vain for the interference call from Umpire Barnett. Controversy swirled around Riverfront Stadium, but it was misplaced. The instant replay should've been of my living room, of my mother teetering toward the toilet, of my diving headlong across the room, belly-flopping down on the glass-topped table, bashing my jaw off the wrought-iron hassock legs, crashing my head against a collapsing Tiffany lamp, and mashing my nose beneath the tumbling weight of a 176-pound, hysterical mother.
When I regained consciousness, I was in a local hospital, wrapped in bandages from head to foot. Time had become a blur. Months may have passed since the third game of the World Series. Years, even. I didn't know.
I peeked through the eye-hole of my bandages and saw a lanky lefthander in aviator glasses approach. He shoved a cigarette through the slit that led to my mouth. I choked on it. "Don't smoke, " I coughed.
"Sorry, sport," he said, "don't want to lose you now.
You've made quite a comeback. When your mom brought you in, you weren't much more than a shaky combination of contusions and lacerations but you're doing just fine now. We'll have you out of here before you can say 'Pinky Higgins.' By the way," he added, reaching into his pocket, "got this postcard from your mother this morning. 'Say goodbye to the lunatic for me,' she says. It's postmarked Cincinnati." He turned to leave, but the sound of Cincinnati had jarred my memory.
"Doc," I implored in a low, raspy voice, "the World Series, Doc. Who won the '75 Series?"
"Who won it?"  he beamed broadly. "Why no one's won it. The Reds lead three games to two. It's been raining in Boston for almost a week now. You'll be able to see the sixth game for yourself tonight. We'll roll a TV in here for you." And with that he turned on his heel and vanished.
I could hardly believe my ears. We were still in it. The Series wasn't over. The Sox still had a chance. Rain, he'd said. Rain in Boston. Rain from Providence no doubt had given me one more chance to muster THE POWER together and destroy the Big Red' Machine.
Could it be done, though? That was the question. My range was limited to a hospital bed. The odds against finding the POWER CENTER there were prohibitive. And even if I found it, the cocoon of bandages wrapped around me strictly constrained lateral as well as anterior and posterior movements. I wouldn't have the agility needed for occupying any but the most orthodox positions. The obstacles were damn near overwhelming, but I knew that I'd practically pulled off a successful cross-body transference in game three. Who could tell what might happen in game six?
Who indeed?
Seventy million Americans could tell, that's who. Seventy million Americans watched Bernie Carbo clout a three-run homer to tie for the Sox in the eighth; seventy million Americans saw Dwight Evans make a spectacular catch to save it in the eleventh; seventy million Americans looked on as Pudge Fisk lofted one in the screen in left to win it in the twelfth. Seventy million Americans enjoyed the greatest game ever played, all thanks to a semi-invalid in a hospital bed a hundred miles away.
It was a feat unparalleled in the annals of sports phenomenology, and I'd done it under the direst conditions. For hours I just lay there savoring it all, replaying the Fisk home again and again off the ceiling--until the doctor broke my revelry. "Pinky Higgins," he said, twinkling.
"Huh?" I said.
"Time to take those bandages off and go home," he an- nounced.
I took it as a joke and muffled a chuckle or two beneath my wrappings. Then he produced a shining set of shears, and I realized how serious he was. My eyeballs dilated to painful proportions and I yelled, "Can't do it, Doc! The seventh game of the Series is on tonight. I gotta see it. . . ."
"Sure you do," he said with maddening calm, "and you shall see it - at home on your own TV." And he began snipping away.
"No, here!" I squealed. "This is the POWER CENTER ... this bed ... these bandages ... I need them…the Sox need them . . . Yaz and Rico . . . EI Tiante…they're counting on me!"
He continued to cut. I struggled to get free. Two grim nurses arrived to hold me down. One looked like my mother. I howled. They stripped me bare, stripped the POWER off my body like it was so much useless adhesive, and rolled me out of the bed. I leaped to my feet, and in one last, inspired moment I hurled my body through the wire mesh and glass to the shrubs and pavement three stories below.
I knew on impact that the Reds were dead. As they gathered my shattered body onto the stretcher and carried it away, I knew I was on my way back to bed and bandages - back to the POWER CENTER and onto the Championship of the World for the Boston Red Sox.
And I made it happen - me - the best 26th man in baseball. I made it happen just by being the right man in the right place at the right time. It didn't matter that I couldn't see it or hear it. I felt it and that's enough. But try telling that to some of these doctors around here.  What do they know about baseball? All they care about are dreams and childhood traumas. Baseball--POWER CENTERS, TOTAL CONCENTRATION, the old cross-body transference--none of it means baked beans to these guys and gals.
Dad still understands though. He drops by every once in while to show off a pair of lucky slippers or something. And sometimes when he wheels me around the room I can still pick up a good vibration or two. Dad says that when I get better and out of here I ought to start thinking beyond baseball. He says that if I can win the World Series for the Boston Red Sox there's probably lots more good I can do for mankind. So I'm thinking about writing a letter to the President and telling him about my power. Who knows? Maybe rearranging the White House furniture is just what this country needs.
How the Boston Red Sox Won the 1975 World Series first appeared in The Red Sox Reader, edited by Dan Riley and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992  (Please note: that’s 40 years before Silver Linings Playbook)

How the Boston Red Sox Won the 1975 World Series, Part I

Ladies and gentlemen, your 1975 Boston Red Sox
(This year marks the 40-year anniversary of the epic clash between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox in the 1975 World Series. Since neither team has accepted the invitation for a repeat this October, The Nobby Works commemorates what is often called the greatest World Series ever played with this look back at how one lonely fan tilted the odds in favor his underdog team.)
I've had THE POWER for some time now. Inherited it from my father, I guess, and got my first intimations of it when I was no more than a kid of 12-121/2. It was then that I began to see direct correlations between the success of my team, the Boston Red Sox, and where and how I positioned myself during their games.
It was back in 1961 and the Sox were about to play the Detroit Tigers in an afternoon game at Fenway Park. From the pre-game show through the "Star-Spangled Banner" I was receiving strong vibrations from the area of the family coffee table and sofa. I wasn't at all sure what the vibrations were about at the time. Being on the brink of adolescence, vibrations were coming from everywhere, but I went with my instincts. I nestled into the corner of the sofa, kicked off my PF Flyers, and propped my feet up on the coffee table.
The event would change my life, because there in the corner of the sofa with my feet upon the table and crossed at the ankles and my head resting upon a satin pillow inscribed Festival of Mount Carmel, Aug. 9-12, 1955, Thompsonville, Conn., I had my first real experience with THE POWER. Call it native intuition or call it divine revelation, but I just knew that if I held my position on the sofa and my attention on the TV, the Red Sox would win that game. I decided to call the space my body occupied the POWER CENTER (PC) and the state of my mind TOTAL CONCENTRATION (TC). And neither thirst for Coke nor hunger for chips was going to make me abandon either until the last out of the game had been made.
Bill Monbouquette, then ace of the Sox staff, was the starting pitcher against the Tigers that day. It was a Saturday - cleaning day. My mother, ace of our house-cleaning staff, was starting her vacuum cleaner against me and our Motorola. Neil Chrisly, an outfielder, was the Tiger leadoff hitter. Chrisly batted left-handed with what they now call “an inside-out” swing, meaning that his swing drove the ball to the opposite field. In those days Curt Gowdy was calling him a wrong-field hitter. (In Little League, if we did it, our coaches reamed us out for swinging too late.)
My mother cleaned right-handed and approached the coffee table from the left. "Just a minute, Mom," I said. "Just this one batter." But she drove forward with the hose of her vacuum, forcing my feet off the coffee table and out of the POWER CENTER. And Chrisly drove a Monbouquette fastball off the left-field wall for a double.
I was rattled - hopping mad, as they say in the big leagues - and I told my mother so. "You just ruined the guy's no-hitter!" I hollered above the roar of her Hoover. But she played deaf to my outburst and simply vacuumed her way out of the POWER CENTER, into the dining room and tracts of household dirt beyond.
Fortunately I regained my composure and the POWER CENTER in time to get Monbouquette through the next three batters, but let history record that Bill Monbouquette missed a no-hitter that day by one pitch - and that pitch became Neil Chrisly's vacuum cleaner double off the wall.
There was no mistaking the lesson of that game: it is not whether the game is won or lost, nor even how the game is played that counts so much as what I--with my newfound, awesome POWER--did at home. Games, I realized, could be decided before they even began, depending upon my ability to find the PC and get into TC - both of which could be elusive as a glance at the Red Sox composite won-lost record since '61 will reveal.
I've been out in front of the TV before virtually every game, feeling for the vibrations in the room. The pre-game chatter between the old batting coach who's become an announcer and the old announcer who's become a batting coach has helped imbue my being with a sense of baseballness. Then the National Anthem comes on and helps soothe the stresses of the workaday world in my body. By the time the drum and bugle corps gets to "rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air," I’m in harmony with the universe and body and soul are reaching out for the POWER CENTER in the room.
Sometimes the vibrations come from the worn, red armchair in the comer - sometimes from the straight-back rocker by the door - often they come from my couch - eight handsome feet long, stuffed' with duck feathers and upholstered in a custom-made fabric that featured thousands of pairs of tiny red socks. (It is the winningest three-cushioned couch in the majors, and I have the stats to prove it.) Occasionally THE POWER will settle in a hard place - like an end table - or worse. I've never liked watching ball games from the top of an end table.
There've been times, however, when there've been no vibrations at all - no signs - no clues as to where the old PC is. I once stood in front of the TV through an entire doubleheader waiting for the room to signal me. It never did, and the Sox lost both games. As I grew more mature and adept at using THE POWER, I'd actively seek out the PC if I didn't get a message by the time of the first beer break. I'd sit here. I'd sit there. I'd hang my legs over the arms and backs of chairs. I'd turn the rocker around and straddle it from behind. I'd take the couch in the supine position or the belly-down position - the upright position if necessary. I'd assume any angle in any place for a Red Sox victory. (Posture isn't everything: it's the only thing!)
My mastery over THE POWER - and its subsequent mastery over me became apparent during the 1975 Championship Series between the Sox and the Oakland A's. In my haste to locate PC and get into TC before the start of game one, 1 tripped over a treacherously placed hassock, which had been given to me by my mother as a house-warming gift. Before I could come to my senses, the Señor, Luis Tiant, was on the mound for the Sox and he was dazzling. From his very first pitch it was clear that the PC was on the floor, and I had my work cut out for me.
Playing the POWER CENTER from the floor is one of the most exhausting positions imaginable, but I played it naturally that day - stretching out laterally in front of the TV and cradling my head in the palm of my right hand. I'd played THE POWER from the floor before and was well acquainted with the discomfort it caused the hip and the elbow, and by the seventh inning of game 1 all the blood from my wrist to my shoulder had drained into the joint between them. The players call it "a handful of bees" when their bats make bad contact on a cold day and it stings, and that's what I had, too - a handful of bees, caused by all those innings of propping my head up with my hand. It was an overall torturous, but gutsy performance on my part - and in the end it paid off. The Sox beat the A's 5-3 to take the lead in their best of five series. .
My excitement about game two of the playoffs was near fever pitch when I discovered to my dismay that the PC was again located on the living room floor. Later reference to the record book and my own infallible memory for such things revealed that on no previous occasion had the POWER CENTER stayed on the floor for two consecutive games. It was unprecedented, and although I winced at the thought of putting my body through the rigors of the floor position again I knew there was a pennant on the line and in a pennant drive everybody gives 150%. And once again the agony paid off in ecstasy - the Stockings beat the A's 6-3.
Both teams traveled the 3,000 miles from Boston to the West Coast for the third game in Oakland. Incredibly, the POWER CENTER didn't move an inch. For the third game in a row every vibration in the house was coming from the same spot in the middle of my living room floor. I was astounded and not a little concerned about my health. I had ice-packed my arm and given my hip a whirlpool bath after game two. At best, I figured, both would be ready again for spring training. The prospect of playing the floor once more was, in a word, stupefying. Not to play the couch during a big series like the playoffs was one thing, but at this point I would've settled for the armchair - or the straight -back rocker - the end table even. I would've played the end table without a word of protest. But to return to the floor and submit my body to its excruciating demands was more than should've been asked of any one fan.
I paced the room and pondered my options. I even tried rationality. "This is nonsense," I argued to myself. "This ball game being played a continent away cannot be affected one way or the other by me. I can watch it from the floor - or the couch - or spread-eagle off the ironing board and it will still come out the same." It’s not like I was some dumb Flat Earther, ignorant of the advances in modem thought. I took adult education classes, read Psychology Today, studied the social theories of Charles Reich and Robert H. Rimmer. Truly I was capable of rational thought and action. So, why this obedience to such a superstitious ritual?
Because the evidence was irrefutable, that's why. My mind flashed back to 1967, the Red Sox “Impossible Dream” year - a 100-1 shot driving for the pennant. They were getting obliterated by the lowly California Angels one day, 8-0, and for the life of me I couldn't find the PC anywhere. In exasperation I decided to go out for a drive and clear my head. I walked through the side entry of my garage and got into my car. I turned on the ignition - and the radio - but before I could reach for my automatic garage door opener, there was Ned Martin's voice on the radio breathlessly announcing the Sox' comeback. Mercy! I couldn't believe it - the POWER CENTER was there in my garage, and I was nearly breathless myself by the time the Sox tied game up. And I was nearly overcome with carbon monoxide by the time Rico Petrocelli turned in a nifty play in front of the bag at second, giving the Sox a miraculous come-from-behind victory. The Red Sox won the pennant by one game that year - and it was won as much by my clutch gasps on poison gas as it was by all of Carl Yastrzemski's home runs.
The memory inspired me. I knew I'd been through worse, so I took my place on the floor. My hip ached. My arm throbbed. The bees in my hand turned to wasps by the bottom of the third and by the top of the sixth the wasps had turned to Jews…and Arabs…fighting it out over the Golan Heights. But the Sox were winning the pennant and I was coming to understand the pleasure in pain.
How the Boston Red Sox Won the 1975 World Series first appeared in The Red Sox Reader, edited by Dan Riley and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1992  (Please note: that’s 40 years before Silver Linings Playbook)

Innocents Abroad Once More

Faithful readers of the blog will recall that back in April I declared my candidacy for President of the United States. As is required in this noble endeavor, it has come time for me to--as they say--burnish my foreign policy cred with a trip abroad. If I were running for the Republican nomination, I’ve already done enough world travel to dismiss this requirement with a simple “been there, done that.” Fact is, at this point I’ve visited considerably more foreign lands than the last Republican president ever visited before he started to invade them. If I had not, of course, there’s always the option for any members of the globetrotting Teddy Roosevelt party to cover their bases just by flying into Grenada for a weekend and laying a wreath at the Ronald Reagan War Memorial.
Alas, I’m running for the nomination as a Democrat, the party of advanced placement students, where being a George W. Bush-level slacker is not an option. This upcoming journey will include a stop in London in recognition of  “the very special relationship” between the US and Britain. The itinerary also includes Rome, where I hope to score an audience with His Holiness and encourage him to keep up the good work. And then there’s Cape Town...which is in South Africa, which is on the African continent, which is where the natural resources and human tragedy would be more the object of our diplomatic, military and financial attention if not for the Middle East with its oil and Israel.
Amazingly, this will be our third trip to South Africa, making it much like Naples, another destination we’ve been to multiple times in spite of the warning label that always comes with a visit. Neither is a place that was ever on our bucket list, but circumstances have conspired to make us sorta, kinda regulars. The first trip to South Africa came about in 1993 as Lorna and I were about to celebrate our 25thwedding anniversary and were trying to decide between Carmel and Cape Cod. Suddenly, out of the blue, Lorna called me at work one day to ask how I’d like to pop the champagne in Johannesburg. Turned out someone wanted to hire her to be the main speaker for a 3-day convention of women in business. This would not be one of those offers you hear about that you just can’t refuse. There were some overwhelming reasons not to go, not the least of which was the violent political situation as South Africa was transitioning out of its nasty apartheid era. But we invoked our “the fall alone will kills us” policy and went.
Here’s how scary it was. Our hosts insisted that we stay in our hotel at all times. Nighttime curfews turned Johannesburg, one of the major cities on the entire continent, into a virtual ghost town. And when we called the hotel restaurant to reserve a table for our anniversary dinner, they told us that because of the curfew they would not be opening that night.
And here’s how magical it was. The restaurant called us back less than an hour later to say they were opening...just for us, because it was our anniversary. When we arrived at the 5- star Carlton Hotel's Three Ships dining room, we were greeted by a full wait-staff, a menu of utterly divine food and wine, and a pianist at a grand piano who broke into “Hey Jude” after asking what “our song” was. That evening was followed by Lorna leading an audience of 700 women in a raucus version of "Simply the Best" (with full-on, white girl Tina Turner moves), and then off on a safari that was as otherworldly as one could ever experience without actually leaving the planet.
So it was pretty easy to say yes to a return trip three years later as a new South Africa was just beginning to take shape. Now here we are nearly 20 years later about to make a return visit. The new South Africa has been a mixed bag. On one hand, two remarkable leaders-- Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu--led the country through its “truth and reconciliation” period of racial healing.  On the other, the country is still prone to outbreaks of vicious, mostly tribal-based violence and the Carlton stands shuttered…according to one report, "All that remains to testify to the good old days is a lonely grand piano." 

Yet, when we asked our Cape Town contact about safety, he told us that we’ll be fine as long as we applied common sense. And then he added that we’d be safer there than we are in the States. And you don't have to be an advanced placement student to know exactly what he was talking about. 

Finger Lickin' Insanity

Col. Sanders

I’ll be leaving the country soon. Not on one of those escapist romps civic-minded citizens vow to take whenever political winds seem to blow against them. This will just be a mental health break, which those of us privileged enough to afford should enjoy before another national election gathers enough nutso-craziness to sweep all of us up in its madness.
Already there are enough signs of freedom gone gaga to make mad King George seem the sanest monarch who ever lived for letting us go on our Yankee-doodle way. Just last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most cerebral, coherent, and conscientious candidate to run for president since Adlai Stevenson, found himself attacked--first in person and subsequently online--for being insufficiently sympathetic to African Americans because he refused to be cowed by Black Lives Matter demonstrators at a public event where he’d been invited to speak. 
And before I get tarred with the racist brush myself, let me state unequivocally my support for the Black Lives Matter sentiment. To affirm that black lives matter does not imply that other lives don’t. So responding with "all lives matter" is at best obtuse and at worst argumentative. As someone explained, it is like taking a broken leg into a doctor only to have your doctor examine it and declare, “All your limbs matter.” Shit, I know that, doc, but it’s the broken one that hurts and needs attention. So when you reply to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter, you may think you’re simply being inclusive, but you’re really being dismissive of someone’s very real pain.
That being said, Bernie had every reason to be perturbed at the disruption of his speech on any number of levels…and let’s just begin at the public safety level. Who in his or her right mind in today’s violent-prone civic environment would not take a defensive posture when confronted with unruliness? Piling on, some news media "talking head" then dissed Bernie for pointing out to the angry protestors that he had a long history of supporting civil rights. This “political expert” (who would’ve wet his pants if confronted the way Bernie was) claimed that the 72-year old warrior for justice didn’t understand that it was unfashionable for white folks to pat themselves on the back for the role they played in the Civil Rights movement. Of course, a preening media peacock would see this as patting yourself on the back, while some of us would see it as a sorely needed history lesson. 
Generally, while the rightwing media cackled to watch such a fissure in the progressive alliance develop, the more moderate-to-liberal media was full of tut…tut…tutting at how unprepared Sanders seemed to be in campaigning in front of African Americans. It was a reaction that illustrated the subtle, insidious racism on the left that sees black Americans as a monolithic group. Would Sanders have received a similarly nasty greeting from, say, a convention of the NAACP? Not only would the reception have been more civil, there would’ve been a greater appreciation for Bernie’s message of restoring income equality from a group that historically has its eyes on the prize rather than the latest twitter trend.
But the attempt to turn Bernie Sanders into some plantation colonel was only one of the many signs of a political process already unhinged by an election more than a year away. Republican presidential candidates stumbled over each other to condemn Barack Obama’s nuclear treaty with Iran in the foulest language, including the scurrilous "appeaser" slur by the odious Lindsay Graham, who compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain. This from the party that reveres as saint Ronald Reagan, the president who negotiated similar high-stakes treaties with the Soviet Union and traded arms for hostages with Iran.
Then lefties wasted a week of their lives and God knows how much of their integrity posting links and comments in support of Donald Trump’s charge that John McCain wasn’t really a war hero. And the great Steely Dan lyric fell on those deaf partisan ears: “I’m a fool to do your dirty work for you.”
Another clearly disturbed cop abused another black life that didn’t matter…to him at least and those who excuse his behavior. Another black life ended in police custody under dubious circumstances. Another gunman with a history of mental illness opened fire on yet another gathering of innocent human beings. Another politician who champions unrestricted gun rights and slashes funds for mental health services stepped forward to shamelessly cry crocodile tears over the entire tragedy.  
Yes, we get what we deserve. There are some secret and rather diabolical herbs and spices that go into the making of our peculiar American lunacy. But it all begins when the chickens start running around with their heads cut off. 

The Straits of Dire

Chris Hayes interviews LA Mayor  Garcetti about water
I’ve had lawns and loved them for most of my life. When I was a kid of 11, it was a lawn of our own that announced most resoundingly that we had moved up and out of apartment living and into our own house. We strung our lawn together with three neighbor lawns to our east to create the field where I learned to play and love baseball and football. The neighbor lawn to the west of us was the size of all four of the eastern lawns and the owner paid me $5 a week to mow it…so a lawn was my first job.


When we started a family of our own, again it was a long, rolling New England lawn that reminded us that we were no longer tenants on someone else’s property. We turned part of that lawn into a large vegetable garden, played softball and picnicked on other parts of it, and generally let our kids roam free over the whole of it whenever it wasn’t covered with snow.
The most recent lawn…a California lawn…was the most impressive of all…the greenest and thickest. It was also the most expensive. When we called the water department about 7 years ago to assess how we might cut down on our $300 a month water bill, they said we could begin with ripping out the lawn, which would save us about 50%. The lawn served no practical purpose…not even impractical. We never had a picnic on it, played softball, croquet or bocce on it…hardly ever walked on it. It was a purely aesthetic pleasure, and tearing out something that lovely to look at took a good deal of friendly persuasion.

But then it was done…two years before everything turned really dire on the California water front, and before the persuasion would not have been so friendly. We would have had no choice but to rip it out under the current circumstances. Such a lawn is unsustainable in California’s drought crisis.  

Chris Hayes, whose All In is the best damned news show on TV (as long as he doesn’t talk about football), recently travelled to California to cover the crisis. Hayes often travels to where news is being made to offer viewers insight from beyond the scare headlines. He interviews people close to the ground who are actually grappling with issues, rather than merely inflaming them. His trip to California to view the water crisis up close is a typically excellent endeavor (save for the title…"Water Wars." Is there no civic argument in this country we can't turn into a frickin' war?) In one interview he speaks with a Central Valley farmer who tells us a few remarkable things. First is that his main crop, cantaloupes, don’t need water…don’t want it really. Second is that the root drip system he’s put in place will cut water usage while increasing yield…significantly in both cases. Third is that the reason for the rise in demand for water-sucking almonds is healthier, more sophisticated eating habits. People no longer see a salad as a piece of iceberg lettuce with dressing, he says. They want it with fruit and nuts…thus the increasing demand…thus the increasing supply…thus the increasing water usage. And thus another item to be filed away under “Unintended Consequences." 
The most compelling interview (above) is with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who in adding rich texture and nuance to the discussion proves to be the most convincingly optimistic politician I’ve ever seen. Garcetti genuinely seems to embrace the water shortage facing his city and state as a galvanizing challenge, not as an overwhelming one. He seems positively energized by the creative and resourceful ways in which Californians are going about meeting the challenge. He talks about the jobs the crisis is creating. He talks about the innovative methods cities and individuals are implementing to create more usable water out of the available water rather than waiting for a miracle from the skies. He expresses unabashed, old-fashioned American can-doism about beating the drought and coming out of it stronger and better on the other side.

I must confess, after the interview he had me looking at the glass half full of water rather than half-empty. There’s definitely a heightened consciousness about water use in our social circles. Everyone is either talking about recycling, or tearing out lawns, or putting in water-saving toilets, appliances, and gadgets. Garcetti says that over the past 45 years the population of LA has increased by one million, but water usage has remained the same. That’s a pretty amazing and encouraging fact…the kind you don’t get much in the sky-is-falling world of 24/7 fear on cable news. Every once in a while it’s good for us humans to remind ourselves that getting things right is not as impossible as we make it out to be.  Our lawn before and after we got with the program

The Statue of Bigotry

Give me your rich and privileged asses, your high rollers, your golfers, and big-titted blondes. Give me your One Per Centers and Award Presenters. Your advanced placement students, your movers and shakers, your crèmes de la crème, the leaders of your packs. Give me your self-regarding elites. Your narcissists. Your loud and vulgar peacocks. Give me your Johann Breyers. Your Raj Rajaratnams. Your Schwartzeneggers  and  Kissingers. Give me the Gabor sisters, the Warner brothers. And Einstein! Most of all give me people who look like me, act like me, think like me, smell like me. Make this a land of mirrors and reflecting pools and echoes of the voices in my head. (But keep your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free buried under rocks where they belong.) 

It’s All About Me

One person's seduction is another's sexual assault. 
A few posts ago virtual friend and sometime sparring partner Rob Belgeri left a comment (a pretty solid one, I might add). Very soon thereafter, however, he deleted it. I’m always intrigued by unforced acts of self-censorship. I’ve practiced them myself on occasion. And actually Rob's self-censoring in itself was rather germane to the blog topic, which was comedy vs. political correctness--specifically the question of who gets to edit creativity…the creator or the various and sundry bluenoses who object to the creation? When I asked Rob why he removed the comment, he wrote back, “It was all about me, and it ain’t about me.” (Full disclosure…I’m paraphrasing here…and at my own risk, because Rob is a hell of a writer in his own right. What Rob really wrote was “Too autobiographical. I hate when I do that.  It ain't about me.” But I massaged his words to make them fit with the title of this post…and also because…well, because it is all about me.)
This blog, of course, is about me. Without me, I’d be out of business, though there’s little business in the commercial sense going on here (unless I’m selling a book!). But my me…my story, my experiences, my thoughts and observations, my passions and antagonisms are what fuel and drive this blog. Without me, I have very little to say about very much and am empty. But with me--with what I’ll blushingly call my humanity--I have at least some key to gaining insight into people whose lives otherwise might be remote or alien to me.
Here’s an example. As I said in that post that prompted Rob’s comment, it’s been a long while since I’ve been on a college campus, so there’s a lot going on there that I hear about on the news but can hardly relate to--not just political correctness, but the whole rape culture thing. Recently the statisticunderpinning the notion of rape culture on campus was reinforced: 1 in 5 college women report that they have been the victims of sexual assault, ranging from unwanted touching to rape.
Though I’m sure it happened in real life (albeit with less frequency) in my college days, the only discussions I can recall of rape would be in regards to films that featured rape scenes (most famously Gone with the Wind, which was in re-release in 70mm at the time, all the better to appreciate Scarlett’s lascivious smile the morning after being raped by Rhett). But in my writer’s struggle to access a sense of what’s going on at today’s colleges, I managed to unearth three memories that seem in retrospect somewhat relevant.   
In the first instance, I had come back to my apartment to gather up a forgotten book...or paper or pen, whatever. When I opened the door to return to campus, a woman who lived across the hall was standing in my doorway and blocking my exit with considerable attitude. I told her I didn’t have time to talk; I had to get to class. She said she would let me pass after I kissed her. This was the first time anything like that had ever happened to me, and Catholic boy that I was I was duly flustered. I tried to treat the situation as joke, but she was serious and repeated her demand. Reality check #1: I didn’t find this woman at all attractive. Had I, perhaps the situation wouldn’t have felt so intimidating. Reality check #2: she was petite and as such presented little resistance when I finally pushed past her and left. Had I been the petite one, it’s quite possible that this memory would be far uglier.
The second instance answers a key question raised by the first: does attractiveness mitigate against aggressiveness? Same apartment…different woman, a co-ed I had once been quite attracted to. We had a cancelled class together and decided to spend the free time at my place. When I returned from the kitchen with drinks, she was undressed and beckoning me to join her on the couch. Six months earlier, my attraction to her easily would have trumped her aggressiveness toward me, and I’d have been down and dirty with her on the couch, happily so. But in the time between her break up with her last guy and that afternoon, I had fallen helplessly in love with Lorna,and there was no way I was going to trade that winning lottery ticket for a one time ticket to ride.
The final instance involved a rather renowned professor in the English department. I had gone to his office to pick up Lorna’s final exam. As I got up to leave, I found myself in exactly the same situation as I had been with the petite woman in the doorway…only there was nothing petite about this PhD. He was quite heavyset and easily blocked my exit and asked me to kiss him. I looked at him in shock…I never saw that coming. Heavyset or not, I bulled my way out of there. I know this is redundant with the first story, but this is where it gets depressingly resonant with what we’re reading and hearing about on today’s campuses. A few months after the incident, I described it to a faculty couple that had become social friends of ours. This was in no way a report on my part, formal or informal. It grew out of our discussion at an evening dinner. But when I finished my story, both husband and wife--highly educated and fiercely liberal though they were--refused to believe me. They insisted that their colleague was just joking and that I had misread his intentions. 

None of these instances are as heinous as the one I blogged about some years ago, which I believe gives me some standing to write about rape if not rape culture. But each of them puts me in—or rather out—of the shoes of the women currently making their complaints about what’s going on in a world I no longer inhabit. I have no trouble seeing how lucky I was in each circumstance to successfully navigate through them. I also have no trouble seeing how frustrating and frightening it can be to find yourself in such circumstances where you are clearly the vulnerable one…by virtue of physical size or innocent insobriety. Finally, I can see how isolating it can be not to be believed by either those who should be protecting you or those who should be supporting you. That's when it becomes all about you in the worst and loneliest way possible.    

Sweet Home America

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I’ve written quite a few posts about songs that I love (here, here, and here), but I’ve never written about songs I hate, so maybe it’s about time. Hell, the time couldn’t be better. Please allow me to pile on today’s runnin’ in reverse rebels with a little exegesis of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, which is nothing other-- thematically speaking--than Dixie with a dance beat. In other words, it’s another woeful lament about the gone with the wind American South that some folks insist on getting all teary eyed about despite the inescapable truth that it was a bastion of treason and white supremacy.
Oddly, where some folks (like me!) see treason and white supremacy, others like Johnny Van Zant, lead singer for Lynyrd Skynyrd, see something totally different in Southern iconography like the Confederate flag. “We don’t consider it a racist thing at all,” he said in an interview. “It’s more collard greens and saying y’all.”  He elaborated:

For us the Confederate flag doesn't mean any kind of racist thing or anything like that. The original version of “Sweet Home Alabama” The Water Sisters sang on it, and not only that, one of my favorite singers in the world was Ray Charles. You know? Gee whiz. You like that kind of music you can’t be racist at all. We’ve been mistaken for that. The reason why we started doing that was because we had a song called “Sweet Home Alabama.” Hopefully we haven’t offended a bunch of people by doing that. Cause we’re not racist at all..One of my best friends in high school was a black guy, hey you know? We’re just common people. 

That’s pretty standard good ol’ boy spin on the issue, including the classic some of my best friends are black. I’ll give Van Zant the benefit of the doubt on what he said there including the existence of a black best friend in high school. But this is not a psychic exercise, this is exegesis and as such I have only to deal with the lyrics Van Zant and his two writing partners wrote—none of whom, by the way, were from Alabama.
So, to the lyrics and the verse that actually put the song on the musical map both for those who hate it and those who love it. I speak of course of the song’s frontal attack on Neil Young who had written two earlier songs on the American South (Alabama and Southern Man) that had clearly riled the good ol’ boys
Well I heard mister Young sing about her Well, I heard ole Neil put her down Well, I hope Neil Young will remember A Southern man don't need him around anyhow
Sweet home Alabama Where the skies are so blue Sweet Home Alabama Lord, I'm coming home to you
For those who may have forgotten, Young’s Southern Man was a musical version of Sherman’s scorched earth:
Southern manbetter keep your headDon't forgetwhat your good book saidSouthern changegonna come at lastNow your crossesare burning fastSouthern man
I saw cottonand I saw blackTall white mansionsand little shacks.Southern manwhen will youpay them back?I heard screamin'and bullwhips crackingHow long? How long?
Southern manbetter keep your headDon't forgetwhat your good book saidSouthern changegonna come at lastNow your crossesare burning fastSouthern man
Lily Belle,your hair is golden brownI've seen your black mancomin' roundSwear by GodI'm gonna cut him down!I heard screamin'and bullwhips crackingHow long? How long?
What Young’s lyric lacked in subtlety it at least made up for in confronting historical reality. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song, on the other hand, true to its Southern heritage, glories in denying historical reality, as in this verse that manages to whitewash the Birmingham church bombings, the segregationist policies of Gov. George Wallace, and the high crimes and misdemeanors of Watergate.
In Birmingham they love the gov'nor (boo, boo, boo)Now we all did what we could do Now Watergate does not bother me Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth
It’s a hat trick of historical ignorance, and to tell the truth, I think the verse like the entire song stems from ignorance…thoughtlessness…and what I like to call bad boy culture, where the good ol’ boys sit around drinkin’ and thinkin’ ‘bout how best to piss people off. As I say, I take Johnny Van Zant at his word that there was nothing malicious intended in any of this. They more likely wrote this tripe with Jack Daniels in their bloodstream rather than Jim Crow in their hearts. But as most of the nation finally seemed to realize this week, flying the Confederate flag (or singing Sweet Home Alabama) may originate with a mere boyish impulse to stick it to Yankees, pointy-headed academics, and the “lamestream” media, but when it enters the bogey boy brain of a little monster like Dylann Roof, it becomes the paraphernalia of a killer.  
The obviously one good thing to come out of Roof’s murder spree was that at long last an act of a domestic terrorism was not dismissed as the work of some psychotic lone wolf. In moving swiftly to take down the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state house and other sanctuaries for treason throughout the South, there was at least some recognition of cultural complicity in the crime. The timing of it all might allow some Southerners and their soul mates in other regions of the country to at long last overcome their divided loyalty this Fourth of July. By taking down their Confederate flags, they can experience the pure patriotism that comes from celebrating allegiance to Sweet Home America rather than one of its bloodiest enemies…the Confederacy. 

The Gipper Gets it Right

"Governor Haley, tear down this flag!"
From the grave The Great Communicator decides to go after those who actually did attack the United States of America.