beautiful, funny, sad & true

When I was in sixth grade, one of the crazes in that myopic little world was for everyone in the class to have a small stuffed Garfield doll.  Guys had them, girls had them, everybody had them.  We didn’t play with them, per se, the thing was just to have one in your desk.  Incidentally, my mom told me a few months ago that with the release of the new Garfield movie, the little stuffed dolls were becoming a craze with kids again, thirty years later.   I never saw THAT one coming.

A more universal craze of the time was the Rubik’s Cube, a maddening brain teaser of a toy that took the country, and indeed the world, by storm when it was released in 1980.  You know, one of these:

I was hooked on it too, and even bought a book on how to solve it.  You start by solving one side, then another, and it all sort of comes into place that way.  The book was full of these arcane strings of formulas with acronyms like, “F L U2 R2”, which stand for Front, Left, Upper 2, Right 2, etc.  Some people just gave in and pulled their cubes apart in order to ‘solve’ them, and some people pulled the stickers off and moved them into place, which I think would be a prohibitive amount of work, and it would make the stickers look crappy once they were back on.  But I digress.

I learned to solve the Cube in record speed.  When they would have national competitions on TV, like this one, from the show That’s Incredible. . .

. . .I would always beat them ‘by a large margin’, as my brother used to say.  I wondered how they got to be on TV and everything, when it took them an eternity—like forty-five seconds!—to solve it.  My hat’s off to you if you sat through that entire piece of crap video, by the way.  The episode of the show is staggeringly boring, and the video ends before we even get to find out who wins the contest.  What a letdown!

The world record for solving the Cube was seven seconds, and I could only whittle my time down to around eight.  When I was in New Hampshire visiting my grandparents, one of their neighbors, upon meeting the eleven-year-old me, handed over his scrambled Rubik’s Cube and said, “If you can solve this, you’re a better man than I am.”  Little did he know what he was in for.  I whipped it around and handed it back to him a few seconds later, completely solved.  He gave me a stunned look, and was actually a bit angry and petulant about the whole thing—although he tried to hide it—which I found hilarious.  I got the feeling he didn’t particularly care for kids, and he wanted to give me something to keep me occupied and out of the way of the adults.  I had my secret skill, however, which foiled his little plan.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was telling a friend about this story on the phone today and afterwards said, “This is probably a blog story.”

“It’s totally a blog story,” he replied.  “You should call it ‘Eight Seconds.’  You can start it like this.”  He lowered his voice in imitation of a melodramatic TV announcer.  “Eight seconds.  That’s not the length of time I can stay on a bull, or the amount of time before I have an orgasm, that’s how long it took me to solve the Rubik’s Cube.”

We both laughed, and then he had to get off the phone and return to work, as did I.  I liked his suggestion for the name, but I obviously took some liberty with (i.e., completely disregarded) his other suggestions.

In the interest of even more disclosure (is that possible, after proclaiming the last disclosure ‘full’?), unlike my skill at playing Ms. Pac-Man, which hasn’t ever really dwindled over the intervening decades, my ability to solve the Cube has completely evaporated.  Sad, I know, but it’s the kind of skill you have to use, or else you lose.  I might still have my old Cube in a box somewhere at one of my parents’ houses.  Amazing how little of that childhood stuff actually survived, and also amazing are the things we adults WISH had survived.  My brother and I do still have a bunch of our original Star Wars action figures, and my little Yoda one is the mascot for my recording projects, to remind me and the people working with me, “Do, or do not; there is no ‘try.’ “  More than anything, I wish I had my collection of toy cars.  I have a couple of them, but most of them got given away, or lost, or given to Goodwill, or just. . .vanished.  I also wish I had my collection of cassettes from childhood through high school.  My brother and I made tons of cassettes in which we acted out skits, or made up songs, or just recorded ourselves talking and playing with our friends, being our dorky selves.  Those are my favorites.  I still have a couple of them, but we made tons, and they don’t seem to have survived.  The ones that have survived are worthy of their own separate blog entries.

By way of the television industry calls a ‘teaser,’ I’ll tell you that my favorite of the tapes, which has been safely stored away from almost thirty years until I recently copied it onto my computer and digitized the audio, is entitled, “One in a Million,” and it’s quite possibly the best thing ever.  If my brother will agree to it, I’ll write the story out and post the audio on here.  If he doesn’t, then I’ll have to just tell the story minus the audio, which will still be entertaining.

There is more to come.

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the 1970’s lately, not in a nostalgic way, but in more of a sociological way.  I had a fleeting thought a few weeks ago—The Seventies were before everything changed—and that thought has stuck with me ever since.  Funny how such a simple statement led me in so many directions, but the main one I keep coming back to is that the 1980’s, led by the invention of the personal computer, mark the point at which our society started to become more the way it exists today.  The pace of everything is more frenetic, divisions between people seem to be greater, society seems more fragmented, wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and whole industries that existed for centuries have dwindled and become extinct in the new electronic economy.  Hindsight being as keen as it is, the Seventies almost feel like the Fifties by comparison.

I’m not a sociologist (I just play one on TV), but I find this idea completely intriguing, and I’m not sure what to do with it just yet.  The Seventies were before everything changed.  It could be the basis for a story, or an entire book, or an incredibly witty and insightful series of blog entries.  It could just as easily turn out to merely be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  It will definitely require some research, of what kind I am unaware, but I do feel like it could lead to something interesting, regardless.

I can easily imagine that thought leading to a story set back then.  I’ll have to dig up some of the highlights of the decade, since I was alive during the Seventies, but was too young to really know much about what was going on in the world.  I certainly remember some of the bigger events, like the Voyager space missions, the launches of which we watched during my classes in school.  I certainly remember the gas shortage, during which the price of a gallon hovered at ninety-nine cents for the longest time, until economic circumstances inevitably pushed it over the one-dollar threshold and beyond.  I remember the Iranians (but I don’t remember which specific group of Iranians) holding American journalists hostage, which (among other things) prompted the football players in the Super Bowl to stick a strip of yellow tape on the back of their helmets, in order to show their support for the hostages.  I remember the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, in which a meltdown of the reactor was narrowly avoided.  I also remember plenty of the television shows and theme songs of the time.  My friends used to ask me to play the theme songs on the piano all the time, so I dutifully learned them and can still dredge them up at gigs occasionally.  You have my permission to ask me about this if you see me play somewhere.

Speaking of that, I do have a show tonight, so I have to wrap this up and get ready for it, but I wanted to let you in on what I’ve been thinking about lately.  It could be nothing, or it could be a Big Idea.

To be continued.

Have a nice day!