‘Hair’ is Back

 

 

Hair is back on Broadway – and if you’re over 60, a lot of other places, too.

 

When the musical first opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theater on April 29, 1968, the hair in question referred to the stuff on the heads of the generation then in their early twenties and just discovering that you could really tick off your parents if you let your hair grow so big you needed a bushel basket for a hat.

 

That generation – my generation – was the same one that protested against the war in Vietnam, thought it invented sex, and vowed to never trust anyone over 30. And hair was the membership badge. Whether as mutton chop-sideburns, frosted and streaked ‘fros, three-foot-ironing board ponytails or Prince Valiant locks, hair was how we said to the world “I’m here – look at me!”

 

So Hair the musical was of and for the Boomer generation, The Age of Aquarius was an anthem and the new age would last forever.

 

Forever for the musical turned out to be running for 1,750 performances. The Boomers are running still, although a lot of us have switched to something called “power walking,” a thinly disguised form of “still walking under our own power.” And starting anything,  especially a song, with the words “The Age…” just makes us cranky.

 

We switched positions on a lot of other things, too, like wars, and free love and having to trust folks over 30 because you soon hardly knew anyone under 30 – and then 40, 50 and. . .

 

But as Hair the musical reopened in a Broadway revival on March 31, most of us could say that our personal hair remained a generational badge.

 

But we now wear the badge differently.

 

For guys, the issue is not so much wearing hair over your ears as having it grow from your ears. And your nose and knuckles and back and, well, just about any place you don’t want it to grow. As for growing it on your head, you’ve now been admitted to the secret of why old men wear caps all the time.

 

For women, it’s the age of Cover Girl – not the magazine, but what you’ve got to do when you kiss your grandson and he says “Grandma, that tickles!” Or Bleach Girl. Or, when mush comes to stash, new uses for The Razor That Lives In The Shower.

 

Neither sex is going to discuss changes to That Other Hair, except to pass on this wisdom for future generations: hair dye kits can really, really sting.

 

As for the anthem The Age of Aquarius, it ends with the repeated lyric “Let the sun shine, Let the sun shine in. The sun shine in.”

Somehow “SPF 50, Use SPF 50, SPF 50” isn’t the same.

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EDS – Larry Blasko said will be sporadic next week. Happy Holidays to all! --LGB

Dog, Wife and Davy Crockett

 

 

Davy Crockett’s 1834 autobiography begins with :

 

“I leave this rule for others when I'm dead
Be always sure you're right — THEN GO AHEAD!”

 

Good advice, or as Tigger would say, “Arooof!” which gets us to the dilemma. In mid-September, Tigger, my soulmate and companion of 12 years, needed the kind of help that only a vet’s final needle can give, so we went together and only one of us came home.

 

Which was tough, and I mourned.

 

Wife, my other companion, didn’t mourn exactly, but if she gave herself high fives, she at least had the courtesy to do it elsewhere. She also said “There will be no more dogs!”

 

Well, whether wife or dog, you’ve got to make allowances for a fellow creature’s nature. Just as most dogs will loyally follow your lead, most wives will try to pull or push things their way. And besides, whether it’s a wife or a dog, it’s not seemly to take up with a new one while the old one’s barely gone.

 

But when six months had passed,  it was time. I needed loving eyes, a wagging tale and big, slobbery kisses. After almost 40 years of marriage, I knew that would most probably come from a dog. But when I mentioned to Wife that I was going to get one, she said that if a dog came, she would go.

 

Oh.

 

Clearly, the thing to do was to examine it in light of Davy’s motto. Pick Dog or Wife and then go ahead. I began to make a list:

 

·        Living with a dog is fairly straightforward. With a crate, a leash and the mutual understanding of who’s boss, things progress nicely and the dog will make you happy. A wife always wants a new crate, ignores a leash, has a twisted idea of who’s boss, and expects you to make her happy.

 

·        A dog will give you a happy greeting every time you walk through the door, probably figuring out where you’ve been from the scent of your clothes. A wife will figure things out the same way, but it may not be a happy greeting.

 

·        A dog is always by your side. A wife is always on your back.

 

·        A dog sheds twice a year and you sweep. A wife buys new clothes constantly and you weep.

 

·        A dog listens without comment. A wife comments without listening.

 

The list could have gone on, but it was clearly in the dog’s favor, and it doesn’t become a gentleman who’s ahead to run up the score. And even though Dog was way ahead on points, Wife eventually won the game, thanks to Davy Crockett.

 

See, I was looking just at the positive. Davy Crockett would have looked at both sides. He would have pointed out that while I have trained several loyal, loving dogs in my life, I’ve been at the Wife-training game for decades and still haven’t trained one.

 

Giving up now would make me a quitter, and Davy Crockett was no quitter. I won’t be a quitter either.

 

Besides, there’s always a chance to slip away to the local shelter now and then for a little discreet dogging on the side. . .

 

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Dead-Right Patriots

 

 

A general solution to the nagging problems of Social Security, Medicare and a host of other government problems bit-bopped along the AP news feed today, but it seemed to be pretty much ignored.

 

That may be a result of the AP’s newly announced “Sue ‘Em All, Let Courts Sort It Out” policy on linking to Mother AP’s content without linking to her purse, but it’s probably a general reluctance to embrace the solution.

 

Citing several sources, the Washington-datelined article notes that folks who smoke actually save the government money. And no, it’s not in the federal excise tax on tobacco products that the feds goosed into the stratosphere beginning in April.

 

That would be dead wrong.

 

The correct answer is dead right.

 

As in stiff.

 

As in no longer eligible to do anything at all except maybe vote now and then in Cook County, Illinois.

 

See, while smokers cost a bundle in health care, not to mention lost productivity, they graciously die ten years before non-smokers. Since the federal government usually pays only the living, bureaucrats excepted, dying sooner means Uncle Sam will have spent less on you overall than your thoughtlessly thin, healthy, smoke-and-booze-free neighbor who lives to be 93.

 

It’s such a drop-dead-simple and straightforward idea.

 

Social Security fears going broke because old folks drawing benefits will hugely outnumber young folks paying the bill. Medicare, Medicaid are in the same bind, not to mention the Medi-whatever health care plan starting to bud in Congress.

 

Folks who live long lives continue to crowd highways and produce pollutants; they occupy homes, causing scarcity and that pushes up prices. They cling to jobs that could be filled at lesser cost by the young.

 

The list could go on and on, but the times call for action, not lists. And besides, the whole point of the idea is not to go on and on, but just to go. So it’s time for President Obama to create a Cabinet-level Department of Patriotic Aging.

 

The department would offer several no-cost benefits to those 50 and older, including free cigarettes and booze, lifetime Supersize-It coupons, gratis high-fat/high-salt snacks and any required transportation alternatives to walking.

 

For those willing to be patriotic but worried about the afterlife, the government could partner with major denominations in a Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free program that would be available to those patriots who party so hard for their country they check out before 55.

 

Nathan Hale regretted that he had “but one life to give my country.” Light up, pour yourself a strong one and ask if you can do less.

 

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R.I.P. Delivery Business

 

 

Sometimes you can have a very good business without really understanding what business you’re in. Just ask a daily newspaper – and hurry while you can still talk to one without a séance or a Ouija board.

 

Newspapers long trumpeted that they were in the News Business. In the last few decades, that changed to the Media Business or Communications Business, but those two were really just the News Business with a college degree and a daily clean shirt.

 

And now that newspapers find themselves flopping in the muck at the bottom of a rapidly draining pond, they’re using their last gill-gasps to wonder what happened to the News Business.

 

Which is odd, because they mostly had much less to do with news than they did with delivering it. Then again, a fedora with a “Delivery” card tucked into its brim doesn’t have quite the cachet of one that says “Press.”

 

What newspapers were delivering was events that happened outside the immediate range of most folks, but interested them nonetheless. You didn’t need a newspaper to tell you your teenage daughter was gaga over that lowlife down the street or other really important stuff. Instead they delivered news that Senator Windbag’s bill to tax public flatulence had been tooted out of Congress, or that the Red Sox had laundered  the White Sox.

 

The hunter-gatherers who found and processed these events, the reporters and editors, developed an endless capacity for self inflation, but the whole process depended on delivery, not discovery. No matter how penetrating your insight, how soaring your prose, how stunning your revelation, it was for zilch unless an awful lot of folk wrestling heavy machinery, driving fleets of trucks and hauling bundled newspapers in bags or little red wagons did their stuff.

 

That was the service that the most valuable subscribers signed up for – home delivery.

 

It was the home delivery subscriber that advertising salesfolk peddled to advertisers, convincing them to make the never-quite-proven assumption that all these folk (a.) read the paper daily and (b.) would read their ad if they did. Newsstand sales counted, sure, but kind of like a walk down the aisle after the third kid – acknowledged, but not really celebrated.

 

And the subscribers stuck around because they had no real alternative, especially in the one-newspaper towns that came to be the norm.. Although broadcast news was handy and multimedia, it was usually constrained to a predetermined time slot and a predetermined length. Nothing else delivered content in a way that subscribers could use pretty much any way they wanted any time they wanted, at least within the confines of an hours-long publishing and delivery cycle. And within the limits of content discovered and selected by the reporter and editors.

 

That setup drove profit margins that were so obscene they were seldom discussed in public, attention instead being lavished on the reporters and editors, who liked hearing how important they were so much they were willing to ignore generally crummy pay and worse hours. Like parakeets before mirrors, they were in love and nothing else mattered.

 

Then came the telecommunications revolution. Events still happened and folks were still interested in them, but they didn’t need a report delivered via truck or underpaid kid. They could go online and get it whenever they wanted.

 

In fact, they didn’t even need the reporter/editor hunter/gatherer crowd as much, since just about anyone near an event could capture and post it for anyone else to see.

 

That’s over-simplified, but the subscribers lost interest in getting filtered information gathered and delivered via presses and trucks and under-tipped kids and stopped paying for them all. Maybe not all at once, but a website called “Newspaper Death Watch” being pretty busy these days is a solid clue about a trend.

 

If any of the folks in the delivery business survive, it will be the ones who finally figure out what business they were in, notice that it doesn’t have much of a pulse, and find or start a new business.

 

And they don’t have much time.

 

 

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Self-Made Quadriplegic?

 

We can all rest easier knowing that the North Carolina Department of Corrections protects us from Timothy E. Helms. The record on that is clear.

 

Less clear is who will protect Helms – and the rest of us – from the North Carolina Department of Corrections.

 

Sunday’s edition of the Raleigh News and Observer carried an article about Helms written by Michael Biesecker.  He explains that Helms, serving three life terms for a fatal drunken-driving crime, is a quadriplegic. He can’t sit up or feed himself, but he apparently has extraordinary powers. More on those later.

 

Now the North Carolina’s Department of Corrections must have been worried about those powers, because the reporting by Biesecker says they kept the 48-year-old Helms in “disciplinary or administrative segregation,”  for more than 1400 days. Those days cover all of 2008, including after August when Helms became injured. And 89 so far this year.

 

In case your BureaucratSpeak dictionary isn’t handy, “disciplinary or administrative segregation” is solitary confinement.

 

You never know when a quadriplegic is going to make a break for it or organize a riot, I guess. The North Carolina Department of Corrections isn’t taking any chances.

 

And to be fair, Biesecker’s reporting in the News and Observer is clear that the 48-year-old Helms, in the slammer since 1994, is no angel. After hitting his head in a car accident when he was ten, his record before prison features drunken driving, assault, petty crime and visits to mental health facilities. In prison, the N&O reports his record of offenses includes –gasp!—hoarding 84 postage stamps, and other slightly more serious stuff. And for most of that time, he wasn’t even quadriplegic.

 

That started to change last August 3, when his special powers came into play. Seems he used some batteries and metal scrap to set his cell on fire. Hundreds of days in solitary confinement might make you cranky enough to do that, especially if you already have mental health issues, but that’s no excuse.

 

The prison guards, of course, put out the fire, the N&O reports, and “subdued” Helms. The next day, they took Helms to a local hospital, where doctors found a fractured skull, brain bleeding, fractured ribs and the marks you get when a nightstick whacks you.

 

Even in North Carolina, you’re not supposed to beat prisoners into quadriplegics, but the N&O reports an internal Department of Correction investigation found nothing to “conclusively determine what might have caused his injuries. . ."

 

So that’s where those extraordinary powers we mentioned must have come into play. Clearly, the North Carolina Department of Corrections thinks it possible that Helms beat himself so severely he made himself a quadriplegic. And to top it off, a hospital report said, he shoved two batteries in a plastic bag up his rectum.

If  Helms doesn’t have extraordinary powers, then some guards from the North Carolina Department of Corrections might have broken the law. The State of North Carolina is checking into all law-breaking in connection with the incident.

Already, the News and Observer reports, the eagle-eyed folks from the state have come across two felony-class charges. They charged Helms with burning a public building and malicious damage to occupied property by use of an incendiary device.

 

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Read the excellent News and Observer article yourself at: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1472530.html

 

Caution – Explanatory Aside!

 

There are lots of ways to tell you aren’t a kid anymore, and technologies to hide most of them, but none of us can evade the awful impact of the Explanatory Aside.

 

It’s how you at last must admit to yourself  that you’re older than dirt, which, by the way, is one of the phrases you should avoid using if you’re trying to pass as just yesterday’s dust.

 

The Explanatory Aside is a clever enemy, hiding in the grass of a lot of ordinary prose, waiting to deflate the self esteem of anyone who not only doesn’t see it coming, but doesn’t need it coming.

 

Here’s an example from an Associated Press report on an Obama administration tilt at the elimination of nuclear weapons windmill (italics added):

 

“In doing so, the White House official invoked the names of former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker, as well as former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga. Kissinger was in the administration of President Richard Nixon while Baker was in the administration of George H.W. Bush.”

 

Now the AP, in common with just about all other major media, writes for a mainstream audience, one that shares a common understanding. And the obvious assumption of the writer and editors involved was that mention of these two historical figures would require explanation, just like mentioning Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s longest-serving Secretary of War.

 

So if the mainstream audience needs a tag explaining Dr. K and Jim Baker, those of us who don’t must be. . .

 

Well, let’s not say it out loud. If we have to speak of at all, we’ll call it “differently mainstreamed.”

 

Explanatory Asides pop up all the time. Reading the Sunday comics a couple of weeks ago, I saw a panel take a moment to explain what a typewriter was.

 

It might have been easier if the artist just put a footnote inviting the audience to “Dial 1-800-SAY-WHUT, except another footnote would have been necessary to explain the verb “dial.”

 

Those of us with grandchildren can look forward to more footnotes explaining LP records, floppy disks, tape decks, video cassettes and why “Twist And Shout” was something other than a George W. Bush Administration interrogation technique. So here’s a suggestion.

 

Study explanatory footnotes as though you didn’t already know them, and make it a habit. It might help in later years when you have forgotten so much you’re actually mainstream again.

 

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