drag queen drop

Today I learned from Garrison Keillor via The Writer’s Almanac that:

The Times Square celebration dates back to 1904, when The New York Times opened its headquarters on Longacre Square. The newspaper convinced the city to rename the area “Times Square,” and they hosted a big party, complete with fireworks, on New Year’s Eve. Some 200,000 people attended, but the paper’s owner, Adolph Ochs, wanted the next celebration to be even splashier. In 1907, the paper’s head electrician constructed a giant lighted ball that was lowered from the building’s flagpole.

Other cities have developed their own ball-dropping traditions. Atlanta, Georgia, drops a giant peach. Eastport, Maine, drops a sardine. Ocean City, Maryland, drops a beach ball, and Mobile, Alabama, drops a 600-pound electric Moon Pie. In Tempe, Arizona, a giant tortilla chip descends into a massive bowl of salsa. Brasstown, North Carolina, drops a Plexiglas pyramid containing a live possum; and Key West, Florida, drops an enormous ruby slipper with a drag queen inside it.

Wait, what was that last?

Yes. Yes, it was:

How to see Milwaukee on just $500 a day – Part 3

image of County Clare Inn in Milwaukee WIJust a bit more drivel about Milwaukee and then I’m done for a while, I promise.

Almost as good as being in the audience for one of our favorite radio shows was having the great good luck to find a place to stay for the night as comfy and warm as the County Clare Inn. I could say good things about this place from now until the cows come home and, if I didn’t stop for breath and maybe a bite to eat, I might get them all said, but it would be close.

First off, the location is great: It’s right in the middle of old Milwaukee, a short walk from the river, a short taxi ride from the UW-Milwaukee campus. We might even be able to hoof it all the way to the Modern Art Museum from there if the weather was good and we were feeling our oats. If all we were looking for was a place to stay the night and maybe take a walk in the morning, though, the tree-lined streets around the inn are quiet and some of the houses and buildings are really very eye-catching.

Then, there’s the pub downstairs: Irish-themed, obviously. I don’t usually go for themed bars chock full ‘o kitschy knick-knacks, but they managed to keep the kitsch under control. It isn’t spilling out of every nook and cranny. We could hold a conversation without shouting at one another; the background music stayed in the background. That should always get high marks. There was just one television screen, it was off to the side and the sound was muted. More high marks.

And the service is wonderful. We came back from the taping a little after eleven o’clock and, because we hadn’t eaten since two, My Darling B was feeling a little peckish. I could’ve used a snack myself, but we figured the kitchen wasn’t serving any longer so I asked the bartender where we could get a bite to eat. He helpfully pointed out there was a place down the block, then added, “You could always order off our bar menu, too,” and handed me a copy. Smooth.

B got the hummus plate, figuring it would be a pita sliced into eighths with a dab of hummus and maybe a little couscous on the side. Wrong. It was enough pita and hummus to feed us both. Not knowing that, I ordered a plate of tater tots myself, figuring that would make up enough of a bedtime snack to hold us both over. Well, we both went to bed sufficiently serensified that night, I can assure you.

Saving the best for last, there’s the room. We’ve been to a few places in all corners of the world; fallen into fleabag flophouses and lucked into sumptuous suites with luxury amenities that were probably all but wasted on us. We weren’t expecting so very much from an inn smack in the middle of town that charged just a hundred fifty bucks a night, but I’m pleased to say the accommodations exceeded our expectations in every way. The room was much larger than it had any right to be. The bedroom and the bath were all together in the same room, but separated by a permanent screen with the toilet and sink off to one side, the shower and whirlpool bath off to the other. B cherished every minute of her Sunday-morning soak in that tub.

Finally, we got two tickets to breakfast with the price of our room, a nice little perk. They had an eye-popping spread laid out when we came down in the morning. Two short-order cooks were making omelets to order on a row of portable gas stoves. We put in our order with them, then grabbed a complimentary newspaper off the stack in the dining room as we went in to pick out a table by the window and whiled away the better part of two hours eating, sipping coffee and flipping through the news.

When the staff began to pack away the buffet and bus the tables, we thought we might have overstayed our welcome, but just then a guy came by with a pot of coffee and offered to warm up our cups. B asked how long the dining room was open.

“It’s the weekend,” he said. “Stay as long as you like.” Then he went off to see if anyone else wanted coffee.

How to see Milwaukee on just $500 a day – Part 2

image of Art Smart's Dart Mart in Milwaukee WIWe went to Milwaukee to see a taping of one of our favorite radio shows, Says You! and then we almost didn’t make it to the show! It was an evening taping but we left Madison in the morning and got to Milwaukee around noon so we could have a wander around town. Then we went back to our room to clean up and catch a short nap. When we were ready to go, I called for a taxi to pick us up.

The driver called me from the curb outside the door of the inn when he got there and I very nearly didn’t answer because he had a New York phone number, so I assumed he was a telemarketer. I only decided to pick up so I could mess with him.

“Yessss?” I answered.

“Dave?”

That old dodge: Using my first name to get me to stay on the line. “Yessss?”

Pause. “Did you call a cab?”

“Oh! Yes, yes I did! Hang on, we’ll be right down!”

Then, as we stepped out the elevator into the lobby, a couple dressed to nines were looking out the window and saying something like, “I don’t know how he got here so quickly. Maybe it’s not ours.” But they went out anyway and stopped short of getting into the cab when we followed them as closely as a shadow all the way to the curb.

“Did you call a cab, too?” the woman asked me.

“Yes, I did,” I answered as My Darling B stuck her head in the door to make sure it was, in fact, our cab. It was. As I climbed in, B asked the driver to take us to the Helen Bader Theater on the UW-Milwaukee Campus, and then gave him the address: 2419 E. Kenwood Boulevard. “Right, right,” he said, and sped us to a faraway neighborhood of the city.

Let me just interrupt here to remind the reader that the only times we’ve been to Milwaukee before this have been on guided tours, or to pick someone up from the airport. We don’t know any of the streets or neighborhoods, but we assumed our driver did, and when he said, “Right, right,” and nodded, I don’t think we went out on a limb when we assumed he knew exactly where the Helen Bader theater was. Certainly, we expected him to know where the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee was.

So when he dropped us off at the intersection of what looked like a shopping district, we didn’t say, “Where the hell are we?” We assumed he’d dropped us off maybe around the corner from the theater and we only had to walk to the corner and we’d see it. Call me foolishly naive, I deserve it. When we walked down to the corner to get our bearings, though, we discovered that the driver had dropped us off on Kenilworth Street, not Kenwood Boulevard! I ran back to the taxi with B yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!” behind me. Thank dog it took him so long to get his dispatcher on the phone.

On the upside, he didn’t charge us for the ride to the correct address, and we got there in plenty of time.

I was trying to describe Says You! to a friend the other day and rather ironically found myself at a loss for words. Ironic, because Says You! is, as the show’s host, Richard Sher, describes it, a game of words played by two teams. It’s alrways played in five rounds, each with its own peculiar quirk. They played one of my favorite rounds last night, a game I can play without making my brain explode. Richard Sher gives the name of an actor and asks a panelist to guess the movie he’s thinking of. It’s usually an almost unknown actor in a supporting role. With just one name, the guess is at best wild, of course, although sometimes they actually get it on the first try. If so, ten points! If not, another actor’s name gets added to the list, this one a little more well-known than the first.

With the choices narrowed down a bit it’s not a coin toss any more, but still just barely an educated guess. Sometimes Richard will go with the most popular movie featuring the actors in question, sometimes the most recent, but sometimes he’ll go for the obscure title. You never know. The last name added to the list is a giveaway, the name of whoever got star billing, and when it gets that far its announcement is followed by a lot of facepalming and oh-I-shoulda-got-that groaning.

Two of the rounds are Bluffing Rounds: the host gives one team a word so obscure that it sounds as though he made it up on the spot. The words they used the other night, for instance, were “callithump” and “corf.” Don’t ask me what they mean; I forgot already. Each of the team members gets a card, but only one of the cards has the definition of the word on it; the other two cards say, “Please Bluff.” Those two team members try to make up a definition that sounds plausible enough to fool the other team into picking one of the made-up definitions.

There’s always a musical guest to play a song during the introductions, and to provide a musical interlude during the bluffing rounds, to give the panelists enough time to come up with a good bluff. The musical guest was probably the most delightful surprise of the evening: they were The Squeezettes, the power-polka band we just happened to see last month at the Monroe Cheese Fest. I described them then as an all-girl accordion band but there was a guy drumming and another guy playing a sousaphone, so obviously I wasn’t paying close attention. And although there are three women playing accordion, calling them an all-girl accordion band doesn’t do them justice. They describe their style as “power polka,” which comes much closer to capturing the feel of their art. Have you ever thought of “Wooly Booly” as a polka? Me, neither, but to hear them belt it out is to experience a whole new level of polka that I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible. I didn’t hesitate to buy a CD from the guy selling them in the lobby.

There was just one thing, and I mean only one thing, I would have changed about the evening: If I’d known the six people behind us were going to jabber and shout through the whole performance, I would’ve eaten a brick of cheese right before we were ushered in. I’ll have to keep one in my man purse from now on for emergencies.

How to see Milwaukee on just $500 a day

image of My Darling B drinking beer from a boot in a Milwaukee tavernWe’re back from Milwaukee! We went there to watch a taping of one of our favorite radio shows, Says You!, and ended up doing a sightseeing tour of a small slice of Milwaukee while stopping off at a couple of our favorite places.

Even as the number of things we wanted to do mounted up, it seemed like a good idea each time. Tickets to the show cost just $17.00 each, but the taping was scheduled to end sometime after 10:30 pm. I didn’t want to drive back to Madison that late at night, so we reserved a room at the County Clare Inn. That tacked a hundred fifty bucks on to the cost of our trip right away, but seemed like not only a good idea but a good deal: We’d be smack dab in the middle of Milwaukee. That’s how we decided to do some sightseeing while we were there. We had the time. We were in a good location. Why not?

We left Madison as early as we could Saturday morning, by which I mean ten o’clock. We were going to shoot for a much earlier departure time until we realized it’s not like there was a great big hurry to get there. I made a pot of coffee and we slowly drained it while we passed a couple hours Googling for information about interesting places to go and fun things to do while in Milwaukee. Don’t laugh. There really are some. The last time we were in Milwaukee, for instance, we stopped at a place called the Wisconsin Cheese Mart. Guess what they sell there? And not only can you snack on a selection of great Wisconsin cheese, you can take your plate of cheese to the tap room where you can ask them for one of the two-dozen great Wisconsin beers they have on tap. Tell me that’s not a place you’d want to visit.

And it was within walking distance of the inn, along with other sights we’d never seen before just because we hadn’t taken the time. So we pulled into town shortly after noon and, with more than a few hours before the show was scheduled to begin, started wandering the streets in the warm sunshine of an gorgeous autumn day in Milwaukee.

comic

When I tuned in to my Twitter feed this morning, I naturally expected to see mostly “Happy Independence Day” or something similar, because that’s what’s happening in my life, and what else is there in the universe but me, right?

Wait, does everyone understand the concept of “tuning in?” I don’t want to lose anybody here. Let’s get all the younguns to move up to the front row, okay? “Tuning in,” boys and girls, means turning the “dial” on a “radio.” You might have seen old black-and-white photos of people gathered around a “radio” with stern looks on their faces and wondered what they were doing. They were listening to someone in a studio read the news. It’s like a podcast, except radio is transmitted through the air, sort of like wifi but there was no internet! Crazy, right? And to listen to a different announcement, you had to turn a knob on the radio with your mind control, and they called that “tuning,” just like the evil aliens in the movie Dark City. Here endeth the lesson. Back to my Twitter feed, now.

Instead of a lot of babble about Happy Fourth of July, all the people I follow on Twitter were talking about the Higgs boson. Apparently the science nerds who run the Large Hadron Collider found it. Remember the Large Hadron Collider, the atom smasher that the socialist commie Europeans built to create a black hole powerful enough to swallow the world? Holy shit, I’m speaking almost entirely in anachronisms today. “Atom smasher” is what we used to call particle accelerators way back when we dressed exclusively in black and white clothes and listened to radio, because that’s when we learned that atoms aren’t the smallest bits of matter. Of course, back then we very quaintly thought protons, electrons and neutrons were the smallest bits of matter. What a gaggle of noobs we were.

Now there are quarks and gluons and muons and bosons, and this Higgs boson of which everyone speaks is apparently the particle that makes all the other particles massive. If I understand that right, without the Higgs boson there would be no gravity, so nothing would stick together. This is all very important, I’m sure, but what really got everyone talking was the fact that, when the science nerds made their announcement, they used Comic Sans in their PowerPoint presentation. If you want to turn any conference into a kicked hornet’s nest, use Comic Sans.

Maybe now they’ll go back to shooting high-energy beams at Italy and wondering what would happen if you stuck your hand in the beam.

blowin’

As I was scanning the headlines on NPR’s web site, my eyes flitted across a headline that turned the crank on my admittedly already-cranky disposition: Blowin’ In The Wind Still Asks The Hard Questions.” Heavy sigh. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say something like, “Blowin’ In The Wind Asks Needlessly Cryptic Questions That Are Still Confused With Deep, Spiritual Meaning?”

I never got Blowin’ In The Wind. I could see that practically everybody else in the world felt it had the moral, ethical and philosophical qualities of the sermon on the mount, but to me it has always been nothing more than a lot of nonsense questions, strung together and sung to a repetitively simple tune that bored me silly.

I didn’t come to this conclusion quickly. Blowin’ In The Wind was once considered so spiritually significant that the Catholic congregation our family was part of back in the 70s sang it every Sunday during guitar mass, so aside from hearing it overplayed on the radio, I had to sing every line of it once a week in church, as if it were a prayer. Even with all that time to think about it, none of the supposedly deep, inner meaning of Blowin’ In The Wind has ever revealed itself to me.

This is a little maddening because I genuinely like Bob Dylan’s music, an appreciation I got from my Dad, who added quite a few Dylan recordings to the pile of 8-track tapes we kept in the back of the family shop. My favorite was Desire, an album I plugged into the Panasonic tape player and cranked all the way up to ten (this was back before anyone had ELEVEN) so I could hear it through the door of the darkroom when I had to work into the evening. Try overmodulating Bob Dylan on a cheap stereo sometime. You have never heard as many Mondegreens as I’ve heard listening to Black Diamond Bay.

I found a wife, Miranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat
Her pisspot shows a trace of
Another time and space
She cooks nothing like Spam

Now there’s a lyric that forces you to ask some hard questions, and I tell you honestly, as well as a little sheepishly, I’ve asked myself over and over again: What the hell does her pisspot have to do with anything? And Spam? Why Spam? In my defense, Dylan’s mumbling style of singing doesn’t make him easy to understand. Also, the water was running.

But even with all the words scrambled, Black Diamond Bay was a million times more enjoyable than Blowin’ In The Wind ever was, and it always will be, especially now that I know the words. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is for me to sing it without regressing to the screwed-up version in my head, though.

faster

While I was driving around all weekend I listened to more pop music on the radio that I usually do in a whole month. A whole lot more. So much that I exceeded all my quotas and won’t have to listen to pop music again for at least a year, thank goodness. I think I might have sprained my eardrums.

Flipping between stations, I heard the same song three times on a single afternoon. It turned out to be “Faster” by Matt Nathanson, but I didn’t know that the first time because I caught the end of it and was only half listening. All that really sunk into my brain was the chorus, backed up by a guitar riff so jazzy that I couldn’t help but slap the edge of the steering wheel with my fingers as I sang along:

You own me, you own me
You rattle my bones
You turn me over and over
‘Till I can’t control myself
Make me a liar, one big disaster
You make my heart beat faster

A little further down the road I punched up a different station and caught the song from the very beginning. The guitar riff gave it away. I cranked up the volume to see if I could catch the words and it turned out I could, but it also turned out I didn’t really want to:

You’re so delicious
You’re so soft, sweet on the tip of my tongue
You taste like sunlight and strawberry bubble gum

Oh. My. We have a poet here who knows what the sun tastes like. Talk about the best way to put the brakes on an otherwise decent lyric, this one will be included in the how-to: Start off with a terrific hook, like “You’re so delicious,” then set the hook by adding pure sex, like “you’re so soft, sweet on the tip of my tongue.” Finally, yank on the line as hard as you can and totally lose it by making a comparison that absolutely nobody can experience. If you’re going to drag the sun into a song about sex, there’s heat, there’s sweat, there’s nuclear fire erupting volcanically into the sky, but unless you’ve got a tongue ninety-three million miles long and you slather it with ten million SPF sun block, there’s no taste.

But he wasn’t satisfied with that. He had to go all Rod McKuen on us and compare her to strawberry bubble gum, too. How does anybody over the age of eight think a girl would like being compared to a gob of overly-sweet, spit-soaked glop that ends up a black smudge on the sidewalk? Yuck.

Almost forgot: The third time I heard it was when he sang it during a visit to a radio studio. It sounded even clunkier in the live acoustic version.

I liked this song a lot more before I listened to the words.

whiskey

Tuning through radio stations in search of something I could stand to listen to, I came across an oldies station that was playing the kind of dance hall music that reminds me of the ending to The Shining when the camera gets closer and closer to the wall of photographs until it finally zooms in on the one where Jack Torrance is standing in the foreground of a crowd at the Fourth of July Ball. Oh, hell, is it too late for a spoiler alert? Sorry.

I stopped to listen even though I didn’t recognize the song, although that wasn’t unusual as the orchestra was right in the middle of the bridge, which doesn’t usually sound like the rest of the melody. When the bridge was over a singer jumped in with the chorus, the first line of which sounded so much like “Whiskey will make it so” that my hand bolted out to grab the volume knob and give it a twist. The rest of the chorus was about hope and love, beautiful blue skies, yadda yadda yadda, until he finally repeated the first line: “Wishing will make it so.”

Well, dammit. I was kind of pulling for whiskey.

Stop already

Please, WOLX, please stop playing “The Pina Colada Song.” My generation put that song at the top of the pop song charts so many moons ago, but we never liked that song. We bumped it up the charts by mistake. Haven’t you ever drunk-dialed a request line and asked them to play a song that you knew, even while you were blitzed out of your mind, was so bad it stunk on ice? That’s all we were doing back then. “Hey! Play that song about peeing in a closet! You know, ‘If you like peeing in a closet,’ that one! Whatever! Play it!” It was a joke that’s backfired on us disastrously. How were we to know that, thirty years later, there would be radio stations like yours that would torture us by repeating our drunken pranks over and over, day after day, week after week? Please stop. Please. Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it. Just make it stop.

You Never Close Your Eyes

On this morning’s broadcast of Says You, host Richard Sher asked the panel which twentieth-century pop song has been played more than any other on the radio. First guess, “White Christmas,” was not bad, but I think maybe it just seems to get more air play than any other song, especially right around the middle of December.

Next, they blew several guesses on Beatles tunes, but they didn’t get anywhere with that and finally had to ask for a hint. When the host told them it was recorded by The Righteous Brothers it didn’t take them long to get the correct answer, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”, which has been played on the radio 45 million times.

That doesn’t seem right, does it? I’m pretty sure our local oldies station has played “Crocodile Rock” at least 45 million times in the five years I’ve been tuning in. Even if that’s an exaggeration I’ll bet it’s not far off.

My Darling B thinks it’s got to be “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but I say if any song by Queen has a chance of being played more than any other pop song it’s got to be “We Are The Champions”, which is playing in my head right now and won’t stop for at least a week, now that I’ve thought of it.