Best of the Worst

I rarely do "memes," those fill-in-the-blank templates that ricochet all over the Internet with lightning speed. One of the blogs I read regularly is written by a guy named Ian. I've never met him but he is the brother of Emily, a former publishing colleague of mine whose intelligent blog I also read. Ian recently left a career as a chef and is now getting a graduate degree in history (I'm jealous). He tagged me for a meme a while back that I intended to do but now I can't even remember what it was about. Instead, I'm taking a post he recently wrote about 15 "worsts," turning it into a meme, and tagging myself. I was so intrigued by this post that I'm keeping the categories exactly as Ian had them on his blog. What's more fun than purposeful kvetching?

Worst Concert: Aretha Franklin, 1983. But before you shun me I'll tell you what the best concert I ever saw was: Aretha Franklin, 1982. Do any of you remember ChicagoFest, the great summer music festival held at Navy Pier in the late 70s and early 80s? This music orgy lasted close to two weeks and had many stages where you could see all sorts of local talent (including my then-roommate’s band “The Hellcats” and “The Vanessa Davis Band” featuring my sister’s boyfriend Greg on drums). There were national acts on the large stage including Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, Asleep at the Wheel, Muddy Waters, the Blues Brothers, and so on. One year, we waited in the blazing sun with thousands of beer-soaked fans to see the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin. She performed for nearly three hours and was simply electrifying. Though she’d gone through a lot of health problems and was much heavier, Aretha’s voice was in top form, as powerful as it was when she was in her mega-hit 60s heyday. When I saw that Aretha was headlining ChicagoFest the next year, I couldn't wait to go back. But this Aretha appeared distracted, disinterested, and vaguely hostile. Her voice was strained and she didn’t even try to hit the notes that seemed to come so easily the year before. She cut her set short without any warning and made an abrupt exit. I never found out what Aretha was going through that day. I was saddened by both the performance and by the reaction of many audience members who were so quick to turn on her. “No, you don’t understand,” I wanted to explain to each one of them. “Let me tell you about last year. Let me tell you about the magic this woman is capable of.”

Worst date: Being terrified of rejection, I never went on that many dates. I usually waited until it was crystal clear that someone was interested in me, thus delaying the more humiliating kinds of first-date awkwardness. When I first moved to Los Angeles in 1986, the company I was working for went bankrupt after five months and I was left broke, unemployed, and friendless. I had left a relationship in Chicago and was so lonely in my tiny orange-carpeted apartment in the San Fernando Valley that I used to make extra trips to the grocery store just to talk to the checkout cashiers. One day my father called from Chicago. The daughter of an old girlfriend of his was visiting L.A. and he thought it would be a good idea if we met. Normally I would run screaming from my father’s attempts to make a shiddach, as we Jews say, but I was desperate. You know how sometimes you instantly know that there is zero chemistry between you and another person and you’d rather eat glass than talk to them for another second? That’s how it was between me and Michelle. Our date seemed longer than the voyage of the Titanic and just as fun. Michelle was like an exaggerated Gilda Radner parody of a Jewish American Princess but without the humor. Any attempt I made to be amusing was met with the same incredulity as Woody Allen’s post-Diane Keaton date in “Annie Hall” (“just put the lobster in the pot”). After explaining that I was unemployed and broke (admittedly not the savviest first-date repartee), Michelle proceeded to order the most expensive item on the menu and then made no move to contribute a cent when the bill came.

Worst hangover: I’m happy to say the days of hangovers are far behind me, except an occasional New Year’s Day throbbing from too much Veuve Clicquot. In the late 70s, when I was in college and working at Gare St. Lazare, a French restaurant in Chicago, the staff went out one night to a neighboring Mexican restaurant called El Jardin. We ordered pitcher after pitcher of Margaritas. Yumm, this stuff is delicious, I thought. Very sweet and perfect with chips and salsa. I was so wasted by the end of the evening I remember very little except the bartender trying to sell me some pot and staggering onto the El train at about 4 am. Somehow I made it home but when I woke up at noon the next day it felt like my head was going through the meat grinder used at the Gare to make paté. It was years before I could even be in the same room with a shot of tequila and not want to hurl.

Worst roommate: I went to school in Paris during my Junior Year in College (1978-79). I was placed in a Catholic dorm (?) called the Maison Diocésaine on rue Madame. My roommate Francis hated Americans and chain-smoked filterless Gauloises cigarettes all day and night. He always had a bunch of friends over in our tiny room where they would listen to bad heavy metal music and talk in such a thick slang from their native Normandie that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, not that any of them ever tried speaking to “l’Américain” as I was called. As luck would have it, my program had accidentally placed our one handicapped student in a seventh-story maid’s room with no elevator in the tony 16th arrondissement. They desperately needed to switch him with a student who lived on the first floor so after a week or so I said au revoir to Francis and moved to higher ground. Dieu merci!

Worst illness: My first wife and I had just returned from the emergency room after baby Leah had scratched my wife's cornea that morning with her tiny but razor-sharp fingernail. Seconds after putting my daughter in her crib, I suddenly doubled over in the worst pain I had ever experienced. Back we went to the emergency room, this time driven by an eye-patched Frenchwoman on heavy pain medication. As I sat in the waiting room, I was in such agony that I kept taking off my clothes, somehow thinking in my delirium that this would provide some relief. As soon as they saw me, they rushed me into surgery for an emergency appendectomy.

Worst meal: Back to my Junior Year Abroad which began with six weeks in the picturesque medieval town of Tours, France, in the Loire Valley. For these first six weeks in France I lived with the Chevaliers, a sweet family whose parents were both professors at the local university. Though they were highly educated, they were rural people at heart, and they had many animals on the grounds of their 16th century house including some adorable bunny rabbits with huge floppy ears. One day the young son, Guillaume Chevalier, introduced me to his favorite rabbit, a magnificent lop named Nantes. The next night we were having a family celebration to honor Guillaume’s first day of school. With great fanfare, Madame Chevalier brought in a large platter for the special meal. There, on the plate was a whole rabbit, sans fur and swimming in a garlicky white wine sauce. It was Nantes, Madame Chevalier cheerfully announced, and he was going to make quite a succulent treat. To add to the horror, Nantes’ earless head was still attached to the body, his teeth bared and oozing wine sauce. Mon dieu. Guillaume didn’t seem the least bit phased and he enjoyed munching down on his pet. I forced a few forkfuls of Nantes into my mouth and washed it down with a lot of Orangina. Runner-up for my worst meal: at another family banquet, Madame Chevalier served us a foul-smelling tripe dish, also known as the stomach lining of a cow. To this day, when anyone asks me if there are any foods I don’t eat, I say, “no, I like everything…except rabbit and tripe.”

Worst book I actually finished: This is the only category where I could reprint Ian’s reponse word-for-word. Here it is:

The Fountainhead. I know it seems like I have an axe to grind with Ayn Rand, but I just hate all that superior social darwinism crap. Problem is, and I don’t like to admit this, the writing was compelling enough to see me through to the end…and, sigh, actually made the book difficult to put down. There, I’ve said it. Moving on…

Wow, I could have written that myself, that’s a little scary. My runner-up would be “The Celestine Prochecy.” I enjoyed the New Age mumbo jumbo in the book and read it cover to cover but on every single page I kept thinking, “I can’t believe how badly written this is!”

Worst movie: I’ve seen a lot of bad movies but I’ve only walked out of one: “Switching Channels,” a misguided 1988 remake of “His Girl Friday” which was itself a remake of the wonderful “The Front Page.” This monstrosity starred Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner in the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell roles, and Christopher Reeve as Turner’s hapless fiancé. It was so bad it nearly destroyed the career of all three. What sent me over the edge was seeing them butcher so much of the original dialogue from the 1940 comedy. After about half an hour, I couldn't take any more. I ran out of the theatre and snuck into the screen next door which was showing "Cocoon: The Return." Not a great film but it seemed like an AFI classic in comparison. To his credit, Reeves later expressed regret that he made the film. He said he only agreed to be in it as a distraction from a depression he was in following his breakup from Gae Exton, the mother of his oldest child. He said he spent most of the film acting as a referee for Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner who despised each other.

Worst try-out: Ooh, this is sad because I don’t think I ever tried out for anything, at least not in the usual sense. I was never on a sports team and I never tried out for a play. My daughter Leah is sitting here and was shocked when I told her that because she’s 13 and has already tried out for dozens of plays and teams. Could a job interview be considered a try-out? I guess my worst one of those was just after graduating college. I couldn’t find work at first and I saw an open call for American Airlines flight attendants. Perfect! I was dying to get back to Europe and this would provide me with endless travel opportunities as I decided what I wanted to do with my life. I appeared at the interview site with a bunch of big-haired women who looked like they were runners-up in the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant. These women were cheerful enough to induce a diabetic coma in Ebenezer Scrooge. Coming off my long-playing run as Disgruntled Student, I didn’t do cheerful. I was the first one dismissed, a fact I am very grateful for since a few weeks later I got a great job as a writer/producer of educational filmstrips.

Worst moment in a classroom: I was a Radio/TV/Film major at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. For some reason I was required to take an Introduction to Interpretation class even though I had no idea what Interpretation was unlike the rest of my classmates who were in the acting program. My professor was Frank Galati, who later became a Tony Award-winning director and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of “The Accidental Tourist.” His new play, “Kafka on the Shore,” opens at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago next week. Back in the fall of 1976, we had to choose a piece from a book to dramatize in front of the class. My talented classmates chose exquisite, moving selections from a range of classical books. What did I choose? A scene from “Gone With the Wind” in which I had to interpret Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and speak in the phonetic “Negro dialect” Margaret Mitchell wrote for the slave characters. “Oh, Mista Rhett, you sho’ is baaaad!” Forgive me, Dr. Galati, by all rights you should have had me banned from the campus. Second worst moment: peeing in my pants in first grade when I was up in front of the class. But I’d rather go through that again than perform as Mammy in front of a group of college students.

Worst computer mishap: My most traumatic computer mishaps were both documented on this blog: the crash of my unbacked-up hard drive last November and the theft of my still unbacked-up laptop last April. It took two total losses to learn my lesson (I now back up regularly). Another mishap happened when I was working for a nonprofit in the early 90s. I had hired a bunch of writers to work on a history-based curriculum project. One of the writers was submitting work that was unacceptable and she was also a major pain in the ass. I wrote a long email to my boss explaining how this writer was such an obnoxious prima dona and why we needed to let her go. The second I pressed “send,” I realized to my horror that I had accidentally sent the email to the writer herself. In those prehistoric days, emails would gather on the main server in a business before going out into the world. The cycle would take about ten minutes. In my utter panic, I did the only thing I could think of—I ran into the closet where the computer server was kept and quickly yanked the plug out of the wall, not only deleting my email but also everyone else’s in the building along with any unsaved files they were working on.

Worst job: My first job during high school was at Wolfy’s Hot Dogs in Chicago. Great dogs (I still eat them when I’m there) but at the time I felt a bit abused by the $2.10 hourly wage and the fact that we had to go off the clock during our 15-minute breaks and pay FULL price for our hot dogs. So what’s an unhappy employee to do? Every time I went into the cooler I would grab freshly cut pickles or tomatoes or other accoutrements and shove them in my mouth as fast as I could. I’d also “spill” milkshakes whenever I made them until I had a full cup to gulp down.

Worst fashion choice: Hmmm, what to cite? My lime-green Nehru jacket? My first pair of pristine white bell bottoms that I wore to Fran Stein’s boy-girl party? The purple “leisure suit” I wore in a commercial for Karoll’s, my grandfather’s clothing store? My oversized filthy ripped-to-shreds jeans jacket I wore every single day? My wide polyester ties or hip peace-sign medallions? My childhood is a cavalcade of velour, Qiana, and corduroy horrors. But it was the 1970s so cut me some slack.

Worst bruise: We were visiting my sister’s house in Indiana two summers ago and hiking in the woods following a big rain. There, in the distance, was a large tree, felled by the storm and laying horizontal in the woods on top of some other shrubs and bushes. Some fantasy of the tree-climbing childhood I never had came over me and I ran to the tree and hoisted myself up onto its rough, wet surface to walk across it. There was nothing to hold onto and after about ten seconds I lost my balance and fell off the tree, bouncing off the sharp branches and landing face down in the thorny bushes underneath. I will never forget the sound of my daughter’s screams who thought I had broken my neck. I remember my own slow-motion thoughts as I was going down: “Isn’t this silly. I’m going to be paralyzed for life because of this one moment. How embarrassing.” Miraculously, I walked away with just a few ugly bruises—to my face, my arms, and my ego.

Worst airline experience: Two to choose from. I was going to Europe with my girlfriend Julie on Icelandair. It was the cheapest way to get from Chicago to Europe and entailed a quick stopover in Rejkavik where you were herded into an airport store to buy thick Icelandic sweaters and stuffed puffins and then back onto the plane which landed in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Getting on the plane at O’Hare Airport, something seemed off. The doors were shut, we taxied to the runway, and then we sat there, with no food or drink for one, two, three, four, five, SIX hours. Several allusions were made by me to Jews in Nazi cattle cars, but 12 hours after boarding, we reached our destination. Probably the scariest flight I was ever on was an Aeroflot plane on New Year’s Eve 1978 between Moscow and Leningrad. It was the coldest winter that the Soviet Union had seen since before the Revolution and the ice was so thick around the plane that we couldn’t see out the windows. I remember the sound of workers chipping away at the hull of the plane to get the ice off as I pored through my English-Russian dictionary looking up how to say "Get me off this fucking thing!” Once airborne, the flight was so bumpy that the carry-on luggage stored in NETS overhead went flying every which way, usually into my head. The smoking Aeroflot flight attendants, not exactly known for their obsequious manner, laughed after spilling drinks on customers and walked down the aisle throwing unwrapped pieces of processed luncheon meat at us. Getting off the plane in Leningrad, I pulled a Pope John Paul II and kissed the ground in gratitude. 

Hey, Miller, stop yer complaining! At least you're not filling out categories such as Worst Mental Collapse, Worst Dismemberment, or Worst Genocide. 

Comments

[your sister]

Hahahahaha!!!!!!!

[Ian]

Sorry all those bad things happened to you but man did I laugh! The pulling of the server plug NEEDS to be in a movie scene somewhere. And poor Nantes! Same thing happened with a (much less cute) goose when I was in Normandy. I've also seen the sweaters in the Rejkavic airport. And a plane journey written by Kafka.

I got a very PO'd comment from an Ayn Randian for that quote by the way, claiming that Rand was NOT a social darwinist. I tried to get him to explain but he never commented again.

[Debbie]

The Celestine Prophecy was also one of my favorite worst books. I managed to read the whole book even though the writing style was reminiscent of my third grade reading textbook. I never made it through the sequel, though.

BTW, happy birthweek!

Debbie

[Mary]

I feel so much better now!

[churlita]

What a great "worsts" list. I had such quite a laugh at your expense. Don't worry. I'm a female Don Knotts I'm so spazzy, so everyone gets to laugh at my expense everyday.

[Julie Schreiber]

Too f@#%n funny! Loved it! My favorite visual was the flight attendants throwing the unwrapped lunch meat at you. I personally will not eat turkey, roast beef, bologna, etc. unless it has been flung at me first.
Julie

[Heather P.]

I just can't help but think of the scene from Giant where the children are petting Pedro the "pet" turkey at Thanksgiving. Then the next day when the turkey is brought to the table one of them, exclaims "Pedro". Grandma absentmindedly says "yes baby that's Pedro," and they all burst into tears.
I totally would have burst into tears when she served Nantes for dinner. LAWDY that's awful!

[Pam G]

Gee, Danny . . . Looks like I still have some living to do to catch up to your list of worsts. Pretty impressive. Good thing I'm (a couple years) younger than you so there's still time for me to fly on a Russian airline, inadvertently eat someone's former pet, and send some nasty work-related emails instead of just bitching vocally like I usually do and never getting overheard by the wrong person. I guess I've just been living a too-timid existence. Thanks for the challenge!

Oh, happy belated BD, too.

[tamarika]

I adored this! So funny. It made me think that I might have to borrow this meme at some point - perhaps this very weekend. Maybe it will get me back to blogging. Danny, you are most humorous when you "kvetch!" Thus, giving me (and probably others!) permission to do the same!

[communicatrix]

Yes, you're hilarious and yes, you should do more of these and yes, I bow to your wit (not to mention your ability to recall events long past in such vivid detail.)

But what I really want to know?

WHERE DID YOU GET A PHOTO OF A BUNNY WITH PANCAKES ON ITS HEAD?

[Danny]

Ha, I can't even remember where I stole that from, communicatrix, but just thank me for it because I found a bunch of photos of cooked rabbits on a plate with their teeth still attached that looked remarkably like the one I ate in Tours. At the last minute, I substituted the cute pancake bunny because I couldn't bear the thought of seeing that gruesome real-life image every time I opened up my blog!

[Marty]

This is really comical kvetching. I hope you didn't pass up opportunities at first class operations like the Red Hot Ranch or Flukys in order to labor at Wolfys. Your former employer is the last of that era to remain open.

[pogo]

i did aeroflot in 85.....wing on fire, flight attendants casual to the point of a psychiatric disorder....me and my pals laughing (in the face of death) hysterically....happy days....

[mark]

OK. And I really mean this, the reason I read your blog consists of the following:

1)Thoughtful and fair political observations.

2)Pithy and funny and smart observations about movies and popular culture in general.

3)Touching, self-revelatory and sometimes painful recollections of your family and personal history. My family, on it's surface, couldn't be less like yours. That said, I always find something to relate to, to empathize with and to understand....sometimes about myself. Those essays may be my favorites.

...Unless you choose to devote a posting to Carroll Baker and then I make no further promises.

[phil 13]

Holy cow... i was going thru a trunk of old t shirts and found not only a hellcats shirt but a vanessa davis band shirt in with all my chicagofest shirts... never thought id see a blog with both bands in it