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.
Hahahahaha!!!!!!!
Posted by: your sister | September 07, 2008 at 02:06 PM
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.
Posted by: Ian | September 07, 2008 at 05:57 PM
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
Posted by: Debbie | September 07, 2008 at 06:09 PM
I feel so much better now!
Posted by: Mary | September 07, 2008 at 06:52 PM
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.
Posted by: churlita | September 07, 2008 at 08:17 PM
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
Posted by: Julie Schreiber | September 07, 2008 at 08:35 PM
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!
Posted by: Heather P. | September 07, 2008 at 08:51 PM
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.
Posted by: Pam G | September 08, 2008 at 02:48 PM
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!
Posted by: tamarika | September 10, 2008 at 04:30 AM
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?
Posted by: communicatrix | September 10, 2008 at 10:04 AM
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!
Posted by: Danny | September 10, 2008 at 10:44 AM
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.
Posted by: Marty | September 10, 2008 at 11:24 AM
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....
Posted by: pogo | September 15, 2008 at 03:30 PM
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.
Posted by: mark | September 19, 2008 at 07:14 PM
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
Posted by: phil 13 | August 13, 2013 at 11:11 AM