Summer Replay

This story was originally published at the Virtual Occoquan. Since it's a fun summer vacation story, I'm posting it now while I finish some important work-related stuff. Sorry I've been a sporadic blogger this month. I have so many family things on my plate (uh, like working my butt off to feed said family), and I'm behind like I've never been behind before. Please bear with me, and enjoy this summer re-run:

Arts and Crafts

One summer I collected Monarch butterflies and pinned them to an old walnut board in the family barn. I was eleven and chubby with a Dorothy Hamill haircut, and my two younger sisters and I built endless Mexican blanket forts in our battered living room and dressed our long-suffering dog in my dad’s blue boxer shorts. My mom decided she couldn’t take one more minute of an endless muggy minute summer, and she signed us up for the one-week August hell known as Arts and Crafts camp at the Town Hall.

We marched the two blocks to the hall, and opened great mahogany doors to a building more than 200 years old. It housed Selectman offices, the hunting and fishing commission, and a hall with a sagging scratched wooden floor and wire-covered windows where town meetings and middle-school physical education classes met. We waited, my feet nestled in Dr. Sholls, my two sisters in matching brown suede clogs. We didn’t want to spend a week painting and sculpting. We called it Farts and Craps and waited with five other dirt-poor town children for our teacher.

He told us to call him “Charlie.” He said this as he paced the gym, white t-shirt with a hole two-thirds down his back stuck to his skin with sweat, faded photo of Elvis on the front. He seemed so old to me, to my sisters, to the five other squirmy kids in our camp class. He must have been twenty-five, maybe thirty, we thought. And rich! He must be rich, he collected three dollars from each of us, and he used big words like “disenfranchised” and told off-color jokes we didn’t understand. He set a beat-up black tape player on the floor and flicked on a Fleetwood Mac cassette.

Charlie never gave us paper and old watercolors and told us to paint pictures of our parents like our school art teacher. He slapped old magazines with strange names like Ebony and American Film and Cinefantastique on long folding tables, and showed us how to cut out random eyes and words and legs and cigarettes and paste them on poster board. Make a message! Change the world! Charlie spoke in exclamation marks and shook his hands like they were coated with water. His breath smelled of tobacco and lemon and a shock of hair like blonde heat lightening stuck out from the right side of his head.

“You gotta use your ART to CHANGE society, man! You gotta give a voice to the disenfranchised! You gotta bring down the MAN, you hear me? You hear me?” We said yes, we hear you, and we continued gluing dark brown fingers and ice cream cones on bright orange cardboard, shrugging our shoulders at each other, our moms sitting home watching Days of Our Lives in blissful peace.

Charlie started each class with a relaxation exercise. We lay on our backs; legs cool against the polyurethane, and listened to him recite a litany of energy and body parts.

“Power to your toes, power to you toes!
“Power to you feet, power to your feet!
“Power to your legs, power to your legs!
“Power to your knees, power to your knees!
“Power to your thighs, power to your thighs!”

We jiggled each piece in unison to the chant, synchronous child art jellyfish, knowing our Farts and Craps days were numbered if our parents knew we played hippy games like this with our clove cigarette teacher, knowing they would call the Selectmen and demand a refund, demand a sturdy woman in polyester with a portfolio of landscapes and pet portraits. We loved that exercise, loved Charlie, jiggled and oscillated, upstream salmon revolutionaries, knowing these days were diamond rare special, life changing, crazy art life-changing.

I pasted a thousand wandering eyes on a piece of red poster paper, kaleidoscope eyes, made them match the songs on that looping tape, arranged them in a circle around a photo of a perfect plastic hot fudge sundae. Charlie grabbed my poster and held it over his head with one hand, smoking another clove cigarette with the other.

“Look! Birdie’s got it! She’s got it! Look! This is such a fanfuckingtastic statement on society, man, can you see it? Can you see it? Look at those hungry eyes. Look at that fucking plastic ice cream, man, that’s the fucking United States. Far out. Far out, Birdie. You’re an artist now, congratulations.” Charlie placed the poster on the table, swapped his smoke from one hand to the other and extended his right hand, shook mine, blew sweet smoke in my face. I didn’t dare smile, the moment seemed to serious, but I relished that compliment more than any other I ever received, replayed the words in my mind the rest of the day, and carried my art home as if I was carrying the Lord’s Supper at mass. I hid it in my closet, didn’t dare show my parents, didn’t want to face questions, have to make up answers, and couldn’t rat on Charlie.

The last day of class one of the girls arrived late for class. She lived next door to me, in a rotting Colonial home like ours, and carried a red bamboo purse everywhere she went. She walked into the hall, no purse in hand, eyes inflamed from crying. Her skin shone pale from shock, and the endless bruises on her arms looked darker than usual. She sat against a radiator, tears falling over her face, arms, legs, onto the floor.

“Why are we here? Why are you here? Elvis died. We just heard it on the radio. They found him dead. Elvis is dead. Please, we can’t have class. Charlie, Elvis died.” She stared into the space between us, as if Elvis’s new ghost walked the hall, and let those tormented tears run, run like the river Styx.

“Man, no way. No way. It can’t be. You’re right. No class today.” Charlie whispered, the first soft words he ever uttered, and he picked up his carpetbag of magazines and glue and left. We walked into the sunlight, followed Charlie out the door, watched him slump to the bus stop. We sat on the cement steps and cried for the poor bruised girl, for Elvis, for Charlie, for our lost poster revolution.

Comments

[Carroll]

Oh Birdie. I cried the first time I read this, and it got me again. Oddly, I have very recently watched a couple of old Elvis (the young Elvis, that is) videos on YouTube. I never was a teenaged fan of his, but I think, were he around today, I would be. Well, not still teenaged, of course. That man had a darn fine voice, despite the ravages of peanut butter ;)

[Rick]

I was born under the postrological sign of Jail House Rock in the second year of Elvis. News of his demise hit me when I was a counselor at an Elks-run camp for disabled kids in Northern New Jersey, a sleep-over place on property that used to be Joe Louis’ training camp. The lake was owned by the Singer Sewing Machine company and there is a photo of Joe and Lena Horne on it in a boat (saw it in a book in the ‘80s).

Charlie here reminds me of Mike, the Farts and Craps man at this camp, Elks Camp Moore (named after former Governor Moore). But Mike’s thing was more the Beatles.
I hear they still sing the same camp song, though all the counselors are now hired from Europe and paid next to nothing:

Oh here’s to Elk’s Camp Moore
Best of them all
Camp near lake Kearfoot
Hike all over
Hike all over the nature trail
Of all the other camps
Moore beats them all
More! More! More!
So here’s to our Elk’s Camp Moore
The best of them all

Again, Bird, a cinematographic offering on your part. I see colors when I read it. And as so often happens it had that Proustian effect. Gotta go with it.
Whistle whilst you work, Bird--Diz

[Rick]

What do you know? A typo in my above stream-of-commentness! That should be "popstrological" at word six. Go to http://www.popstrology.com/

What is your popstrology, y'all?

Diz

[barbie2be]

i was at an AC/DC concert the day that elvis died. unfortunately, i was supposed to be at a friends house. my parents saw me on the news getting interviewed outside the concert and grounded me for life when i got home.

[matt]

hi Birdie!!

[Rick]

C'mon, c'mon, c'mon... Popstrology. It's fun.

For example, I'm Nov. 17, '57: Second year of Elvis under the song "Jail House Rock." Let's say you're February 5, 1975--well then, of course, you're under the song of Fire by the Ohio Players in the year of Elton John. That all means something!

It's all about the #1 song on the charts the day you were born and which pop god dominated the charts for the year you were born. Finally find out who you are!: Go to www.popstrology.com Click on on "What's your sign?"

...March 1, '63?...that's right! Ruby Tuesday by the Stones in the Year of the Monkees.

Now go and report back here.
Diz

[Carroll]

OK, FINE, Diz! Be that way. Make me admit that the damn chart doesn't go back far enough to even GET to my birthday!!!!

Hmmph!

But it was interesting to note that I was married under the sign of Simon and Garfunkle's "Mrs. Robinson". And went into labor with our first child during the pop wasteland year of 1974 during Ringo Starr's moment of fame with "You're Sixteen" (oh, but I wasn't!). And I certainly wasn't listening to Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were" the next day when the kid finally got born.

Does anyone have a new game we could play now with a more level field? Maybe some kind of "Boomer Trivia" :)

[Rick]

Indeed!

I should have issued a warning that the age of Popstrology began with Elvis' Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 and ended with Richard Marx's Right Here Waiting in 1989. In with a bang, out with a burp. I noticed, however, that Richard Marx is on tour in Ringo Starr's All Starr band this summer. Ringo started that tour years ago with Dr. John! Again, in with a bang, out with a burp. The same burp

I just made it in by a hair myself, Carroll, m'dear. I, too, knew Eisenhower.~,:^)

Keep playing folks! Or start. Carroll correctly moved on to other important dates in her life and thus illuminated her great purpose among us!!!! We have all surfed the New Frontier, The Age of Aquarius, and the Invisible Hand of the Free Market!

(Oh, and you can only play if the top 20 in your native country was dicated by Bilboard Magazine between 1956 and 1989. This may offer a less revelatory way out for certain other Beauty Dish Playiz. Candada's good, right? Or were they on Melody Maker? or Mersey Beat? I think Canada's good.)

Just go. And report back
www.popstrology.com

[Rick]

...and perhaps the proprietress might let us know which stars guide her destiny?

www.popstrology.com
that's
www.popstrology.com

[barbie2be]

i was born in the 4th year of elvis and my birthsong is "save the last dance for me" by the drifters. :)

[Jedd]

OK Rick (Diz?)
HOW much stock do you own in that site?

OKOK -
I was born under the sign of "Soldier Boy" by The Shirelles in the year of The Four Seasons.

Love them Seasons. Is that why I was a Chef for a while???

[Louise]

Just as well I checked back here. "Postrological" baffled me and had me scurrying to my beloved OED with no success.
I'll check mine out and report back

[Birdie]

Ooooooo DIZ I LOOOOOOOVE THIS!!!!!

Ok, I was born in the Second Year of the Beatles

under the sing: The Byrds Turn! Turn! Turn!

Coincidence??? I think not!!

[Birdie]

(Uh, that would be Dec 7, 1965)

[Rick]

The Byrds!!!--There is definitely something to Popstrology.

Dig the charts.

~Diz

[toes]

Born in the Third year of Elvis under the birth star of David Seville singing Witch Doctor...just how should I interpret this??? I dislike elvis with a passion...I've never heard of David Seville OR Witch Doctor. Does this mean I don't exist?? If that's the case...then I don't have to go back to the office on Monday right???? (please, PLEASE someone agree with my logic!!! LOL)

toes~

[Meg]

Ah see? I was born under the theme song for Soul Train.