Month: April 2005

Here in the city, one of the more delightful rites of spring is the University of Minnesota’s annual release of injured birds that have, over the winter, recuperated at the Raptor Center. This gala happens May 21 at Battle Creek Regional Park—just in time for the great raptor migration back north.

Serious raptor enthusiasts all over the world know about Hawk Ridge up in Duluth. They are especially familiar with the fall count in September, when tens of thousands of hawks, eagles, and falcons funnel through Duluth before heading south. They also know about the spring count, although it is less dramatic because of shifting, more disparate southwesterly winds. Just the same, up to four thousand broad-winged hawks will make their way back north through Duluth each day this month, along with red-tailed and rough-legged hawks, eagles, peregrines, and any other raptor you’d care to name.

Naturally, the biannual migration attracts lots of scientists. Last fall, I met up with one of them. His name is Frank Taylor, and he is a master bird bander from White Bear Lake. For three decades, Taylor has maintained a huge bird blind in a vacant field between Duluth and Two Harbors. The day I visited the nine-foot-by-four-foot, camouflaged blind, the atmosphere was tense and hushed, as a female harrier hawk checked out the lure behind an invisible net.
“She’s looking, she’s looking—aw, she’s turning toward the road,” Taylor said quietly, a note of disappointment in his voice. The six other occupants of the blind, including Channel 11’s “Bird Lady,” Sharon Stiteler, shifted their cramped positions and resumed their scan of the sky. The blind is an unassuming shed built more for science than for comfort. It has a pitched roof to shed snow, and its fence-post skeleton is weathered gray, blending nicely into the woods behind it. A three-inch gap in the boards at eye level allows a panoramic view of the north to northeast skyline; and overturned milk crates accommodate the bottoms of as many visitors as will fit inside.

Thanks to a federal bird-banding permit, which he has had for thirty-three years, Taylor captures birds of prey during the yearly migration and provides statistics for the Bird Banding Laboratory of the U.S. Geological Survey. What does Taylor do with the birds he snares? First, he notes whether the bird has already been banded. “I take care so as not to injure the bird,” Taylor said. He typically cradles the hawk, then barks rapid-fire orders to his helpers to hand him a band—an alloy circle imprinted with a serial stamp and sized for every genus of hawk and falcon. Next, he measures wingspan and tail length, and assesses the bird’s general health. When he’s on a roll, Taylor can band up to sixty birds a day.

Information gathered by banders is used to measure bird populations and communities and the life spans of individual birds, and to study dispersal and migration. There are only two thousand master banders in the United States, and Taylor is proud to be one of them. The practice requires dedication and expert handling skills.

Everyone in the blind held his breath as a passing red-tail spotted the lure, a little furry bauble that mimics injured prey. The hawk circled in to get a better view, and decided to check things out on the ground. Out came the “landing gear” (as banders call the outstretched talons—even a novice can see they look like a 747 approaching an airfield) and the dihedral guided it down. Then, surprise! The net dropped and the blind burst into action.—Jaime Benshoff

These past harrowing weeks, we’ve heard a lot about the “Culture of Life.” Perhaps it would be edifying to take a closer look at the Machinery of Death. Sometime in the coming weeks, we may hear more about reinstating the death penalty here in Minnesota, a favorite subject with some of our legislators. Regardless of how we proceed, the one thousandth person condemned to death since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the U.S. will die soon too, most likely down in Texas.

He will walk from a holding cell to a starkly lit, barren execution chamber. There, a team of guards and technicians will operate his state’s machinery of human destruction. It will be carefully designed to bring about the quick and efficient death of the convict.

Like most of the previous 999 executions, this one won’t have much in the way of uncertainty or technical novelty. It will be private, clinical, and, as far as we know, pain-free. For that small favor, Condemned Man Number One Thousand can thank an obscure New York bureaucrat named Elbridge Gerry.

In the late nineteenth century, after a number of botched executions by hanging that resulted in slow strangulation or decapitation, the State of New York began searching for a more humane method of capital punishment. The governor appointed a committee of experts to evaluate alternatives to hanging for convicted and condemned capital murderers. This committee became known as the “Gerry Commission,” after its chairman, Elbridge Gerry.

Under Chairman Gerry’s watch, thirty-one deadly ideas were developed and described in the Commission’s March 1888 report to the governor.

In all likelihood, the Gerry Report is the most bizarre and grotesque document ever produced by a committee of government bureaucrats. For weeks, plucky public servants brainstormed, researched, and categorized all the ways of killing people they could think of. Many ideas were apparently dredged up from the most ghoulish recesses of a bureaucrat’s sadistic soul. Then they comprehensively, deliberately, and dispassionately examined the merits of each in alphabetical order.

Some of the more unusual suggestions included:

Beating to death with clubs;

Beheading;

Blowing from a cannon. (The commission became interested in this method of execution based on reports of its use in the East Indian army in the nineteenth century. Its report notes two ways for carrying out this sentence. First, “the insurgent is lashed to the cannon’s mouth. Within two seconds of pulling the trigger, he is blown to ten thousand atoms.” Alternatively, “the living body of the offender is thrust into the cannon, forming, as one might say, part of the charge.”);

Boiling (“usually in hot water but sometimes in melted sulfur, lead, or the like”);

Burying alive;

Crucifixion;

Dichotomy (cutting a person in half);

Dismemberment (like dichotomy but messier);
Drowning;

Exposure to wild beasts. (In due diligence, the commission briefly considered the method of execution served on female criminals in Tonquin, present-day Vietnam. The commission noted that the condemned were “tied to a stake and in that situation delivered to an elephant who seizes them with his trunk, throws them into the air, catches them on his tusks, and finishes them off by trampling.”);

Lapidation (stoning);

Peine forte et dure (placing heavy weights to stop breathing);

Pounding in a mortar. (In Proverbs 27:22, the Bible reads, “Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.” This passage prompted a religious Gerry commission member to consider “pounding in mortar” as a possible method of serving the death sentence. Presumably, this procedure would involve the condemned being placed in a large mortar or similar vessel and then pounded with an enormous pestle, rather the way mint is prepared for a mint julep.);

Precipitation (throwing from a cliff);

Garroting;

Running the gantlet;

Stabbing;

Strangling.

With a little imagination, one can envision the tenor of the debates swirling around the conference table of the Gerry Commission. On one side of the table might have been the dismemberment and elephant-stomping advocates, sniping derisively at the beheading and garrote crowd about their relative daintiness, while the “blowing from a cannon” promoters crowed about the sure-fire nature of their choice, as well as the state’s ability to raise funds by charging admission.
While some of these methods (e.g. boiling, crucifixion, and throwing from a cliff) may have possessed an impressive deterrent effect, few of them fit the commission’s stated objectives of speediness, humaneness, and efficiency in execution.

Brainstorming session over, the work of winnowing out the cruel, the unworkable, and the just-plain-weird ideas began. In the end, no ideas remained—all were considered either too cruel or weird.

“Your Commission have examined with care the accounts which exist of the various curious modes of capital punishment … that have been used. The result (is that none of these) can be considered as embodying suggestions of improvement over that now in use in this State.” The felons on New York’s death row may (or may not) have sighed in relief, knowing that the whole mortar and pestle thing was off the table.

One hundred and sixteen years later, Condemned Man Number 1000 will lie on the gurney as orderlies attach long tubes to the needle inserted in his arm. When the lethal drip starts, he may take a bit of comfort in knowing it could have been worse.—William Gurstelle

One might think that the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular would be a disorienting experience for someone with eighteen years of sobriety under his belt and only the haziest recollections of unnumbered adolescent evenings spent hunched over a power-hitter and listening to Dark Side of the Moon on the eight-track player of a 1972 Cougar.

That was our assumption the other day as we prepared to attend Laser Floyd at the State Theatre. We’ll admit to certain hardwired preconceptions regarding Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd fans, and we’ve also heard a few things about lasers. Given this admittedly sketchy background, we had reason to fear some at least mild psychological disturbance, if not outright flashbacks and seizures.

Precisely to bolster us against such fears, we felt it prudent to choose an appropriately seasoned chaperone to accompany us, someone whose own drug experiences and knowledge of the Pink Floyd catalog was a bit more up to date, shall we say. We’re not ashamed to acknowledge that our personal phone directory is full of candidates whose credentials on both these counts are impeccable, but the clear front-runner to play Virgil to our Dante for the Laser Spectacular was our old friend and occasional bookkeeper, Dutch Gaines.

We were unsurprised by Dutch’s enthusiasm for our proposition, even as we were nonetheless unprepared for the advanced state of torpor in which we found him—enshrouded in smoke and listening to Jim Reeves’s version of “Gentle on My Mind”—when we arrived at his basement apartment.
This alarming spectacle made it abundantly clear that we would be chaperoning Dutch to the Laser Spectacular, rather than the other way around. So obviously indisposed was Dutch that when we eventually managed to steer him into the lobby of the theater and immediately encountered a booth for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the do-ragged caretaker of the booth took one look in our direction and bawled, “Lots of weed smokers here tonight!”

For those who might be unfamiliar with the Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular, it is, according to its website, the “longest touring theater show in history!” The phenomenon has spawned a host of imitators (e.g. Laser Nirvana, Laser Zeppelin) in its eighteen years on the road, but, we are assured, it remains the undisputed king of all laser shows. Judging by the steady emission of satisfied chortles and dissonant bleats we noted from our companion, we feel it’s safe to say that Dutch would soundly endorse this contention.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. A few words of advice: When you have a chance to check out the P.F.L.S. in the future, fork over the two bucks for the 3D glasses. Thus goggled, we discovered that even the theater’s exit lights were positively lysergic, and the uniform weirdness of the things only added to the goofy esprit de corps.

The show itself really is quite a lot to process, and frankly we had a hard time fathoming how anyone with smoldering brain cells and crackling synapses could handle the multi-tiered assault. Dutch was so fully engaged in the experience that he was of little help with the set list. Near as we could tell, however, the evening’s first half featured the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon, blasted at maximum volume (never mind the decibels, this was ten thousand watts), while the battery of lasers cut through clouds of smoke, and strange imagery was projected onto three huge screens on the stage. There was a good deal of footage from The Wizard of Oz, and as we were unfamiliar with the theories regarding the alleged synchronicity of Dark Side with that film, we’ll admit to finding these juxtapositions at times somewhat confusing and unsettling. The computer-generated imagery resembled everything from colorful Spirograph doodles to Spin Art, and there were plenty of moody interludes that featured various flying things (including a bloated, sexless baby) and religious iconography transposed over what appeared to be vats of bubbling pudding; tornadic bursts of blood; protoplasm sloshing around in a skull; and video footage of a colonoscopy. An androgynous moon-man with perfectly shaped buttocks and a bottle of whiskey did an interpretive dance, rode on a merry-go-round, and played a trumpet. Things sometimes got vaguely erotic; we were frequently dazzled.

The audience seemed comfortably numb but did manage the occasional collective gasp or burst of applause, often at oddly inexplicable moments. As for Dutch, he didn’t end up being of much use other than as a spectacle of slack appreciation. His commentary on the evening consisted of exactly two full utterances, one for each set of the show. The first, during an early segment from Dark Side, was, “This is like a really incredible screen saver.” The second came as “Learning to Fly” pulsed through the speakers—or perhaps it was “Run Like Hell.”

“Pink Floyd,” Dutch leaned over and observed helpfully, “is all about containment and freedom.”—Brad Zellar

The other day, Northwest Airlines informed the union that it wished to lay off six hundred mechanics. In recent years, Northwest has had a near-perfect record measured on the only scale that really matters—mechanical failures leading to tragic crashes. Some thanks is surely due to the men and women who are responsible for keeping things shipshape under the hood. It was not always thus.

Plenty of Twin Citizens remember the early days of the airline industry, a racy time that bred giants. In the late forties, Howard Hughes led Hughes Aircraft and Trans World Airlines with the fastest and latest aircraft. Juan Trippe of Pan American pioneered and charted new flight routes with Charles Lindbergh. But in March 1950, Northwest had no giants of its own, and it was in big trouble. The next thirteen months would be very rocky indeed.

On March 7, 1950, the snow and wind howled. Howard Huber was tending bar at his tavern near the airport. The regulars heard an aircraft that was too low and too close. When they heard it a second time, apparently making another approach, Huber said, “That plane is in trouble but he’s not going to make it this time.”

The plane was a Martin 202, a sexy model for Northwest in 1947. It was new and fast and quickly set some impressive speed records. It brought the age of air travel to cities such as Eau Claire, Sioux Falls, Bismarck, Rochester, and Helena. Within a short time, the company was flying twenty Martin 202s—more than forty percent of its total fleet. In an effort to fight the glamorous publicity of Howard Hughes, who at the time was canoodling publicly with Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner, Northwest hired Yvonne DeCarlo as its sultry spokeswoman. (She would later become famous as Lily Munster on The Munsters and star in horror films like Satan’s Cheerleaders.) The Martin 202 also marked the birth of the Northwest red tail as an enduring symbol of the carrier. Some employees speculated that the primary purpose of the paint scheme was so emergency crews could find the often waylaid aircraft. They had good reason.

On that day in March, Mrs. Patricia Knowles was shoveling snow and wanted to stay ahead of the snowfall. She glanced up at the Washburn Park Tower and noticed an airplane wing “floating down like a feather.” In seconds, Northwest’s problems would come crashing down into three Minnehaha Parkway residences.

The crash of Northwest Airlines Flight One summoned thirteen fire engine companies to the scene. Amid a sea of blowing snow, smoke, and ash, neighborhood heroes pulled survivors from the burning houses. But when firefighters set up their ladder to rescue two children from the second floor of a house on the eleven-hundred block of West Minnehaha Parkway, the flames were too much, and the house collapsed in front of them. The children had just been tucked into bed while their parents watched the Minneapolis Lakers game on a television downstairs. The disaster claimed the lives of all thirteen passengers and the two children on the ground.

From August 29, 1948, until January 17, 1951, Northwest endured six fatal crashes and, astonishingly, lost five of its twenty new Martin 202s. In other words, twenty percent of the fleet had been destroyed in crashes.

Later, in the spring of 1951, one hundred Twin Cities businessmen celebrated Northwest Airlines’ twenty-fifth anniversary. Hosted by Radisson Hotels, the fare included Alaskan salmon and “Broiled Guinea Chicken Croil Hunter,” named after the sitting president of Northwest Airlines. The guests were startled when the intercom system roared, “The twenty-fifth anniversary flight of Northwest Airlines is ready for departure. Captain Croil Hunter and Captain Tom Moore at the controls. All aboard please!”

The spring of 1951 was indeed a perilous time for Northwest. With its planes grounded, its crews and the general public afraid to fly, the government agency doing the comprehensive investigation was led by a man named Donald Nyrop. His top-to-bottom review of the carrier’s safety record, maintenance, and pilot training led him to declare the Martin 202 “a basically sound airplane.” This surprising confidence made a profound impact on Northwest’s board of directors, and they began a determined three-year courtship to get Nyrop as its president. When he accepted on September 27, 1954, Northwest had its industry giant and its future would be secured.—Tony Nichols

About two years ago, a Northfield, Minnesota, man named Fred Herzog had a vision that made him weep for hours each day for weeks on end. “Jesus came to me and said, ‘You are crying out to the souls of people in South Minneapolis,’” he said. “When I discovered South Minneapolis, it was narrowed to Uptown. I saw young people in chains, hands in chains, legs in chains. And I heard these words: ‘These people are in the devil’s chain gang. Pray for them so they can be set free.’”

For two years, Herzog conducted services in an Uptown-area living room. But today, thanks to a growing assembly of worshipers, his church has been blessed with a permanent home in the sub-basement of a strip mall. The congregation calls itself the Uptown Fellowship, and the name fits. It is made up of a few dozen ragtag members. One recent Sunday night, I noticed a tattooed and pierced schoolteacher, an African-American man in a Nike jumpsuit, a homecoming queen from my hometown (she was a year ahead of me), and a mop-haired guitarist who fronts the church band. (This last congregant I thought quite attractive, until he shared his thoughts on the importance of freeing ourselves from lust. Busted!)

The band jammed off-key as parishioners shuffled in for the service. There were coy waves and earnest smiles. As coats were hung and diaper bags stashed under seats, personal Bibles came out. This being a special spontaneous service, however, the Bibles were soon set aside in favor of making a great noise with the house band. Parishioners jumped to their feet, clapped their hands, and swayed their hips. A middle-aged guy in the front row, wearing a Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt, shouted “Praise Jesus!”

A church elder stepped forward, and the music lulled. Then the room was filled with the odd clamor of someone worshiping in tongues. The elder closed his eyes and raised his voice. “I think there’s someone here who needs to be healed,” he said. He brought forth a parishioner whose chronic illnesses were well known to the congregation, and he beckoned others to place their hands on her shoulders. Then the keyboardist complained of knee pain and two parishioners knelt in front of her, laid their hands on her patella, and prayed. Soon the bulk of the congregation was splintered into several small huddles, each murmuring prayers. The band provided instrumental ambience. The elder now shouted to be heard: “I’m feeling that there’s someone here with neck pain! Is there someone with a digestive problem?”

As the commotion settled, John Shank opened his Bible to the book of Isaiah, as instructed by Herzog. By day, Shank is a professional animator. Here, he is a church elder and Bible-study leader. A person worshiping next to Shank would notice that he has devised an elaborate highlighting system that divides and subdivides biblical texts into blues, yellows, and oranges (only prepositions are left behind). He followed along as Herzog dissected a passage on King Hezekiah, the Old Testament king who died young as punishment for pride and bitterness. Not being burdened by traditional notions of theology, Herzog speculated that premature death is thus evidence of certain kinds of sin. “Humpf,” said Shank, closing his Bible at sermon’s end.

After the service, everyone moved to the back of the room to eat tacos, coo over babies, and make a visitor feel welcome. One of the Fellowship’s rising stars, a twenty-six-year-old fashion designer, described it as “a charismatic-type church” and admitted to tempering that definition in accordance with Uptown attitudes. She related a dream in which she was anointing the sick with oil, and she was excited to have realized that dream earlier in the evening, before the sermon. As she told her story, I began to see what binds this hip young woman with golden highlights in her hair to the congregation’s eclectic mix of tightly permed sixty-somethings and burned-out Gen Xers. It’s not so much the literalist reading of Scripture, which she and other parishioners didn’t want to discuss over dinner. Rather, it’s a taste for mysticism and a belief that Herzog provides a special link to the divine.

Even Shank, regarded as the most academic in the bunch, said he thinks Herzog is specially attuned to demonic spirits and has a gift for warding them off with prayer. After a youth spent in more traditional Christian settings—places he called “dead churches”—and dalliances with Hinduism, hatha yoga, and psychedelic drugs, he’s all too happy to be following Herzog’s flamboyant path to God. “After being in the presence of the Holy Spirit, I’d find it insulting to be in a dead church,” he said.—Christy DeSmith

In just a matter of days, the new toll lanes on Interstate 394 will open, giving thousands of commuters in the western suburbs the option of paying to escape the bonds of gridlock as they make their busy way to and from downtown Minneapolis. The last time we drove west on I-394 it was not rush hour. It was a Saturday afternoon in October, not long after President Bush had held his “victory rally” at the Target Center. We were taking the children to a Halloween party in Golden Valley, and we were beset by scrubbed suburban teenagers too young to vote but old enough to drive—and honk and point and make lewd gestures when we did not show a sufficient level of enthusiasm for their candidate. Anyway, the traffic was terrible, and we waited for what seemed like hours just to reach the HOV lane. We were demoralized to see it was closed.

In theory, then, we should be very pleased, along with our westerly friends, that we now have this high-tech option. It is called MNPass. For a deposit of around forty dollars, you can receive a small antenna and computer chip to be glued inside your windshield. This transponder will be recognized by overhead chip readers, which will be indirectly connected to your bank account (and, by the way, directly to the State Highway Patrol—you didn’t think this was going to be on the honor system, did you?). Your MNPass account will authorize you to use a special lane shared only by other toll payers or car-poolers. The technology for MNPass looks much like that for EZPass, New York City’s celebrated system used on countless toll roads around the Big Apple.

There is one important difference, though. Everyone must pay to use the Garden State Parkway, or the New York Thruway, or the Tappan Zee Bridge—there are no special lanes, no special dispensations. (There are different tolls for commercial vehicles and for trailers; also, you are allowed to pay with hard cash.) Back East, all are equal under the electronic eye of God. But our own pay-to-play toll road rankles for a couple of reasons.

While it’s nice to see that car-poolers will still be able to use the lanes unharrassed, the idea that you can substitute money for socially agreeable behavior is repugnant to us. MNPass may appear to embody the libertarian ideal of point-of-service fees, whereby those who use are those who pay. But we’ve seen how this ideal works before, particularly in our public parks. We never liked it, and now we know why. While besieged taxpayers are supposedly getting “relief,” they are expected to pay higher fees for many of the things their taxes formerly paid for. There is a subtle moral violation of the public trust in this. Forty dollars may not seem like much money—indeed, it is merely a deposit against tolls you will be paying when you use your pass, and the monthly cost of the transponder is just $1.50—but the system inherently excludes people who don’t have forty dollars to deposit. (Another telling example: You need to reserve your account with a credit card number; if you have no plastic, you are not welcome.) We think the punishment of sitting in traffic fits the venal sin of insisting on driving your own automobile alone, every day. Money should not be the lowest common denominator dictating our behavior. Morality should be.

But if you insist, then let’s consider this matter strictly on a financial basis. The high price of gas is already putting a pinch on drivers, and in a rational world, it should lead to more car-pooling, more public transit, and more long-term solutions in which we all participate. Opting out, or rather paying what amounts to an indulgence, in order to have the law not apply to you, in order to be exempted from uncomfortable realities—is that any way to act? MNPass calls to mind recent efforts to allow industrial corporations to buy and sell pollution credits. In our bizarre, delusional state, we seem to believe that social and civic responsibility is optional, that morality is a commodity that can be traded in the open marketplace. We seem to believe that responsible behavior is something that takes place in the aggregate, not at the individual level. Someone else will take care of it; let’s just make sure I got mine.

Dick Clark is not pleased about the headlight situation. Oh sure, he’s driven his fair share of luxury automobiles, both domestic and European. He has even leased various Japanese models, though he finds the lack of headroom troubling. But every day lately, Dick finds he’s spending more and more of his valuable time thinking about how best to carry out his crusade against the proliferation of very bright headlights. Unread copies of Billboard accumulate in a growing column on his nightstand. He isn’t keeping up with pop culture like he should, and close friends say they’ve noticed a few gray hairs at his temples. He lies awake at night, vacantly watching the LEDs dance on his clock radio. In the morning, exhausted, he makes his coffee without turning on the kitchen radio. He does not make his customary scan of both frequencies in search of his friendly rival, Casey Kasem. For the first time in his life, there are dark circles developing under his eyes.

Why do they have to be so bright? Why is the light so intensely white-hot? Is this a further sign of man’s inhumanity to man? Dick Clark is deeply troubled. Now that Daimler and Chrysler have merged, he feels certain that very bright headlights will be installed on virtually all automobiles. This, of course, is unrealistic and pessimistic. But there is little doubt in Dick Clark’s mind that cheap, aftermarket headlights will be made available to drivers of older cars. These will not be quite as bright, but they will have the same painful blue nimbus seen from certain angles. He’s already noticed them retrofitted on used minivans and economy cars.

Technically, Dick is not losing sleep over very bright headlights. He’s resigned to the fact that they are here to stay. Instead, he is obsessed with what his own personal response should be. He feels a vague sense of powerlessness, even though he is one of the most influential pop culture icons ever to hold a California driver’s license.

The fact of the matter is that this is not the first time Dick has toyed with the idea of using Bandstand as a bully pulpit. Several years ago he was very unhappy about high levels of mercury in the environment, due to sneakers with batteries in them. In the seventies, he felt that so-called “earth tones” were unflattering to most complexions. In the fifties, he was convinced that canned beer was a sure sign of social declension. But his producers always prevailed. Why would he want to needlessly alienate his fans and his potential advertisers? Bandstand was about uniting the kids, not dividing them! A professional would surely save such personal “issues” for private after-parties.

Frankly, though, Dick is at his wit’s end. He has tried everything. At first, he would flash oncoming cars. Unfortunately, they often flashed him back. When you are flashed by very bright headlights, you don’t soon forget it. Once, Dick saw multicolored lights in his peripheral vision for a long time afterward. Dick Clark is a very conscientious steward of the corporal territories of Dick Clark (particularly those in the Northern Hemisphere), so you can imagine how disturbing this must have been.

Dick tried honking. He quickly realized this brought him the wrong kind of attention. Other drivers thought he was trying to get them to notice him—Dick Clark! A grown man with his own television program! And yet still eager for every last bit of public recognition, no matter how petty! He felt certain this would lead to a backlash in his popularity, or at least an insinuating article in the tabloids. Not very helpfully, his agent advised him to avoid driving at night.

Perhaps it was desperation that finally pushed him into playing “chicken” with drivers of cars equipped with very bright headlights. Most sane people would say that at this point Dick Clark had crossed the figurative line. His producers would have killed him if they knew what he was up to. Luckily, he came to his senses. In theory, of course, it would not have been an unpleasant death for a timeless legend like himself—Dick Clark finally dead! Foul play suspected! Yet he was repelled by the thought of leaving such a big tonsorial job to even the most accomplished of mortuary beauticians.

In his troubled dreams, Dick Clark entertains fantasies that do not conform to the expectations and practices of the waking world. He uses laser-sighted weapons to frighten inconsiderate drivers (he would never actually fire). With a very powerful transmitter, he commandeers their car radios and shames them in full surround-sound stereo. He spends hours in the hot sun of the San Fernando Valley, putting up false detour signs that say “Deduction for Business Use of Halogen Headlights, Next Exit.” In the mercifully muted twilight between dreaming and waking, Dick Clark is afforded a precious few moments of extraordinary happiness each morning.

Yeah, yeah. In some ways I have that “old soul” thing going on (though I find that expression to be fundamentally jive). Lately, however, some form of latent immaturity has started to kick in. For instance, I recently walked into a conversation at work among a group of people who were discussing the joy–and excitement of–a pregnant coworker. The conversation came to an abrupt halt when I pointed out how weird it was that she was growing a little penis in her stomach. Well, she is! Maybe it makes sense to be working my way backward. I was kind of an old woman as a little kid. I loved cats and my own company. Getting into my jammies was usually the highlight of my day. However, I was a complete insomniac, which isn’t a disorder one normally associates with childhood. While most little girls were sawing logs wrapped in their Strawberry Shortcake sheets, I was wide awake at 3:00 A.M., fretting that I’d lost my hot-lunch ticket and the lunch lady with the hairdo that looked like a roast was going to yell at me. Everyone says, “What’s the hurry to grow up?” Oh, I don’t know. How about the fact that life is ass when you’re fifteen? Fake IDs saved my life at a time when seeing bands meant more to me than any prom or college application. There was nothing more satisfying than waking up for school with a smudged ink stamp on my hand, which I was careful not to wash off. Listening to girls on the school bus chirping about their latest crushes, all I could think was, “Dude, last night I somehow passed for twenty-one, saw Brad Brains, and had to climb through a basement window when I got home.” I think they missed out. They think I missed out. What do you think?

Email Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com