Thank God for the holidays. They never fail to give one a series of experiences. That’s right, I’ve become nothing but a thrill-seeking adventurer, always out to capture the new, find the unbeaten path--and all for you, my listeners.....sort of, anyway.
Here are just two recent experiences that I’d like to share with you. The first involved a Broadway play. My folks, in their infinite kindness gave my honey and me two tickets to see Tom Stoppard’s new play, “Rock `n’ Roll.” That day we ambled around the city, ate an amazing meal at Café Colonial, and had an all-around great time. Yea, New York may be the most exciting city in the world, but I’m a Hoosier dammit, and a proud one at that. Anyway, our day of bliss was simply prologue to the experience of watching Stoppard’s play. I wish I had it in my power to transport all of you to New York to see this play. It is the bomb, as the kids used to say. Yes, it is an extremely literate play that details the travails of British Marxism, the relationship between class and consciousness, and other academic ideas, but the heart of the play is the overpowering impact of rock and roll on the young. As my poor friends will only too readily attest, I have long thought--and told them countless times--that Elvis and American popular culture in general were the secret weapons that destroyed communism. And as luck would have it, Stoppard agrees with me. Good move major playwright! I kid you not, but the women next to me in the audience, a woman who was well into her 70s, was humming during the intermission the Rolling Stones song “It’s Only Rock and Roll” with its refrain of “but I like it like it yes I do.” From Stoppard’s perspective, communism never had a chance when Mick and Keith were creating such revolutionary agitprop.
I walked out of the play feeling that I had just had a real experience, one that I would carry with me for some time. It was simply a warm-up, though, to the experiences that the airlines had and were going to inflict upon me and my little family, once again. Now, I have long felt that the airlines are like Nixon, in that they never, ever, disappoint, but they outdid themselves this time. The first experience was our inability to leave South Bend on the day that we had planned because of “weight issues.” As we were in the processes of checking in our luggage we learned that one of us wasn’t going to be able to fly to Detroit because the plane was at its maximum weight. I wish. I could. Make this stuff up. And given that the next two days were solidly booked up, we got to spend a bit more of the holidays here in Michiana.
Even more amazing, on my flight back to South Bend, one that did not involve the rest of my family, I was on a plane where they were taking passengers off the plane because of, yes, you guessed it, weight issues. After awhile I got to worrying about the limits of that blubber-carrying projectile, and so I raised my hand and voluntarily left the airplane. I figured I could rent a car and make it back to South Bend in a couple of hours and enjoy the free ticket that they had bribed me with. But I really did it because of you, the listener. See, I needed an experience, a weird one too, because I had a Michiana Chronicle to write and dammit, if getting out of Detroit isn’t one, well I don’t know what is. So in the interests of art--that’s right, art--I drove an absurdly over-priced rental car back to South Bend.
I made a pit stop in Ann Arbor and loaded up on goodies at Zingerman’s Deli. Yet, this experience got the better part of me. The drive was much longer than I figured. The road conditions were God-awful; there was so much fog that I thought I had left the Midwest and entered into Sherlock Holmes’ London. The car I rented was dull, dull, dull. And then I had a real experience. I had just made a quick stop at a Starbucks, and as I was leaving the parking lot I looked around and saw a landscape of big box stores and fast food joints, exactly like the dozen and one other places I had seen along the way. In other words I wasn’t having so much as an experience as a flashback. We won the cold war for this?