where the streets had no name

I grew up in a house in McDowell County, West Virginia, that was up a hill "a piece," about three-quarters of a mile from the nearest paved road. Topography sometimes had its disadvantages. For instance, we didn't have cable television until 1984 because of our location - well, that and one person's grudge against my mother, but unfortunately he was the head of our local cable company. The only channel we could get over the antenna was WHIS (which is now WVVA; the call letters changed after a 1979 Supreme Court decision about radio and TV station ownership forced the heirs of Bluefield media mogul Hugh Ike Shott to sell the station).

That meant that I was stuck with NBC in the '70s, and it also means that I unfortunately know more about B.J. and the Bear and Supertrain than you likely do. I only saw non-NBC shows while on family vacations or, after she moved out and got married, while visiting my Aunt Ellen.

Our house's location also meant that mail and packages didn't usually come directly to our house. Back home, most places didn't have "street names" or even streets. It was coal mining country, and the vast majority of the towns were unincorporated: a cluster of houses in the bottom, and more homes strewn across the hillsides. The US Census Bureau classifies it as "rural non-farm," and while that still strikes me as odd - people are in very real communities, not one house here and the next 40 acres away - I guess it's right.

OK, my point was that mail and packages wouldn't come to our house. The US Postal Service didn't offer delivery to folks' mailboxes. Instead, you had to rent a post office box if you wanted to receive mail. For example, everyone's mailing address in my hometown was something like PO Box 55, Powhatan, WV, 24877. Again, unless you lived in an incorporated town, you didn't have a street address to use as a backup.

UPS was even worse, absolutely refusing to drive their trucks up the hill to deliver at our house. They would deliver to people who lived along the main arteries (in our neck of the woods, US Route 52), even without a street address, but not to us. Weirdly, of their own accord, our local UPS guys decided that since we had two kinfolks who did live on US 52, they'd just drop off our packages at their houses. They didn't even bother to get the consent of these relatives; they just started doing it! Sometimes the UPS guys would even leave the package at some other random Powhatan household, and we'd only find out about it if the chance recipient decided to play good samaritan and carry it over to the post office for us.

All of this was extremely annoying when trying to deal with the rest of the world. I remember trying to order concert tickets from Ticketron for something in Charleston, WV, or Roanoke, VA (given the timeframe, it was either ZZ Top or David Lee Roth), and I got into this argument with the Ticketron operator because she absolutely refused to believe that there was a place without a street address. And I guess in the five blocks of New Jersey she'd ever seen, that was certainly true to her experience, but she simply could not get her head around the fact that I could not give her a street address. I could have made up a street address - my mom sometimes did! - but who knows where the tickets could have gone then? She did finally give in and I got the tickets a few days later, so that had a happy ending, but over twenty years later, I still remember the mind-numbing uncomprehendingness on her side of that argument.

I got even more peeved a few years ago when UPS began airing a commercial that showed them delivering a package to a guy living on a houseboat in Hong Kong. You mean to tell me that you can deliver a package to a guy on a boat in a crowded harbor half a world away, but you can't get a package to my mom's house here in the good ol' US of A? That guy wouldn't only not have a street address, his whole home could be somewhere completely different on the next ebb tide. Yet he can get UPS to put his Sweatin' to the Oldies tape directly into his hands, and my mom can't? There's something wrong there.

For better or worse, the "streets" do have names now. A few years ago, a 911-related project forced street names - seemingly random ones that had nothing to do with the local inhabitants and their history - upon all the back alleys, dirt paths, and tram roads back home, including the one that goes past my mom's house. So now the house I grew up in has a street address. There's still nothing street-like about the "streets," everyone still has to get their mail at the post office, and UPS still won't deliver to my mom. So plus ça change 'n' all that.

owner of an oily scalp

I'm nearly out of shampoo, so the last few times I've been on shopping expeditions, I've been keeping an eye out for what's available and what it costs.

But what I've discovered is this: you can't find shampoo for "oily" hair any more.

Used to be that nearly every shampoo bottle in the universe said clearly and in big letters on the front of the bottle that it was for either "normal," "oily," or "dry" hair. And there's still plenty of stuff on the shelves for "normal" and "dry," as well as "damaged," "color-treated," and a half-dozen other classifications.

But between two Targets and two Krogers, I didn't see a single shampoo that said on the front of the bottle that it was for "oily" hair. There's one variety of Head & Shoulders (I think "Citrus Breeze") that says on the hidden-away blurb on the back of the bottle that it "removes oil." That's all I've found.

Has "oily" been named something else? Has it been removed from hair-typeitude like Pluto was de-planetized recently? Is it looked at as insulting or demeaning to be said to have "oily" hair? Seriously, I feel like I've missed a major development in the shampoo industry. I guess I should resubscribe to their trade periodicals.

By the way, I'm open to believing that maybe I've misdiagnosed my hair type. What happens with my hair is that if I go 30 hours without shampooing, it definitely gets oily, and after about 48 hours, it feels oppressively oily to me. Also, when I've been forced to used "normal to dry" shampoo that puts moisturizers in my hair, my hair feels icky and slick within minutes of getting out of the shower. So that's why I think I have oily hair. Could be wrong, but all that says "oily" to me.

minute maid, minute maid, the amazing soda

Back in my 1985-88 undergrad days, my cousin/roommate Rusty and I mocked many things. One of them was a commercial campaign for Minute Maid Soda. In fact, since the commercials for Minute Maid Soda so prominently featured the word "amazing," any time we heard someone else use the word "amazing," we'd promptly go into the "BUH-waku-waku... UHHH-maze-ING!" routine from the commercials.

In the intervening years, everyone but me and Rusty had forgotten this commercial. I mean, you put the two of us in a room together, we'll still do the "buh-waku-waku... UHHH-maze-ING!" thing, but no one but us will know why. Not only doesn't anyone else remember the commercial, they usually don't even remember that Minute Maid made a soda.

But today, thanks to the magic of YouTube, I can now prove that Rusty and I did not hallucinate the whole thing. Here's one of those mid-'80s Minute Maid Soda commercials:


The magic phrase occurs at the 20 second mark.

However, instead of "BUH-waku-waku," the sound in this commercial goes more like "ah-uh-uh-oh." Rusty and I did this so much back in tha day that I've gotta think there was another one that went more "BUH-waku-waku."

Anyway... vindication good!

seasonal hair fare

A Christmas Story (1983) seems to have a secure place as a "holiday classic" these days, and is the most recently-made addition to the Holiday Classic Movie Pantheon. Maybe Elf (which I still haven't watched because of my contempt for Will Ferrell, even though it has the godlike Bob Nehwart in it) or one of those Tim Allen holiday movies or even the creepy "they have no souls!" animation of The Polar Express will get there someday, who knows?

(By the way, that's assuming that The Nightmare Before Christmas - one of only two Tim Burton films that are great all the way through - and Bad Santa will remain more "cult Christmas" than "TNT 24/7 Christmas Day repeat marathon" in their level of mainstream acceptability. We're talking society's picks when I'm talking "pantheon," not my personal choices.)

I used to dislike A Christmas Story. It didn't strike me as funny the first few times I encountered it in the '80s. My aunt and uncle adored it, I think in large part because its near-perfect recreation of the 1940s reminded them a lot of their own childhoods in the 1950s. But other than the Leg Lamp (and yes, I know there are A Christmas Story-branded Leg Lamps now - we just don't have a place for one!) and how the "you're gonna shoot your eye out!" thing ends up, it was pretty laugh-free for me at the time.

Nowadays, while I don't think I'll ever list A Christmas Story as a favorite, the repeat viewings have had their effect, and the movie's grown on me. I certainly laugh more at it now than I used to, but the thing I appreciate most about the movie is its attention to 1940s period detail.

However, there is absolutely one thing about A Christmas Story that, every time it comes into the frame, takes me right out of the story:

The mom's hair.

I mean, look at this!


Ladies and gentlemen, that's not 1940s hair. That's a vintage 1983 poodle 'do from Hair Affair at the Mercer Mall. Could no one on this film convince Melinda Dillon (the actress playing the mom) to succumb to a period hairstyle? If she was so attached to that crazy frizzy thing (which I hate hate hated on women 'n' girls at the time, much less now), couldn't she have put on a wig? And unless I missed the Melinda Dillon Ascendancy of the early '80s, she wasn't a big enough star, then or ever, to have demanded "no one touches my hair!" and gotten away with it. Maybe she was boffing the director, I dunno.

Hairstyles are usually the downfall of period pieces. Of course, there are plenty of other clues to when a period piece was filmed, most often in the cinematography / lighting / color processing, but usually it's someone running around 33 CE Rome or King Arthur's court or Studio 54 c. 1977 with Anachronism Hair, like they just pulled them off the street, threw chainmail or a leisure suit on them, and called it a day.

So yeah, every time Ralphie's Mom is in the frame, it totally undoes the decor, the sweaters, Darren McGavin's irascible Dad (surely an ancestor of That '70s Show's Red Foreman), and hours and hours of painstaking research, set decoration, and costuming, all because that woman had to keep her damn poodle hair.

I usually am a purist when it comes to being against ex post facto alterations of movies and TV shows. No colorization, no Apocalypse Now Redux bloating , no George Lucas-style reedits. But if I could, I would digitally alter this film to put an actual 1940s hairstyle on this woman.

By the way, in Googling up the photo for this piece, I discovered that many, many men developed pre-adolescent crushes on Ralphie's Mom, and still think she's totally MILFy. Who knew? For me, the hair by itself trumps any other virtues of Melinda Dillon's, at least in this film. But then again, I was 16 when this movie came out, so I was spending my time pining over very real girls at school rather than getting dewy-eyed over Ralphie's Mom. Plus my own pre-adolescent crush on a TV or movie mom was Elizabeth Montgomery, and what poodle-haired latecomer could compete with that?

total eclipse of the heroes

So I'm slowly catching up on this season of Heroes, via the good ol' TiVo. While it's certainly a blogworthy idea to explain how I feel about the show (in general: first season good, second season bad, third season in between but more iffy than not), I just watched "Eclipse: Part 2," and this is what I have to say right this minute, while the thought is still pipin' hot:

In case you don't know anything about Heroes (not that there's anything wrong with that): On this show, there are a bunch of folks with superpowers. Not all the characters, but most.

In the two-part episode I finished watching tonight, these folks lose their respective superpowers during a solar eclipse.

Somehow, it doesn't occur to any of the show's characters - and their ranks include powerful leaders, off-the-charts scientific geniuses, mind readers, time travellers, super duper quasi-government agents, etc. - that once the eclipse is over, these superpowers might come back.

I mean, yeah, having everyone lose their powers for a few hours opened up lots of possible character development and interesting plot twists (interesting by the standards of last season and this one, anyway).

But it did this totally at the expense of suspense of disbelief. None of these people thought "hey, when the eclipse is over, all those powers might come back"? C'mon. I think even this episode's Comic Book Guys (Breckin Meyer and Seth Green in cameo appearances) would know that was the Worst. Idea. Ever.

police on my back

I was supposed to have today off but got asked to work this evening. I need the money, so I said "yes."

My start time was 6 PM, so I left the house at 5:30 PM, which in this here northern hemisphere at this time of year means that it's dark already.

I was almost to my workplace - about a mile from it - and traveling in the left-hand lane on my side when a cop pulled behind me.

The scene:

• I'm on Gallatin Road, a city street.
• There are two lanes of traffic on either side of the street.
• There is a turn lane in the middle of the street.
  

The police cruiser then moved closer to me and turned on the ol' flashing lights. It didn't look like the cop was trying to pull me over, and rush hour traffic meant I was in no danger of speeding, so I concluded that he had just gotten a call and wanted to pass me. Since I had traffic in the lane on my right, I simply slowed down. The turn lane to our left was completely clear, so he could have easily gone into that lane to get around me.

Instead, he pulled closer and stayed behind me. Even though he didn't have his siren on, I then figured "well, he's pulling me over." I slowed down more and he still didn't pass me. I tried to look at the cop to see if he was signaling me, but since it was dark outside, I couldn't tell.

So, still thinking I'm being pulled over, I put on my right turn signal, and cut through the lane of traffic to my right, and then on to the shoulder. In the dark. In rush hour. Because a cop has on his flashing lights and is all up in my tailpipe and seems to want me to pull over.

And the cop didn't follow me. He stayed in the lane we were in, turned off his flashing lights, and went on up Gallatin Road with no sense of alacrity whatsoever.

To which I can only say: huh?

the ubiquity of iced tea

On Thanksgiving Day, we had the traditional midday dinner at my wife's aunt's place. It's one of those meals where there's enough attendees and little enough space around the table that once you sit down, you're pretty much locked in place until the plates are cleared in advance of dessert.

After we had loaded up our plates and sat down to begin mass consumption, two beverage choices were passed around the table:

• unsweet iced tea
• sweet iced tea
  

I don't like iced tea, but I didn't want to make a fuss, and I'm not a person who needs to drink while eating. And somewhat later in the meal, someone noticed that I hadn't chosen a beverage and at that point, I did receive liquid sustenance (in the form of good ol' H₂O).

My point in bringing up this example is that in my adult life, I have found myself at dozens of meals - at workplaces, with significant-other families, at daytime/working-hours parties - where not only was iced tea the only beverage option offered, it didn't even seem to occur to the organizers that some poor miscreant might not want iced tea.

I've tried iced tea plenty. I'm not much for any kind of tea, but I imagine my aversion to hot tea has to do with my lifelong bafflement at how to consume hot beverages (grist for another blog post, that).

But iced tea... oh yeah, I've tried it. As a kid, as a teenager, as an adult, as a quadrigenarian, you name it. And I've never liked it.

Not sweet or unsweet, lemon or no lemon, never, no way. To me, it's like someone put a stick in some water and called it a beverage. It's work for me to drink, and I can't get down even half a glass. The only variant that I've been able to drink a glassful of in one sitting is "fruit tea," and that's grudgingly, and with enough fruit content that it may not quite be tea anymore.

We didn't drink any kind of tea in the house I grew up in, so this beverage was foreign to my own upbringing in West Virginia. But my first wife grew up 15 miles from where I did, and she and her family quaffed iced tea like it was going out of style. In fact, during the nineteen years we were together, her mother never remembered that I didn't like iced tea, resulting in many unpleasant moments for me at meals when I hadn't noticed that I'd been served tea. I'd pick up the glass, and take a big swallow of what I expected to be Coke or Pepsi or at least Big K... and bleagh! mouthful of TEA!

One more example: in the late '90s, I organized and implemented conversion training in three cities for the employees of a bank that my then-employer had bought. In Jackson, MS, I left the catering arrangements to my local counterpart. As I'm sure everyone reading this has already guessed, at every meal during these training sessions - which I'm thinking was ten meals during the course of that week - the only beverages offered were sweet tea and unsweet tea. By the second day, I tried to make sure that I either brought in a couple of drinks for myself or had enough change for the vending machines at the training center. However, I was the only person out of dozens at these sessions that I saw use the machines. Everyone else blissfully quaffed their iced tea.

But I want to know... is it just some weird southern / Appalachian thing to offer only iced tea, and to assume that everyone loves iced tea? Or is it all iced tea all the time everywhere?