The Dropoff

It wasn't a long drive from our house, maybe ten minutes or so, but it was long enough for me to build up anxiety for what was about to happen: I was going to be dropped off at a new place with lots of people I'd never met, and although I was a reasonably social high school junior, this wasn't what I had bargained for on that Sunday night.

A souvenir picture from our OWS 2010 reunion

My mom had become interested in this church halfway across town in East Memphis. She had heard that it was a growing congregation with great youth activities, and I guess she felt it was time we found a church again. We'd left our previous church several years before, and we hadn't really seriously looked anywhere since. My uncle was a Methodist minister in California, so it only seemed appropriate to maintain some level of religious involvement. My dad, owing to the recent lifting of blue laws, spent most Saturdays and many Sundays working at his grocery store down on Lamar Avenue, so my mom and I were pretty much on our own on the weekends. And so, one gorgeous Sunday morning in the fall of 1971, we packed up and headed to Mullins United Methodist Church, at the corner of Walnut Grove and Mendenhall.

From the moment we walked in, we liked the place. It was a bit more modern in appearance than our previous church, and it didn't have a stuffy feel, which appealed to both of us. The minister, Reverend Tom Wilson, was a friendly fellow who seemed to wear a perpetual smile and was genuinely engaging with members of the congregation. We liked the music, and we liked the fact that lots of people greeted us and made us feel welcome. We called it a wrap and decided we'd come back the following week, but my mom went one step further: she decided that I would attend Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) that same night. I guess she figured that if you were going to jump into something, it might as well be at the deep end of the pool. That being said, I wasn't much of a swimmer in those days.

Anyway, there we were, with me sitting in the car, saying I was not going to get out. I was adamant. However, my mom in her youth had been a fiery redhead of strong opinion, and her tenacity had not dissipated over the years. In short, I lost the battle and with an air of obvious resignation, I headed into the church to attend the meeting. I was 16 years old, and here I was, sitting among a very large group of kids roughly my age, none of whom I had ever met. You remember how it is at that age: you're hypersensitive about anything you do or say, fearing that you might be labeled an outcast, but in this case, that never happened. On the contrary, I found that people actually appeared to want to talk to me, and somehow, it was natural to reciprocate.

The theme of that night's MYF meeting was the recently released album "Jesus Christ Superstar," and although I played multiple instruments and listened to music constantly, this was something I had never heard. I lived and breathed Grand Funk Railroad and could sing Creedence in my sleep, but I knew very little about "Jesus Rock," as it was called in those days. But I was somewhat taken by it. We listened to a few songs from the album, and then our youth leader Richard asked if any of us played instruments. Since I had played guitar for about five years in a series of garage bands, I tentatively raised my hand. Richard wondered if, given the size of our church, we might be willing to start our own "group." He offered to serve as director, but he didn't want to call this a "choir," because that sounded very uncool to us early 70's types. We did some thinking and came up with a name: The One Way Singers.

Almost from the beginning, everything just clicked. At its peak, we had well over 100 singers, some of whom came from other churches just to be part of the group. There were six of us in a band that accompanied the group: a keyboard player, drummer, lead guitar (yours truly), rhythm guitar, bass guitar, and percussion. We rehearsed diligently, meeting every Sunday afternoon about 4:00, after which we would have dinner in the church basement, followed by our regular MYF meeting. It seemed that everything at Mullins took on a new flavor, and the group gained momentum.

By the next summer, despite a change of directors, we were ready to embark on our first tour to Louisiana and Texas. Our outfits were amazing and so totally hip for the time: lime green jumpers for the girls, lime green polo shirts for the boys, with white pants, white belts and white shoes. Every day of the tour was a new experience. We played in churches large and small, and one night, we even played at an orphanage in New Orleans. Each evening except for one, we split up and stayed overnight with church members. We had some of the kindest hosts: they would give us tours of their communities, talk to us about our experiences and interests, make big breakfasts for us, and even wash and fold our laundry. We hung out with families at their pools, talked about whether the universe had an end, and made midnight snack runs. The tour was an unqualified success.

The next year, we changed up our outfits and broadened our geographical horizons, heading north to play in Indiana, Michigan, Ontario, and Ohio. We spent a day at Greenfield Village, got to explore Toronto's Yonge Street when our bus broke down there (a frequent occurrence), stayed overnight with a hippie musician, and spent a wonderful, memorable day at Niagara Falls. Since I had just graduated from high school and was headed to Chicago in the fall to attend Northwestern, I realized that this trip would really be my last hurrah with my Mullins crowd. I'm not exaggerating when I say that to this day, that week remains as one of my best memories, a time when everything seemed to come together to prepare me for launching into whatever life might deliver.

I headed to college in the fall, but I would make a point of stopping back at Mullins to visit whenever I was on breaks, and each time, it would feel like I'd never left. Back in those days, it didn't seem that I was completely home until I had strolled through the peaceful little cemetery that separates the parking lot from the church door. A few years ago, the One Way Singers held a weekend reunion, and on that warm Saturday night in late July, as I walked into the church with my friends from so long ago, my black and white Stratocaster over my shoulder (I didn't end up playing it), everything came flooding back, and I silently thanked my mother for making me get out of the car all those years before. If she could have been there at that moment, I know that she would have been smiling from ear to ear.

A Serious Peace Piece

​​I read a Rolling Stone article about the late Glenn Frey yesterday, and it mentioned that his hit songs featured "melodies that were perfect for the easygoing mood of the Seventies." I don't mean to dwell on the past, and I am thankful for life's many experiences in the intervening years, but reading that made me so grateful for having spent my late teens and early twenties in that unique decade.

What was it that made the Seventies "easygoing?" Certainly, they weren't that way at every point in time between Eric Clapton and Talking Heads, but overall, I believe what made the decade special was a combination of the overall decompression following the Vietnam war combined with an open-mindedness and sensitivity to others that has yet to be replicated. We seem to have become a more callous society. Many of the challenges that we face today are those that have been created from within: detachment, pessimism and isolationism are prime examples. We live on the very same planet that we inhabited in 1974, yet in many ways, it feels like a different world. The thing is, it doesn't have to be this way.

I don't preach about many things, and I'm not a hippie awaiting the return of psychedelia, but I think it would serve us well as a society to try to bring back some of the sentiment of the Seventies, to celebrate with those we love and at the same time, to be aware of challenges that others we know may be facing. Given our current modern methods of communication and the ever-expanding world of social media, it seems like we might be able to give ourselves a head start. We're all in this together, and maybe if we try, we can once again achieve at least a degree of that "peaceful, easy feeling" that Glenn Frey sang about all those years ago.

J.E. and the Violet Ray

It was probably a little over ten years ago that I first encountered J.E. He was a close friend of my stepfather and lived his whole life in and around Sevierville, Tennessee, just a stone's throw from Great Smoky Mountains National Park. One morning, I stopped in for breakfast with my stepfather and his friends, who met each morning at the local Hardee's on Highway 411, adjacent to Tractor Supply and Big Lots. They called themselves "The University," owing to their rambling, yet quasi-scholarly opinions on subject matter far and wide.

I observed that one man was highly animated, a major contributor regardless of the topic at hand, and the only name I heard anyone call him was "J.E." On that memorable morning, J.E. related to me a story, the essence of which I will attempt to reproduce here. The language is as close as I can recall to what he actually said.

"Well, Richard, I had been havin' this problem with real bad pain in my arm, so I went to see this feller right up here on 66 (Tennessee Highway 66, which runs north from Sevierville up to Interstate 40). I heard he was good. And he was a medical doctor...he had a certificate on the wall and ever'thing.'

'I sat down and told him what was both'rin' me, and he pulled out this thang in a lo-o-o-ng black box. He plugged it into the wall, and then he run it right over my arm a few times, and just like 'at, the pain was GONE. I mean, it was GONE.'"

Surely, one cannot witness such an account without experiencing a rush of curiosity, and I was no exception. Having told the story to countless friends in the intervening years, I'd often wondered exactly what the device had been. As fate would have it, while browsing a large antiques store here in Atlanta over this past weekend, I happened to see a long black box with a plug coming out of it, so I went over to have a closer look.

Sure enough, I had hit pay dirt. There it was, the same type of instrument to which J.E. had been referring. Within the box was a wand-like tool and a couple of glass tubes, which would appear to be illuminated when inserted into the wand. A hand-written label attached to the power cord read, "Western Coil and Electric Co. -- Quackery -- not intended for use. $124.99." I had to know more.

I Googled the name of the company and discovered that indeed, such devices were commonplace in the early twentieth century and were used in a medical practice known as electrotherapy, which involved applying high voltage, high frequency, low current electrical stimuli to the surface of the body. The machines were collectively known as "violet ray" devices and were manufactured until after the Depression, when the companies who made them redirected their production efforts to making wartime equipment and other assorted electrical components.

Wikipedia provides an excellent description of violet ray technology, which was actually introduced by Nikola Tesla prior to 1900:

"A typical violet ray device consisted of an ungrounded electrical control box that controlled the interrupter and which housed the magneto coil, and an attached bakelite or other handle housing which contained the high voltage coil and an insertion port for attachments. Glass evacuated tubes of varying shapes and for different therapeutic uses could be inserted into the bakelite handle to apply the resulting current to different parts of the body."

Granted, the FDA may have seized all the violet ray devices in the early 1950's, but that didn't stop J.E.'s healthcare professional, Lord have mercy on his soul, from finding the right instrument to treat his patient's ailing arm in the new millennium. Besides, these devices were purported to help remedy everything from brain fog to catarrh, and that's no small feat. Quackery? I think that's jumping to conclusions, a premature assessment. The way I see it, when you've got something that works, stick with it.

Groomsman

There it is in the picture to the right -- that's my daily personal care armamentarium, at least as of this moment. My wife laughs at me and tells me I use more than the normal number of potions, but hey, "this" doesn't come easy. A guy has to work at it, you know. What's notable about this array of products is that it is not stable. I wish it were, but manufacturers are constantly swapping offerings in and out of their lines, and they seem to be especially reckless with men's products. Maybe they're thinking that we won't complain, but I'm here to let them know that's not the case.

Take after shave. These days, I double dog dare you to find the same after shave lotion or balm twice in a row. For example, I used to use a Neutrogena product that contained a built-in 20 SPF sunscreen, because I figured that would be a good, healthy thing. But within a short period of time, that product had disappeared, only to be replaced with a version which did not contain sunscreen. But now I see that the sunscreen version has returned to the shelves. The same thing happens all the time with all kinds of products. Of course, there are times when you discover something new and good in the process.

One afternoon in the very early 80's, I was shopping at the Old Orchard Marshall Field's in suburban Chicago, and I needed some after shave. In those days, I bought "real" after shave, the kind sold only in department stores. As I perused the offerings, a pleasant female sales associate, some years my senior, asked if she could be of assistance, and when I told her what I was looking for, she asked if I'd ever considered a balm instead of a straight lotion. When I told her I hadn't, she asked me to hold out my hand, and she would apply some Chanel Antaeus to it so that I could feel the texture. When I told her how nice it felt, she said, "Why would you shave your face, then splash it with something containing alcohol?" I replied that I had no answer for that savage male practice and that it stung immensely. She then said, "You should use a balm. It's better for your skin. Women know this." I committed this statement to memory. Needless to say, I left Field's with my first bottle of Antaeus, and it would not be my last. It's still on the market, but it's kinda pricey.

The study of shaving cream/gel/foam is something for which you could probably earn an advanced degree. As you may be able to see from the picture, I've opted lately for a cream. That's what men used to use many moons ago, and I became interested in it when I saw a man shaving with it in an old black and white movie. He was applying something to his face that I could barely see, but it seemed to work. (I don't think he was bleeding, but then again, it was a black and white movie, so it was hard to tell.) Anyway, he was using cream. Shaving gel lasts so long that you become quite tired of its fragrance after a while and want to move on to something else. I once had a can of Edge Sensitive Skin for over a year. Shaving foam, on the other hand, lasts approximately 35 seconds once it's applied to the face and has never been the same since Barbasol, which is still sold, but for something like $6.00 a can. And of course, you can never find the same shave cream twice in a row, except in the case of Cremo, which despite its odd name, smells of citrus and has such a pleasing fragrance that you don't want to ever stop shaving.

Shampoo for guys? Look out. There's an assumption that many men (and this may be true) want to use only one product for body wash, shampoo, and whatever else. The big manufacturers like Old Spice and Axe have catered to this with products which, although probably effective, often have scents which could peel the paint off walls. Other guys may not say anything when they catch a whiff of these, but I could not with a clear conscience wear them around my female friends. They would become distressed and avoid talking to me altogether. Plus, I sing in a choir, and you cannot wear stinky stuff when you sing with such a group, because that might disturb others around you, and they might start sneezing, which is not a good recipe for choral success.

I became more aware of using the "right" fragrance some years ago, when while walking into the office with my friend Swanzetta, she smiled at me and said, "Rico, what is that you're wearing? Mmm-um...ain't nothin' like a good smellin' man in the morning." I laughed, but took that statement to heart. Just as important as the right fragrance is the concept of discretion in its application. Back in the 80's, I worked in an office where one of our compadres loaded himself up every morning with Ralph Lauren Polo, the one in the green bottle with the shiny gold top. There's nothing inherently wrong with this time honored fragrance, but the amount that this fellow used was absolutely staggering. We could smell him heading our way from several aisles away. I vowed back then never to repeat that offense. I don't want to get sued by someone for respiratory damage or because they missed their solo.

So what to do? I'm thinking that maybe I should just stockpile my favorite brands, but I'm wondering if they have a shelf life. I have some eau de toilette that I've had since the 90's, and it still seems to smell okay, but I haven't field tested it, if you know what I mean. I have to be careful, being a baritone and all.

On Being a Morning Person

"Up, boy...rise and shine! Half a day's gone...there's work to be done."

-- Foghorn Leghorn

Back in the day, I'd awaken around 6:45 every morning, weekday or weekend, and it was always cold. Our apartment in Wilmette, a leafy suburb on Chicago's North Shore, had a big picture window that looked out over a pretty little courtyard. I'd make myself a cup of steaming hot coffee and settle down in one of our Pier 1 chairs (such a nice design, so comfy) to read the Chicago Tribune or make a little more headway in the latest book I happened to be reading. Over time, this ritual evolved into something more than a habit...it became a necessity. That was 35 years ago, and still, my mornings have to start with quiet time.

Those of you who spend a lot of time with me know that I rarely sit still, but morning is the time when I get all my thoughts together, and I love getting up earlier than necessary to savor it. I'm definitely not one of those "get to work at 7, leave at 4" people, because I need that time in the morning to putter around. I've been a fan of "Good Morning America" since the late 70's, when I traveled a lot for work and got hooked watching it in hotel rooms before I headed to the office. I can still remember David Hartman and Joan Lunden greeting me as I looked for a tie to match my suit at the LAX Marriott. I've followed the show all through the years and hosts, and now, it doesn't seem like a proper weekday morning until I've checked in with George Stephanopoulos, Amy Robach, Ginger Zee and the rest. They seem like family.

Weekend mornings are grand. There's absolutely no traffic, so I can head wherever in the city without running into a jam, which is quite pleasing. I love to walk for exercise, and I usually engage in my best urban explorations early in the morning. That's when I head into the city and scout out cool neighborhoods, making mental notes of where the good parking places are. By the time I return home, the day is in full swing, traffic has picked up, and I'm ready to go on to the next adventure. Of course, the downside to all this is that by around 2:00 in the afternoon, I'm usually whipped and ready for a nap, so if we happen to be out and about at that time, my wife will often do the driving, since I tend to fall asleep rather quickly (I'm a cat napper par extraordinaire).

This morning, as I write this, I'm beginning a much needed week long staycation, and I'm really looking forward to all these mornings. Today, I slept in until 7:05, but I'm thinking that will not be the norm. Half a day's gone by then, and I don't want to miss anything.

Ciao, y'all.