Postcard from Barcelona

Earlier this month, I visited Barcelona, Spain, on business.  I didn’t get to see any of the traditional sights (the giant cinder block convention center is apparently not quite as visually striking as  Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia).  But I did get the chance to see Europeans in their natural habitat and that is always fun for an ugly American like me.  A few observations…

• Europeans love rules.  I showed up for breakfast at my hotel a few minutes before 7:00 a.m., when breakfast officially started.  All of the wait staff were in place.  The buffet was laid out.  But when I made a move to sit down, I was shooed away.  “We are not open yet,” the girl said, tapping her wrist, the international sign for temporal disputes.  I stood there for another minute or two.  “Okay,” the girl said, finally, and showed me to my table.  One night, a few of us showed up at a restaurant for dinner.  “Do you have a reservation?” the host asked us.  We did not.  He disappeared for several minutes and then, in a show of true generosity, brought us into the dining room — where we were the only people in the entire place.
• Europeans do NOT love clothing.  After nine hours overnight in coach, I took a walk along the beach to stretch my aching legs.  Most of the women were topless and it is just SO not a big deal there.  Janet Jackson flashes her boob at the Super Bowl and America has a meltdown.  Not so much in Barcelona.  The funny thing is that when boobs are on such rampant display, they lose all of their magical, hypnotic  powers.  Sadly, many of the men were in Speedos and one guy was strolling down the beach completely naked.  Nothing magical about that.
• Europeans like to drink.  My company is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and, at the convention center, we invited customers to come by our booth for a little celebration.  In the U.S., we would have passed out “sparkling apple juice,” the beverage equivalent of dry humping, but in Barcelona, they handed out genuine Cava, a type of Spanish champagne.  A few hours later, all of the executives from my company gathered to do a conference call with financial analysts — but not before another round of Cava was passed around. 

I would like to return to Barcelona someday as a tourist.  I visited Madrid many years ago on business, but managed to extend my stay for a few days and really loved it, so I would expect similar success in Barcelona.  I’ll be sure to pack my Speedo.

D is for Divorce(d)

Free at last, free at… Oh, come on, you know the rest, don’t you?  Anyway, as of Thursday, May 7, at about 2:00 p.m., I re-joined the ranks of the single folk.  After 10 years of marriage, I am officially dee-vorced. 

How does it feel?  Well, I am NOT going to Disneyland.  (Can’t afford it anymore.)  But it does feel pretty good.  

It’s kind of like banging your head against a wall.  It hurts, but if you do it long enough, the pain becomes a part of your life — so much so that you no longer even realize that you’re IN pain.  Until you stop, that is, and realize, “Holy shit, that HURT.  My head really fucking HURT for a LONG fucking time.  And now it doesn’t.  And that feels really fucking GOOOOD.”

I am not gloating here.  Basically, I got my ass handed to me in the divorce settlement.  The divorce business (and make no mistake about it, it IS a business) is one of the few in the world where being a man is a distinct DIS-advantage. 

I had a final, blinding moment of clarity about this on the day of my divorce, when I looked around for sympathy and saw my lawyer (a woman), my ex-wife’s lawyer (a woman), the two court-appointed mediators assigned to our case (both women), and the judge (a woman).  One of these things is not like the other.  Oh, wait, it’s ME!  As Kenny Rogers said, you got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, and, son, it was time to fold ‘em.  So that’s what I did.

Still, all is not lost.  I am now poorer in wallet, but richer in every other way you could possibly imagine.  At the tender age of 41, I am REBORN (and rising, baby, always rising).

Having survived this experience relatively intact, I feel obliged to “pay it forward” — to impart the lessons learned along the way to those of you who also will someday stop banging your head against that dreaded wall.  In no particular order, here they are…

• Use a mediator, not lawyers, and, if at all possible, get it done without any of them — It’s a difficult process emotionally, but if you had asked me nine months ago to sketch out the broad strokes of where things would have ended up, I would have come pretty darn close.  Everyone thinks their situation is unique.  Basically, NO ONE’S situation is unique — but people getting paid by the hour have very little incentive to tell you that.  You can spend $50K to figure that out or you can just take it from me.
• Pick your battles — For me, I wanted to have frequent access to my kids.  (Awwwww….)  I was willing to go to the mat for that.  Everything else was negotiable.  No one gets everything they want.  Not even the women. 
• It’s only money — No, it doesn’t grow on trees — not even in the backyard of the dwelling I used to call my home, contrary to popular belief.  But money IS overrated and, like Doritos, you can always make more.  Toward the bitter end, I asked my friend, Liam, for advice.  “If she asks for $50K, give her a hundred,” he said.  His figures were off by a factor of ten, but, philosophically, he was exactly right.  Probably explains why he’s been happily married for about 17 years. 
• Be nice — In the course of getting divorced, there are about 4,000 opportunities to be decent or to be a dick.  Be decent about 3,995 times — not for the benefit of your ex, but for the benefit of YOU.    

So there you have it.  I hope you never need it.

Oh, Sure, NOW Spock Is Cool

I have pointy ears.  There, I said it.

Your ears are rounded on the top.  Mine come to a point.

My mother says that when I was born, the doctor said that my pointy ears could be “fixed” through some combination of baby oil and bandages.  Mom took a pass.  Thanks, Mom!

I was teased mercilessly about my ears throughout childhood.  “Hey, Spock ears!” was a pretty popular taunt.  “Look, it’s Mr. Spock!” was another.  You get the idea.

I did my best to hide my deformity.  Whenever I wore a baseball cap, I tucked the points of my ears under the rim.  On the rare occasion when my hair grew a bit long, I would try desperately to pull a piece of my hair over the points of my ears.

When I was in college, I worked as a lifeguard at the swimming pool in the condominium where I grew up.  I thought I was pretty cool and had attracted a following of young kids who hovered around me all day, waiting and hoping that I would go into the pool and horse around with them for a while.

Jonathan was one of my favorite kids.  He was maybe seven or eight and just a very sweet, smart boy.  One day he was sitting next to me on a pool chair.  He sat up with a bit of a start.

“Do you know that your ears are pointy?” he asked me.

It was very much like that scene in “The Sixth Sense” when Haley Joel Osmet reduces his teacher to mush by screaming “Stuttering Stanley!” over and over again until the poor man has, indeed, regressed back to his childhood and can barely spit out the words, “Shut up!”

“Yes, Jonathan, I know my ears are pointy,” I said as calmly as I could. 

There would be no horsing around in the pool that day.

Today, many, many years later, I love my pointy ears.  I know now that they add character to my ugly mug and, besides, what the hell am I going to do about it anyway?  I wear my hair short and when I wear a baseball cap, the points go on the OUTSIDE, baby. 

All this has come back to me recently with the opening of the new “Star Trek” movie, where Mr. Spock – and everybody else in the film for that matter – seems to reek of a cool that I never could have imagined way back when.

My son, Christian, has one ear that’s a bit pointy.  Son, you are the coolest kid in the galaxy.

Polar Bears 1, Deranged Humans 0

My kids and I visited the Central Park Zoo over the weekend and one of the featured attractions there is the polar bear exhibit.  These things are HUGE and I was reminded of the recent story of the “deranged woman” in Germany who jumped into the polar bear exhibit ( do “sane women” do this, too?) and quickly learned that what’s cute and cuddly from a distance is quite terrifying when it’s close enough to sink its teeth into you.

The bears batted the fraulein around a bit, but she was eventually hauled to safety.  The whole thing was caught on tape, of course, and quickly became an on-line sensation.

I love incidents like this — when people forget for a moment that, although caged, these are still WILD animals and pay dearly for their mistake.   (Just to be clear, I do NOT love it when people ACCIDENTLY get attacked by an animal.  Only when they willingly put themselves in harm’s way.)

You may recall the story from a while back about three jackasses who decided to taunt a tiger at the Miami Zoo.  Here are some choice excerpts from CNN’s coverage of that story:

• “Police are probing whether one of the Siberian tiger’s three victims climbed over a fence Christmas Day and then dangled a leg or other body part over the moat.”  Can you imagine the moment when you realize that the tiger can actually get you?  Hey, everybody, look at me up on the fence!  Am I crazy or what?  Oh, look, here comes the tiger.  Oooh, I’m so scared.  Here kitty, kitty… oh, shit!

• “The investigation is looking into the possibility that the tiger escaped by latching on to a leg or other body part.”  Apparently, tigers are not only ferocious, but really smart.  What must the victim’s two friends have been thinking?  Man, that sucks for Carlos, but at least we’re safe out here… oh, shit!

• “Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Mollinedo was asked about an incident last year, in which Tatiana chewed flesh off a keeper’s arm during a public feeding demonstration. Mollinedo said that Tatiana ‘was acting like a normal tiger’ at the time.”  How do ABNORMAL tigers act?  Do they give you their paw or something?

• “Ron Magill of Florida’s Miami Metrozoo told CNN that the Siberian tiger is ‘the most powerful cat on the face of this planet.’”  I can testify to the size of these suckers.  We visited the Bronx Zoo last summer and they have an amazing exhibit where you can view tigers up close.  At one point, one of the tigers was pacing back and forth about 20 feet away from where we were all standing there looking at it.  Suddenly, it turned and began walking very slowly, but very purposefully, straight toward us, prompting several children (and a few adults) to scream in terror, despite the fact that the glass separating us was about three inches thick. 

• “When police arrived, they saw the tiger ’sitting next to a person on the ground,’ and the tiger turned back and began attacking the person again.  Officers yelled at the tiger to stop.”  Did they actually yell, “Stop”?  Why would a tiger respond to that?

Ah, well, if you have to go, go big.  Perhaps the next time we’re at the Central Park Zoo, I’ll climb into the penguin and puffin exhibit and see who wants a piece of me.

Play That Funky Cello, White Boy

On Tuesday, I kissed the kids goodnight and headed to Joe’s Pub in NYC to hear a guy named Trevor Exter sing songs about his life and play the cello.  This is not nearly as lame as it sounds because a) Exter can really sing and b) Exter rocks the cello and makes music with it that is entirely “un-classical” and totally cool.  An old friend of mine is Exter’s agent (allegedly) and invited me to the show.  (“We’ll have a drink with Trevor after the show,” she told me on the phone the previous afternoon.  She was nowhere to be found.  Ah, well)

After a brief scuffle with the woman working the door — “The box office is CLOSED,” she kept insisting as though I’d shown up late and without a ticket to see “Phantom of the Opera” — I was eventually allowed in and there he was, sitting on stage all alone, just a man and his cello.  The sight of it was jarring, almost funny, at first, but then I realized that Exter is a serious musician who makes beautiful, haunting, serious music.

After a few songs, Exter invited a drummer to join him on stage and they played a few songs.  The drummer emerged from a very small door at the back of the stage, which eventually disgorged a bass player, a sax player, and a harmonica player.  It was the nightclub version of a clown car.  (A quick bass story… In the eight grade, I was the MC for my school’s talent show and introduced one of my classmates as playing the electric bass, which I pronounced like the fish.  I couldn’t understand why everyone was laughing.) 

At the end of their last song together, Exter jumped out of his seat and gave his cello a sort of “modified Pete Townsend windmill” and the crowd went about as wild as a crowd will ever go at a Trevor Exter show, which is to say modestly and politely wild, but not really very wild at all.

Exter came back out by himself to play a few encores, ending with a fabulous rendition of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (also covered brilliantly by one of my favorite bands, The Housemartins).

All in all, I thought Mr. Exter was awesome.  Two thumbs up, Trevor!

Best Lines: “You Ate Your Own Heini?”

My son is three, my daughter is eight, and I am 41, but we all love “Phineas and Ferb,” an animated show on the Disney Channel, which offers a little something for everybody.

Phineas and Ferb are brothers and the show is set during their seemingly endless summer vacation. For kicks, they think of incredibly elaborate things to do, like building a roller coaster in their back yard. Their older sister, Candace, lives for the day that she will be able to bust Phineas and Ferb to Mom and Dad, but it never quite works out that way.

The boys have a pet platypus named Perry, who doubles as a secret agent charged with foiling the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz. (One of my favorite moments in every episode comes when these cheery female voices sing the evil doctor’s corporate jingle: “Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated.”)

A few months back, my kids started saying the phrase, “You ate your own heini?” and I had no idea what they were talking about except that it seemed to crack them up to no end. One day recently, we were watching “Phineas and Ferb” and my daughter gushed, “This is the heini episode!”

As it turned out, Dr. Doofenshmirtz zapped Perry with a machine that encased the platypus in a thick coating of chocolate. Doofenshmirtz exults in his triumph and plans to unleash his machine on the entire planet. But Perry emerges to battle him once again. Doofenshmirtz, who speaks with a silly German accent, looks over at the chocolate shell of Perry’s body, where a certain piece of the anatomy has gone missing, allowing him to escape.

“You ate your own heini?” Doofenshmirtz says incredulously and we all laughed long and hard.

It has become a standard phrase of ours whenever we want to express complete shock and surprise at something.

The Greatest Songs of All Time

My favorite song at the moment is “Circus” by Britney Spears.  Yes, I admit it, I have always been a big fan of Ms. Spears ever since she danced around in a Catholic school girl uniform in “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”  (That’s what 12 years of Catholic school will do for you, folks.  You emerge very smart, but totally dysfunctional.)  I was even one of the few people who thought Britney looked just fine when she made her infamous appearance on the MTV Music Awards last year.  Let’s see you pump out two babies and then dance around in a skin-tight costume!   

Like Britney’s best work, “Circus” is three-and-a-half minutes of pure bubble gum dance pop.  It also features Britney’s speaking voice, which always sounds a bit weird.  At a certain point in the song, for example, she says, “Let me see what you can do,” but it doesn’t sound quite right.  “Circus” also has lyrics that don’t quite fit, but Britney MAKES them fit by changing the emphasis in certain words, another one of her signatures.  “I’m like a PER-former, the dance floor is my stage,” she sings, putting the accent in the wrong place.  Ah, well.  It’s a dance song, for God’s sake. 

As much as I love “Circus,” it does not make my top eight list – or my top eight HUNDRED list, for that matter – of The Greatest Songs of All Time (not to be confused with my recent post discussing The Greatest DANCE Songs of All Time).  Here, in no particular order, are the songs that I love the best:

• “Boys of Summer,” Don Henley – This lyric has influenced my life a great deal: “Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.  A little voice inside my head said, ‘Don’t look back.  You can never look back.’”  I try very hard to never look back.  The future is so much more appealing.   
• “Let’s Go,” The Cars – There’s something about this song that just makes me very happy.  I like the nightlife, baby!
• “Take Me Home,” Phil Collins – By contrast, there’s something about this song that makes me very sad.  As I’ve written previously, my favorite word is “home” and this song is all about wanting to get back home and it is beautiful and wistful.
• “Wanted Dead or Alive,” Bon Jovi – OK, I absolutely LOVE Bon Jovi and I think this is their best song by far.  “I’ve seen a million faces/And I rocked them all.”  Yes, boys.  Yes.
• “Holding Back the Years,” Simply Red – The vocal on this song is just killer, especially when he wails, “Holdin’, holdin’, holdin’, I…” and holds the “I” for about 20 minutes. 
• “Promises in the Dark,” Pat Benatar – I love it when there is a count down or count up in a song and I love the part in this song when one of the band members counts, away from the microphone, “One, two, three, four…” before Pat kicks it back in and finishes the damn thing.
• “Things Can Only Get Better,” Howard Jones – I am a glass-half-empty kind of guy, but for these four minutes my cup runneth over.  “And do you feel scared? I do/But I won’t stop and falter.”  Me, neither, Howie.
• “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen – Yes, this is on everyone’s top ten list, but it deserves to be.  If an alien landed in my apartment and asked me to play one song that embodies the human experience, I would say, “Sit down, Spaceman,” and crank this one to eleven.
• “It Takes Two,” Rob Base – This one topped the list of my Greatest Dance Songs of All Time and it is SO DAMN GOOD that it earns a place on this list, too. 

So there you have ‘em.  The Elite Eight.  Which ones did I miss?

41 and Still Rising

When I started this blog, I was 39 years old and staring down the barrel of the big Four-Oh.  Last week, I turned 41 and I know now that it is just the beginning. 

Lots of old stories left to tell. 

Lots of new ones still to come. 

Let’s do this.

The Funniest Thing I’ve Ever Seen in My Life

A few weeks ago, I was reminiscing with my dear old friend Richard about the time he appeared in a high school production of “The Sound of Music” as Friedrich, one of the Von Trapp children.  Richard was, and still is, old-looking, ugly and hairy, and he had a deep singing voice that, despite numerous vocal lessons, could not find and hit the proper note for all the tea in China.

My father and I went to see Richard in “The Sound of Music” and there is the scene where all of the children introduce themselves, quite militantly, to their new governess, Fraulein Maria.  Richard’s turn came and he — being about 18 at the time in real life — stepped up and delivered the famous line, “I’m Friedrich. I’m fourteen. I’m impossible!”  My father and I began to laugh, but that was OK, since the scene is played for laughs.

We settled back down, but came completely unglued by the number, “Do Re Mi,” during which Maria teaches the the Von Trapp children the different notes in the musical scale — “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” and so on.  Richard’s ungodly attempts to hit his notes became funnier and funnier, until my father and I were clawing at each other in an attempt to avoid hyperventilating and being booted from the theatre entirely.

“That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said to Richard the other day.

“Yes,” he said, suddenly very serious. “But you do remember THE funniest thing, don’t you?”

I knew instantly what he was talking about.

Richard and I were theatre geeks in high school, and the geekiest geek of them all was Andy Smith. Andy was one of those guys who worked back stage. He ran the lights, built the sets, that kind of thing. He was painfully awkward and shy. Compared to Andy, I was COOL and, my friends, believe me when I tell you that Urkel was cooler than yours truly in high school.

The one thing Andy had that most of us didn’t was a car. So, while he was a total geek, he was actually quite handy to have around. One day, Andy was driving Richard and me to a pool party that our drama teacher was hosting at his house for all of the theatre kids. I was sitting in the front seat of Andy’s car, Richard in the back.

We were not the first to arrive and as we pulled into the driveway, one of the theatre kids — Tim Lagasse, who would go on to become Oobi the talking hand on Noggin — decided to jump onto the hood of Andy’s car and hurl insults at Andy, with his face mashed up against the windshield.  He was going at it real good when Andy, without a moment’s hesitation, flicked on his wipers, sending Tim’s face first violently to the left and then whipping back to the right with equal force.  The expression on Tim’s face — which was about 8 inches in front of mine — was a brilliant mixture of pain, shock, and, above all, utter humiliation, as he realized that Andy — ANDY! — had taken him down to Chinatown.

Richard and I probably laughed for an hour that day, and I am laughing now as I type this sentence, more than 20 years later. 

It remains the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Desert Island Discs: Toad the Wet Sprocket, “Dulcinea”

I had the great pleasure of seeing Toad the Wet Sprocket play Webster Hall in New York City last week.  I have always been a big fan of these guys and many of the songs they played were from “Dulcinea,” the band’s 1994 masterpiece.

How can you not love an album that contains a song (“Nanci“) with these opening lyrics: I can’t believe you/You bend your words Like Uri Geller’s spoons.”  Smart.  Funny.  Goddamn brilliant.

“Nanci” is one of my favorite songs on “Dulcinea,” but there are many others.  The album’s two radio hits, “Something’s Always Wrong” and “Fall Down” are excellent, as is the opening track, “Fly From Heaven,” which begins with these lyrics:

Paul is making me nervous
Paul is making me scared
Walk into this room and swaggers
Like he’s God’s own messenger

I read somewhere that this song is written from the perspective of one of the apostles, James, and is about Paul the apostle and the struggle of faith after the death of Jesus.  Not so funny.  Still brilliant.

I lost my copy of “Dulcinea” several years ago and simply could not find it no matter where I looked.  Eventually, I stopped looking.  As loyal readers of my blog will recall, I parted ways with my wife last year and moved out of my house into a new apartment.  One of the few items that I brought with me was an old CD rack system that had been gathering dust in a closet.  I hooked it up and hit the “Open/Close” button on the CD player.   There, resting comfortably in the CD tray, was “Dulcinea.”

Hello, old friend.