“The Baby Boomers wonder why we aren’t
interested in the counterculture that they invented, as if we didn’t see them
disembowel their revolution for a pair of running shoes.” from Winona Ryder’s valedictory speech in “Reality
Bites”.
During my middle years at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) in the early 1980s, I often spent lunch hours at the Newman Center (the Catholic student outreach) playing spades or Trivial Pursuit with Father Al, the secretary Janet, and a ROTC cadet named David. We alternated between the two, and one afternoon I won Trivial Pursuit by answering the question, “Which song from the late 1960s mentions ‘one of 16 Vestal Virgins’?”.
During my middle years at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) in the early 1980s, I often spent lunch hours at the Newman Center (the Catholic student outreach) playing spades or Trivial Pursuit with Father Al, the secretary Janet, and a ROTC cadet named David. We alternated between the two, and one afternoon I won Trivial Pursuit by answering the question, “Which song from the late 1960s mentions ‘one of 16 Vestal Virgins’?”.
I didn’t
even have to think. Procul Harum’s “A
Whiter Shade of Pale” had been one of my favorite songs for quite a while. My favorite line in the song, though, is “He
said, ‘there is no reason and the truth is plain to see’.”
The song
was featured in the 1985 film “The Falcon and the Snowman” as background for a
mellow party where everyone was too stoned to disagree much less to fight with
each other. But I first heard it in what was for many years my all-time favorite
movie, 1983’s “The Big Chill”.
The film
is about a group of friends who attended the University of Michigan in the late
1960’s and considered themselves part of The Movement, against the war, for
women’s liberation, for the war on poverty, against segregation, for civil
rights, etc. The action takes place a
decade and a half later, after their ideals have withered, with the catalyst
being the suicide of the one member of their clique, its central figure, in
fact, who was still hanging on.
The movie
was quite popular among the college crowd back then, especially the more
socially-conscious of us who were unhappy with the Baby Boomers for turning
into yuppies and betraying all the values of the Counterculture they had
espoused in their younger years, talking the talk without really walking the
walk during the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Wynona
Ryder’s speech in the opening scene of “Reality Bites” spoke not to the entire Generation
X so much as it did to us in the cross-generational “Generation Jones”, the
“Dazed and Confused” segment of the tail end of the Baby Boom (1947-1960) and
the dawn of Generation X (1961-1981) born roughly between 1958 and 1965 too
often lumped in with the Boomers.
For
yuppies (young, soulless urban professionals who brought us Ronald Reagan,
“greed is good”, and neoliberal supply-side/trickle-down/horse-and-sparrow
economics as well as the current catastrophic state of the world’s economy and
finances) themselves, on the other hand, the lesson was that having shallow,
superficial values currently popular but easily discarded when inconvenient is
okay.
The Baby
Boomers have been a generation often characterized as an intense bright light
for one brief shining moment featuring peace, love, and concern for fellow
humans followed by a long period of darkness featuring narcissism, greed, and
self-absorption. A shallow, superficial
lip-service Counterculture for Change (predecessor of today’s hipsters), which
produced a New Left claiming the position of spokesperson for the proletariat
yet had little but contempt for actual working people (the gauche caviar of the USA, known here as limousine liberals) turned Me
Generation (as hipsters will in the future). Maybe the light was just too bright to look
at and they had to turn away, only able to bear their own shadows.
Hemingway’s
“Lost Generation” at least had better taste of location (Paris) to in which to
search for themselves, and their art had soul even if their lives were
dissolute. And since they had just been through a bloody war (World War
I), many either serving in the trenches, literally, or near the lines with the
ambulance services, the Lost Generation had a bit more right to be pissed.
For all
its faults from the point-of-view of us in Generation X, “The Big Chill”,
even at its worst, came nowhere near the Baby Boomer self-congratulatory mutual
masturbation fest that was 1994’s “Forrest Gump”, and its equally offensive
reception of five of the eight major Oscars, none of which it deserved. I say that even though I loved the film.
In a year
which produced the movies “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “The Quiz Show”, “The
Shawshank Redemption”, and “Pulp Fiction”, there is no way in hell that
“Forrest Gump” deserved Best Picture. When
he got the Oscar for Best Actor for Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks had the same look
on his face that President Obama did when he got his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
The most offensive award with which the film was gifted was for Best Adapted Screenplay, since the yuppie self-love flick
that was the movie bears very little resemblance to the novel.
At least
“The Big Chill” had a redeeming feature of the film both sets of folks liked:
the obvious love, friendship, and mutual respect between the characters in
spite and because of their varying conflicts. A bit like the way Congress
worked before Newt Gingrich and the Contract on America.
One of the
many conversations my friends and I had about the movie figured in one of the
more memorable series of events from my first round of collegiate endeavor,
when I was studying political science at the UTC in the early '1980's.
One
evening, I was being given a ride home late one afternoon by a female friend
with whom I was having a date that next weekend. I forget the reason
exactly that I needed a ride, but it may have been after Sunday Mass at the
Newman Center.
Mary, the
girl driving, and I had both seen “The Big Chill”, her twice, me four times,
and were discussing it.
As we passed
out of the tunnel through Missionary Ridge from McCallie Avenue in downtown
Chattanooga onto Brainerd Road, Mary half-turned to me and asked, “Who do you
see yourself as? Which one of the
characters?”
“Hmmm...,”
I replied. “I guess I'd have to say Nick.” Nick, played by William Hurt,
was the cynical drug-dealing anti-authoritarian former psychology student and
war vet had who lost his genitalia, or at least the function thereof, in Viet
Nam.
"Why?"
"He's so cynical, and so am I."
I was particularly that way at that time. Haven't changed too much since then either.
"Well, you’re as cynical as Nick," she answered, "but that's not who I'd say."
"Oh, who do you see me as?"
Keeping one eye on the road, she looked at me sideways with a funny look in her eyes and said, “Alex.”
Alex? I thought. The dead guy??
“Alex?” I asked. “The dead guy?”
Kevin Costner's first role. The original opening scene, later cut, had him in the bathtub, still alive, bleeding. The opening in the release just showed his body, no face, as the mortician was dressing him, the last shot being that of his slit but now sewn up wrists.
"Why?"
"He's so cynical, and so am I."
I was particularly that way at that time. Haven't changed too much since then either.
"Well, you’re as cynical as Nick," she answered, "but that's not who I'd say."
"Oh, who do you see me as?"
Keeping one eye on the road, she looked at me sideways with a funny look in her eyes and said, “Alex.”
Alex? I thought. The dead guy??
“Alex?” I asked. “The dead guy?”
Kevin Costner's first role. The original opening scene, later cut, had him in the bathtub, still alive, bleeding. The opening in the release just showed his body, no face, as the mortician was dressing him, the last shot being that of his slit but now sewn up wrists.
Alex was
the true believer, the one person in the group who really believed the things
he was saying, the principles they espoused.
And continued searching and believing long after he left the university
and the others quit believing.
Mary did go on to point out that she was talking about all the things the other characters said about him, all their memories, all the ways he'd touched their lives. So it wasn't a dead guy she was comparing me to, it was the memories of that dead guy. She wasn’t casting me for Zombie Apocalypse, at least.
Mary did go on to point out that she was talking about all the things the other characters said about him, all their memories, all the ways he'd touched their lives. So it wasn't a dead guy she was comparing me to, it was the memories of that dead guy. She wasn’t casting me for Zombie Apocalypse, at least.
Oddly, this
was around this same time that my Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity brother Richard
Smith (later known to Chattanooga’s radio audience as DJ Parker Smith) started
calling me the “red-headed guru”.
Richard started doing that after the mortgage burning party at Lambda
Chi Alpha when I learned to meditate from two of our chapter’s alumni from the
‘60’s at 3 0’clock in the morning. You
can guess what state all of us were in.
She added
that Michael (the Jeff Goldblum character) also reminded her of me.
Michael was the talker and joker who tried to get into the pants of every
female member of the group that weekend, just as he probably had at the
university; she was comparing our sense of humor. But Alex won out.
The Alex
comparison was flattering as well as disconcerting. Several years later,
however, after the waterfall scene in the movie Robin Hood, my now ex-wife
Grace leaned over and said, "Kevin Costner's got your ass," so maybe
my friend's assessment was more accurate than she knew at the time, and in more
ways than she could have known.
Speaking
of my ex-, in Sunday school one morning in the ‘90’s when I was still going to
church, our class was beginning the book What’s So Amazing About Grace?.
The class leader asked us what was the first thing that came to our minds when
we heard the word “grace”.
“My
ex-wife,” I immediately answered. Everyone laughed, but it is her
name.
For mine and Mary’s date that weekend in 1983, we went to a Sicilian-owned restaurant in Brainerd Village, Mama Theresa’s, very intimate atmosphere, delicious food, great wine, then to a movie. Typical dinner-and-a-movie date, but the conversation at dinner was fantastic, lively, and engaging. All-in-all, one of the best "just-a-date" dates I had ever had to that point.
For mine and Mary’s date that weekend in 1983, we went to a Sicilian-owned restaurant in Brainerd Village, Mama Theresa’s, very intimate atmosphere, delicious food, great wine, then to a movie. Typical dinner-and-a-movie date, but the conversation at dinner was fantastic, lively, and engaging. All-in-all, one of the best "just-a-date" dates I had ever had to that point.
By the
way, don’t go looking for Mama Theresa’s. Caesar, who owned it along with
the wonderful Pizza Caesar’s, moved back to Palermo. Too bad for
Chattanooga too, because all their food was superb.
Afterwards, I couldn't get Mary on the phone for the next three weeks after our dinner and movie, nor did she show up at the Newman Center for Mass.
When Mary finally did show up at the Newman Center for Sunday evening Mass after those three weeks, she came up to me and said, with no preamble, “I'm sorry, but things between us would never work out. I'm too conventional for you.”
Afterwards, I couldn't get Mary on the phone for the next three weeks after our dinner and movie, nor did she show up at the Newman Center for Mass.
When Mary finally did show up at the Newman Center for Sunday evening Mass after those three weeks, she came up to me and said, with no preamble, “I'm sorry, but things between us would never work out. I'm too conventional for you.”
(Conventional:
1. Following generally accepted principles, methods, and behavior. 2. Ordinary,
commonplace. 3. Lacking originality or individuality. 4. Typical,
stereotypical. 5. Conformist.)
I just
stood there with my mouth open. What do you say to something like that?
After a
time, Mary and I did get back to being pretty good friends again, but for a
while it was pretty awkward. She never explained nor gave me any hint of
what had brought her to that conclusion after just one date, and it wasn’t
exactly like we didn’t know each other.
Mary
graduated UTC and began teaching at Notre Dame, the local Catholic high school
which was her alma mater. She graduated a class ahead of my best
friend at UTC, Chris Mahoney, who finished Notre Dame the year I finished
Tyner, in 1981. During our time at the university, I got to know so
many of his classmates so well that a number of them got the idea that I’d
graduated with them from there.
A few
months after she started working there, I got a call from her asking if I
wanted to come to her wedding, and if so, she'd send me an invitation.
The 22-year old too-conventional-for-me Catholic girl was marrying a 38-year old divorcee who had 19-year old a daughter.
And she had called me unconventional.
The 22-year old too-conventional-for-me Catholic girl was marrying a 38-year old divorcee who had 19-year old a daughter.
And she had called me unconventional.
(Unconventional:
1. Not adhering to accepted standards. 2. Out of the ordinary. 3. Dissident,
unorthodox, heretical. 4. Atypical. 5. Nonconformist, maverick.)
(Irony: Contradiction between circumstances and expectations)
Sure, I replied, I’ll go. Why not?
Sure, I replied, I’ll go. Why not?
The
wedding was surreal. The only person whom I knew there was Mary, my friend and
one-time, literally, date. I ended up slow dancing, very closely, with her new
19-year old step-daughter Darly, which her boyfriend, whom I hadn't known
about, didn't seem to appreciate, though he took it out on her rather than me, by
delivering her to her grandmother, me in tow.
What ensued was a lot of screaming and yelling and scolding. In Cuban Spanish. No one paid me any attention.
What ensued was a lot of screaming and yelling and scolding. In Cuban Spanish. No one paid me any attention.
It turns
out Darly was not happy about having a step-mother only two years her senior,
but she wasn't pissed at Mary, she was pissed at her dad. So she’d overindulged in some refreshments.
A couple of weeks later, “too-conventional-for-you” Mary was fired from Notre Dame High School for having married a divorcee on grounds of moral turpitude, by the same organization (the Catholic Church) that has provided so much aid, comfort, support, and shelter to the kiddie-fuckers in its ranks all over the world, with the cooperation of its highest echelons, including the head of the Inquisition.
A couple of weeks later, “too-conventional-for-you” Mary was fired from Notre Dame High School for having married a divorcee on grounds of moral turpitude, by the same organization (the Catholic Church) that has provided so much aid, comfort, support, and shelter to the kiddie-fuckers in its ranks all over the world, with the cooperation of its highest echelons, including the head of the Inquisition.
Before
that happened, though, two nights after the wedding, I called Darly, my friend
Mary's new step-daughter, and the two of us wound up dating on-and-off for
several months.
3 comments:
Your blog is excellent! Keep the good work.
Hi, I'm from Brazil so sorry for the bad english.
I was raised Catholic but recently I became interested in the real history behind Judaism and Christinanity and your blog helped me, so thank you.
I have some questions:
How the jews remained such powerful force in the World?
Anonymous 1 (31 March): Thank you very much!
Anonymous 2 (1 April, Brazil): Your English seems excellent. It's much better than my non-existent Portugese. As to your question, the answer to that is one of the things I am working around toward.
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