Singing Poetry

I still remember the first time I heard John Prine.  It was the summer of ’73 and I was living in what used to be a gracious old Des Moines neighborhood.  The neighborhood was on its way downhill, with beautifully maintained family homes being turned one-by-one into seedy dives filled with raucous students, impoverished laborers, and unemployed ne’re-do-wells.  I lived in one of the seedy dives and was working my way through the stages from raucous student to impoverished laborer and unemployed ne’re-do-well.

Impoverished Laborer in Transition to Unemployed Ne’re-do-well

I felt that, in many ways, my life was moving in the same direction as the neighborhood; downhill.  I was a fresh college drop-out whose future looked like it would consist of eking out an existence as a ditch digger.  (According to my conditioning at the time, ditch digging was the only alternative for someone with no college degree.)

In spite of my gloomy self-prognosis, the summer of ’73 was one of the best and most memorable of my life.  I was living with four friends in a great old house and making enough money to get by.  And if I didn’t have a future, I didn’t have anyone expecting anything of me, either.  I had a job that was… unusual.  I was hanging out with people who were… unusual.  Life was one long party, and there was no place else I had to be.

The best thing about the house was the second-story sleeping porch.  The house was perched on a little rise at the corner of the block.  The porch was at the front of the house, so it dominated the street and gave us a commanding view of the intersection.  Giant hardwood trees shaded the porch and it was always cool.  In an un-airconditioned house during a Midwestern summer, this was important.

When we first walked through the house, my buddy Jim laid claim to the bedroom connected to the porch, thinking he’d scored a coup.  What he’d actually done was choose as his bedroom the corridor between the porch and the rest of the house.  People tramped through his room and carried on right outside his bedroom window at all hours of the day and night.  Jim spent most of the summer sleeping at his girlfriend Kim’s apartment.

Late one night, we were hanging out as usual on the porch when we heard someone bellowing at us from the street, inviting himself up to join us.  He was boisterous, bearded, burly, and none of us had ever seen him before.  He’d heard us partying in the wee hours and decided to party with us.  But he was friendly and a lot of fun.  He had us splitting our sides while he told us stories about the psychotropic properties of nutmeg when ingested in large quantities, “You have to eat, like, a quarter pound, man, and you’ll puke your guts out, but you’ll trip your ass off!”  And then he asked, “Do you guys like bluegrass?”

Well, being Iowa boys born and bred, we didn’t even know what bluegrass was.  So we moved the party over to boisterous, bearded, and burly’s place, two or three houses down, and he introduced us to John Prine.*  I’ve been listening to John ever since.

One of the reasons Nan and I knew we were sympatico early-on was because we both loved John Prine.  We’ve gone to see him at every opportunity since the late ‘70s.  Last Friday night at the packed Touhill Performing Arts Center, we were with 1,623 other people who, judging by their enthusiasm, felt the same way we did about John Prine.

John and two other musicians performed for over two hours.  The crowd was absolutely in love with what they were hearing.  John’s voice has gotten rougher, but he still has a great stage presence.  When John and his sidemen finished Lake Marie and said farewell, all 1,625 of us leapt to our feet and cheered until they came back for an encore.  They were joined for the encore by Carrie Rodriguez, the talented young fiddler/guitar player who opened the concert.  They performed the duet In Spite of Ourselves, and finished up with an extended version of Paradise.

Dang, it was a sweet show.

- Poppa

 

* I don’t think John Prine actually plays bluegrass.  I’ve been told he refers to what he plays as “shitkicker music.”  But the album cover in 1973 was mostly blue and there was straw on it, so we all agreed it must be bluegrass.

Election Day 2008 – One for the History Books

Heard while waiting at the polls:

“They’re going to be beating up the homeless people today!”  (woman on cell phone)

WTF?  Was she expecting Rove and Cheney to beat up homeless people?

“It’s all a game, they already know who won, the one with the most money wins, but somebody’s going to throw some salt in the game.” (the guy behind us in line)

Repeated about 20 times and directed at no one in particular.  Grrrr…

“Everybody whose name starts with S or Z, come with me.”  (poll worker without a clue about Queue Management)

He would come out of the polling place, walk down the line saying “Everybody whose name starts with S or Z, come with me” and escort six or seven people inside.  When I asked him if he meant “S through Z” he just repeated, “Everybody whose name starts with S or Z, come with me.”  We were almost to the door before those inside finally told him it was “S through Z.”  Consequently, for the first hour and a half, everybody with a last name starting with S or Z got to vote before anybody whose last name started with T through Y.

Bonehead.

Still, shaping up to be a glorious day!

Poppa

Waiter! There are SNAILS on my plate!

Nan, Jan, and I had dinner at Vin de Set last night, and I ate my very first snails.  I ordered the “Escargot Over Puff Pastry w/ garlic-white wine butter sauce” starter and it was to die for.  Granted, the garlic-white wine butter sauce would have tasted good over cardboard, but the escargot had a nice, firm texture reminiscent of scallops or mushrooms, not rubbery or slimy as I feared.

So now I’ve eaten part of a whale and several snails, and smoked a Cuban cigar (not all at the same time), what’s left to do?

Poppa

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, Nan thinks I should clarify that I didn’t take either of these photos.   The escargot over puff pastry picture was somebody else’s escargot over puff pastry.   Mine looked exactly the same, though my puff pastry didn’t have a top.

Before

After

Search Terms

One of the features WordPress has to offer is a record of search terms that steer people to your blog.  Apparently our blog intersects with search engine demographics in only one category: The Flintstones.  According to WordPress, the Flintstones have lured people here 91 times, all apparently because of a single post.

Search	Views
flintstones	69
flintstones car	15
flinstones car	2
flintstone’s car	2
flinstones car schematic	1
flinstones in the car	1
flintstones family	1

Some other odd search terms have been:

• sensitive guys martial arts and gun club (I love it!)
• office of price administration ceiling (?)
• humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago (Twice.)
• recipe for mick’s corn and tomator lingu
• mick’s corn and tomato linguini
• corn and tomato linguine recipe, micks (Hooray for Mick’s corn and tomato linguini!)
• voskovec (Juror #11 from 12 Angry Men?) 
• “kidney popper” (In all honesty, this may have been me.)
• zionist control (They must have been on Google hits page 37,000 before this search brought them here…)

It will be interesting to see how many more “Flintstones” or “Flinstones” searches show up here since I’ve just used the word “Flintstones” 12 times in a single post.
 
- Poppa

A Great Day and a Bizarre Declaration

I celebrated my birthday Saturday in the best of all possible ways, a bagel in the morning,

dim sum for lunch,

a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich for supper,

Ted Drewes for dessert, and CDs/DVDs for after (White Stripes, Hellboy, and Doctor Who).

Yes, after resisting for 33 years, I’ve drunk the Doctor’s Kool-Aid.

Between dim sum and Ted Drewes, we stopped at the Central branch of the Public Library to see an “original copy” (sorry, I chortle whenever I say that) of the Declaration of Independence.  

There was something a little twisted about the circumstances of the Declaration display.  Not the Declaration itself; it was sealed in a glass case and you could file by and examine it as closely as you liked for as long as you wanted.  You could take pictures (no flash).  There were about 30 people ahead of us so it didn’t take long to work through the queue.  The strange note came in the form of the handout we received when we walked in the door.

On one side of the handout was a Xerox of the original Declaration, complete with signatures.  On the back was an article about what happened to the signers.  Some were captured by the British and executed as traitors.  Several more lost all they had and died penniless.  At the bottom of the article was a curious sentence.  “Although some of these men suffered and died for their defense of liberty (as America’s political prisoners do today) others went on to become respected leaders of society.”  The article was credited to Serendipity at serendipity.li/jsmill/decl_men.htm

Since “America’s political prisoners” was underscored on the handout, I was curious about what the source was trying to say.  I headed for the Serendipity site and was flabbergasted to see that the underscored phrase was indeed a link which took me to a page with this patriotic message.

“The United States of America, which styles itself hypocritically as a defender of human rights, keeps many people behind bars (when it doesn’t simply kill them, as in the case of pro-marijuana activist Grover Crosslin) because they dare to express (non-violently) their opposition to the unjust policies of the U.S. government.  That is to say, in addition to the many dissidents now in their graves there are many locked away as political prisoners.  These are often members of ethnic minorities, perhaps because the United States, which was built upon the exploitation of black people by white, has always denied the human rights of its ethnic minorities.

The United States govt. insists that the U.S. is a country where its citizens and residents enjoy freedom. But they can’t even go for a walk in the evening without the risk of being arrested and thrown into jail.”  And to prove this, there’s a link to a story about a guy who was arrested and thrown into jail because he went for a walk.

The root URL (www.serendipity.li) is a hodge-podge of links to every whacked-out conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard of and some I haven’t.  If you surf there, you’ll learn that Zionists control Wikipedia, 9/11 was a government conspiracy, Waco was a government conspiracy, UFO cover ups are a government conspiracy, in fact, pretty much every bad thing that’s ever happened was a government conspiracy (except the Zionist conspiracies).

The guy(s) at Serendipity (who, to my shame, describe themselves as Libertarian) would no doubt theorize that the propagation of this link on the handout was part of a subtle conspiracy perpetrated by a shadowy group to get subversive information into the hands of the unsuspecting dupes of the imperialist US government.  I, on the other hand, suspect somebody at Cricket Communications just Googled “men who signed the Declaration of Independence”, grabbed the first link, and used it for their handout without checking the source.

But it COULD be a conspiracy.

Poppa

“Swimming out to the open sea, like the great, wild herring!” (Last words of Leon Voskovec – Herring Merchant from Love and Death)

Two notable events so far this weekend.

1.) Nan and I went to a Second City performance Friday night.  I laughed.  I cried.  (Actually, I laughed ’til I cried.)

2.) I saw Woody Allen’s Love and Death again today.  It came out when I was in the midst of my Russian Lit phase and I thought the way it careened back and forth between highbrow and lowbrow humor was the cat’s pajamas.  But best of all, it introduced me to the music of Sergei Prokofiev.  Consequently, many of Leah’s first meals were eaten while she listened to Russia Under the Mongolian Yoke.

“Human beings are divided into mind and body.  The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations like poetry and philosophy.  But the body has all the fun.” – Woody Allen as Boris Grushenko

8 Things You Don’t Know About Me

Meme-ing for the very first time – I’m shy about this – I got tagged (is that the right term?) by the wonderful homeinkabul so I have been thinking about this in spare moments during my day.

1. The very first odd thing I can recall about myself is that I use my middle name (or at least a variant of my middle name) to refer to myself.  I have NEVER been called by my first name, except by strangers who assume that I use my first name.  My actual first name is the same as my mother’s name.  My parents never intended to call me by that name.  So, you might ask, why didn’t they put my mother’s name as my middle name?  The answer is – religion.  The religion my parents followed was insistent that babies must be baptized with the name of a saint.  Sadly, my middle name, the name I use (or at least a variant of that name), is not a saint.

2. I never expected to be living in Saint Louis at this time of my life.  I left Saint Louis when I went to college.  I expected that I would never return.  I imagined living in a different town every decade.  In the decades since then, I’ve lived in 3 cities.  And 1 of those 3 cities is Saint Louis again!  So I’m falling a little behind on this part of my life list.

3. I regularly forget how old I am.  And I regularly forget how old my family members are.  I always have to do the math.

4. Although I’m capable of behaving in an extroverted manner, I am actually a shy, quiet person – except when I’m feeling blustery.

5. Once, I saw a house on fire and I didn’t call 911.  This was before cell phones existed.  I told myself that someone else had probably already called 911, so I convinced myself I didn’t need to find a phone booth and make the call.  I still feel guilty about that, almost 30 years later.

6. I love to read, but mostly I forget the plot and characters after I read the book – what does that mean about me?  Remember “Lazy Eye”, where the child had to wear an eye patch over the “good eye” to make the weak eye work harder/become stronger?  Maybe I have the equivalent “Lazy Memory”.  But I can’t figure out where to put the patch, to improve the weak memory.

7. I know I have a fortunate life, with many material benefits.  But I have always been insecure about money.  At least a decade of my adult life trickled away with me very reluctant to spend money on myself for pleasure.  And then the pendulum swung the other way, toward retail therapy.  It’s hard for me to find a healthy balance with money.  It’s hard for me to feel that I’ll have adequate resources for retirement, despite consistently saving in 401(k) plans ever since they were created.

8. I have a short attention span.

-Nan

Comments (1 total)
Author:Anonymous
Yay! I’m so happy that you responded to the meme. They are so much fun.
—-homeinkabul
2007-06-09 02:39:24 GMT

8.1 Things You Don’t Know About Me …

… Unless You’re My Wife or One of My Daughters and You’ve Had to Listen to These Stories for Years.

Continuing the meme.

1.) My college aptitude tests told me I was best suited to be either a printer or a mercenary.   I’ve pumped gas.  I’ve painted vending machines.  I’ve delivered furniture (it always seemed to be a damn hide-a-bed and had to go upstairs).  I’ve baled hay (for one day, and got sea-sick on dry land).  I’ve operated machines that stuff junk mail envelopes.  I’ve flipped burgers and worked with Colonel Sanders’ eleven secret herbs and spices.  I’ve been a bean walker, a detasseler, a deroguer, a lard puller, a belly wrapper, and a kidney popper.  I’ve been a brickyard worker, a ram press operator, a spot welder, a jackhammer operator (for one day, it was as bad as hay-baling), a circuit card assembler, a NASA-certified solder inspector, an expeditor, a coordinator, a production control supervisor, an assistant project administrator, a manufacturing specialist, and a business analyst.  Subsistence level drug dealing friends once tried to recruit me to be a collector for them (their “muscle”) but I was too shy and didn’t like confrontation.  I’ve been a garbage man and urinated in the back of garbage trucks.  I’ve worked in slipform construction and urinated in the walls of grain elevators while the cement was still curing.  Think about that the next time you have corn flakes.  Your corn flakes probably didn’t come from the elevators I built, you say?  Well, I wasn’t the only one doing it.  I’ve never been either a printer or a mercenary.  Now I’m a computer programmer.

2.) In 1966 my high school guidance counselor told me I’d never be a computer programmer because I didn’t have an aptitude for math.

3.) I once got in trouble for trying to derail a train.  It didn’t get on my permanent record because I was four years old at the time.  The police came to my house and gave my parents a Stern Lecture, however.  A year or so later, my parents reported me missing because I wasn’t home from school when they got home from work.  I’d gone to visit my grandmother, but she wasn’t home.  A friend and I were playing on a pile of mud at a construction site when the police found us and escorted us home.  This was my last run-in with the police until 1974 when I found myself staring down the barrel of a .38 caliber Police Special.  Once again I found myself being escorted by the police, this time back to a party I’d escaped from by crawling out the second story bathroom window and taking a stroll on the roof of the drugstore next door.  I don’t drink tequila to excess any more.

4.) I was a TAR (Teen Age Republican) and campaigned for Tricky Dick in 1968.  Why, you ask?  Because I couldn’t tolerate the thought of having a president named “Hubert.”  Fortunately I was too young to vote for Nixon, so at least I don’t have that on my conscience.  Four years later I was carrying banners that said “Don’t change Dicks in the middle of a screw, vote for Nixon in ’72!” and “Fuck for peace!”

5.) In the summer of ’73 I used to hang occasionally with Hells Angels, the Iowa branch, so they were relatively polite.  Things to remember when dealing with the potentially volatile; don’t ever show fear, exude confidence at all times, make sure your eye contact is firm but non-confrontational.

6.) If I need to know where “O” is relative to “R” in the alphabet, I still need to recite the whole thing from the beginning.  If I ever have to recite the alphabet backwards to stay out of the drunk tank, I’m doomed.

7.) Science Fiction turned me into an atheist when I was a kid.  Organized religion ensures that I remain an atheist now that I’m an adult.

8.0.) I’m still keeping secrets involving cemeteries and sloe gin.  8.1.) I believe I know the meaning of life.  It’s not 42.  I didn’t find it in either cemeteries or sloe gin.  I found it while reading Tolstoy, not in his words, but from the state if mind he put me in while I was reading him.  You may not learn details of any of this until after my death (if then, bwah ha ha ha ha).

- Poppa

Comments (3 total)

Poppa – I believe your number 8 falls into the category of “8 Things You Still Don’t Know About Me”. Thanks for meme-ing, its always an interesting read.
–erin-bob 2007-06-24 16:59:46 GMT

Yeah, thanks. I learned some new things but you’ve still managed to maintain an air of mystery…
–Leah 2007-06-25 19:58:21 GMT

Really cool, thanks for sharing.It’s a good thing I don’t eat cornflakes…
–asiyah 2007-06-29 14:22:03 GMT

The Monster

I was surfing past the Discovery Channel the other day when I noticed some familiar scenery.  It looked just like a lake we saw on the road between Bo and Bergen in Norway.  I paused at the channel and read the program summary.  The show was a documentary about Selma, a sea serpent thought to live in Lake Seljordsvatnet in Seljord, Norway.  There were the usual accounts of locals who had seen the monster with their own eyes.  It reminded me of the time I saw a monster in a lake.In the summer of 1964 I was twelve years old and experiencing my first trip to a foreign country.  Every summer, my parents, Aunt Anita and Unca Gail (I was enamored of Donald Duck back then, hence the “Unca”), and cousins Don and Sally used to spend a week at a fishing camp in Minnesota.  This year my parents decided to splurge and go to a camp in Canada.  My younger brother Jim was parked with my Aunt and Uncle.  Mom, Dad, cousin Don, and I headed north to a back-woodsy place called Penney’s Timberlane Lodge on Lac Suel in Ontario.Being in a foreign country was an unsettling experience.  It was almost like home, but there were differences.  The candy bars were strange and they weren’t celebrating the 4th of July for some reason.

But the fishing!

The lake was huge, over 150 miles long, far larger than any I’d ever been on.  It took hours to get to some of our fishing spots.  And the fish!  At the little lake we usually went to in Minnesota, catching a Northern Pike was a major event and Walleye were unheard of.  At Lake Suel it seemed as though every time you dropped a hook in the water the Northern and Walleye were waiting to strike.  I didn’t like fish unless it was Mrs. Paul’s and served with lots of tartar sauce, but that summer I discovered how good Walleye could taste.  We caught far more than we could eat and froze a lot to take home.

The camp seemed primitive and remote compared to the Midwest.  In Iowa you were never more than a few miles away from some little town with a store and no matter how deep in the woods you went, you were never more than a 20 minute walk to a farmhouse.  Here, there were trees and then more trees.  Once we got to the camp I felt like we were cut off from the world.  All of the food we brought with us was preserved.  Until then, I didn’t realize potatoes or bacon could be put in cans.  The cabin was made of rough-cut logs and the kitchen area was like something out of the Wild West.

Fishing was my Dad’s thing, not mine.  I was always more interested in comic books, science fiction, and military stuff.  My cousin Don was (and still is) an avid fisherman and hunter, but I was just there because my parents were, although the fishing was so good it was easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm.

But even though I was enjoying the fishing, I was most assuredly not a morning person and my Dad and Don liked to be out on the lake at an hour when I was usually still snug in bed.  They would drag me out in the boat with them and I would spend the first hour or so huddled in my jacket, trying to stay warm and wishing I was still in the sack. One morning we were going through the usual routine, Dad and Don with their lines in the water and me wishing I was someplace warm and cozy.  And then I saw something I’ll never forget.

The water was smooth as glass and it was completely quiet, not a breath of air moving.   I was staring over the side of the boat when, without warning, fifteen or twenty feet directly in front of me, a half-dozen gigantic tentacles thrust up from the depths, loomed over the boat for a few moments, and then withdrew under the water.  I was petrified.  My brain was operating on overdrive but my body seemed paralyzed.  What I was looking at should have been impossible, something out of a horror film or a fairytale.  But it was real and it was happening to me.

I froze for what felt like a long time but couldn’t have been more than a second or two.  I was experiencing what special effects people call “bullet time” in the movies.  You know, the scene where everything slows down to the point where you can observe a bullet in flight or the protagonist flying through the air to kick an opponent in the head.  These exaggerations are intended to represent a real phenomenon, the feeling of time distortion that sometimes accompanies stressful events, the “my whole life flashed before my eyes” cliché.  Some speculate that the sensation may be triggered when our brains are trying to process a lot of information faster than usual, causing perceived time to subjectively slow down.  I’ve experienced it once since then, when an oncoming car on a two-lane road went out of control and slid sideways toward Nan and me at 50 miles an hour.  Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.  To the right was a steep drop off and to the left was oncoming traffic.  I had no choice but to remain in our lane, slam on the brakes, and hope we’d be moving slowly enough to survive the impact.  We did.  Our car didn’t.  Always wear seatbelts.

As I sat there, stunned, the tentacles emerged again, just a few feet this time.  I became aware that what I was seeing were the limbs of a submerged tree bobbing on the surface.  Our boat was in the midst of a drowned forest and our anchor or one of our fishing lines had disturbed a tree that had been precariously attached to the lake bed.  If it had come up directly under us it could have been a much more uncomfortable experience, possibly capsizing the boat or punching a hole in the bottom.

I don’t even remember how my Dad or my cousin Don reacted to the experience, if they shrugged it off, or just said, “Huh, that was weird,” or perhaps didn’t even notice it.  It didn’t make much noise and was over in seconds.  If they’d been looking in the opposite  direction they wouldn’t have even been aware of it.

But, for a second or two, I saw a monster.

- Poppa

good story

–erin-bob 2007-09-06 22:07:28 GMT

Forward, Into the Past! – The Great Northeast Des Moines Panty Raid, February 27, 1971

 

Once again our DVR serves as a catalyst, resurrecting a memory of my first year in college when I was discovering, albeit later than many, Sex and Drugs (I’d had some preliminary exposure to Rock and Roll while still in High School).

The History Channel was showing a documentary on German WWII tanks and many of the talking heads were German vets. One of my college history professors served on the crew of a Jagdpanther and I was wondering if his head was among those talking. I dug out my 1971 college yearbook to remind myself of his name. He wasn’t in the documentary.

But while I was flipping through the yearbook I noticed some forgotten scribbles in the end pages. In addition to the usual admonitions to remember various collage pranks and memorable episodes of overindulgence in controlled substances, two entries alluded to an incident I haven’t thought about for a while.

“Never forget …the weekend of February 27th & especially the night of February 27th, (thanks for saying you were in on it, you really helped save my ass)…”

“Don’t forget the night of February 27, even though you weren’t in on it, it was nice of you to say you were. It helped save our necks.”

I was in my first year at Grand View College, a small two-year school in Des Moines Iowa. It was affiliated with the Lutheran church so despite my lackluster academic record I was a shoe-in because of my family’s Lutheran background. Most of the students lived off-campus in apartments or at their parent’s homes. The only campus residences at the time were The Boy’s Dorm and The Girl’s Dorm. The dorms were late ‘60s buildings and each could accommodate between 120 and 130 students. They had official names but no one ever used them.

In 1971 Grand View was really taking its in loco parentis responsibilities seriously, especially with regard to the residents of the girl’s dorm. Life in the boy’s dorm was pretty laid back. We had a house mother affectionately known as Mamie, and were allowed to (gasp) have girls in our rooms during occasional “open dorm” hours as long as the doors to our rooms weren’t closed and everybody kept at least one foot on the floor. Our building doors were never locked and we could come and go as we pleased all hours of the day.

The girl’s dorm operated under a different set of rules. The house mother was “Mrs. Wagner,” no first-name familiarity there. Boys were only allowed in the first floor lounge and the basement rec room until 10 PM. At 10 PM, males were ejected, exterior doors were locked, and a bed check was performed. If any of the girls were AWOL their parents got a phone call.

We boys would sit in the first floor lounge of the girl’s dorm and watch the objects of our desire come and go through the two doors that led to The Sacred Territory of The Girl’s Rooms. What wondrous delights awaited one who could elude the Cerberus-like eye of Mrs. Wagner and venture into the unknown realms where scantily dressed coeds were no doubt having pillow fights all night long? We burned with lust for forbidden fruit. A panty raid was inevitable.

As I recall, the girls struck first. One night, thanks to a gender-traitor in thrall to her boyfriend, word spread through the boy’s dorm that the girls were going to stage a jock raid before they were locked up. Our perimeter was wide open. We did the only thing we could. We stripped down to our underwear and sat in the lounge awaiting their arrival. The girls screamed down the hall, came to a screeching halt when they saw us relaxing in our tighty-whities, did an abrupt about face, and ran screaming back to their dorm. It was a bloodless victory.

The next day some of the girls were asking their boyfriends, “Do you guys really sit around in your underwear at night?”

Ours was the next move. We would carry the fight to the girls on the night of February 27th.

I don’t remember where I was on the evening of February 27, 1971, but I do remember where I wasn’t — inside the girl’s dorm. However, most of my friends were running up and down the girl’s halls spraying shaving cream everywhere. Several of them were identified by Mrs. Cerberus. They were going to be singled out for punishment.

The whole thing sounds like a harmless prank today, but in 1971 at Grand View College, it was potentially serious stuff. Two of my closest friends, male and female, had just been expelled because she’d been caught in his room several times during the first semester. There was going to be a meeting of the disciplinary committee and the busted panty raiders would be punished. Examples would be made. Expulsion was a possibility.

There were a lot of guys in the girl’s dorm the night of the 27th. If I’d been on campus that night I’d have been there. If all of us who’d participated or WOULD have participated were up for disciplinary action, they couldn’t possibly expel everybody or they’d lose almost half of the on-campus male students in one fell swoop. So all but one of the guys who’d raided the girl’s dorm that night and several of us who would have if we’d been there reported to the disciplinary committee meeting and plead guilty to the same offense. There was some huffing and puffing and finger-wagging, but no one was expelled.

Over the next couple of years the gender policies started to relax a little. “Open dorm” became a regular thing in both dorms instead of a once in a blue moon treat just for the boys. The girl’s dorm was still locked at night but bed checks and calls to parents became a thing of the past. I finally got to experience The After-Hours Forbidden Garden of Earthly Delights when I squeezed my then-31-inch waist through the window of my girlfriend’s room, had my hair put in curlers, makeup plastered on my face, infiltrated the upstairs lounges in an old robe and floppy slippers, and was introduced as a visiting cousin with laryngitis. I’m sorry to report there were no scantily dressed coeds having pillow fights while I was there. However, I did see several girls who weren’t wearing bras.

Of course we screwed it up eventually by doing things like lighting fires in inappropriate places, spelling out “FUCK” in letters three stories high on the side of the dorm using lit and unlit windows, stealing cafeteria trays to use as snow sleds, taking the school mascot (an eight foot tall golden fiberglass Viking statue) from the library and putting it on our roof, and basically turning our dorm into a den of iniquity where police raided to retrieve stolen road signs and clouds of dope smoke rolled up and down the halls night and day. By 1974 both dorms were back in lockdown.

I visited the Grand View College website tonight. The school has become a four-year liberal arts college with 1,750 students and seems to be doing well. I see the boy’s dorm is now called Knudsen Hall and the girl’s dorm goes by Nielsen Hall. They have to use the official names because both dorms are coed.

Heh.

- Poppa