WE ARE WHAT WE WEAR

What's the single best “word of advice” anyone's ever given you? For me, the word was “accessorize.” I've always been a huge fan of accessories. Hats, watches and glasses seem to be what “float my boat,” certainly more so than the rest of the outfit. It's been like that for as long as I can remember although, I've been told that, as a very small child, I was intimidated and frightened by hats. At least that was what my mother assumed when she was in a bank, holding a very young me, when her friend Richard walked in and he was wearing very nice fedora. I, reportedly, went berserk at the sight and started to pitch a proverbial “wang dang doodle” until he went outside and waited for us to leave. Yes, I was that obnoxious. I never really understood why I would do that since hats are one of my favorite things in the world. I have dozens of types of headgear from the aforementioned fedoras to Kangols to baseball caps to berets and beyond and I don't ever recall not wanting to wear one. After a long conversation with my mom, we were finally able reach a conclusion as to why seeing Richard walk in the bank and approach her had that particular effect on the sheltered infant she was trying to control. It had nothing to do with his hat. I would have gladly put it on my own head had it been offered. The truth was - Richard was Black. He was first person I had seen, by the ripe old age of 9 or 10 months that looked different from my immediate family, who were the only people I had been exposed to by this point in my young life. Hell, my dad wore a hat, you'd think my mom would have thought of that but, I'm relatively certain she didn't want to embarrass Richard so, she said I was afraid of his hat. The irony here being that Richard had nothing to be embarrassed about......my mom did. I was being just that obnoxious. Or so I have been told. But, I certainly loved his hat. Watches fall into the same category as hats for me. They are cool and necessary to make me feel complete. I have lots of watches. Two of them actually work but, I just can't see fit to part with any of them. I have 2 boxes of watches that are taking up space in a drawer in my closet. One of the watches is a Gruen from the 1940's that belonged to my grandfather. No, it doesn't work. I suppose I could toss them all and use the space for other stuff. Like all of the glasses I have kept whenever I got a new pair. Of course, the prescriptions are all outdated and I can't see through any of them. It's just that, at one time or another in my life, I have found them extremely cool and refuse to part with any “stuff” that I have had a relationship with over the years. By the same token, I still have a report card from my junior year of high school. Judging from the grades, I have, apparently, kept it to use as an example to my kids of what NOT to do. As for glasses.......I need them to see close-up and I need them to see far away and, if I have to wear them, I want them to look fashionable. The problem is that I'm pretty fickle and tend to change my “cool margins” when the spirit hits. I can only get glasses twice a year because I get them through the VA and I always pick a pair of frames I like........while I'm in the store. By the time I pick up the finished product, usually a couple of weeks later, I have found a style I like better and am disappointed that I have to wait 6 months to go through the process again. Am I never satisfied? I don't think there has ever been a time in my life when I wasn't all googly eyed and fascinated by a well designed hat, a slick watch or a snazzy pair of glasses. I always felt that if I was wearing a spiffy fedora, a Rolex and a really nice pair of horn-rimmed frames, I didn't need anything else – like pants or shoes or underwear. “Who's gonna notice?” I would assume, “They'll all be too busy being blinded by the glow of my accessories.” I can hear the conversation now as people pass me in the street: “Wow, check out that great hat, what is that? A Stetson?” “I don't know about the hat but, what a beautiful watch. Is that a Patek Phillipe?” “Do you realize that this guy isn't wearing any pants?” “Who cares.....that's a GREAT pair of glasses......must be Ray Bans.” Accessories are the “Be All and End All” as far as I'm concerned. I do, however, have a bit of an issue when it comes to what I am accessorizing. I own 2 pair of jeans, 4 pair of shorts, 3 pair of Sanuks (shoes), about 7 or 8 t-shirts, a couple of shirts with collars and not a single pair of socks. I am about to go out to shop. I will put on a pair of shorts that I've been wearing for a week and a half, a t-shirt that's wrinkled but clean and the pair of hemp Sanuks that I wear everywhere. That will take about 2 minutes. I will then find the watch that goes with my black framed glasses and spend about 20 minutes trying on hats. All this because the hat store at the mall has a buy 1 - get 1 half price sale on a style of hat that I already have 4 of.........but, I need a blue one!

WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?

"There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt." That was written by mid 20th century poet, writer and feminism activist Audre Lorde. She must have assumed she was having an original thought when she wrote it. She wasn't. In his biography, it is reported that Mark Twain said, about 100 years or so earlier, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” It wasn't an original concept for him either. You will find the sentence, “There is nothing new under the sun,” in Ecclesiastes, making it apparent that, whoever wrote that particular portion of the Bible, spent a good deal of time hanging out with pagans. They were the ones with the first ideas. Or were they? What this tells me, then, is that all of the so called radically “new ideas” we had in the 60's came from other sources. As unique and different as we purported to be, we were obviously “inspired” by others who preceded us. A fact we were too cocky to see even with Mao's “Little Red Book” in our back pockets while we sported T-Shirts with “Che's” face glowering from under his beret. We live in a vacuum.....there are no original ideas. As I transitioned out of my teens into perceived adulthood in 1966, a year that was rife with the likes of The Weather Underground, The Black Panther Party (for Self Defense), SNCC and the Puerto Rican equivalent, The Young Lords, I found myself drawn to these ideologies of social justice, as were thousands of other young Americans, disillusioned with everything from the Vietnam War to starving children in inner cities. Names like Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver Jerry Rubin, Abbey Hoffman, Felipe Luciano, David Perez and Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman resonated and we felt alive in the idea of the “revolution,” televised or not. It was an idea whose time had come and I was all set to jump in with both feet, until I got a letter that told me Uncle Sam had other ideas. “Greetings,” it said. That was all I needed to see. The revolution was kicking into full gear and I had just been drafted. I saw, at that point, that the level of my radical spirit had been trumped by a dash of “wussiness” when it came to the idea of possibly dodging the draft. My father had fought in WWII and my uncle served in Korea and I could see that, even though socially, we had an awful lot of work to do, there was enough patriotism in my own blood to keep me from shirking this particular responsibility. In 1966 I joined the Air Force and, in 1968, I went to Southeast Asia. That didn't mean it had to dampen my socially conscious spirit. When I stepped off the plane at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, I was immediately hit with a burst of humidity and a smell that I soon learned to embrace. I had to.....I was going to be there for a while. Every time we go to a new place, the first thing we do is try to surround ourselves with like minded people and I soon found myself in the middle of a group of GIs who were also disenchanted with social situations back home. It wasn't long before a group of us with names like Tito, Tony & Chops, joined the Black Panther Party, by mail, and were selling the newspapers on the base, in between our military duties, of course. In the military, you can only be as radical as they will allow you to be, but, again, we thought we were being original. As a “GI,” I must have been adequate because on Jan. 10th, 1970, I was honorably discharged. I had gone to Vietnam and was now back home where I could protest it. After being spit at and called a baby killer enough times, I grew my hair long, refused to admit to my Veteran status and moved to Puerto Rico where I became fast friends with the central committee of the Spanish Harlem based Young Lords. We became close enough that, whenever they would be on the island, they would stop by my apartment and, occasionally, hold meetings. It was at one such meeting that I realized that the “revolution” was not the romanticized cure-all I was initially drawn to or an ideology I wanted to embrace any longer. The guys from the “Lords” came over and said they wanted to have a meeting but that it was private and they had to use my bedroom, which was where they headed with my stereo, my records and my weed, leaving me only partially high and very dry and alone in my living room. They weren't discussing some secret strategy to get the kids in the Barrio free school breakfast or trying to find alternatives to police brutality in the neighborhood. They were partying in my bedroom and I wasn't invited. We were now well into the early 70's and the drug culture was beginning to surface with enough of a vengeance to render the radical 60's a thing of the past. An idea whose time had come......and gone. Over the years most of us grew up, married, had families and became downright responsible. Hell, Eldridge Cleaver became a Republican politician. Our idealism had given way to the hope that, as we changed and became the mainstream, our off spring would start the process all over again, as they grew into disillusioned teens, with minds and thoughts of their own to act upon as the cycle continues. I only hope they have better luck than we did. A good start would be to not get cocky and remember the completely unoriginal words of Audre Lord - "There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt."

BLINDED BY THE SOUND

I saw a Facebook post from a friend in Chicago that says he will be at Navy Pier to broadcast the 4th of July fireworks this year for WGN.........radio - not TV. That's right, fireworks on the radio. I know how silly the concept sounds. Radio is an “audio” medium and fireworks are a smidge more “visual” in nature. There is a distinct difference between the two senses that would suggest broadcasting fireworks on the radio would be an exercise in futility, at best. The concept, however, is quite doable. It just depends on how adept the broadcaster is at using words to create “theater of the mind,” so as to allow the listener to see the images in their heads. And, of course, his post immediately reminded me of a story. In the early '80's, the ABC Radio Network was still the Satellite Music Network, based in Mokena, Illinois, a suburb 30 miles southeast of Chicago. We were a relatively small, emergent company that, at the time, had two formats with about 20 or 30 affiliates between us. The concept of broadcasting, for 24 hours a day, via satellite, to small and medium markets was in its infancy and we were forced to set up shop where we did, in a Chicago suburb. The technology was as new as the concept and the only satellite we could “link up” to was WGN's in Mokena. We had to rent space on “the bird.” The biggest difference between satellite broadcasting then and now had to be our charade of pretending to be local. It was a brilliant, but fatally flawed, idea which I always felt was kind of idiotic. We would record 50 “liners” per quarter for each affiliate. Each liner would be 5 to 7 seconds long and would identify the radio station and, consequently, the talent as live and local. These liners contained all kinds of information – call letters and frequencies, public service announcements, local tie-ins – anything that made us sound as if we were sitting right there at the radio station with our “stacks of wax,” entertaining the local gentry. If executed properly, the radio stations did, indeed, sound as if we were right there. People would occasionally drive to the local stations looking for us to meet their local celebs, bring us food and, in my case, every once in a while, to kick my ass because of something that I might have thought was funny and they didn't. Many of the affiliate stations were incapable of pulling it off. They sounded sloppy and the fact that they had “major market” talent working there made no sense at all. We had all come from large and major market radio and tiny markets like Bell Buckle, Tennessee and Mule Shoe, Texas would never be able to muster up a staff like that, financially or otherwise. There were, however, a few stations that were able to execute things flawlessly. These were the ones that “got it” and it showed. They would bring us to their markets to do personal appearances and remote broadcasts and they always sounded great. These were the stations that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what we were trying to do did, in fact, work. They had the ratings and they made the ad sales......bottom line. One such affiliate was north of us, in Crystal Lake, Illinois, a tiny town, if memory serves (and that's debatable these day) quite near the Wisconsin border. They would bring us up for “remotes” all the time. We could drive there, unlike many affiliates that would have to fly us to them, put us up and feed us, and the station took full advantage of their proximity. I was the morning guy and spent many a weekend doing broadcasts from local car dealers and new store openings. It was a pretty easy ride and I always got paid. Whatever they asked me to do – I did. One mid-June day, I got a call asking me if I would drive up to broadcast the 4th of July fireworks. My initial reaction was to shake my head and utter a befuddled, Scooby Doo like “Huh?” Fireworks.....on the radio? “Why not,” I thought. I had done some pretty bizarre stuff in my career to that point, including broadcasting from a car that I lived in for three days, raised high above a new car dealership in Philadelphia. ABC's Jim Hickey who was, at the time, a reporter for a local Philly TV news team, even interviewed me from a cherry picker. Fireworks? OK. The big evening had arrived, we had all enjoyed a lovely dinner and dusk was making way for “dark enough for the show.” We set up all the wires and knobs we needed (this was before the “digital” age) to do our broadcast, although, I still had no clue what I was going to say or do. That's when I got an idea: I gathered as big a crowd as I could find to stand around me and every time we heard a boom I would say “Red” and cue the crowd to go, “Oooooooooohhh,” another boom, “Blue,” “Ooooooohhh.” I am going to assume that it worked. As ridiculous as it felt, the affiliate was happy, they sold the broadcast to sponsors and people tuned in. So, my friend in Chicago, I say have at it. 4th of July fireworks, from Navy Pier, live on WGN radio. You can make it work if you want to. Happy Birthday America!