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| The BBHQ Boomer Essays: |
| Our Boomer-In-Charge here at BBHQ, Hershel Chicowitz, writes frequently about current events... from a boomer perspective. He is sometimes funny, sometimes provocative, sometimes a little of each. We hope you get a kick out of our Boomer Essays. |
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Hurray! It's that time of year again... Princess and I are planning our summer vacation. I hadn't taken a vacation in years; but now that I have a dog... well, it just seems natural.
I guess I get that from my mother; she thought nothing of packing up two kids and a dog and driving all over the country... and those were the days before interstate highways. When we had gone about 300 miles in a day, we'd start looking for a Howard Johnson's. It didn't matter to my sister or me, as long as the motel had a swimming pool.
Among our favorite sites along the way were the Burma Shave signs. I didn't even know what Burma Shave was, but I memorized many of their signs. (For you non-boomers: Burma Shave was... and still is, I guess, a brand of shaving cream. From the late 20s up to the mid 60s, they placed hundreds of sets of 4 or 5-line poems along the side of the roads, each line a couple hundred feet apart. It may sound corny today, but it was effective, different, and entertaining. They have become a classic symbol of the boomer years.) Here's a sample:
Dinah doesn't
treat him right;
but if he'd shave;
dyna-might!
- Burma Shave
Remember this one?:
Cattle crossing
Means go slow
That old bull
Is some
Cow's beau
- Burma-Shave
They're back! You'll see them scattered around BBHQ all summer.
These days, no matter where we go, all roads seem to lead to Cleveland. I know, Cleveland is a heck of a summer vacation destination. But Princess loves the parks there, and I still have some friends of the family in my old home town. So we'll be heading up that way again this summer.
But this time we're going camping along the way. The Howard Johnson's have all but disappeared. If you're just looking for a place to sleep, motels are too expensive. Motel 6 may leave the lights on for you, but you pay as if it were the stadium lights. Besides, there is a nasty motel along the outer banks of North Carolina that made it abundantly clear to us that we should never come back there. I didn't see that "Absolutely No Pets" sign until after I had checked in. Downright un-American, if you ask me. (But of course, they didn't ask me.)
Last week I stocked up for the trip. Not that I am unfamiliar with camping; I was a Boy Scout and went camping every summer. I still have my uniform and the sash with the camping merit badge sewed onto it. The uniform is a wee bit tight, but I think I'll take the sash along in case I have to produce my credentials.
I bought a little tent that should be fine for Princess and me. It reminds me of George Jetson's briefcase. Remember: he pops it open and it unfolds into a spacemobile. Imagine two loaves of bread, stacked end to end. That is the size of the box in which the tent was packed. This supposedly unfolds into a self-supporting, fully equipped tent six feet by eight feet, and four feet tall at the center. Whew! Oh, I could unpack it, but what do you suppose the odds were that I could ever get it back into that box? They didn't have boxes or tents like that when I was in the Boy Scouts.
I wanted one of the inflatable ones that you can attach to your car battery, flip a switch and sit back and watch from a safe distance. I saw one of those on the Drew Carey Show. But I couldn't find any in the store. Wait a minute; maybe that wasn't a tent at all. Maybe it was Mimi, the plastic, technicolor love-doll. Oh well.
But following the Boy Scout motto ("Be prepared" or "No good deed ever went unpunished" - one or the other), I decided to give it a test run in the back yard. As I recall, in the Boy Scouts it took two of us about forty-five minutes to put up a tent. The instructions for my new tent say that one person can do it in 60 seconds. Respectfully, I beg to differ; even if you can read the instructions, written in clear Japanese.
Nonetheless, without any help from Princess, I set up our little tent OK. It is a bit snug; but it'll do. But after I took it down, I had to get a new box; the original one must have shrunk. So I give myself a B+ in tent erection.
I saw an ad for an Internet web site set up by Vice-President Al Gore; it supposedly lists all sorts of vacation destinations managed by the federal government. Although the only ones that I can think of are San Quentin and Sing-Sing. Not exactly what we have in mind. Cynic that I am, I expected the site to point out the dates and locations for a series of Buddhist fundraisers. But I never made it that far; the site crashed on me just after the home page. Apparently it takes a village of programmers for that site, and the vice-president was a neighborhood or two short. Why does that not surprise me?
So next month we're just going to head up Interstate 75 and stop at a campground where the mood suits us. We'd sure welcome any suggestions you might have for us. I want to do some sight-seeing, something that would be appropriate for both of us. Maybe we'll add a page onto BBHQ highlighting vacation spots that one might not think of. But we'll skip the home movies of Sing-Sing. I'm sure they'll leave the lights on, but that's not where we want to go, thank you.
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If you like what we're doing here at BBHQ, please help us by buying stuff through our link to Amazon.com:
| The BBHQ Album of the Month is "Old Friends Live on Stage (Deluxe Edition) (2 CD/1 DVD)," by Simon & Garfunkel. If you were fortunate enough to see them in concert last year, I do not have to sell you. The concert was terrific! This album collection includes 55 songs, plus their new recording, "Citizen of the Planet," and one of the songs sung by the Everly Brothers during the concert. The DVD was recorded during their concert in Madison Square Garden in 2003. For any S&G fan, this is a must have! But then, you knew that already, didn't you? |
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The BBHQ Book of the Month is
"Vinyl Highway," by
Dee Dee Phelps. You remember her as Dee Dee, of Dick and Dee Dee.
Together, they took a decade long ride on the rock and roll roller
coaster. It was a heck of a ride! Dick Clark, Quincy Jones, the Beach
Boys, Glenn Campbell, Dionne Warwick, Bobby Vinton... Dick and Dee Dee
rubbed shoulders with all of them. This is her "behind the scenes" story.
It's pretty cool.
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