Better Watch Out If You Want To Get Back To The Garden-The Film Adaptation Of Patricia Highsmith’s Novel –“A Kind Of Murder” (2016)-A Film Review

Better Watch Out If You Want To Get Back To The Garden-The Film Adaptation Of Patricia Highsmith’s Novel –“A Kind Of Murder” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

A Kind of Murder, starring Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Biel, Haley Bennett, Eddie Marsan, based on a Patricia Highsmith novel The Blunderer, 2016

I remember once at a lecture, or maybe it was a forum, a military officer, maybe a colonel, you will have to ask Sam Lowell or one of the military veterans who write at this publication about military rank mentioned that humankind’s DNA was hard-wired for war. Whether that was true or not or the officer was just trying to justify his military career as a leader of some special forces-type operation, rangers I think, is open to some serious discussion. What is not open to discussion though is a similar idea-that humankind is hard-wired for murder, murder one, murder most foul as Agatha Christie would say. Obviously even if this is true going all the way back to Cain slaying Abel for dimes and donuts, maybe before, then the impulse in most of us is deeply suppressed or else we as a species would have gone extinct a while back.

That is not to say that we are not all capable, very capable of thinking, thinking hard about doing in somebody who has bothered us in some way. May have even fantasy planned out some aspect of the avenging angel angle and then let it go because something more pressing came up, or you needed to go to the bar or bathroom. That is the premise behind this film A Kind of Murder, a film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Blunderer on the part of one of the characters-the wishing that somebody would die to alleviate some kind of sorrow aspect.

Today we are, unfortunately, inured to murder, murder most foul, what with the blanket 24/7/365 cable-social media overkill coverage of every gruesome tragedy but back in the early 1960s such events took on outraged proportions. Take the case of Walter Stackhouse, played by Patrick Wilson, a successful architect living the good life and his wife Clara, a bundle of post-World War II anxieties and traumas. Not a trouble in the world really but dear Walter has had it up to his elbows with Clara’s incessant unhappiness. He wants her out of his life, would like to see her dead really. Fair enough although divorce would be a better call. Except if he divorces her she will get even with him by, well, by killing herself. And she had attempted to do in the past already. Sadly she will eventually wind up dead, wind up committing suicide jumping off a bridge in of all places Saratoga Springs, the summer watering hole of the Mayfair swells in the old racing days.

That is one take on the man and wife situation. Here’s another and see if you can see a little pattern form, a little something to hang your hat on. Another guy, a Walter Mitty type guy, Marty, Marty Kimell, played by Walter Mitty-ish Eddie Marsen-you know the guy who ran that bookstore in Newark where nobody seemed to go in and browse had a wife problem too. A nagger unto eternity and so one day she winds up dead, very dead outside of poor Harry’s Rainbow Diner a bus stop on the way to Saratoga Springs. Poor Harry though since sweet Clara was last seen before she took her leap of faith after last being seen at Harry’s when she was taking the bus to see her mother. Evil times in the North Country no question.

So follow me. Two deaths, two dead wives, two not sorry husbands whoever their public sentiments hell even a two bit suburban copper could figure out the prime suspects-the hubbies did it even on the alleged suicide. That is the percentages, no question. That the way the copper played it hard and loose before the Warren Court pulled some of his antics up short. That is the way things played out anyway once Walter, poor shmuck, started playing footsie with some beatnik torch-singer, Ellie played by Haley Bennett, from the Village in the days when jazz and poetry ruled the roost in those environs before the folk minute burst onto the scene. Walter also had ambitions as an amateur sleuth, a writer of short story thrillers, just in case the architect business went south. He got interested in that Walter Mitty-ish guy case once he figured out that all signs pointed to the guy doing in the wife. So he played cat and mouse with the guy. Wrong move for two reasons that Walter Mitty guy was an American psycho and that ain’t no lie and with Walter mucking about even a two bit cop can see big time promotions by solving two wife murders for the price of one. Simple. But the only lesson that the rest of us humankind should draw here is hold off wishing you want to see somebody dead just because that would be the best situation for you. Simple too.     

                  

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-“The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” Johnny Silver’s Sad Be-Bop 1960s Beach Blanket Saga.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-“The Next Girl Who Throws Sand In My Face Is…” Johnny Silver’s Sad Be-Bop 1960s Beach Blanket Saga.

A YouTube film clip of the Falcons performing You're So Fine.

From The Archives Of Allan Jackson

[Back again since the negotiations between Sam Lowell and current site manager Greg Green have stalled out for now. Sam is fervently negotiating with Greg to get Allan Jackson the previous site manager full attribution and more for his relentless work on this series several years ago when the series was originally posted. A hard sell although by general agreement of both those who had supported Allan like me and those who had opposed like Sam are anxious to see Allan get his just due as that will affect their rights as well which is maybe the real sticking point. Rather than going piece-meal with what is happening on that front I will continue, at Allan’s request, to shoot down the vast swirl of rumors that have surfaced around his name once he went “underground” after his departure (a departure now recognized by all, just ask Sam, as a “purge”).

I have already swatted down the vicious rumor that Greg had Allan “done in,” meaning according to one far-out “conspiracy theory” take that Allan was probably buried out in some arroyo with the stage-brush tumbling over his head out West someplace where they don’t ask so many questions. Swatted down to my relief, Sam’s and probably all the older writers who knew him in his radical 1960s days after that shattering hitch in the Army during the Vietnam War, a rumor that he had for filthy lucre been “turned” and was writing copy for various Mormon publications out in Utah and later tried to mea culpa beg his way on to Mitt Romney’s U.S. Senatorial campaign after ancient Orrin Hatch decided to give up the ghost. 

Couldn’t swat down the big rumor that he was shacked up with some twenty-something surfer girl, a young woman whose name is Damask which tells you quickly all you need to know for now about this California-bred blonde, out in La Jolla who was teaching him to surf  and be her “sugar daddy” or something like that since that was actually true although the whole thing was blown way out of proportion about the sugar daddy part if you knew anything about Allan’s finances with three ex-wives to send checks to a few of his younger kids since creating a serious drain via their college tuitions. The latest we heard from him after we were able track down Allan up in Bar Harbor, Maine was that he was working like seven dervishes to bring her East to check out the surf.  

More recently, and frankly more ominously, Allan’s name had been attached to the Perez cartel, the big Mexican-based cartel (at least at last report that is where the operation was based) which was not above murder and mayhem to get the “product,” these days cocaine and heroin, to the United States market. This was serious stuff not only for what is left of Allan’s fairly well established and positive professional reputation but for his personal legal situation if such a rumor was true. As usual, once we asked him about the matter, the whole thing had once again been blown out of proportion and it never really came to anything once Allan realized that he would be their “mule” forever after he took the first bite.        

I mentioned a minute ago Allan’s generally fraught with peril financial status along with that big desire to bring his lady friend Damask East. Along with no current income Allan said he got a little desperate especially when Damask, who had never been East before, kept pressing him to bring her East. For most of Allan’s adult life he has been a pretty straight legal arrow whatever desperate situations he might find himself in. Of course we all smoked, snorted, swallowed whatever dope was around when we were younger, back in those 1960s days when in some places you could get “high” just breathing in the air, dealt a little to keep the wolves from the door too when necessary.

This thing with Damask had kind of unhinged him a bit figuring this was his last serious grab at the brass ring of romance. Somehow through an old connection (a guy who wrote with him in the days when they both worked for the now long-gone alternative newspaper The East Bay Other whom he had keep in touch with), who knew a connection who knew a connection which is the way such things go he got “connected” with a guy down in Tijuana who represented the Perez cartel. Basically the deal was that he would “mule” some stuff up from Mexico for a while, take a cut and that would be his way to get out from under. When he laid it out for us it sounded pretty good what with the idea of using an old seemingly harmless white guy tourista to run the stuff across the border.   

Stop. Before the thing went to the starting point Allan backed off, backed way off. Reason? The reason which both Sam and I knew the minute he mentioned that he had backed off. Memories of the fate of our old still missed like crazy Scribe, our old friend from the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville Peter Paul Markin (whose name Allan used for years as an on-line moniker here and elsewhere in his honor) who when he saw the writing on the wall about our dashed hopes of a newer world in the 1960s were going down without a fight got seriously in cocaine. Got so serious he made the fatal mistake of trying to put some gringo idea of making an independent big drug buy down in Sonora in Mexico and got blown away by some bad guys and a potter’s field grave for his foolishness. With that in mind Allan just told Damask that they were through unless she could wait until he got some cash together after he went back East to see what he could put together. As it turned out Damask was not only a wait person at Dave’s Diner out there in La Jolla and a surfer girl but was working on her master’s degree in physical therapy so was not some teeny-bopper (our old time expression) airhead. Surprised Allan when she said she would wait. Pretty good, huh. Jack Callahan]

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No question that Jimmy Callahan and his corner boy comrades, including me, from the old Frankie Riley-led Salducci’s Pizza Parlor hang-out up the Downs from the day high school got out for the summer in the early 1960s drew a bee-line straight to the old-time Adamsville Beach of blessed memory. One day recently he had been thinking back to those times, back a half century at least, as he walked along the beach at Big Sur and had been telling his girlfriend, Miranda, that his love affair with the sea started almost from the day he was born near that beach, a beach that still held his sway although he had seen, and was seeing right there with her better beaches since then. (As far as that girlfriend designation goes with Miranda Jimmy always wondered what the heck do you call somebody whom you are not married to but are intimate with who is along with you pushing the wrong side of sixty, so Jimmy simple girlfriend it is until somebody comes up with something better that “significant other,” “consort,”  or “partner”.) The old Adamsville beach with its marshlands anchoring each end, its stone-laden sands uncomfortable to sit on, its rendezvous teen meet-up yacht clubs, its well-sat upon seawalls, and its thousand and one night stories of late night trysts in fugitive automobiles and while on skimpy beach blankets, its smoldering fried clams at the Clam Shack fit for a king or queen, its Howard Johnson’s many-flavored ice creams still held memories wherever he was in later life.

Although from what Red Rowley, an old corner boy comrade, had told Jimmy a while back when they had touched base for a minute in Sweeney’s Funeral Parlor over in landlocked Clintondale a couple of towns away after the death of a Jimmy family member the old beach had seen serious erosion, serious stinks and serious decay of the already in their day ancient seawalls and no longer held the fancy of the young who back in the day wanted to go parking there at night to “watch the submarine races.” Also no longer served as a coming of age spot for winter-weary guys watching winter-weary well-tanned girls in skimpy bikinis between the yacht clubs hot spot for such activity. In fact Red said that last time he checked on a hot July summer’s day at high noon nobody, young or old, was in that sacred spot.   

Red Rowley who was the youngest boy in the Rowley household and who had been afraid of girls, not gay afraid, but just afraid of girls and their ways had like a lot of Irish guys who took their stern religious upbringing too seriously never married and had stayed in town the whole time, stayed in the same house, and once his mother’s health declined after his father died never thought to leave. So Red could, as an old fixture like the street lights, see what changes had occurred around town. And he would ask young people, some of who were interested in talking to him, what they were up to, what they knew about the old time customs of the high school and of the town.

Hell, Red said, the young guys in the neighborhood didn’t know what he was talking about when he mentioned “watching the submarine races,” that old code word for getting in the back seat of an automobile (or if car-less and desperate on a skimpy beach blanket against that stony sand) with a girl and seeing what was what, coming up for air to check for any midnight submarine sightings. One guy even asked how one could see a submarine at night if one was in the neighborhood of the beach. Jesus. Also they, and here Red meant both sexes, had no idea on this good green earth that those now old tumble-down yacht clubs in dire need of serious paint jobs after the slamming of the seas and the furious winds had done their work had been the site of many a daytime planning for the night heat sessions. Were clueless that guys would ogle girls there, thought it kind of, what did one of them, one of the girls, call it, yeah, sexist. Jesus doubled.   

Red, by the way, was one of those ancient Irish Catholic corner boys who had stayed in town to help mother in order to have clean socks and regular six o’clock suppers without the bother of matrimony but also like Jimmy, hell, like me and every guy who breathed their first breaths off an off-hand sea breeze, also stayed to be near the ocean too. But Red had mainly watched the town change from an old way station for the Irish and Italians to the South Shore upward mobile digs further south to a “stay put” moving from the big city immigrant community which he was not particularly happy about since he could not speak any of the new languages (frankly in high school he had serious trouble with the English language) or understand the cultural differences when they, the collective mix of immigrants none from European homelands, did not bend at the knees in homage on Saint Patrick’s Day. But Red’s trouble with the new world of America (not really so new since these shores since the sixteen hundreds had seen wave after wave of immigrants just back then they had been from Europe, or had been Africa branded), or the real condition of Adamsville Beach was not what had exercised Jimmy on that trip to Big Sur with Miranda but about the old beach days, the now fantastic beach days.

Jimmy had chuckled to himself when he told Miranda- “Did we go to said beach to be “one” with our homeland, the sea? You know to connect with old King Neptune, our father, the father that we did not know, who would work his mysterious furies in good times and bad. Or to connect as one with denizens of the deep, fishes, whales, plankton, stuff like that. No.” Then he went down the litany of other possible motives just as a little good-humored exercise. “Did we go to admire the boats and other things floating by? The fleet of small sailboats that dotted the horizon in the seemingly never-ending tacking to the wind or the fewer big boats, big ocean-worthy boats that took their passenger far out to sea, maybe to search for whales or other sea creatures? No.” “Did we go to get a little breeze across our sun-burned and battered bodies on a hot and sultry August summer day?” Jimmy, a blushed red lobster in short sunlight who was sensitive about that red skin business declared a loud No, although Red, Frankie, Peter, and Josh, his other comrade corner boys less sensitive to the sun would have answered, well, maybe a little.

Jimmy said that he soon tired of those non-reasons, this little badger game, and got to the heart of the matter, laughed to himself as he thought and then mentioned to Miranda-“Come on now we are talking about sixteen, maybe seventeen, year old guys. They, every self-respecting corner boy who could put towel and trunks together, which meant everybody except Johnny Kelly who had to work during the day in the summer to help support his mother and fatherless younger brothers and sisters , were there, of course, because there were shapely teeny-weeny bikini-clad girls [young women, okay, let’s not get technical about that pre-woman’s liberation time] sunning themselves like peacocks for all the world, all the male teenage North Adamsville world, the only world that mattered to guys and gals alike, to see. Had been sunning themselves in such a manner since bikinis and less replaced those old-time bathing suits that were slightly less cumbersome that the street clothes you saw in your old grandmother’s scrapbook. And guys had been hormonally-charged looking at them that long as well.”

“Here is the catch thought,” Jimmy continued. “They, and they could be anywhere from about junior high to the first couple of years in college although they tended to separate themselves out by age bracket were sunning themselves and otherwise looking very desirable and, well, fetching, in not just any old spot wherever they could place a blanket but strictly, as tradition dictated, tradition seemingly going back before memory, between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. So, naturally, every testosterone-driven teenage lad who owned a bathing suit, and some who didn’t, were hanging off the floating dock right in front of said yacht clubs showing off, well, showing off their prowess to the flower of North Adamsville maidenhood.” And said show-offs included, Jimmy, of course, Frankie Riley (when he was not working early mornings at the old A&P Supermarket and did not show until later in the afternoon), his faithful scribe, Pete Markin (who seemingly wrote down for posterity every word Frankie uttered and some that he did not, and others including the, then anyway, “runt of the litter,” Johnny Silver. And me too. It is Johnny’s sad beach blanket bingo tale that Jimmy had suddenly thought about when he had driven  pass the old beach one day to confirm Red’s recent beach judgment and wanted to relate to Miranda as the over the top waves pummeling the scarred rock faces in the secluded reaches of Big Sur to give her an idea of what the sea meant to a lot of guys he knew. If, in the Jimmy telling, it all sounds kind of familiar, too familiar even to old time non-corner boys, to those who do not live near the oceans of the world, to the younger set who may have a different view of life than what carried the day back then, it is because, with the exception of the musical selections, it is. 

This is how it all started though:

“The next girl who throws sand in my face is going get it,” yelled Johnny Silver to no one in particular as he came back to the Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boy beach front acreage just in front of the seawall facing, squarely facing, the midpoint between the North Adamsville and Adamsville Yacht Clubs. “For the clueless,” and Jimmy assumed Miranda was in that vast company so he told pains to spell it out, “the corner boy world in North Adamsville, hell, maybe every corner boy world everywhere meant that you had certain “turf” issues in your life not all of them settled with fists, although an issue like some alien corner boy looking the wrong way at one of the Salducci girls could only be resolved that way.” But mostly it was a matter of traditions, traditional spots which the “unwritten law” held for certain groups and the spot between the boat clubs was theirs, and had been the “property” of successive generations of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys since at least the end of World War II when Frankie Riley’s father and his corner boys, some very tough boys transplanted from South Boston to work in the shipyards and some restless guys who had like Frankie’s father served in the war but were not ready to settle down “claimed” the spot.”        

Johnny, after having his say, fumed at no one in particular as the sounds of Elvis Presley’s Loving You came over Frankie Riley’s transistor radio and had wafted down to the sea, almost like a siren call to teenage love. Then one of those “no one in particulars,” Pete Markin replied, “What did you expect, Johnny? That Katy Larkin is too tall, too pretty and just flat-out too foxy for a runt like you. I am surprised you are still in one piece. And I would mention, as well, that her brother, “Jimmy Jukes,” does not like guys, especially runt guys with no muscles bothering his sister.” Johnny came back quickly with the usual, “Hey, I am not that small and I am growing, growing fast so Jimmy Jukes can eat my… ” But Johnny halted just in time as one Jimmy Jukes, James Allen Larkin, halfback hero of many a North Adamsville fall football game running opponent defensive players raggedy in his wake, came perilously close to Johnny and then veered off like Johnny was nothing, nada, nunca, nothing. And after Jimmy Jukes was safely out of sight, and Frankie flipped the volume dial on his radio louder as the Falcons’ You’re So Fine came on heralding Frankie’s attempt by osmosis to lure a certain Betty Ann McCarthy, another standard brand fox in the teenage girl be-bop night, his way Johnny poured out the details of his sad saga.

Seems that Katy Larkin was in one of Johnny’s classes, biology he said, and one day, one late spring day Katy, out of the blue, asked him what he thought about Buddy Holly who had passed away in crash several years before, well before he reached his potential as the new king of the be-bop rock night. Johnny answered that Buddy was “boss,” especially his Everyday, and that got them talking, but only talking, almost every day until the end of school. Of course, Johnny, runt Johnny, didn’t have the nerve, not nearly enough nerve to ask a serious fox like Katy out, big brother or not before school let out for the summer. Not until that very day when he got up the nerve to go over to her blanket, a blanket that also had Sara Bigelow and Tammy Kelly on board, and as a starter asked Katy if she liked Elvis’ That’s When The Heartache Begins.

Katy answered quickly and rather curtly (although Johnny did not pick up on that signal) that it was “dreamy the way Elvis sang it, but sad when you think about all the trouble guys bring when they mess with another boy’s girl.” Then Johnny’s big moment came and he blurted out, “Do you want to go to the Surf Dance Hall with me Saturday night? Crazy Lazy is the DJ and the Rockin’ Ramrods are playing?” And as the reader knows, or should be presumed to know, Johnny’s answer was a face full of sand. And that sad, sad beach saga is the end of another teen angst moment. So to the strains coming from Tammy’s radio of Robert and Johnny’s We Belong Together we will move along.

Well, not quite. It also seems that Katy Larkin, tall (too tall for Johnny, really), shapely (no question of “really” about that), and don’t forget foxy Katy Larkin had had a “crush” since they had first started talking in class on one John Raymond Silver if you can believe that. She was miffed, apparently more than somewhat, that Johnny had not asked her out before school got out for the summer. That “more than somewhat” entailed throwing sand in Johnny’s face when he did get up the nerve to ask. And nothing else happened between them for the rest of the summer, except Johnny always seemed kind of miserable when he leaned up against the wall in front of Salducci’s to confer with his corner boys about life being kind of crazy. But get this- on the first day of school, while Johnny was turning his radio off and putting it in his locker just before school started, after having just listened to the Platters One In a Million for the umpteenth time, Katy Larkin “cornered” (Johnny’s term) Johnny and said in a clear, if excited voice, “I’m sorry about that day at the beach last summer.” And then in the teenage girl imperative, hell maybe all women imperative, “You are taking me to the Fall All-Class Mixer and I will not take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Well, what is a guy to do when that teenage girl imperative, hell, maybe all women imperative voice commands. After that Johnny started to re-evaluate his attitude toward beach sand and thought maybe, after all, it was just a girl being playful. In any case, Johnny had grown quite a bit that summer and it turned out that Katy Larkin was not too tall, not too tall at all, for Johnny Silver to take to the mixer, or anywhere else she decided she wanted to go.

Here is what Jimmy told Miranda that Big Sur day to put a philosophical twist on the whole episode fifty years later.  After stopping his car toward the middle of Adamsville Beach, the place between the two yacht clubs where he and the Salducci corner boys hung out, the two clubs whose appearance that day spoke to a need of paint and other fixing up, the place that had stirred his memoires that day Jimmy Callahan thought Red had it all wrong, all wrong indeed, it had nothing to do with the condition of the clubs, the beach, the sand, the waves or the boats. Mr. John Raymond Silver and Ms. Katy Silver (nee Larkin), now of Naples, Florida, are proof of that statement.    

In The Glory Days Of The Cold War Night-Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up –Timothy Dalton’s “The Living Daylights” (1987)-A Film Review

In The Glory Days Of The Cold War Night-Will The Real Bond, James Bond Stand Up –Timothy Dalton’s “The Living Daylights” (1987)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

The Living Daylights, starring Timothy Dalton, Maryam d’Abo, 1987

No question guys like John LeCarre, Tom Clancy and the creator of the Bond, James Bond series Ian Fleming although not all the storylines in the long-running series have had tough sailing since the demise of the arch-villain Soviet Union back in 1991-92. Sure there has been plenty of international dramatic tension possibility since, the “war on terror,” the drug trade, cyber-theft but nothing like those glory days when the smooth as silk and just as deadly good guys wore white hats if only metaphorically and the ham-fisted, can’t shoot straight bad guys wore black, no. red and you had something like the world on the edge with every action-and reaction.

Just look at the difference let us say with a non-descript plot against some holy goof outfit (which also cannot shoot straight) in a post-Soviet demise Bond flick like 2015s Spectre and the action in the film under review, The Living Daylight with late Soviet era-Afghan War as a backdrop. You knew who to root for, or thought you did when the action turned to the Afghan situation later in the story. (That “thought you did” courtesy of the hard fact that those “allies” the mujahedeen turned out to be some nasty Taliban guys when the dust settled later in the beginning of the 21^st century).                  

Of course the attentive reader is wondering not so much about plotline as the burning question of the day-who is the real James Bond. Much cyber-ink has been spilled in this space between the lovely Phil Larkin and the pretty boy youngster William Bradley as they have gone into hand to hand combat over whether their respective choices ruggedly handsome Sean Connery for the former and pretty boy Pierce Brosnan for the latter. Here we have another entrant Timothy Dalton who I would while I don’t want to get in an ambush by either partisan does not measure up to their respective choices. Doesn’t portray the rugged individualism of Connery or the charm the pants off you of Brosnan.

But to the story as Sam Lowell always liked us to get to before the reader wondered why he or she spent their precious time reading a film review like this. This is straight up KGB (even those initials today sent shivers up and down the spine thinking about Siberian exiles or being shot in Lybinaka dungeons) versus M-led MI6 and James Bond agent stuff. Seems the bad ass KGB’s new leader is reviving the old policy of death to spies when caught. Meaning some MI6 agents have been wasted forthwith. his though is just a ruse for a corrupt Soviet general “on the take” to whoever will pay the graft in money, dope or armaments to work his plan to make huge profits off the Afghan opium trade and buy arms to supply whoever has the dough and need for such arms.

This Soviet general is really kind of clever, for a while, as he fakes a defection to the West to put the whammy on the new KGB leader who is actually a reformer of sorts maligned by that renegade general. Has the help of his angel-faced girlfriend Kara, played by Maryam d’ Abo (nice name) who also plays a mean classical cello. This is the ruse Timmy, oops, James must breakup at whatever costs. First he has to realize, which he does in short order, that this general’s flight is bogus. Second he has to gain the confidence of Kara to set the trap to grab this bad ass general who is ready to do business with a don’t give a damn American arms dealer who will sell anything from firecrackers to nuclear weapons to whoever has the dough.

Naturally in these thrillers we see the latest in what Q-MI6s master technie has put together, see whatever three hundred actions per minute put Bond (and Kara) in harm’s way across Vienna, the Alps, Tangiers, Afghanistan and who knows where else before that bad ass general and that amoral arms dealer bite the dust. Naturally as well there has to be the little dance between Bond and Kara before they go under the sheets that everybody knows from the minute she shows up on screen is going to happen. Well at least unlike in the past where the women who fall all over whatever Bond is in play are strictly eye candy Kara can play that mean cello too.             

Title IX Witchhunts, Anti-Sex Frenzy and Bourgeois Feminism (Women and Revolution pages)

Workers Vanguard No. 1121	3 November 2017

Title IX Witchhunts, Anti-Sex Frenzy and Bourgeois Feminism

(Women and Revolution pages)

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Unwanted Advances

Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

A Review

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Is the specter of sex haunting the campus? Under the pretense of targeting sexual harassment and assault, university administrations have been whipping up a climate of fear and imposing neo-Victorian values. As the recent book Unwanted Advances—Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (HarperCollins Publishers, April 2017) argues, “The new campus codes aren’t preventing nonconsensual sex; they’re producing it.” Written by Northwestern University professor and self-described left-wing feminist Laura Kipnis, the book exposes the vastly expanded definitions of sexual assault, which criminalize anything from drunken hook-ups to student-professor romance and even allow for consent to be withdrawn retroactively.

Kipnis joins others who have blown the whistle on the Title IX “sexual misconduct” investigation apparatus. Title IX was originally enacted in 1972 to outlaw sex discrimination in federally financed institutions, to increase funding for women’s college sports and women’s enrollment in medical and law schools. Now it has been turned into a mammoth kangaroo court without any semblance of due process for the accused. In 2011, Obama’s administration issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” containing revised Title IX guidelines with which colleges had to comply or risk losing federal funding. Most striking of these guidelines was the adoption of the lowest standard of proof, a “preponderance of evidence,” in campus sexual assault hearings. By this standard, the accused can be convicted based on anything over a 50 percent likelihood of guilt, as opposed to “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal cases. Students have had their scholarships withdrawn and been expelled, and professors have had their careers destroyed based on mere speculation.

With sexual harassment vaguely defined as “unwelcome conduct,” university bureaucrats have gone after teachers and students alike for controversial comments and misguided jokes or compliments. And though one would be hard pressed to find sex on campus that doesn’t involve some level of intoxication, under the Obama-era guidelines, any sexual act under the influence is treated as nonconsensual.

Kipnis herself witnessed firsthand a process that is normally cloaked in a veil of secrecy after she became a target of a Title IX investigation for having written an essay. Students complained that she had created a hostile environment with her Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” (February 2015), which opposed prohibitions on student-faculty relationships and other draconian campus sex codes. After documenting this sinister circus in a follow-up essay, “My Title IX Inquisition” (May 2015), Kipnis became an unintentional spokesperson for countless victims of the anti-sex bureaucracy.

To be sure, rape and sexual harassment happen, and universities are well versed in sweeping cases of criminal sexual violence under the rug to preserve their reputations. Kipnis goes out of her way to prove she’s not “soft” on rape. But it is no help to victims of real abuse for voluntary and involuntary acts to be lumped together under the umbrella-like designation of “sexual misconduct,” i.e., to make no distinction between discomfort and coercion. As we wrote following the implementation of “yes means yes” legislation in California: “The suggestion that a misunderstanding—or for that matter, bad or unpleasant sex—is equivalent to rape is not only ludicrous but dangerously trivializing of actual sexual violence” (“Sex and Consent on Campus,” WV No. 1056, 14 November 2014).

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced in September that she would rescind Obama’s guidelines, feminists and Democratic Party politicos were quick to decry the move as yet another attack by an overtly racist and ultra-conservative administration. Trump and his right-wing cohorts have a sinister program to eliminate women’s right to abortion and to wage a racist war on what little remains of affirmative action. But the Democrats represent the interests of the same bourgeois ruling class as the Republicans, and also push an anti-woman agenda, including sexual repression. In fact, expanding the powers of the government and its agents in the university administration, cynically done in the name of defending the vulnerable, is a gift to the reactionary forces that aim to dismantle Title IX and go after civil rights wholesale.

The Uses and Abuses of Title IX

The current anti-sex campaign is rooted in the bipartisan rollback of the limited but real gains won through struggles in the late 1960s and early ’70s amid the radicalization during the fight for black rights and against the Vietnam War. But important concessions, such as the legal right to abortion, have since been undermined or overturned by the ruling class—see the massive erosion of Roe v. Wade. Reforms are always reversible when power remains in the hands of the capitalist exploiters.

In the 1980s, a right-wing “family values” offensive was joined by a liberal/feminist auxiliary that went on to promote panic over “date rape” on campuses. The Title IX apparatus has become the latest tool in the rulers’ decades-long anti-sex crusade to justify augmenting the police forces of the state and legitimize intrusion into private life—from the demented accusations of satanic ritual abuse against day-care workers in the 1980s to the permanent ostracizing of hundreds of thousands of people branded “sex offenders” today. Stirring up mass anxiety conveniently diverts discontent away from the horrors of life for the bulk of society: unemployment, plunging wages and soaring costs of housing, health care and education.

Aside from Kipnis’s own story, which she relates with impressive wit, the central case of Unwanted Advances is that of Peter Ludlow, a highly regarded, tenured professor of philosophy at Northwestern. Ludlow was driven out of the university by the Title IX authorities who found him guilty of sexual harassment in two cases. One involved an undergraduate who accused him of forcing her to drink alcohol and groping her; in the other, a graduate student claimed there had been a nonconsensual act during their months-long relationship. Ludlow denied all accusations. During drawn-out Star Chamber procedures, he was banned from campus and smeared in the press as a rapist. Blacklisted, Ludlow resigned and moved to Mexico, dead broke from legal fees. He handed over all his documentation to Kipnis, which confirmed her suspicion that the case was a frame-up.

In page after page of engrossing detail, Kipnis describes the sexual misconduct inquisition: the accused has no right to know the charges, nor who made them, which makes mounting an effective defense nearly impossible; hearings are conducted in secret and typically conclude with a gag order on the accused; the investigators act as judge and jury, and can raise accusations based on hearsay. Kipnis exposes the rampant bias of the Title IX officers in favor of women they call “survivors,” a term that presupposes the charges to be true (and the man to be the aggressor).

In reviewing Ludlow’s case, Kipnis discovered a backstage adviser in the affair who has played a nefarious role in many other Title IX investigations, Professor Heidi Lockwood. Defying all logic, Lockwood denies that consent is the decisive factor in determining whether sex is consensual. In her schema, widely shared in feminist academia, consent does not exist if there are “differentials in power.” The logic of Lockwood’s construct is that women are never independent beings during heterosexual sex since we live in a patriarchy.

Sex—which under bourgeois morality is colored by shame, fear and religious dogma, not to mention class and racial inequality—is often messy and complicated. But we do not believe that someone who is simply older, has a better job or is in a position of authority inevitably turns his or her “subordinate” into a passive automaton. As long as those participating consent at the time, nobody else, least of all the state or campus administrators, has the right to tell them if or how they can do it. For Marxists, the guiding principle in sexual relations is effective consent: what two (or more) people agree to do, regardless of age, gender or sexual preference, is no business of the government or campus authorities.

In her recent book and essays, Kipnis challenges how female students are infantilized as helpless victims of professors with whom they’ve had sexual relations. She harks back to her own years as a college student, before sex was considered dangerous and when screwing professors “was more or less part of the curriculum.” The number of students and teachers who have fallen for each other and acted on it over the years is legion. To condemn these acts is a blatant attempt to control and criminalize sex (or anything hinting of it) between consenting individuals. We oppose all “age of consent” laws that prohibit consensual sexual relations in the name of “protecting” youth; we do not accord the capitalist state the right to decree an arbitrary age at which people can experiment, desire or fool around. Likewise, we oppose all laws against “crimes without victims” such as prostitution, gambling, drug use or pornography.

Anti-sex hysteria intersects the racial oppression that is central to U.S. capitalism. In a country where simply being a black man is enough for the cops to frame you up for something, blacks and minorities are particularly targeted as supposed predators. Panic over black male sexuality and interracial sex has long been used as a justification for (legal or extralegal) lynch rope terror—look at the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till. Unwanted Advances mentions in passing the story of a black college athlete charged with sexual assault for giving his girlfriend a hickey. The case was that of Colorado State University student Grant Neal. Although the woman emphatically reported that no nonconsensual act had taken place, a “friend” of hers reported the hickey to the Title IX authorities. Grant was suspended, his athletic scholarship was revoked, and no other college would admit him. He later sued the university for discrimination, settling out of court.

As reported by journalist Emily Yoffe in an article, “The Question of Race in Campus Sexual-Assault Cases” (Atlantic, 11 September), Colgate University was recently investigated for race discrimination in its sexual assault adjudication process. On a campus where only 4 percent of students are black, during the 2013-14 academic year black male students made up half of those accused of sexual violations. Black and immigrant students, who more often than not lack the financial resources to mount an effective legal defense, are exceptionally vulnerable in the face of bigoted and zealous prosecutors. Title IX has also been used to railroad gay people and leftists.

The Myth of “Rape Culture”: Sex Panic as Social Control

The ideological backdrop to sexual paranoia on campus is the notion of “rape culture.” Kipnis challenges two ubiquitous claims: that one in five college women is a victim of sexual assault, and that only 2 percent of rape allegations are false. In fact, contrary to the image of universities as a hotbed for rapists and predators, students actually experience lower rates of sexual violence than their non-college counterparts. As far back as the 1990s, Princeton grad student Katie Roiphe challenged the notion of a so-called “epidemic” of date rape on campuses in her defiant book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (see “The ‘Date Rape’ Issue: Feminist Hysteria, Anti-Sex Witchhunt,” Women and Revolution No. 43, Winter 1993-Spring 1994).

The false “one in five” figure originates from Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, which infamously contended that rape or threat of rape is the main way in which all men control allwomen. Pervaded with racist and anti-sex filth, the book equivocated on the defense of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth who was kidnapped and lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Brownmiller presented the whistle by Till—whose killing was a galvanizing incident for the civil rights movement—as a “deliberate insult just short of physical assault.”

Kipnis shrewdly argues that “rape culture” has become the university counterpart of the September 11 attacks that have been used as the justification for the wholesale shredding of civil liberties under the guise of the “war on terror”:

“On campus, the term rape culture, like the term terrorism, has become the rhetoric of emergency. Fear becomes the guidelines, promulgating more fear…. The failed war exacerbates the fears, which becomes the rationale for further expanding the security state: vast expenditures, increased layers of bureaucracy, surveillance, secret renditions, summary justice—like expelling a freshman for ‘emotional coercion’.”

Unwanted Advances touches on the social and economic backdrop to the regulation of sex. Today, where even a miserable $15 an hour is out of reach for millions of workers, college-age adults see a precarious future. Decent-paying employment is far from guaranteed even with a four-year degree, which in any case leaves graduates saddled with debt, chained to their parents’ housing and health insurance. Combine that with concern that a romantic encounter could end up with one being marked a “sex criminal,” and you have a solid means for the ruling class to push social conformity.

Part of why Kipnis was able to maintain her composure during her own farcical Title IX trial was because, as a tenured professor, she felt her job was secure. Today, the bulk of professors are not so lucky. Over half of all university instructors are part-time adjuncts—low-paid contract employees with no union representation or job security. If an adjunct instructor is brought up on even the flimsiest charges of sexual misconduct, their career is immediately on the line.

Title IX “sex offender” vendettas strengthen the power of the reactionary campus administrations to strip tenured faculty and staff of the few protections they have. Students, professors and campus workers should have more defense against misconduct allegations, not less. The fight to gain and extend protections on campus, including union rights, requires a fight against the administration, which runs the university on behalf of the anti-woman, anti-black, anti-worker ruling class.

Bourgeois Feminism vs. Revolutionary Marxism

In capitalist society, the prospects of justice for actual victims of rape are bleak. Women who report rape are routinely harassed by the police and practically put on trial themselves while the courts inspect their “morality.” In the bourgeois legal system, the prosecution of sexual offenses has little to do with protecting women against violence and more to do with maintaining their subjugation within the family. The institution of the family is the main source of the oppression of women and children. For the bourgeoisie, the family is used to pass property on to the next generation. For working people, the family—in which women are consigned to running the household and rearing the next generation—inculcates and reinforces bourgeois ideology and morals and, above all, obedience to authority.

Anti-sex witchhunts not only bolster the family, but also provide an ideological basis for state repression. For Marxists, the capitalist state—including the cops, courts and prisons—is the instrument for the suppression of the exploited and oppressed by the exploiters. Alongside the family and organized religion, it plays a key role in enforcing the oppression of women and youth. Feminists, even radical or “socialist” ones, operate entirely within the framework of capitalist rule and reject this understanding. In fact, one form of feminism today is called “carceral feminism” because it pushes for more policing, prosecution and imprisonment as the solution to violence against women.

Kipnis denounces carceral feminism and paternalist feminism, i.e., the concept that women should be protected and men policed, and argues in favor of “grown-up feminism.” For her, the feminism from her generation has been “hijacked.” She notes that college students in the 1960s and ’70s fought to end the in loco parentis prerogatives of campus administrations, while her students today invite college administration snoops into their bedrooms.

Yet feminists have often lined up with some of the most virulent reactionaries, including allying with religious fundamentalists, to support the bourgeoisie’s anti-sex witchhunts—from censoring porn to criminalizing “deviant” sex. Feminism is based on the false consciousness of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who seek to enter the straight male club of power and privilege. Their strategy has been to rely on the capitalist Democratic Party to defend women, which serves only to demobilize fighters for women’s rights.

While Kipnis bemoans the fact that abortion rights, equal pay, childcare and maternity leave have been relegated to mere side issues, she still relies on feminism to address such concerns. In fact, the fight for things like free, quality 24-hour childcare, equal pay for equal work, and free contraception and abortion must be tied to a struggle to overthrow the economic system that is the source of women’s oppression. The liberation of women requires a socialist revolution, which will uproot the private property system and replace the family with socialized childcare and housework, bringing women fully into social and political life.

Fake Socialists Join Anti-Sex Frenzy

It is a mark of the reactionary political climate that Unwanted Advances has either been ignored or treated with contempt by the bulk of the left. Kipnis has instead been lauded by right-wing libertarian groups like FIRE and Reason, both with ties to the Koch brothers. These groups have been promoting the faux “free speech” agenda on campus as a cover for racist, sexist provocations. Kipnis is perplexed by such praise from those who want to destroy the left. By entrusting the capitalist state with powers that will inevitably be used against them, liberals and feminists have handed a weapon to the right wing. It is a measure of how much reformist socialists have adapted to puritanical “family values” that they march in lockstep with the feminists (read: Democrats) to promote bourgeois behavior codes.

In the article “DeVos Is Turning the Clock Back on Survivors” (Socialist Worker, 13 September), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) laments DeVos’s latest action as one of a “series of attacks against survivors by the current administration,” and declares: “We will not go back.” The ISO hails Obama’s “Dear Colleague Letter” and retails dubious statistics about sexual assault in order to join what they hail as a “growing” movement against sexual violence on campus. That movement plugs the inherently racist, sexist and elitist bourgeois education system as a “space” in which women, transgender people or racial minorities can be “safe” from oppression.

Socialist Alternative (SAlt) has latched onto the same movement, in particular at UCLA, where they have been active around the Title IX case of Gabriel Piterberg. An Israeli, pro-Palestinian professor of history, Piterberg was charged with sexual harassment by two grad students in 2014. While denying the charges, he made a settlement with the university, which included being fined, suspended for a quarter without pay, and removed from his position as director of the university’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. But this was not enough for SAlt and its cohorts in the feminist Bruins Against Sexual Harassment. Student protesters repeatedly shut down his classes, railing that UCLA was protecting a “sexual predator.”

Whatever happened between Piterberg and his accusers, we oppose eternal punishment, akin to being branded a sex offender for life. Piterberg is also a well-known defender of the oppressed Palestinian people who has been targeted for years by powerful Zionist forces. His treatment raises the question of whether the Title IX apparatus is being used to do the Zionists’ dirty work.

While no one can fix all the problems of sexual relations in this rotten, decaying society, we oppose all attempts to fit human sexuality into pre-ordained “norms.” To create genuinely equal relations between people in all spheres, including sex, requires nothing less than the destruction of the capitalist system through a series of socialist revolutions internationally, opening the way to the creation of a communist world. In a classless society, social and economic constraints on sexual relations will be nonexistent, and in the words of Friedrich Engels, “There is no other motive left except mutual inclination.”

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Gary Ladd Danced The North Adamsville High School Be-Bop Hop Dance Night Away

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When Gary Ladd Danced The North Adamsville High School Be-Bop Hop Dance Night Away 

From The Archives Of Allan Jackson

A YouTube film clip of The Shirelles performing their 1960s teen angst classic Mama Said

[As of this introduction negotiations between Sam Lowell and current site manager Greg Green around full credit attribution, including 2018 updated introductions and reflections, for previous site manager Allan Jackson are still on-going. There has been something of a groundswell by both older writers who have longtime relations with Allan going back to high school days in their collective 1960s growing up and coming of age in the working class Acre section of North Adamsville and the younger writers who led the charge to have Allan replaced after he lost a vote of no confidence. Probably all are, not unimportantly, worried about their attribution status on a site that is committed to free usage, fair usage and common copyright. In the meantime old high school friend Allan had asked me to respond to any rumors that might surface, have surfaced until he can respond on his own (assuming Greg does the right thing after having done the wrong thing by having somebody else “front” for the series.       

I have already mentioned in a previous introduction rumors that Greg Green had somehow done Allan in, done to him what was characterized as physical harm after the internal struggle which led to Allan’s demise. That far-fetched notion like this was some Stalin-Trotsky fight flight of imagination probably fueled by the older writers who lived and died for such drama back in their 1960s radical pasts. It turned out Greg had put the word out to the media world that Allan was “hard to work with” almost as much a kiss of death as any physical action. That blown-up rumor led to another which proved to be partially true that Allan was out in American Siberia in Utah and that he had sold out to the Mormons and to U.S. Senatorial candidate Mitt Romney to get a job after Greg had “black-listed” him in the major markets. That turned out to be pretty true as Allan did to make his daily bread attempt this end-around. The close-knit Mormons kind of laughed it off given Allan’s reputation for skewering old Mitt back in in 2008 and 2012.       

Allan never had a reputation say like Josh Breslin and Sam Lowell despite his three ex-wives as a womanizer, as a skirt-chaser and especially not as a chaser of younger women so the rumor that he had been holed up in La Jolla out in California with some twenty-something part time waitress met at a diner who was teaching him how to surf and who knows what else did not ring true. When, concerned about his whereabouts in the aftermath of the internal fight, Sam and I tracked him down to old haunt Bar Harbor in Maine we were incredulous when he confided in us that he had done so and that once he raised some cash he was going to bring her out to Maine and see if she liked Eastern surfing. Yes, you can say we were dumbfounded although Allan’s respond was “what of it” both parties were of age and that was that. Christ he has daughters older than that.

What happened as Allan was at pains to lay out once he saw our discomfort was that after the Utah stuff fell through he kind of had given up hope. He knew that Mormon- Mitt Romney thing was a longshot, he knew they took care of their own in such matters and he had heaped as much scorn as anybody on the perfidious Mitt who would say anything, do anything to take his main chance as he saw it. We laughed when Allan, gallow’s humor Allan, mentioned that had he fallen under the wheel and gotten a job he very well might meet some Stalin-like end from those sanctimonious bastards, hell, their whole history of survival in Utah was by running everybody else off-by nay means necessary. Once he saw the writing on the wall and not wanting to head back East he headed to Southern California, toward Carlsbad where he and one of his wives, Mimi Murphy if I recall, had had a time share. Once he got to Carlsbad though he saw too many old memories on the waves and headed further south to La Jolla.  

One day, hungry, he went into Dave’s Diner, a locale we all know both from back in the 1960s when we were all riding on the yellow brick road bus in the Summer of Love, 1967 with Captain Crunch (that whole thing is a long story and one of the sketches in this series will deal with it so let’s move on) and from later golfing outings at near-by Torrey Pines. Dave’s was the spot to get a good meal and look at the eye candy for waitresses (now wait staff but still eye candy) who were classic Southern California corn-fed blondes who a couple of generations before had forbears from places like Oklahoma and Iowa when things where bad there and were strictly from hunger. Now these sleek blondes had lost that look and had the surfer girl look we remember from back in the Beach Boys days except now the surfer girls don’t wait on the beaches for their surfer boys to get that perfect wave but go for it themselves. Make enough to stay alive and surf at jobs like wait-staffing to pursue the dream. Dave’s in any case a good tipping crowd-or else per Dave who still hustles hamburgers on the back of the house stove once in a while.   

It was kind of a slow day when Allan stepped up to the counter stools which are a god-sent for singles when Damask, his blonde, blue-eyed wait person who was tending the counters which truth be told was where in the real tips came from by single guys mostly and not that six person booth with about a three dollar tip for a hundred dollars’ worth of meals asked him if he would like coffee before making his meal selection. He told her that while he once loved coffee he couldn’t deal with it anymore because his system couldn’t take it. That got Damask started on her own inability or desire to drink coffee and made Allan laugh when she said they would put Starbuck’s out of business. That kind of back and forth went on throughout the meal. Along the way Damask mentioned although Allan already had an idea that she loved to surf and did he know how. No, Jesus, no he blurted out although that only elicited a response from her about wouldn’t he like to learn. One thing led to another and out of the blue he flat out asked her if she would like to have dinner with him giving her the sad story about his being down in the dumps and could use the company.(Allan would mention that he now knew how old friend “forever young” Phil Larkin felt a couple of years ago when he wound up with some young thing which formed the basis for a few stories in this series). Just for the company, that was all. To his surprise she said that it would be nice to go to Scudder’s, another local hot spot although very pricey. Done (thank god for credit cards and 401ks said Allan).       

As it turned out Damask was both a surfer and a graduate student in physical therapy at U/Cal-San Diego up the road and while totally clueless about many things, many 1960s things which Allan had the good sense to not  go on and on about she loved literature and they had a grand old time that night. As they went their separate ways from Scudder’s (a good idea on Allan’s part showing that he still knew a thing or two after three marriages about keeping woman feeling safe around him) Damask mentioned that she was going surfing the next day and maybe he could come by the beach around nine and she would show him some surfing stuff. Bingo. (Neither Sam nor I had the heart to look askance at Allan when he mentioned her name without a bit of irony since when we were growing up Mary, Betty, Janice, Sandra and maybe something as exotic Mary Beth formed the female names world).

As for what happened to have Allan once again foot the bill for some love interest and Damask accepting his invitation East (where she had never been unlike us who were all crazy to go to California when we were younger) outside whatever surfing tips she taught him that will have to wait until he can “tell the tale” himself (our old neighborhood expression concerning exploits with women based on each and every one of us lying like crazy about what did, or did not, happen under the covers). Jack Callahan]

************

Saturday night from seven to eleven, any third Saturday of the month from September to May, every red-blooded teen boy and girl in the 1961 North Adamsville High School be-bop, be-bop night could only be in one locale, or want to be. That was the night of the monthly seasonally-themed high school hop. The Fall Frolic, Pumpkin Ball, Mistletoe Magic, Frozen Frolic, and so on themes with hop at the end to give the old-timey innocent high school feel to the night in a town which had had such dances since the school’s founding in the 1920s, although the term “hop” had been of more recent vintage reflecting the effect that such cultural phenomena as the afternoon television program American Bandstand and Danny and the Juniors classic song At The Hop had invested the word with significant teen meaning. More importantly this monthly hop, unlike the more exclusive Autumn Leaves, Holly Hock and Spring Fling dances which were meant solely for juniors and seniors and their guests and which were not designated hops or any other such shorthand reflecting the new rock and roll breeze that had been stirring through the nation for some time by then, anyone, even freshmen and sophomores, could ante up the dollar admission and dance the night away.

The large attendance of wallflower-like freshman, girls and boys alike, all red-faced, all sweaty palms, all trying to look nonchalantly like they had been going to these things for ages to hide their wallflower fears who were hanging off the walls in the transformed festooned gym and of sophomores, a little more self-assured and hovering around the bleachers which had been extended to provide some seating, but still worried about whether they, the boys, had put on enough underarm deodorant, had swigged enough mouthwash, had combed enough parted Wild Root-infested  hair, and the girls, whether that stolen mother’s perfume would seem too strong, their permed hair was still in array and that that padded dress showed their figures to good effect were witness to the fact that anyone, sweaty palms or not if they had enough moxie could dance the night away.  

Well almost everybody in attendance had the chance to dance the night away. And that had been the dilemma confronting one freshman, Gary Ladd, he the “wallflower” way off to the side of the gym almost into the wall if you didn’t think you had seen him on one of the third Saturday nights in question. And right next to him is another guy, me, hair-slicked, underarm-protected, Listerine-inhaled, his best friend since junior high days when I moved to town from Clintondale and we have since tried to defend each other against the hardships of American wayward youth times, times when we both would have rather just that moment had cool sunglasses on to stifle our fears. But let’s get back to Gary because the night I am referring to was his night after some many failed efforts and my story can be simply stated. I will wind up going home at intermission kind of defeated since nobody, nobody at all had asked me to dance, believing that I had not put enough deodorant on, enough Wild Root or swilled enough mouthwash and had been defeated by the ever-present bane of the wallflowers-personal hygiene.

[I would find out a couple of days later when I mentioned my defeat to Emma Wilson in History Class that most of the freshman girls that she knew kept an arm’s distance from me not for personal hygiene, some girls thought that I was “cute,” but no girl, no self-respecting girl could permit herself to be barraged by the two thousand odd-ball facts that I would spew out in order to impress them during the dance. I have seen decided to take her comment under advisement. But back to Gary.]   

What had been bothering Gary, though, we might as well have our moment of truth right up front since this is a confessional age and the truth would have come out anyway, is that he can’t dance. Can’t dance a damn, to hell, heaven or any place in between. Couldn’t dance in junior high when I tried to shadow-box teach him a few steps and when the moment of truth came he almost broke poor, beautiful Melinda Loring’s big toe. Such a reputation in a small town is hard to break. My corner boy’s problem: two- left feet. Two left-feet despite the more recent best efforts of one Agnes Ladd, North Adamsville Class of 1961 Vice President, whose own feet have taken a terrible beating, and has earned some kind of medal for service above and beyond the call of duty, trying to teach little brother Gary the elements of the waltz, the fox trot, and hell, even two feet away from your partner rock and roll moves and the twist to no avail.

All of this teaching done under the cover of tight security since Gary had sworn Agnes to secrecy about their doings. Agnes, for her part, one of the smartest and most popular girls in the senior class, had no intention of telling anybody that she was talking to, much less teaching dance to a freshman even if it was her own brother. Those are the school conventions, and nobody, nobody who is smart and popular is going to defy conventions like that. The freshman, as Agnes told Gary, would have their day in a few years and would in turn snub their subordinate freshman. That is the way it is. But Gary, no twerp under his two left-footed exterior, has always, as he put it, exercised his democratic right as a freshman in good standing to be at these universal dances, come hell or high water.

But that night, that warm April Bring Spring Hop night I am talking about, things were destined to be a little different as Gary has already staked his place against the far wall (the wall farthest away from the girl “wallflowers” just in case you wanted an exact location. Mostly wallflowers, boy or girl, although not me, were keeping their respective distances on the odd chance that someone may actually come up and ask them to dance. First off this month, unlike most months when some lame student DJ from Communications class spins platters on a feisty school record player, the local craze rock band sensations, The Rockin’ Ramrods, were performing live on the makeshift bandstand and were guaranteed to have everybody who gets to dance rocking before they are done, including Gary and me who are scared but still hopeful. Just that minute as Gary shifted his weight and places his back to the wall they were tuning up before their first set of three with the appropriately named Please Stay by the Drifters. Secondly but in line with that Gary hopeful, a new girl in town, Elsie Mae Horton, had told Gary that she would be coming to the hop, her first since moving to town a couple of months before. Naturally the mere fact that she said she would come was an added reason why Gary was there  all that exercising democratic rights stuff be damned (and also why he had tortured his sister Agnes to try, try in vain, to teach him some dance steps). See Gary has the “bug” for Elsie Mae, Yeah, as I well know since I had taken a failed and fruitless run at her with my two thousand facts in Civics class and had gotten  the deep freeze, he is smitten.

Now this Elsie Mae is maybe, on a scale of one to ten, about a six so it is not looks that had Gary (and about six other guys, five and me), well, smitten. An okay body, fair legs, nice brown hair and eyes, a so-so dresser like I say a “six” (and Gary agreed with me although in that department although if you see Elsie Mae I never said that, nor did he). See what Elsie Mae has is nothing but smarts, book smarts which is how I made my approach to her in Civics class talking about this book we were reading about President Andrew Jackson and how he broke the back of the aristocrats like the Adams family who wanted to keep political power in the hands of some self-selected elite, themselves and forget the guys going west, yeah I know not exactly the smoothest move. Idea smart too which enthralled Gary since he likes to talk about novels and such which is what Elsie Mae was into, talk smarts you name it smarts and one of the sweetest smiles this side of heaven. And, as Gary found out early on in one of their shared classes, very easy to talk to about anything, if she wanted to talk to you. Yes, he is smitten; the only unknown in his mind is whether she can dance good enough to stay out of his way if it comes to that. That is if he gets up the nerve to ask her. And as the Ramrods started their first set with Gary Bonds’ School Is Out (praise be) he noticed her coming in the door. Heart pounding he started sinking into the wall again. As they finished with Brother Bonds the Ramrods start in on The Impressions’ Gypsy Woman before Gary realized that Elsie Mae has drawn a bee-line straight for him and was standing right in front of him, turning a little red after he did not greet her. “Oh, my god,” Gary whispers under his breathe, “she is going to ask me to dance. No way.” The usually easy to talk to Elsie Mae though said nothing, nothing but turned a little redder as the Ramrods covered the Pips Every Beat Of My Heart (nicely done too). She stood there waiting for Gary to ask her, if you can believe that. Well, two-left feet or not, he did ask her. And she smiled a little smile as she “accepts.” Relief.

Needless to say when they did their dance, The Edsels’ Rama Lama Ding Dong, it was nothing but a disaster. A Gary disaster? Yes. Although you can use fake moves galore on such a tune Gary, maybe nervous, maybe just trying to show off started moving all his arms all over the place so he looked from my wall position like one of those devilish Hindu gods with a ton of arms. And while in motion he hit Ella Mae a couple of times, not hard but not cool either. Once she came close to him and he moved back into another couple, a senior couple and I thought the senior, Bill Daley from the football team, was going to level poor Gary but he just moved away with his date with the meanest look of scorn I had seen in a while. So disaster was the right word. But here is the funny part. Elsie Mae Horton, formerly of Gloversville, a town in farm country a few miles away and known for the Gloversville Amusement Park on Route 9 and nothing else really, and new to North Adamsville so of unknown dance quality, had two-left feet too. When she had been closing in on Gary it was because she had lost her balance and was ready to careen into him. Get this though. When the dance was mercifully finished, and the two had actually survived, Elsie Mae thanked Gary and told him that he was a wonderful dancer and said she wished that she could dance like him. Whee! Here is the real kicker though. Elsie Mae had also been taking dancing lessons on Saturday mornings at the YWCA, unsuccessfully. Dancing lessons solely so that two-left feet Elsie Mae Horton could dance with Gary Ladd. See, she was “smitten” too. And so if you did not see Gary or Elsie Mae at the Mayfair Dance last month you have now solved that mystery. That night they were sitting, sitting very close to each other, on the seawall down at Adamsville Beach laughing about starting a “Two-Left Feet” Club. With just two members.

[As for my fate that night I went to the hop with Emma Wilson. See after she clued me in to what was what I ran into her at the library and we talked, or rather she talked, not two thousand facts, talked but talked. And I let her. And she asked me to escort her, her word, to the hop.]