REELING IN THE YEARS:

CHAPTER ONE EXCERPTS

For quite awhile I've been cobbling together a memoir that's tentatively titled Reeling in the Years. The concept, in a nutshell, is to present significant events in my life (such as early childhood obsesssions, coming out of the closet, "wild and crazy" college adventures and coping with my mental illness) in relation to movies that have made a huge impact on me. I'm not necessarily focusing on the best films I've seen. Smoky and the Bandit Part 3 plays a pivotal role in one chapter, for instance, though my capacity for true film appreciation shines through when genuine winners like Nashville and Maurice make their way into my real-life bildungsroman.

I enjoyed a burst of productivity last summer and fall, but for the past six months my first draft has sat on the bottom of my desk drawer along with dead batteries and unread health insurance forms. In an effort to recharge the lifeless battery that this writing project has become, I'm going to periodically post excerpts from the memoir on my blog. This way I can refamiliarize myself with the material, (hopefully) get fired up again and maybe even fish some feedback from my loyal readership.

The book is more or less organized in chronological order, and starts off with an essay about my early childhood and my unbridled passion for that 1939 Technicolor extravaganza about a green bitch and her flying monkeys.

Here are a few passages from that chapter:

THE WIZARD OF OZ

Some boys play with trucks, and some boys play with action figures. When I was a kid, no toy gave me a bigger kick than my deluxe Wizard of Oz play set.
By the time I was five years old, I had seen the movie once or twice on TV. I don’t remember many of my first impressions of the film, but it obviously captivated me because I could hardly sleep the night before the broadcast.
In the summertime I made my mother read to me from Oz storybooks on the front porch, and I was the proud owner of a cheap board game that looked like an off-yellow Yellow Brick Road.
Then I encountered the Rolls Royce of Oz paraphernalia, and all bets were off. Mary Beth Romano – a neighbor who was a few years older than me – invited me over to play one afternoon. Her large bedroom was a den of kiddy privilege, complete with a canopy bed, dollhouses and highly coveted board games like Mousetrap and Operation. My parents never deprived me of toys, but I couldn’t help but feel neglected and covetous when I saw all her loot.
“Do you want to play Wizard of Oz?” Mary Beth asked me when our play session started to lag.
Of course I immediately perked up at this prospect. I figured we’d dive into some Wicked Witch and Cowardly Lion role-playing games, but Mary Beth clearly had something more elaborate when she opened her toy chest and dug out my new best friend.
It was a really ornate Wizard play set which included plastic-coated replicas of the Emerald City, Munchkinland and the Yellow Brick Road. Best of all it came with action figures. Everyone was represented: Glinda, the Wicked Witch, Dorothy, the Scarecrow etc.
I remember coveting this and wishing to Christ that I could have one too. In a turn of events that cemented my early childhood belief in God, the payoff to my prayers came later that day. I was in my family room and Mary Beth came over and she was holding something behind her back. Then she brought out the Wizard playland and offered it to me. For keeps, no less! It was an outrageous surprise that made me very happy.
Every night I couldn’t relax and go to sleep until all of my favorite Wizard characters had been tucked in alongside me. I took the play set all over the house and the yard because I liked experiencing OZ in different places. It was a treat. As much as I loved that thing I have no idea where it is today. It must have been tossed out or maybe it was sold in a tag sale.

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My biggest period of Oz intensity was between the ages of 7 and 10. When I was in first or second grade I looked forward to the broadcast for weeks. When the final week arrived a countdown sounded off in my head. I hated taking baths every other night, so I counted down my remaining baths like a prisoner counts the days by drawing lines on his jail cell wall. When I was down to one or zero baths that meant the movie was near.
When the show was on I felt catapulted into a different world. What’s funny is that, as much as I loved the movie and as much as I thought about it, I was never a huge fan of the musical numbers. I liked “Over the Rainbow,” but it didn’t melt my knees or anything. The songs by the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion kind of bored me. The worst part is when they’re waiting to see the wizard and the lion sings “If I Were the King of the Forest.” I didn’t like anything about that one.
So there were whole chunks of the movie that I wasn’t wild about, but I adored the sheer inventiveness of it and the craziness and the brightness of the colors and the gnarliness of the trees that throw the apples at Dorothy and the Scarecrow. All of it was so exciting that I didn’t care that there were aspects I didn’t like. I think it’s a testament to how well I liked the story.

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I felt like I identified with Dorothy. Her sidekicks seemed very gay, especially the Tin Man. I don’t know if the actors actually were gay, but I remember not feeling threatened by them. This was refreshing because the people in my life that I felt threatened by were mostly men.
My wicked witch, if I had to name one, was Paul Thompson. The Thompsons lived at the top of Olive Lane, which was a street near Hany Lane where I grew up. Mrs. Thompson was lovely, and she was good friends with my mom. There were four or five sons, and they were all older than me by at least four years. There was no one my age, but I got swept up in some of the Thompson antics nonetheless. They were rough-housers, and according to my father the eldest kid, Chris, placed me on his shoulders one time and rode down the steep hill on his skateboard. Any car or any slip wouldn’t have probably been the end of both of us.
We often congregated on Olive Lane. The Thompsons lived on a cul-de-sac, where all the kids would play. I was only four or five and in a way I was a young kid playing out of his league, dipping my toe into the older kids’ lake. Some horribly awkward things happened thanks to the tyrannical reign of Mr. Thompson. One time I literally shit my pants because I was so afraid of him. He was so stern and gruff. I was afraid to go inside and ask to use their bathroom. I tried to hold it but I couldn’t. I remember crying hysterically. Someone walked me back to my house where I cleaned up and tried to shake off the humiliation.
My worst collision with Mr. Thompson happened on time when I was playing in their yard. They had a lamp post and somehow I was hanging on it or leaning on it, and it broke.
He came out and completely lit in to me. He yelled as loud as he could, with no recognition that I was just a kid. It didn’t haunt me at the time, but I am so mad when I look back on it. That no one stopped him from being such an asshole.
He was the wicked witch because if I saw him driving down the road or if I saw him walking it created a chill in me. There was always an awkwardness later on because my parents continued to socialize with him. He’d be at Christmas parties and weddings. I had no desire or inclination to be polite to him, even 25 years later. He was probably the first person I knew that, had something horrible happened to him, I might have been happy. Had he been hit by a bulldozer I might have celebrated or tried to make it a Federal holiday.
That’s what it felt like to have my own wicked witch. I could really relate to Dorothy as she battled Elmira Gultch and the Wicked Witch.

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Recently my partner Drew and developed a strong fondness for Judy Garland. I was at the library one day and they had Judy Garland Show DVD on the shelf. It was a collection of CBS broadcasts from 1963-1964.
I didn’t even know she ever had a TV show. I of course knew her from Wizard, and I had seen Meet Me in St. Louis, I had seen A Star is Born, and I was aware that she had been in a bunch of movies with Mickey Rooney back in the late 1930s-early 1940s.
I also knew that she had died in 1969, around the same time as the Stonewall rebellion. I believe that people were gathered at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village to mourn her death, and that’s when the riots started. The police intended to arrest them and they refused to budge.
Drew and I started watching the show. Part of the kick was the guest list: Ethel Merman came out looking like a drag queen. A very young Barbra Streisand appeared in one episode and sang “Get Happy” with Judy. There was a really big variety of guests. I immediately found myself fascinated with Judy. Mind you, she was the center of attention, the showpiece. What fascinated me wasn’t so much her showmanship, though she had an amazing ability to belt out just about anything from the encyclopedia of American song.
What really interested me was her transparent vulnerability. As everybody knows she was drunk or affected by pills a lot of the time. She often stuttered when she talked with guests. She was slow to respond to certain comments. She also seemed really nervous. She didn’t make eye contact with the camera for very long, preferring instead to talk to her guests in profile.
Judy seemed very human to me. I later learned by watching the Judy Davis TV movie about Judy that American audiences in the early 60s didn’t like Judy very much. Although the show got great reviews, she made people nervous. People didn’t like having her in their home.
The more I watched the more I became enamored with her showmanship- even though I’m not a huge fan of American standards. So Drew and I developed this interest in her and we went on a Judy Garland spree after that. We rented the Judy Davis movie which was quite sensational. It implied that Judy was drug addicted and miserable and suicidal 100% of the time. I don’t deny that she was these things at various times, but the movie failed to convey the joy that’s very apparent on her face on the show. She was a lifelong pill addict, which must have been miserable.
But there had to have been a happy side to her personal life too.