Buffalo Unbound, page 7
Because of rampant inflation, candy prices tripled during my peak sugar years, so my friends and I not only loved Halloween but we needed it to stockpile the treats that would keep us alive until Christmas. Local factories kept laying people off, while a lower tax base meant cuts in civil service jobs, along with hospital and sanitation positions. Parents struggled to pay for heat for the house and gas for the car, so when it came to such childhood necessities as Gobstoppers, Razzles, Chuckles, Bottle Caps, and Bubble Yum, they were tighter than the faux forest mural glued to our dining room wall. Thus we spent months planning our costumes and trick-or-treat route for maximum return on investment. Back then, girls did not dress as streetwalkers because (1) high heels would slow you down; (2) our parents wouldn’t have allowed it (Catholic mothers knew that whatever clothes you died in were what you’d wear throughout eternity); and, most importantly, (3) it was already too cold by then. No one had heard of global warming, and from where we were standing, wearing parkas and overshoes in October, global freezing appeared to be of much greater concern.
For me, Halloween was merely a coin toss. My natural fright wig of unruly strawberry blond hair left only the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz or Cousin Itt from The Addams Family as costume possibilities. Still, I was able to tell people that I was a model, since my mother’s good friend wrote nursing textbooks and used us for the accompanying photographs. I’m the one wearing the cervical collar.
In my local public school, kids were separated by ability. They gave our first-grade reading groups cutesy inspirational names such as Cheetahs, Jaguars, and Blue Jays. Still unable to form words using letters, I was classified as a Dinosaur. I tried not to read too much into it, but since I couldn’t read at all, that really wasn’t possible, aside from a vague feeling that I’d been marked for extinction. It was not unlike the day my teacher dropped the bomb that y could sometimes be used as a vowel, and I was so discombobulated that I couldn’t remember more than one verse to “Kumbaya” during the sing-along after lunch. And that was saying a lot since the neighborhood was 80 percent Catholic and everyone knew at least eighteen verses, while a really good elementary school teacher could do the deaf version too.
But Fortuna spun her mighty wheel and the fickle finger of placement fate rewrote destiny when my seventh-grade homeroom teacher slumbered through the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test and we treated it as a group project. Didn’t they wonder why everyone with a last name starting with Ob to Pr had IQs of 150 while the rest of the school averaged 103? A couple kids previously heading for careers at Midas Muffler were now on the fast track, and suddenly Mensa was calling.
The area in which we all seemed to fall down, teachers and students alike, was the metric system. We were supposed to discard our demented method of measurement that involved the length of some old king’s foot, Egyptian forearms, and double-stepping Romans, and replace it with a system divisible by ten, as the reasonable Canadians had done years earlier. Yet, to this day, Americans in hospitals and doctor’s offices across the country have the magnitude of their various lumps explained not in sensible scientific terms, but in the language of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Rather than be informed that some mass has a perimeter of two or twenty centimeters, we’re told the nodule is the size of a garbanzo bean, the tumor is on par with an acorn squash, or the growth is larger than a macadamia nut but smaller than an apricot. American universities should offer a double major of oncology and horticulture.
In a similar fashion, grammar went out the schoolhouse window, evidenced by the fact that a best-selling children’s album of the era had the pronoun-challenged title Free To Be…You and Me. Other recording artists were having lay versus lie issues, as was the case with Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” and Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally,” unless these were supposed to be clever double entendres or else not-so-sly references similar to the drug-encrypted “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Subject-verb agreement was next in the syntax firing line with The Police singing, “Everything she do just turn me on.”
But make no mistake about it, school was important! There was no safety net, trust fund, or backup plan in my recession-scarred neighborhood. It was before grade inflation, student self-esteem, and protein shakes. If you decided not to study one night and did poorly on just a single test, it could ruin your average and your chances of getting into a good college, and you’d end up as riffraff, living in a decrepit bungalow on the wrong side of the tracks with mean dogs and a rusty jalopy in the front yard, on the slippery slope to becoming the town drunk with the village idiot as your only friend and a twenty-five-year GED reunion the solitary invitation on your refrigerator.
At least this was true if you weren’t a candidate for a sports scholarship, and I was no more likely to win one than I was likely to win a beauty pageant. Still, I enjoyed a four-year career on the soccer team, one distinguished more by attendance than prowess and largely a result of the fact that our Born Again Christian coach’s philosophy was more “equal opportunity” than “go for the gold.” He praised “good energy.” Also, he told me the real locations of the games, which is more than I can say for the neighborhood kickball hooligans.
Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibited discrimination in federally financed activities, thereby declaring equal funding and facilities for girls’ sports, hadn’t quite taken hold yet. We were just crawling out of the primordial Crisco ooze of the home economics (or domestic sciences) wing, and girls’ sports had only a 7 percent participation rate in 1972, compared to the 50 percent it has today. As a result, my girls’ varsity soccer team was issued the discarded uniforms of the boys’ junior varsity soccer team. The fabric was somewhere between tent canvas and Silly Putty, which, despite causing a few strange rashes, didn’t shrink or wrinkle or even really bend, for that matter. And without darts or extra room for the female figure, the jerseys acted as an early version of the as-yet-to-be-invented sports bra. This fabulous prison-farm look was finished off with long white tube socks that when pulled all the way up resembled go-go boots. Before it was warm enough to practice outside (basically anywhere above freezing), we had to take a bus from our high school to an elementary school and back every day after school because the coaches didn’t want us scuffing up the floor of the boys’ gym. So whenever you see a woman over forty supporting a female presidential candidate, it’s not that the voter agrees with all of the nominee’s policies so much as that she played sports at a public school prior to 1980 with wads of polyester chafing her thighs and armpits.
School is expensive nowadays, and kids require all sorts of stuff, like iPods, laptops, cell phones, and prescription drugs. Instead of book bags, they need not just backpacks, but backpacks on wheels—actual luggage that makes it look as if they’re going to catch the shuttle to the airport for a week of meetings in Chicago. When I was growing up, we had windup toys, Etch A Sketch, and glow-in-the-dark yo-yos, but nothing with a fun factor that was deemed worthy to drag to class. The school banned slingshots and squirt guns. And there was not yet a need for an official policy statement on automatic weapons and Tasers. You were as likely to bring your father’s shotgun to middle school as you were a can of your mother’s Tab. Not happening.
Back then, if we were jonesing for something it was usually a Snickers bar or a Slurpee, so we went to the kitchen where everything reusable was kept—basically paper plates, tea bags, and butcher string—wet a piece of bloody butcher string, tied it around the loosest tooth in our mouth, and attached it to the garage door. Voilà. Next day the tooth fairy came and we had a dollar. What could be easier?
Suffering the humiliation of Amherst’s unfortunately named Sweet Home School District was sadly made worse by a home improvement store called The Busy Beaver located right next to the middle school back in my day. And with the recent addition of a million-dollar auditorium, the school now resembles a prison for the performing arts. However, after years of insisting that the school system’s architecture was Soviet-inspired functionalism at its worst and clearly suggested that the Geneva Conventions could be discarded while authority looked the other way, I silenced the scorn after a recent visit to the Amherst Museum. On display was the original one-room Sweet Home schoolhouse, built in 1847 for $125, which had an outhouse. Now I absolutely adore those turd brown bricks of yore. Why not bring back the turquoise trim?
In fact, I’d love to be a student at my old high school today because now you can wear shorts and sweatpants. Actually, we didn’t think we had it so bad in jeans and sneakers, since our mothers had to wear skirts and saddle shoes. Meantime, girlfriends who attended Catholic school slyly hemmed up their skirts a few inches until one day the nuns would haul them all into the cafeteria, measure the skirts with a yardstick, rip out the hems of the skirts that were too short, and send the girls home to their Singer push-pedal sewing machines. This doesn’t happen nowadays for a number of reasons, largely because most high school girls no longer even own a needle and thread.
Traversing the old school corridors, I am most pleased to see that in health class they still use skinny, pasty-faced Resuscitation Annie, in the blue tracksuit, to teach CPR. And she still looks like she died from a heroin overdose. “Annie, Annie! Are you okay?”
How I Was Exposed
Following high school graduation, I spent a number of years on Wall Street valuing things, mostly stocks and bonds, determining what a share of X is worth right now. Well, now obviously next to nothing. However back then, we had formulas to make such calculations for everything from index options to soybean futures.
But how do you value art? What is the value of art—what someone will pay for it? How it makes us feel? And how do you put a price on that?
Growing up in the Buffalo area during the seventies, my family didn’t have much disposable income, like most people at the time, because it all went to the Niagara Mohawk power company, and we weren’t particularly sophisticated, though we knew enough to have gold shag carpeting, a sand sculpture, spider plants in macramé hangers, and a bottle of Blue Nun on hand for company. Still, on the salaries of a nurse and a court reporter we had access to an amazing amount of culture—concerts, plays, dance, exhibitions, museums, galleries, craft fairs, poetry readings, and festivals. At the height of the Blizzard of ’77, locals didn’t yell and curse—they went on television singing “Send in the Plows” to the city’s head of transportation.
Watching Peter Pan at the Studio Arena Theatre when I was seven made me think that I could fly. I couldn’t, and it ended badly, but you never know until you try. Art makes you dream big. And like Picasso’s Guernica, it can also deliver a big dose of reality along with an introduction to the concept of negative space.
I saw Andrés Segovia play classical guitar one particularly stormy night when I was eleven and suffering from one heck of a case of bronchitis. As other people live with cancer or AIDS, the children of Western New York lived with upper respiratory distress. If we’d stayed home for every case of walking pneumonia, pleurisy, or whooping cough, we’d have been shut-ins the first eighteen years of our lives.
However, I was terrified that I’d cough or sneeze during the great Segovia’s performance, and so right before the curtain rose I hacked and hacked and honked and honked. The dowager to my left turned, lowered her opera glasses, and inquired, “Do you plan on doing that all throughout the performance?” I said, “No, ma’am, I am getting it all out now.”
Then a small man, almost ninety years old, walked out onto that enormous stage at Shea’s Buffalo Theater, a stage where we’d watched knights on horseback in Camelot and the goings-on of an entire Thai village in The King and I. One small man on a stool, who didn’t speak to us in English, filled that large stage and that enormous theater for over two hours, transporting us from the cold and snow to someplace warm and romantic with the soaring melodies of his Spanish guitar. I wanted to move to Andalusia, take guitar lessons, and wear thick glasses with dark black, heavy square frames.
My mom and dad took me to shows at Shea’s, Studio Arena, Artpark, Melody Fair, the Aud, UB’s Katharine Cornell Theatre, and Kleinhans Music Hall, and many more wonderful productions at local churches, synagogues, and event spaces. I remember how we’d walk across Main Street and see people in Dada attire prophesying end-times in loud voices (turns out they were right), talking to themselves, and even fighting with themselves. My mom, a psychiatric nurse, would explain that they had problems and most likely thought they were talking to other people. Being an only child, I could certainly understand the value of having an imaginary friend, but I remember thinking, Wouldn’t you choose someone you got along with so it’d be fun to do things together?
Nowadays you walk down Main Street and people are all yammering into their cell phones and everyone looks like they’re living on cloud cuckoo if you don’t see those little wires coming out of their heads. Maybe you’d call it installation art, or art of the moment. My mother the nurse would call it people not watching where they’re going who will end up in the paraplegic ward at Erie County Medical Center, and don’t call her when it happens because she told you so. Now that everyone has cell phones, my mom says you have to identify crazy people by looking at their shoes. Only I don’t know what to look for.
My Sweet Home Junior High School English class went to see a matinee of A Christmas Carol, and kids sitting in the row directly in front of us threw pennies onto the stage and my class got the blame. Even worse, it was the seventies so the actors picked them up.
On another class trip, a world-renowned danseur was performing in George Balanchine’s Jewels when he fell and improvised a somersault off the stage. I realized that no matter how famous you are and how much you practice, shit can still go wrong.
The real show that night was on the way home, when the big yellow school bus went down West Chippewa Street at eleven o’clock. It was 1978. You want to talk about art? The neighborhood was a media presentation so mixed that it included silver Spandex. That you could dress fur up or down I guess I was aware of. But fuchsia fur hot pants? No, that was definitely something new.
By age fifteen, I knew almost every work in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Pete was studying to become a docent, so I’d hold up flash cards with pictures of the paintings and sculptures and quiz him. I hate to admit that I did this in exchange for food at Burger King and not for art’s sake, but as an adult I remember the French artists Rousseau and Gauguin and the French fries all with equal appreciation.
My artist friend Russell Ram, who won the gold medal at the National Collage Society annual exhibit and has his work in the permanent collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center, says that Western New York has always been a supportive community for artists. This is evidenced not only by the number of artists, galleries, museums, and private collections, but the fact that the Buffalo Society of Artists, founded in 1891, is one of the oldest continuously operating arts organizations in the country. “Despite its reputation as being a blue-collar town, art has always been a large part of the fabric of the Buffalo area community.”
My elementary school teachers were fond of saying, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger.” Inspiration comes from all places. If you’d told me that writing about waiting for the bus with snot frozen to my face would later become my art, I wouldn’t have believed it, but as usual, those teachers were right.
When we experience art, we can never know what will come of it. There’s a woman who’s seen The Sound of Music more than a thousand times. Maybe she misunderstood the line “With songs they have sung for a thousand years,” or maybe that musical is the art that speaks to her.
I volunteer at the Booker T. Washington Learning Center, in East Harlem, where we struggle to find enough time to work on reading, math, and science. But what always takes precedence is exposure to art—dance performances, plays and musicals, concerts, sculpture presentations, visits to botanical gardens, architecture tours. We drop everything if we can get tickets to a show or an exhibit.
Because even when we don’t know the exact value of art—whether a work sells for a dollar or a million dollars, if it’s at the Allentown Art Festival or in the Albright-Knox—we intrinsically understand that it’s powerful, sometimes ineffable, and, most important, transformative.
For instance, there were forty-eight professional Elvis impersonators in 1977. Now there are 116,328, and that doesn’t include the flying Elvises, or would that be Elvi? Anyway, if this growth rate continues, by the year 2025 one in four people will be an Elvis impersonator.
Arborgeddon
Buffalonians love this story: It was late fall and the Indians asked their chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a chief in modern society, he’d never been taught the old ways, and when he looked at the sky he couldn’t tell what the winter was going to be like. To be on the safe side, he told his tribe the winter was indeed going to be cold, and that members should collect plenty of firewood. But being a practical leader, he also called the National Weather Service and asked, “Is the coming winter supposed to be cold?” The meteorologist responded, “It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold.” So the chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared. A week later he called the National Weather Service again. “Does it still look like it’s going to be a very cold winter?” “Yes,” the man at the National Weather Service again replied. “It’s going to be a very cold winter.” The chief went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find. Two weeks later, the chief called the National Weather Service. “Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?” “Absolutely,” the man replied. “It’s looking more and more like it’s going to be one of the worst winters we’ve ever seen.” “How can you be so sure?” the chief asked. The weatherman replied, “The Indians are collecting firewood like crazy.” And that pretty much sums up weather forecasting in Western New York.
