Junior Mints (1956)

The Wooster Schine Theater was a classic example of an art deco movie palace. The ticket booth was a smooth chrome curve extending from the wall, and a ramp lined with movie posters of features and attractions led up to the two sets of bronzed double doors. They opened into a lobby of sky-blue walls, burgundy velvet curtains, and gold starburst chandeliers. There was a long glass candy counter and a brass machine for popcorn. Off to the left, stairs led up to the balcony, while on the main level two aisles led down to a real stage, where occasionally there was live entertainment (my father remembers for his senior prom night that they had entertainment and movies until 2 or 3 am. I thought group fun on prom night to keep kids out of trouble was a modern thing).

When the curtains opened, the movie began. On Saturdays, for a quarter they ran trailers of what would be showing a few weeks out, a cartoon, a lesser picture (a B film or something shorter) and then the feature. My father remembers, “When you went to the movies, you spent your Saturday there. It would start at one and you wouldn’t get out until four or five in the afternoon.” Most of the time the movie was a quarter, but for some of the big releases the price was a dollar. Ben-Hur was one such film. He thought that was nothing short of robbery. I asked him if he paid the dollar. He says he doesn’t remember, but he knows he saw Ben-Hur.

The interior of the Wooster Theater in the 1930s. Note the organ next to the stage. More images here.

I wondered if he ever really thought about or noticed the theater itself. While he knew that it was “nice,” it never struck him as anything particularly special. “Really Mar, I was there for the movies.” The Wooster Theater had ushers – always men, never women – that wore burgundy jackets and carried little flashlights to help you find a seat. “Why no ladies?” I asked. “Don’t really know, but they were definitely always men, college age or a little older. How else are you gonna get a bunch of high school kids to quiet down?” To me, growing up as I did in an age of twelve screen megaplexes, the concept of sitting in a balcony to watch a movie sounded romantic and sophisticated. “They only opened the balcony when they had a guy [usher] to watch it. You couldn’t have twenty kids running around up there with nobody to watch them.” So much for sophistication.

My father was like his mother in that if it was a movie, he liked it. Some of the earliest films he can remember seeing at the Wooster Theater are The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Man from the Alamo (1953). His most vivid memories are of movies like White Christmas (1954), Bambi (1942, probably the ‘57 re-release) and Singing in the Rain (1952) -- big, colorful films with music and wide screen cinematography.

He remembers a lot of hype leading up to the premiere of Forbidden Planet (1956). Quaker Oats Puffed Wheat sponsored a national contest for kids to name the robot. But in searching for this contest, for the kid who won or runner-up robot names, I can only find a Quaker Oats promo to give away free tickets to see Forever, Darling and Forbidden Planet. What could my father be remembering? Or misremembering? I’m not sure I want to tell him that this memory he has is false; if memory is better than reality, what difference does it make after fifty years? What is absolutely true is that Robbie the Robot inspired Spielberg, Lucas, and my father with a lifetime love of sci-fi thrillers, and I am pleased to see that Robbie, like Trigger has his own IMDB page.

Talking to my father made me remember something from my own childhood. “Hey Dad – you know that story you told us, about that thing you did with the washers and the rubber band on the seats of the theater?” “Oh… That.” Yeah Dad, that. I couldn’t get him to confess how old he was when he did it (which means he was old enough to know better) but at some point he and his friends, utilizing the same principles as the motor of a rubber-band airplane, created a gizmo to make a sound like “stinkies” (his word). Apparently against the corduroy seats it sounded amazingly realistic. I’m not sure if they did this to embarrass unsuspecting others (probably) or purely for their own amusement (undoubtedly), but it has always reminded me that my father is not all that he seems.

Once my father started high school he began seeing movies with large groups of friends (for all I know this is when the “stinkies" gizmo was at its most humorous). “It was nothing for just my brother and I to start out and end up with a group of ten or twenty kids. We’d fill up an entire row of seats.” He watched Psycho (1960) with one such group. According to my father they were deathly silent during the film, right up until Vera Mills found Mrs. Bates. Apparently he was not the only one who let out a yelp.

It occurred to me that maybe he and his friends were the reason that they needed male ushers. Did he ever get into trouble? “Oh, we’d get a ‘If I hear one more thing, this row is out of here!’ Other kids got thrown out, but I never did. Besides, we were only noisy during the previews. We wanted to see the movie.” I suspect that my father was probably as rowdy as anybody else, but he’s probably telling the truth. Getting thrown out would have embarrassed him profoundly, so I’m sure he never crossed the line -- or more to the point, never got caught.

My father may not have been particular about the movies he saw, but he was very discriminating regarding his refreshment choices. Grandma usually gave my father and his younger brother 30 or 35 cents apiece, which left them with a nickel or dime for candy. My father didn’t buy candy in the theater, though – too expensive. Just next to the theater there was a candy store. “It was tiny, maybe the size of a small room. One wall was all glass jars filled with penny candy, but I didn’t care about that. The counter with the cash register was a glass case that had pre-packaged candy – Snickers bars and stuff like that.” My father bought a box of junior mints for a nickel.

Junior mints, introduced in 1949 by the Welch Company, makers of Milk Duds and Sugar Babies.

For as long as I can remember, chocolate mint is a flavor I associate with my father. In the summertime there was a stash of small peppermint patties in the freezer. Junior mints, however, were something I had only at Halloween.

“How come I only remember peppermint patties growing up? Did you ever get peppermint patties at the movies?”

“No, not usually. I preferred junior mints. They melt in your mouth better. They also came in a cardboard box, so you didn’t have to eat them all at once. Peppermint patties do not survive well in pockets.” Ever the chemist, he then explained that junior mints, depending on how they’re shipped and stored, will develop a grainy texture in hot weather. The hydrophilic nature of sugar and its properties of re-crystallization aside, peppermint patties just travel better. Once again we are reminded by our elders that candy was a whole lot better in their day.

Or maybe not. My first memory of junior mints comes from when I was five years old. I was in the hospital and had to stay overnight, alone for the first time. Just before my parents left, my father put a box of junior mints in the top drawer. He made sure I saw him do it. “There are junior mints right in there, Mar, so if you want a snack, go right ahead and have some.” I’m sure he did not know that each night they tied a net (they called it a “canopy,” but I was not fooled) over every crib so we couldn’t wander around in the middle of the night. Needless to say I couldn’t get to the junior mints, but I remembered that I had them – a talisman against loneliness, a gift from my father to me.

Details matter. It’s just not always the details that you’d expect.

King of the Bullwhip

Back in March the folks at The Bijou Blog posted “Literary Depictions of the Movie Matinee Experience,” wherein Rich Mendoza pondered the lack of literary descriptions of the early twentieth century bijou experience. There was a contest for readers to send in whatever passages they could find describing the simple act of going to the movies. My mind went immediately to Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and the chapter where Vivi and her friends enter the Shirley Temple look-alike contest. (You can read my entry here) And whaddya know? Little ol’ me won, and Bijou Bob sent along one of the original Matinee at the Bijou press kits circa 1982, filled with nifty goodies. (My detractors will be quick to point out that I was also the only person who actually sent anything in, but leave us not dwell upon mere technicalities.)

However, even as I wrote up my entry it occurred to me that my father was an untapped source of afternoon theater experiences. So I called my father one Saturday afternoon, and I tapped him. We talked for well over an hour, and I asked about all of it -- how old he was, what he saw, if he remembered the décor of the buildings or what he thought about the movies.

Oh what I found out.

As a matter of fact, I learned so many interesting things about his experiences that I have to divide what he told me into chapters. This is the first of three.

*****

Glamorous art-deco theaters have been well documented and photographed, but I don’t think people realize the importance of the little second run theaters in introducing classic films to a new generation. After World War II, the movies had to compete with a new form of entertainment – television. It took a long time for Hollywood to take the challenge of TV seriously and embrace the medium as a new venue for their films. In fact, Metro Goldwyn Mayer was one studio that refused to allow its stable of actors to even appear on television. Eventually there were local, then national programs which showed old movies, but when my father began seeing films in the late ‘40s, the only way to see The Wizard of Oz or Mutiny on the Bounty was through second-run releases.

The Wayne Theater was narrow, with only one aisle down the middle and no balcony. It was so small that it didn’t even have the means to pop popcorn. “They had imported popcorn,” my father recalled, “In big bags behind a counter.” The Wayne Theater did not show first run movies, only B films, second run films, and serials. My father recalls seeing a lot of film noir there as well. (“When you were eight years old?” “Yeah.” “Did you understand any of it?” “No, but who cares? It was the movies.”) However, what really attracted my father to the Wayne Theater was The Cowboys.

Just listing their names conjures fabulous images: actors like Wild Bill Elliot and Rocky Lane, Whip Wilson and Big Boy Williams, and characters named Red Ryder, the Cisco Kid, the Durango Kid and Chico Rafferty. (“Excuse me?” I said to that last one. “You heard right. His mother was Mexican and his Father was Irish.” In a genre fraught with nasty racial stereotyping, there’s a bit of early diversity for you.) But the name that stood out most in my father’s mind, one I could tell from his voice held special memories, was Lash LaRue.

I had never heard of Lash La Rue.

“Sure! Guy with a whip, always wore black. Looked a lot like Humphrey Bogart. You know, Song of Old Wyoming? Eddie Dean and Jennifer Holt were in it. You remember Jennifer Holt; she was Tim Holt’s sister.” (Discussing the actors in Cowboys with my father is like an eerie family reunion where I have a feeling I should know these people and I don’t.) I don’t know how my father can rattle off all these facts, but he’s been watching Cowboys for sixty years and I take him at his word. Lash La Rue? I needed to investigate this.

LaRue as the 'Cheyenne Kid' in SONG OF OLD WYOMING (PRC, 1945)(From Minard Coons)

As the photo shows, La Rue did indeed look a lot like Bogart. For his role in Song of Old Wyoming (1945) La Rue chose a black outfit with white piping, which became the look he had throughout his career. No one could mistake La Rue for a singing cowboy, and that was his intention. He made many B films at PRC Studios in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and as his name suggests, his trademark was his use of a bullwhip to bring down his foes. There is an unsubstantiated Internet rumor that Lash La Rue coached Harrison Ford to use the bullwhip for his role as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (I don’t believe it, but I like the continuity of the image). What is absolutely certain is that Steven Spielberg had Lash La Rue in mind while he created the Indiana Jones character, and Anthony De Longis, the man who coached Ford for his role in the 2008 movie, was inspired by La Rue and the whip-wielding characters who came after him.

(If you want to learn more about Lash La Rue, go where I went: The Old Corral at www.b-westerns.com. I could summarize more, but this site is the best. Chuck Anderson has rounded up information on scores of the cowboys, villains, stuntmen, and those little-known players essential to the B-Western genre. And if you need live action thrills, go to YouTube and look up “Lash La Rue.” If you haven’t seen Lash fight El Azote in King of the Bullwhip (1950), then you ain’t seen a cowboy film.)

After careful research and viewing of archival footage (i.e. – YouTube) I can only say that… those films were bad. Low budget. Thin plots. Footage constantly reused, both from earlier in the movie and other films from the studio.

And yet…

Those aren’t the things you care about when you’re eight years old. You only care that you’re out of the house and off on your own, you’ve got a whole afternoon of movies with cowboys and bad guys, horses and chases and action. Even at that age you can feel that being in a darkened theater is a place apart. Cliff-hanging serials and Lash’s whip action weren’t about reality; they were about possibility. For whole afternoons, those possibilities were my father’s only reality, and he, like so many others of his generation, never forgot how that felt.

I think the reason my father was such a fan of Matinee at the Bijou was because their format was how he grew up seeing movies. In the early ‘80s home video was only just beginning. There was the late movie or the Sunday movie, and the local UHF stations might have a movie host or two, so you could see High Noon or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon on occasion. But nobody showed serials. The first time he saw that MATB was showing serials, he was gone.

“All right fans!” he shouted. “They’ve got Crash Corrigan!”

“They’ve got what?”

“Not ‘what,’ ‘who.’” My father gripped the arms of his Lazy-Boy, eyes widened with disbelief that a child of his should have lived so long without knowing Mr. Corrigan’s fine body of work. “Sit down, Mar. Pay attention. This is educational.” And it was. (You’ve got to have a cool name like “Crash” in order to carry off what amounts to argyle socks and scaly BVDs. Trust me.)

From my father I learned that some really great cinema comes in small segments, and that sometimes something can be so bad that it can actually be kind of good. I learned that the improbability of a cliff-hanging ending makes it that much more fun to watch, that much more engrossing. The more impossible the premise, the more you are transported to a different world. More importantly, I learned it doesn’t matter if the film is a classic or B list, if the theater is an architectural landmark so small they have “imported popcorn” or your own darkened living room – what matters most about viewing films is your own willingness to suspend disbelief.

Details matter. It’s just not always the details that you’d expect.

Update: Science

Well, MP's hair seems to trump feline urinary practices -- SO FAR. Clearly MP can only refresh the deterrent on a limited, 3 week basis.

And yes, the cats have changed their location, but at least it's not the front walkway anymore.

Experiment: MP vs. Stray Cat

There is a black and white feral cat that's been digging in the front flowerbed. Oh who are we kidding here -- he's using it as a litterbox. I've decided to try deterring him from this habit by scattering MP's hair clippings around the bushes (MP has a very distinctive hairstyle, and I cut it. This is worthy of its own post.) Cats are supposedly picky about where they do business, so the introduction of something new and weird (i.e. - MP's hair) will make him go elsewhere (probably the next flowerbed over, but let's take it one bed at a time).

If this experiment is successful, I don't know what we can draw conclusions about -- cats' urinary habits or the smell of MP's head.

I love science.

Gardened Out

The growing things are winding down, and this is just as well. I am feeling a bit gardened out. But like all gardeners (well, all obsessive-compulsive gardeners) I am taking stock in what I’ve done and what I would change next year. Let me share my successes and failures, beginning with...

Squashes
Undoubtedly the biggest disappointment, my curcubits (cucumbers, melons, zucchinis, and, well… “squashes”) were slow to start, forcing me to replant, and then were very quickly set upon by both spotted and striped cucumber beetles. I got sucked in thinking they looked kind of cute before I realized what kind of havoc they could wreak, which they promptly did. I got fewer than ten cucumbers before the vine succumbed to cucumber wilt, so I pulled the rest of the plants to avoid further soil contamination. (At this point I have to say how impressed I am by the simplicity of garden nomenclature. My cucumber vines wilted, and the disease that caused it is called “cucumber wilt.” The bugs that carry the bacterium in their evil little guts are stripy or spotty beetley-looking things, and they are called “striped cucumber beetles” and “spotted cucumber beetles,” respectively. I’m all for transparency in gardening.)

The butternut squash succumbed to a slightly different problem. Not knowing that the Sungold tomatoes would grow into a sprawling jungle of nightshade fecundity, and I planted them too close to the squash. I couldn’t find the squash plants again until they bloomed, but by then they weren’t getting enough sunlight. On the plus side, the striped and spotted cucumber beetles were so busy in the cucumbers that they pretty much left the butternut squashes alone. On the down side, in some kind of pre-arranged turf-agreement, the squash bugs took over the butternut squashes, and they, too, left wilt in their wake (How dumb is it to kill your primary food source? No, wait… Humans do that. Never mind.).

Bottom line on squashes: controlling pest problems begins at the seedling stage either by physical means (row covers and screens) or chemical means (spraying). Weeds trap moisture and provide cover for insects; if they are allowed to gain foothold it’s harder to control the insects, and bacterial vine wilt is inevitable. Spacing is also important; good airflow, especially in humid climates, discourages fungus. Everything needs room to spread out properly without competing for nutrients, not to mention that it’s nice to be able to find stuff, unless you’re like me and enjoy that Eastery feeling of discovering hidden butternut squashes.

But having made all these mistakes, I still managed to eke out 3 tiny squashes (one at 1 lb. and two at 0.5 lbs.), which made the most delicious roasted butternut squash risotto. It was enough to encourage me to try again next year. As soon as I see seedlings, I’ll throw down mulch or newsprint with mulch to keep the weeds down, and I’ll skip the neem oil and go right to pyrethrin.

Beans
The concept of creating a “bean fence” with anchor poles and cross poles and twine wound around is a load of compost. The Blue Lake pole beans had those cross pieces and twine ripped down by the end of July and were cruising towards the neighbor’s fence. The quality of the beans was great; I only wish there had been more. But once again, I didn’t mulch soon enough to keep down weeds, and I planted too many beans in too tight a space, resulting in mineral deficiencies and fungal blight. That was easily controlled when lack of water caused the diseased leaves to fall off (I’m a “hands off” gardener, sort of “organic through lack of doing anything else”).

So! Mulch. Weed. Water. More importantly, there’s a reason they’re called “pole beans.” I’m putting up a line of seven foot poles and planting three seeds at the base. I might wrap a little twine around the pole to give the vines something to hang on to, but I’m not sure that’s necessary.

Tomatoes

This is the first time I’d ever grown tomatoes from seeds (they’re fuzzy). My first Paul R. tomato weighed one and a quarter pounds and I ate it like a steak, but every one after that has been considerably smaller. I was really bad about letting them get too dry before watering, which lead to cracks in the fruit, making each tomato a potential insect hotel. I also let the spray schedule slip a few days, with disastrous results. I can track tomato hornworms by the damage they do, and I do not let them live (which leads to a whole other topic about karmic debit accrued by snipping large caterpillars in half with garden pruners).

As for the Sungold tomatoes, well… It didn’t matter what I did. Unwatered, unweeded, crowded, and attacked by an occasional hornworm, the three Sungolds produced pound after pound of tiny orange tomatoes. By late August I realized that if I ate another Sungold tomato, I would puke. And there they sit to this day, producing tiny orange tomatoes without a care in the world. Of course, those tiny orange tomatoes are full of tiny fuzzy seeds, dropping off the vines as I write. Next year I don’t think I’ll have to “plant” Sungolds anywhere; I think they’re just gonna come up. As a matter of fact, I think they’ll be the new weed problem in that section of the garden. I will plant three Paul Robesons, but only TWO Sungolds next year. Fertilizer and consistent watering will help yield more consistent fruit.

Peaches
I’ve been blogging peaches all season, so I’ll spare you most of those details. My two big lessons: thin more aggressively and keep spraying with the pyrethrin. I think I’ll also seek out some oriental fruit moth traps and see if I can’t make a difference in that problem. Pruning this winter will be essential to try to reverse the damage done by the OFMs. Based on the flowering schedule of this year, I’ll wait until mid-February before I prune. This will give me a few branches I can force indoors for an early spring treat. I’m still trying to get MP to smoke ribs using last year’s prunings, but not having any luck. After this season, I am proud to say I can field-strip a peach in 10 seconds.

Zinnias
The zinnias are the sleeper story of my garden year. I had a tiny patch of dirt left over, and I thought I’d just put in some happy flowers for the heck of it, something I could use as cut flowers and give the place some color. I ordered Burpee’s Cut and Come Again Oklahoma Mix and paid $5 for a packet of seeds that produced… fourteen seedlings. I was livid. “Rip off” and “robbed” were words oft bandied about, as MP will attest. And yet those zinnias exploded. Look at them. I love how this photo makes them look like acres of flowers, but really, we’re talking a 3x4 ft. space, tops.

When the zinnias really started going and a few flowers had begun to fade, I noticed petals strewn over the ground. It was like the leftovers from a colorful wedding. I didn’t think much of it until one morning I caught a goldfinch absolutely ripping the flowers apart to go after the seeds. That was the end of spraying the zinnias with pyrethrin (yes it kills bugs, but it also kills fish and is not so hot for frogs and birds, either. I try to go with the least damaging pest control, but this year, the beetles were bad).

I’m glad I stopped, because not long after I was in the garden, crouched down and studying the beans, when I heard a deep buzzing sound over my shoulder. Certain I was facing down the biggest bee in the Mid-Atlantic States, I turned very slowly and saw not three feet from my head a hummingbird, wanting to have a go at the zinnias. As we regarded one another, my first thought was “My, what a sharp and pointy little beak you have.” Did you know they cheep? Kind of a funny, squeaky sort of cheeping. I did not know that, nor would I have if not for planting the zinnias.

There are still a few things left growing – the zinnias will go until frost, as will the tomatoes. MP has a tiny little jalapeno pepper that survived some kind of fungus and is thriving, in a tiny sort of way. And just the other day I harvested some greens for a salad. MP found me at the sink, gasping and raking at my tongue. “Mustard greens!” I sputtered, hoping the burning in my sinuses wasn’t permanent damage. “Here, try some.”

Gardens. Amazing entertainment, I tell you what…

This Little Piggy Hurts Like Crap

MP hates it when I say, "Eww! This smells terrible! Here, sniff it." I'm not sure what irritates him more: that I'm inviting him to sniff something nasty, or that, for a brief half-second, he leans in to sniff before giving me a withering look and stalking away.

Like the telling of a nightmare in the hope it will fade, sharing bad experiences (i.e. -- the scent of cheap candles, the flavor of uni sushi, or that time you ate half the cream cheese bagel before you noticed that, while the cream cheese was fine, the lid to the cream cheese was covered in mold) is necessary to balance the horror of it. Some things are too big for the individual to handle alone.

Which is why I want to tell you about my big toe.

All summer I keep my toenails painted. Where I live, well-groomed feet are a must. I am known for my bright and eccentric choice of colors -- "tidal wave" (turquoise blue) and "parrot" (lime green) are my particular favorites. Unfortunately, even if you remove the toluene and the formaldehyde, nail polish is some wicked nasty chemistry. For that matter, so is nail polish remover.

So here it is mid-September and I've had nearly six solid months of painted toenails. I removed the polish to give my toes a chance to breathe. The nails are not pretty; they are yellowed (dark colors stain) and dry like you would not believe.

Therefore, it was no great surprise that while I was putting on my kung fu pants, my big toenail snagged on a seam and split. The horrifying part, and whole reason why I'm sharing this, is that is wasn't your typical, horizontal split. No, this was a vertical split, 2 mm wide and 4 mm of side nail all the way into the quick.

After the initial swearing, I stared at it and reviewed my options. I couldn't put my foot in my kung fu shoes with this hanging off. I had no clippers, no file. I could have asked Sifu for a knife, but he probably would have handed me some KA-BAR drop point knife and I couldn't do anything but cut off my toe with that. Nope, only one thing for it -- I pulled.

The whole experience left me surprisingly queasy.

I think I read somewhere that you cannot walk without your big toe. I believe it. Just having that bit of nail gone from the side of my big toe has completely messed me up. Stepping down on my foot feels wrong wrong wrong. It doesn't exactly feel painful, but God knows it doesn't feel right, either.

I think I'm done with painted toenails for the season.

(And thanks for letting me share; I feel better. Really.)

Adaptability Revisited

Our house was built by crack-smoking monkeys. The upstairs ground fault switch is in the hall bathroom, but when it goes out, it doesn't shut off the lights in that bathroom, but the lights in the master bathroom. But only on one side, because the end of the circuit is at the ground floor outdoor receptacle on the back deck.

Crack. Monkeys. Believe it.

I know all of this because for a long time, when it rained I would end up taking showers in the dark, and after I tried to deal with the problem myself, tasting 120 volts in the process (In the last words of every dead electrician, "but I turned it off at the junction box!"), I had a long conversation with an electrician, who informed me that the wiring in my house had monkey-prints all over it.

Well, it rained and the lights went out in the bathroom – on the Friday night beginning Labor Day weekend. No matter what we did, the ground fault switch would not stay set. You never ever want to call a union contractor during a holiday weekend if you can help it, so I tried to think of the bathroom's new look as "mood lighting."

All of this, by the way, is prologue, which is why this post is called "Adaptability Revisited" and not "Crack Smoking Monkeys," which is a good title that I will probably use someday. I wanted to call this post "Adaptability," but I see I already have a post by that name. Strange how events involving MP lead to musing upon this elastic quality of mind...

MP decided he wanted to smoke a pork shoulder for Labor Day, the first one this year. He's been working on ribs, with fabulous results, but he misses doing shoulder. More to the point, he misses smoked pork shoulder leftovers. Doing a pork shoulder is something of a commitment. A 7-8 lb shoulder takes about 12 hours to smoke, which means MP has to *gasp*... get up early! Like, say, 8 AM.

Let me be fair. There are Morning People and there are... What are they, Zombies? You never hear "Night People," what...? Oh yes, "Night Owls." I am a Lark, and MP is Night Owl. He never willingly goes to bed before 12:30 AM, so 8 AM does not find him... fully refreshed. Actually, MP is seldom fully refreshed before 8 oz of coffee, and 20 oz is safer.

So. Pork shoulder. MP decides to get up “early.” I'm up toodling around by 7 AM, fluffing the garden, watering the yard... And it occurs to me to wonder if MP actually set an alarm clock or if I'm supposed to be the alarm clock. What if I was supposed to wake him and I don't? What if I wake him at 8 AM, and he doesn't want to get up until 8:30 AM?

At 8 AM I remove the shoulder from the refrigerator and make a pot of coffee. At 8:15 AM I flitter softly into the bedroom.

I am a terrible flitterer. MP grunts and raises his head immediately.

“Um yes, uh... Hi Sweetie. Was I the alarm clock?”

“No,” MP moans, “I'm waking myself up.” (Translation: fifteen more minutes and get the hell out of the room.)

At 8:30 AM he comes down fully dressed with shoes on, but I am not fooled. He still has pillow lines on his face.

As he transfers his equipment out to the back deck, I have a horrible thought – the lights are tripped in the bathroom, and since the end of the circuit is on the back deck, there's no way the electric smoker will work. Why neither one of us thought of this earlier, I don't know. I mean, you can intuitively grasp the logical connection between the upstairs bathroom lights and the back deck, right?

“What?” said MP.

“Don't worry about it. There's another outlet down in the yard.”

MP stares at the cord of the electric smoker. It's 3 feet long. He stares at me.

“Have some coffee!” I sing out as I trot out to the garage for the 100 ft extension cord. Problem solved.

Or not. Fifteen minutes later MP is still staring foggily at the coils of the smoker. “Isn't it hot yet?” I ask.

He reaches out and wraps his hand around the coil, ““No,” he replies, “I don't think so.”

And wouldn't you know, the receptacle on the front porch is out, too. Son of a Gun. Curse those monkeys. “Well, you can use the outlet in the garage and smoke it out on the cement pad in front of the driveway,” I suggest.

“No, I can't,” MP says as he props himself against the countertop. “I don't want to do it out in front. I don't want anyone to see me. I don't know why, but I don't.”

Barbecue Performance Anxiety? I ponder this. I mean, is he worried about uninvited neighbors looking for handouts, asking questions? It's not like you can hide what you're doing. Big puffs of smoke, cooking meat. It smells. And it's not like MP wears anything stupid when he cooks; no “Kiss the Cook” aprons. He does drink beer, but it's nice beer. And it's stupid to get drunk and play with burning hot metal, he knows that. No, clearly this was a “thing” he just had. There was no talking abut it or convincing him otherwise; it was just one of those “things.”

I popped out of my reverie. MP was staring at me, awaiting Truth. He had not blinked.

“Out one of the windows?”

“Smoke in the house.”

“Good point. Well, if the wind blows south, we can use the north window. Of course, if the wind bows north, then we should use the south window. I wonder what the weather is supposed to be like. Have you seen a weather report? Because I thought maybe it might rain later in the afternoon, but that might hold off till tomorrow –”

MP stood against the countertop with eyes like those of a shot and bleeding deer. Despite being out of bed for 45 minutes, he had not had coffee.

There are times to Think and times to simply Do. “Stand here,” I said, and put him in front of an east facing window. I went outside and knocked on the window with the plug. “Hello? Take this.” MP plugged the cord into an inside socket and the smoker at last had charge. An hour late, maybe, but he was off and... crawling. He still desperately needed coffee.

Adaptability. You wake up thinking you're gonna do one thing and end up doing another. It's too easy to get scope lock and not see the other possibilities, to to end up focused on what you don't have rather than utilizing what you do have. I am a terrible one for getting scope lock. But even when you're trying to avoid fixed-mindedness, you still have limitations. That's why you've got to be honest, and hopefully surround yourself with people who can shore you up when you need it.

MP had his coffee and the pork smoked. Unfortunately, starting an hour later meant everything came in an hour later, which meant we were standing in the kitchen at 11 PM pulling pork. MP was fully awake and singing the praises of his spice rub, and I was trying not to snore in the pork. The only reason I kept eating what I was supposed to be pulling apart was to stay awake. Seriously. After we were through, MP pried the two forks from my hands and gently pushed me off to bed.

You gotta love a man who will smoke pork and clean the kitchen.