A dozen random Good Friday I-wonders

• I wonder if Jesus rolls His eyes anytime He hears we mortal sinners refer to the worst day of His entire life as Good Friday. “Good Friday? Oh, it was the best! One heck of a swell time!” I hope He’s not sarcastic. Sarcasm’d be unbecoming Savior behavior.”

• I wonder if your soul can get sent to hell for being sacrilegious on Earth. I hope not  because I’m a sacrilegious as all get out. I don’t do it to disparage friends of faith, whom I admire, but I don’t see the point of having a brain if you didn’t use it. It makes me spiritual soulmates with Thomas Jefferson who said, “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

• I wonder if my grandfather has in his afterlife met either God or Jefferson. He had what to me is one of the great philosophical questions of all time and he said he was going to ask it to God. The question: “I know you created heaven and earth, but who or what created you?”

• I wonder if he remembers me telling him he was being presumptuous about going to heaven. What if, I said, he was sent to the other place and he was allowed to ask Satan one question. What would he ask? Quick as a whip he said, “So when’s Chris getting here?”

• I wonder who determined coronavirus should become COVID-19? I don’t know which I like least.

• I wonder how many people who are ignoring sound science and going to packed Easter Sunday services like to ridicule snake handlers as backwards morons.

• I wonder how the faithful will react if Jesus comes back on Easter but is dressed head-to-toe in military grade PPE.

• I wonder if Lazarus had any siblings and they resented him because he had two birthdays each year.

• I wonder how many of you remember this ’17 story about the Easter Sunday church service when my declining mother nearly choked to death at the altar on a communion wafer. If it’s not sacrilegious it’s at least plenty irreverent.

• I wonder if my friends think I’m being snobby by declining their zoom bull sessions. I generally detest having to talk on the phone and the idea of having to “appear” on it is even more distasteful.

• I wonder if any of you will be impressed that I researched the reason why the day we slayed the Savior is somehow “Good” Friday. Blame it on our nimble, ever-shifting language. Turns out “good” used to mean “holy,” and that, too, was before, thanks to Michael Jackson, that “bad” meant “good.”

• Lastly, I wonder if it makes me a bad person to on this holy Good Friday wish it were just a regular old Good Time Friday.

Support your small businesses! Tin Lizzy kitchen open Friday for takeout/delivery!

(522 words)

Welcome evidence of human activity stared me right in the face today as I made my solitary trudge to the front door of the Tin Lizzy.

They’re opening Friday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. for take-out or delivery!

The modified menu includes your typical Lenten specials for … for … reasonable, I’m sure, mystery prices to come.

I like that Rick and Lisa chose not to include the price. After all, one of the most popular features in the building is a wheel of chance where lucky participants can win a can of Spam (yay!) and unlucky ones are required to buy the bartender a drink (boo).

You’d be amazed at the bar-wide drama that plays out on that wheel of Spam fortune as it clicks down to victory or despair.

We’re into about Week 4 of the building being on lock down. 

It’ll be five years in July since I began celebrating the Tin Lizzy in books and here on the blog. It’s just the coolest place. I love it here.

But I’m used to loving it so much more than I do now that I’m here all alone.

I still come in almost every day for at least three hours in the morning, and a couple in the afternoon.

I try to be discreet. I don’t want anyone to get the impression there’s any party going on and they weren’t invited. I wonder what people think when they see me going in the door.

They probably think, “There goes that writer guy again. I’ll bet he spends his whole day drinking and talking to himself. I’d like to see what would happen if for even one day he had to work a real job.”

So at least passing strangers are thinking the same thing my family thinks when they see me go out the door.

It’s odd being all alone in a place so renown for liveliness.

It wasn’t that long ago when people were always popping in to say hello and I was always trying to think of ways to make their visit memorable or gossip worthy.

I’ve thought of sitting at my desk buck naked and telling visitors I write better in the nude. It’d be fun to see how rapidly the story’d spread.

Hell, these days I could roam the building nude and no one would see.

Well, maybe the owner. He still pops in. But I’d be afraid to be up here buck naked with him.

What if he’d call the cops? What if he threw my ass out on the street?

Worse, what if he thought it was a new custom and began removing his clothes?

There are some types of “Buck naked” with which I want nothing to do.

So stop in tomorrow and order one of the specials. It’ll make me happy to hear noises again and you’ll be supporting a local business when your support has never meant more.

The Tin Lizzy is a cool building, but it’s just a building.

It’s probably similar to the building most of you are in right now. 

It’s the people in the building who make it truly cool.

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Cheers to Gary Portnoy! Who's Gary Portnoy?

(663 words)

Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.

Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot. Wouldn’t you like to get away?

By now, I’d say about three-quarters if you jumped right to the chorus. Sing it with me!

“Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name! And they’re always glad you came! You wanna go where people know, people are all the same. You wanna go where everybody knows you name.”

In a time of chaste isolation and self-quarantine, could there be a more poignant and tuneful lyrical yearn than Gary Portnoy’s “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” the 1982 bar anthem he co-wrote with Judy Hart Angelo?

While much of America is binge-watching the blood-drenched duplicity of “Ozarks” or the bizzaro appeal of “Tiger King,” my wife and I settle in each night to enjoy a nearly 40-year-old network sitcom that  only once dared to broadcast a pair of nipples (they were Woody’s).

The show still holds up. It’s still hilarious. And a big part of its charm will forever be Portnoy’s understated, yet euphoric theme song, the slender 91-word ditty  that TV Guide editors in 2013 declared the “Greatest TV Theme of All-Time.”

Given the pandemic backdrop, I think it deserves even better than that.

“Where Everybody Knows Your Name” is to sitcom theme songs what John Lennon’s “Imagine” is to humanity.

It’s an aspirational reflection on the flawed yet jubilant communal transactions that take place when, well, a bunch of mostly dysfunctional white people who like to drink and bitch get together.

And, damn, if that son of a bitch isn’t catchy as hell.

I wonder about Portnoy, 63. He and Hart Angelo also share writing credit for sitcom theme songs that kicked off “Mr. Belevedere” and “Punky Brewster.” Portnoy wrote songs for Air Supply (“I’ll Never Get Enough of You”), Dolly Parton (“Say Goodnight,”) and Cheryl Ladd (too murky for my meager research purposes).

He’s released four albums, the most recent being “Songs Along The Way,” from 2010. His must be a peculiar kind of fame. Or is it the opposite, a peculiar kind of obscurity?

He’s best known for performing what is arguably one of the most popular songs in history. A whopping 84.4 million viewers watched the May 20, 1993, “Cheers” finale — double “All in the Family” finale and second only to M*A*S*H (105.9 million). And guaranteed most of us at least hummed along with Portnoy.

I saw a pre-COVID-19 item that listed dates where you could see Portnoy live.

So he’s still performing “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” in places full of people who don’t know his.

I doubt the song’s made him rich, which is a pity because circumstances may lead him to resent it.

Portnoy on Stage: “Any requests?”

Rude Drunk: “Yeah, play the theme from ‘Cheers!’”

Portnoy: “I just played it.”

Rude Drunk: “I know. Play it again. Then play it again after that!”

It’s narrow-minded of me, I admit, but I’m with the drunk. I could listen to that song over and over. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel welcome. It makes me feel optimistic.

You could say it makes me, er, cheerful!

We’re so hyper-focused, justifiably so, on social distancing I wonder if we’ll ever be able to return to the days when there was no hesitancy in shaking a hand offered in friendship.

I wonder if we’ll ever feel comfortable congregating in rooms full of strangers on the faithful belief that we’re in a happy place where people go because we intuitively know our troubles are all the same.

They’re places where people think it’s a valuable use of time to spend hours discussing the irony of a man writing a song about everybody knowing your name toiling in anonymity.

So cheers to Gary Portnoy!

“Cheers!” just wouldn’t be the same without you.

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COVID now worse than DISCO

(727 words)

I guess I was about 25 when I confided to an older friend my sheepish confession of my generational uselessness.

He and his peers valiantly marched in protests against racial hatred, voter inequality, gender discrimination, unjust Far East wars and Watergate corruptions.

“Geez,” I complained, “all my generation has to brag about is we rid the world of disco.”

His response forever endeared himself to me and led to a lifelong conviction that my life mattered.

“Well, Chris, that was very important. I thank you for your service.”

It ain’t exactly like I helped conquer Mount Suribachi but ever since I’ve always felt a quiet kinship to the honorees on Veterans Day.

If you switch just one letter COVID could be an evil anagram of DISCO.

It’s a tricky business comparing a lethal pandemic to a widely disparaged but otherwise harmless musical genre, but readers have plenty of doomsday options on the web. If you’d prefer to focus on sadness, here’s a good weeper from today’s Washington Post: “I’m a funeral director: The pandemic has made saying goodbye painfully lonely.”

Perhaps I’d advance my career if I learned some earnest perspective, like don’t write that vanquishing disco music was equivalent to fighting the Japanese on Iwo Jima. But I just can’t help it.

I guess I’d describe myself right now three parts fearful/one part hopeful — sort of an Arnold Palmer Tea of emotions. Or to put it with some paraphrasing to music …

At first I was afraid, I was petrified

Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side

But then I spent so many nights thinking how COVID did me wrong

And I grew strong

And I learned how to get along …

Even someone who hates disco has to admit, Gloria Gaynor’s 1979 anthem, “I Will Survive,” is pretty catchy.

Highly infectious, you might say.

I’m heartened by all the human goofiness we see flourishing in a time of death and fear.

I wonder if during the pre-internet days of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu outbreak the still-healthy frittered away their remaining days teaching the cat stupid tricks or if they just moped around till symptoms left them bedridden.

I’m sure once they eliminated that scourge no one dreamed it could return to ravage anew. They were mistaken …

And so you're back

From outer space

I just walked in to find you here with that pandemic look upon your face

I should have changed that stupid lock, I should have made you leave your key

If I'd known for just one second you'd be back to bother me and Doc Fauci

I think part of the reason I remain cheerfully optimistic, which is superior to stubbornly optimistic, is because I still feel some control over my outcome. I’m home and get along well with the cellmates I used to call family.

It is spring, the season when Mother Nature puts on her make-up.

And I with my whole heart believe in the men and women who are working to vanquish COVID. I can in my mind see them sitting crowded elbow-to-elbow at the press conference table — screw social distancing! — announcing the vaccine.

I see them laughing with relief at their historic achievement. One of them is holding a stick with a novelty coronavirus beach ball dangling from a string.

The whole room erupts in song …

Go on now, go! Walk out the door!

Just turn around now

'Cause you're not welcome anymore!

Weren't you the one who tried to hurt us with goodbye

Do you think we'd crumble

Did you think we'd lay down and die?

Oh no, not I, I will survive

So disco lives. 

And, for now, so do you and I.

What choice do we have?

I believe it’s our duty to press on, to love the ones we’re with, encourage the others and support the front line essentials we’re relying on to get us through this.

It’d be presumptuous of a heathen like me to declare our doctors and nurses godforsaken, but as a taxpayer I’d sure say those in the hospitals are govforsaken.

Me, I’ll try and do all those worthy things, the whole time trying to get the disco to quit running over and over through my head.

It’s all part of stayin’ alive.

Stayin’ alive

Stayin’ alive

Ah, ha, ha, ha …

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My thoughts on Dylan & "Murder Most Foul"

(594 words)

So here’s my gut reaction to “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan’s divisive new 17-minute song primarily about the Kennedy assassination.

• It’s like listening to four mediocre Bob Dylan songs strung together.

• Might as well call it “Pee Break Most Foul” because if he ever plays this live, every concert goer will at the first notes head straight to their designated restroom.

• The idea of riffing over an era with evocative phrasing has already been done and done better by Billy Joel with “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” only Billy scattered his observations over four impactful decades — and he only needed 4 minutes, 51 seconds to get it done! Even better, albeit more narrowly focused, is Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

Of course in 30 years, I might disavow this judgment, and declare the song utter genius, an essential stitch in the American fabric.

It is my contention that everyone who becomes a Dylan devotee starts out by mocking him. That’s how it started with me.

In fact, for me to begin appreciating Bob Dylan he had to cease being Bob Dylan and become some one else entirely.

He became Lucky Wilbury.

Yes, it wasn’t until I heard him with the Traveling Wilburys that a light went off. He didn’t take himself as seriously as every one else did.

And if you’re today having a bad day (welcome to the club!), realize that once upon a time Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan were sitting around and one of them said, “I have an idea. Maybe we should start a band.”

And they all agreed!

Petty said: “The whole experience was some of the best days of my life, really, and I think it probably was for us all ... The thing I guess would be hardest for people to understand is what good friends we were. It really had very little to do with combining a bunch of famous people. It was a bunch of friends that just happened to be really good at making music.”

Okay, enough sunshine. Back to disparaging “Murder Most Foul.”

Some of the rhyming is just lazy, and the song contains what to me is the single worth lyric he’s ever composed. Maybe worst in history.

Wolfman, Oh, Wolfman, Oh Wolfman Howl!

Rub-a-Dub-Dub

It’s Murder Most Foul!

This is not satire. It’s not a put on. This is factual.

This from the man who on “Thunder on the Mountain” managed to convincingly rhyme “Sons of Bitches” with “orphanages.” So I expect more from him.

I know many people disdain the idea of a 16:57 song (everyone feels obliged to round it up).

Not me. Some of my favorite Dylan masterpieces (“Desolation Row,” “Highlands,” “Brownsville Girl”) exceed 10 minutes.

This one just feels bloated. At least it’s a welcome reprieve from covering old Frank Sinatra tunes, a trend I’ve facetiously said was a factor in Petty’s accidental overdose.

So I don’t like “Murder Most Foul.”

But who knows?

Give me another two decades and I might change my mind and hail it as genius, just like I did with its composer.

Interested in spending roughly the equivalent time on three Dylan songs I contend are bound to break down the walls that separate mockery from appreciation?

Check out “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” “Working Man’s Blues #2,” and “Where Are You Tonight?”

The songs are evidence of a transcendent artist who can be exasperating, tender, charming, infuriating and with every release volcanically compelling.

Just like a woman?

No.

Just like Bob Dylan.

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If I should die before I wake ...

(714 words)

Give my shoes, the tri-colored Giorgio Brutini dandies, to the funeral director. I want to go my great reward in stylish footwear. I don’t understand the how or why, but in the past two years I’ve developed an odd shoe fetish. I now  look at the Johnston & Murphy catalogue the way I used to look at Playboy. Either way, I imagine proper afterlife footwear will matter and I want to make a good first impression.

Donate my golf clubs to the First Tee organization so they’ll go to some less fortunate. Nothing has made me more persistently miserable than trying to properly strike a golf ball. Conversely, few things have made me as happy as the time I’ve spent either anticipating golf or talking about playing golf after we’re done. First Tee’s a wonderful organization for perpetuating the furies and joys of this confounding game.

I have two quality Cross pens. Give the gold one to Josie, the pearl one to Lucy. Tell them the pens are sentimentally significant to the old man. I commemorated the publication of my two most recent books with the splurge and signed lots of books with each. Then tell them that one day, guaranteed, each will lose these pricey pens. They will feel bad, like they let me down. Tell them not to fret. They’re just pens. I like my pens, but I love my daughters.

I have about 15 Tommy Bahama camp shirts. Wearing one makes me feel perfectly relaxed. Perhaps because it’s rare I’m wearing one when I’m not holding a bourbon on the rocks. Have a party at the Tin Lizzy and let all my friends fight over their favorites.

Please give my wife an introduction to a handsome handyman who’s good with a wrench. After 25 years with me, she’s deserving of a man who can fix a leaky toilet, mobilize a busted vacuum cleaner and is eager to wage war with nature when the lawn gets a shade past shaggy. Please, too, preserve the dignity of my memory by keeping the courtship chaste through at least 2027.

Give all my Winston Churchill books to some bone-headed liberal so that he may absorb some of the warmth, wit and wisdom of one of history’s great conservatives, to me the most interesting man since Jesus Christ.

Give all my FDR books to some bone-headed conservative so that she can absorb some of the warmth, wit and wisdom of one of history’s great liberals and see why Churchill with an open-heart revered him more than he did any other man alive.

Am I forgetting anything?

I am.

My internal organs!

Give my kidneys to a pair of young single mothers who without the donation would orphan darling children who need their mommies. Give my liver to the army vet who’s struggled both physically and spiritually since the goddamned war. Let it be my liver that leads to a change of heart and may he grow beloved as he devotes his life to helping others.

My heart? Let’s give that to the dear granny whose own, though full of love, is weakened by hereditary defect. Let it be my heart that beats for her as she delights yet another generation of lapped loved ones.

Save the best for my eyes. Give them to the boy born blind and let him see the exact same things I saw. Let him see all the glory, the smiles, the kindness, the beauty and the all the hope that’s hidden in the pessimistic darkness.

Lastly, bestow upon the whole world my native optimism which has sustained me through so much unbidden tumult. It’s useful even when it’s foolhardy, giving birth as it does to the conviction that we’ll beat this and what will emerge in its ugly shadow will be a better, more tolerant place of cheer we can all share.

And on that day let there be a grand jubilee like the world’s never seen, a party of universal revelry  …

On second thought, screw it.

Gimme all my shit back. Right now — starting with the shoes.

I’m not done kicking ass and, by God, I intend to look sharp while I’m at it.

And tell Mr. Fix-It to stop staring at my wife or he’s first!

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