Charlotte: Skin-coloring pills will solve America's racial problems

(650 words)

I predict within five years our socially-conscious pharmaceutical manufacturers will develop a pill that will for weeks at a time alter our skin pigments. The pill will act like hair dye, but for the whole epidermis.

Trendy kids will pick vivid blues, fiery reds and canary yellows.

I’d like to see as part of their training our white police officers be given ones that let them know what it’s like to appear black.

I think that would be helpful.

Heck, I’d take one of those too.

Being black for me would be ironically enlightening.

See, I have zero personal insights on what it’s like to be black. 

Everything I hear is anecdotal. Like stories about successful black men who enjoy nice cars — rich, white dudes like ‘em, too, or so I hear — getting pulled over at night for Driving While Black.

I think that would be a nuisance until you start hearing about so many unarmed black men and boys being shot dead in the streets for some innocuous yet insane escalation.

One of the commentators said about how we had a suspected terrorist who’d been shooting bullets at police survive his arrest in downtown Manhattan, yet 40-year-old Terence Cutcher was shot dead on a Tulsa street after calling 911 about a disabled vehicle.

It’s appalling.

It’s happening with such numbing regularity, who can be surprised when there are episodes of reciprocal violence?

I find it odd that an issue that is so ostensibly black and white is imbued with so much gray.

Me, when I’m in trouble, I pray a cop shows up right away. I go out of my way to be extra nice to police officers because I think they have it tough.

I was once moved to anonymously pay for the dry cleaning of a Pennsylvania State Trooper when I saw his uniform hanging there behind my stuff. 

Did I extend a gratuity to a bad cop? I’ll never know.

He may have been dirty, but his uniform was spotless.

I couldn’t extend the same grace to a black person. Our skins are different, but you can’t tell by our duds.

But whenever I’m in Pittsburgh, I without fail extend extra courtesies whenever I deal with diversity. 

Happened just last week. I had one of those awkward sidewalk dosey-dos with a big black guy. He stepped left while I stepped right. My nose nearly bumped into his nipple.

We both smiled. He said, “After you!” and let me proceed.

We made warm eye contact and I said, “Thanks, man. Have a great day!”

I know I’m an idiot, but I like to think our encounter reassured him we can bridge  our racial divides. Like maybe he thought, “Sure we’ve endured nearly 400 years of racial prejudice, but at least that one white dude is trying. I think I’ll go home and download some Barry Manilow!”

It’s my form of affirmative action.

I was touched by Cutcher’s father’s poignant lament: “What breaks my heart is the film shows my boy doing everything I taught him to do … and he still wound up dead.”

How can we as a people ever overcome what to me now seems institutionalized injustice?

I have to think a national pigment altering pill program would help.

Everyone could be cedar green for a month; cerulean blue the next; then, yes, we the purple!

Once we’ve been through a uniform coloring we’d all get to pick a color of our own.

After we’ve all been all the colors, maybe then finally none of them will matter.

Call me crazy, too, but I think I see multitudes of positive responses in the Charlotte protests.

I see people of all races realizing there’s a problem and taking urgent steps to solve it.

That’s very healthy.

Healthy, that is, for everyone but the poor bastards who keep getting killed with their hands up.

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RRS: "Oh, Man(dy)! My night with Manilow"

(857 words)

I once took a Mexican girl who barely spoke any English to see U2, an Irish band, in the Dixie town of Nashville.

It was a diversity extravaganza.

It was 1987. I remember meeting her at a party where the music was loud enough to mask our difficulties communicating. I remember doing a lot of smiling and nodding. She was very pretty.

Eager to spend more intimate time in her company, I told her I had two tickets to see U2 on “The Joshua Tree” tour. Did she like U2?

“Si!”

I don’t know if the party music and my attraction to her had exaggerated my impressions of her English, but whatever fluency she had vanished the instant I opened the car door for her.

In fact, the only word of English I remember her speaking the entire evening was at the very end when I asked if I could kiss her good night.

“No!”

I felt used.

It was the second time in six years a pair of tickets to a popular concert left me feeling that way.

And while U2 was a multi-cultural affair, the previous one was anything but. In fact, I remember it as the whitest night of my entire life.

Yes, in 1981 I attended a Barry Manilow concert at Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.

My date was my father.

Manilow was here again on Friday for a well-reviewed show that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called “an escape into some kind of soft pop time warp.”

He played, “Old Songs,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” “Even Now,” “Trying to Get the Feeling Again,” “I Write the Songs,” and a score of other catchy hits from the 1970s.

And I love them all.

My musical bona fides are unimpeachable. My first album was Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” My first concert, Joe Ely opening for Tom Petty. I rocked back then to Seger, the Stones, Dire Straits and the Kinks. Still do.

But when Dad was driving us to early morning hockey practice, we’d often listen to Manilow. Had any other lip-reading motorists been paying attention, they would have spied us singing, “At the Copa! Copacabana! The hottest spot north of Havana!”

They were good times. My old man was the greatest.

But I was cool enough at the time to know Manilow wasn’t.

That’s why I was shocked to come home on Thanksgiving break from my freshman year at Ohio University to see that Dad had bought his young hockey fan two tickets -- not to a Pittsburgh Penguins game -- but to the Barry Manilow concert.

I still wonder if he was cunning enough to foresee exactly how it would all play out.

I remember sitting by the phone and coming up blank trying to think of the girl I could ask that wouldn’t respond with hysterical giggles. Manilow’s not exactly a great first-date icebreaker.

I certainly couldn’t ask any of the guys I know. The would all laugh me off the planet.

Well, all but one of them would.

And he was at that moment sitting in his recliner across the room immersed in “Bowling for Dollars.”

Uh, Dad, I was thinking . . .

“Sure! I’d love to go!”

There were many, many other male couples there that night, but I’ll bet out of the 17,532 Pittsburgh Fanilows, we were the only father/son duo.

Dad didn’t care one bit. In fact, he was euphoric.

Leaving the building, he kept gushing about how much he loved Manilow and how it was one of the greatest nights of his life.

I wish I’d have anticipated that reaction when he’d parked the car. See, Dad hated to pay premium prices for parking. This wasn’t a problem at many suburban venues.

But at sold-out Civic Arena shows that meant parking deep in the crime-ridden neighborhood known as The Hill District. That’s where Dad found a freebie spot amidst the abandoned vehicles and burned-out tenements.

I remember looking in the shadows for parolees ready to pounce. It was late on a school night, but no one was sleeping.

I know this because I kept seeing them look out their windows to see the middle-aged white man bouncing down the sidewalk singing:

“And it’s Daybreak! If you wanna believe!

It can be Daybreak! Ain’t no time to grieve!

Said it’s Daybreak! If you’ll only believe!

And let it shine! Shine! Shine! All around the world!”

As I said, I believe there’s a place for Manilow and his music. I just didn’t believe it was at midnight in the Hill District in 1981.

Of course, maybe I’m letting my prejudices get the better of me.

Maybe those young hoodlums were transformed by the sound of my Dad warbling Manilow’s greatest hits.

Maybe they set down their crack pipes and said, “Damn! You know, that old white dude’s right. It CAN be Daybreak!”

Whether or not it happened that way, I can not say.

But of this I’m certain:

If my date that night had been anyone other than my own Dad, I’ll bet I’d have gotten laid.

Related . . .

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Blogger tastelessness? Not here

(603 words)

Sometimes someone says something about something I’ve written that causes me to shelve my topical plans to address their comment.

Happened again yesterday.

So if you’re clicking in today to read if I’ll be in Pittsburgh tonight to attend the Barry Manilow concert and why that wouldn’t be without precedent, sorry, you’ll just have to wait until Monday.

Today I need to respond to a charge that yesterday’s post was tasteless.

Was it?

Hell, no. 

It was a 702-word essay headlined, “That’s MISTER Shrapnel to you!” Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, I thought it was appropriate to share the nugget that shrapnel was named after British artillery officer Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842). I had no idea and thought it was interesting enough to warrant a timely post.

I fancied it a life-affirming spin on how names become words and how I’m glad nothing I do will 200 years from now lead anyone to say someone was killed by a deadly shower of rodell.

Was it too soon? Too irreverent? Was the tone too what Father Francis Mulcahy might call “jocular?”

In hindsight, yes.

Do I regret it?

Just a bit. Not much. Hardly at all.

I am of the mindset that if we do not move on right away after every tragedy, we’ll never move at all.

Our national tragedies happen with such breakneck rapidity, to not immediately move on would result in our being paralyzed by perpetual grieving.

By any decent standard, we should still be utterly bereft over Sandy Hook. No one should be working, attending ball games, laughing in coffee shops -- doing anything -- until we as a nation resolve that such horror will never happen again.

But, geez, that seems awfully difficult, doesn’t it? Certainly it does for the esteemed men and women of the United States Senate.

So in lieu of working solutions, we need to live every day like the Whos in Whoville did the very morning the Grinch stole Christmas. We must cheerfully persevere understanding bad things are going to happen and that we will always roll with all the punches.

It’s now more than ever imperative to celebrate every day we’re alive.

If that’s a controversial position, so be it. I’ll have to live with it even as anyone accusing me of doing anything controversial feels to me like wearing a shirt that’s too tight around the neck. It makes me uncomfortable.

This puts me at odds with many other writers who aspire to being edgy.

They assume the worst in everyone. They fan conspiracy theories. They fixate on daily doom.

In a world full of so much opinionated edginess, I like to think my blog provides a humble respite from all the contrived controversies intended to stir up opposing comments and agitated readers.

I could never pull that off. Wouldn’t want to even if I was assured it would lead to widespread exposure.

On the contrary, I aspire to this being a near daily repository for feel-good platitudes about life and love.

I guess that kind of makes me the Barry Manilow of bloggers!

Either way, I’m grateful to you and anyone who takes the time to read my stuff. I hope you’ll all stay with me even on days when you read something here that might challenge one of your sacred cows. And that goes for all you non-Hindu readers, too.

I promise to try and keep it fair and above the fray -- except on days when the fray looks fun.

So thank you. I hope none of you ever goes away.

‘cause I can’t smile without you.

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