As a political junkie and a person with a taste for cruel and unusual entertainment, I was one of the eighteen people who watched last night’s Presidential Debate.  And even though it’s a year and a half from Election Day, one thing was right on schedule—candidates stepped up to the microphone and resolutely threw away their final Gs.

Many people claim that George Bush started this.  Although I’m no Presidential historian, I disagree.  I’ll bet it started with William Henry Harrison in 1840.  In case you don’t remember him from grade school (I didn’t), here’s a quick recap: he was wealthy and educated, but his opponent Martin Van Buren was a bit more urbane.  Harrison ran with it, adopting a persona of the rough-and-ready man of the people, born in a log cabin, drinking hard cider, etc., etc.  And I remember reading somewhere that Van Buren was ridiculed during the campaign for using grooming products.

Harrison’s campaign song was “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”  It had twelve verses.  For that matter, there was another campaign song that included tobacco juice being spit at the end of each couplet.  Despite that fact, he won the election.

Historians tell us that Harrison’s was one of the first “modern” Presidential campaigns, meaning that it involved selling a personality, in particular a personality that didn’t really exist.  Worth thinking about the next time you watch a Presidential debate.

Presidential campaign time is ratcheting up, and as always I’m fascinated by seeing politicians in action.  Perhaps it’s because politics seems to be just another branch of show business, depending more than anything else on the ability—same as showbiz—to stand up at any moment and deliver a measured quantity of Talk.  The particular Talk doesn’t need to bother itself with niceties, like facts.  For that matter, it doesn’t need to be about anything.  It just needs to sound as if it might be.

As someone whose own performing life depended on remembering lines, not improvising, I understand that it’s more difficult to get up and instantly write your own script.  Still, when I see these gents (and ladies) letting loose with It-Sounds-Like-Content-Even-If-It-Isn’t, I don’t pity them; I get cynical.  It amazes me that they haven’t yet been called on the carpet and told, “You didn’t actually say a damned thing.”  Oh.  Now that I think of it, some of them have been told that.  They react with denial, or hostility.

In comparison to them, I feel lucky.  I myself learned that lesson, the hard way, when I was five.

In kindergarten I was considered a precocious kid, even if I couldn’t quite get the knack of tying shoelaces.  But Mrs. Hamilton would periodically take me aside, shove a paper under my nose and say sweetly, “Can you read this?”  I would, she’d take the paper away, and it seemed to make her happy.  At school and anywhere else, I was an inveterate talker.  Relatives used to chuckle and say, “He should be a lawyer.”  Or sometimes, “He should be on television.”  At the time, I didn’t understand what those cracks meant.

Came the spring, and the kindergarten class was given a project: we made Mother’s Day gifts by painting empty thread spools and using them as holders for flowers made from pipe cleaners stuck into “tulips” cut out of cardboard egg cartons.  It was probably some of the first 3-D art we’d ever made, and we were enthralled with our work.

Some days or weeks after that, I found myself in the school gym/auditorium, being gently pushed out onto the floor in front of a table filled with other art masterpieces, none of which I could remember ever seeing before.  A mile away from me, at the other side of the gym sat a group of several hundred thousand mothers, mine among them.  I can’t remember being told that I would have to deliver a talk to the mothers, and I can’t remember that I was even shown the other items.  Maybe Mrs. Hamilton had tried to prep me, and I’d been thinking about something else at the time . . . Instinctively, though, I think I realized that I was being asked to tell the mothers about the projects, and that I had probably been picked because they thought I wouldn’t crumple under audience pressure.  Still, the only model I had in my brain for a gentleman who pointed at things on a table and told an audience about it was a TV announcer.  I got into character and plunged in.

For the next few minutes I gestured and proclaimed, sure that I was putting it over as no one in Jefferson School ever had before.  But then I heard a smothered giggle.  Then another.  That threw me off stride.  I thought I’d better wind things up quickly, and the sight of one of our egg-carton flower monstrosities gave me the chance.  I took a big breath and said, “And last but not least—”

The entire crowd of mothers burst into laughter.

I was stopped in my tracks.  Even though I couldn’t formulate the thought at the time, something told me that I had come out with It-Sounds-Like-Talk, and the mothers knew it.  Red-faced but determined not to show any embarrassment at all, I wound up my spiel within seconds.  I don’t remember how I got out of there.

I never discussed it with my parents, or anyone else, but I’m glad it happened.  I was lucky to have that experience at a very early age, and with no cameras or TV commentators around to point out that I was just blathering.

Maybe this country’s politicians should have had Mrs. Hamilton for kindergarten.

Even though the weather in New York has been surprisingly cool, this week the temperature is supposed to climb into the upper 90s.  When that happens, and you pop open a soda—thank St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Ah, carbonated beverages.  They’re available in every store, every restaurant and every deli, and no one gives them a second thought.  But in the early 19th century, “soda-water” was a specialty item, credited with medicinal powers.  The recipe used in those days started with calcium carbonate—chalk—which reacted with sulfuric acid to create carbon dioxide gas.  That, in turn, was then forced through water.  New York was a big soda-water town; but as it was nearly impossible to bottle, it really could be found only at a proper soda-water merchant.  Manhattan reportedly had over six hundred of them; but Lynch & Clark, a tiny shop located at 25½ Wall Street, was known for over sixty years as the place to get soda-water in New York.  In front of the shop was a large thermometer.  On summer days businessmen would note the rising temperatures, and by midday a line of Wall Streeters had formed, snaking down the block as those gents waited for a soda.  When Lynch & Clark sold the business to their employee Albert Delatour, he changed nothing but the name.  Even the thermometer stayed in place.

But at the same time, living in New York and building soda fountains was an Englishman named John Mathews, who had supposedly invented the soda-water process, or at least perfected it, in the 1830s.

(At this point, enter St. Patrick’s.)

The Cathedral had started construction in 1858 with hundreds of stonemasons chipping away at countless blocks of marble.  The construction site wasn’t closed to the public, and Mathews must have been one of the many people who nosed around the area.  Sightseers noticed the walls rising.  Mathews, however, noticed the immense amounts of scrap marble that were being chipped away.  Marble was composed almost entirely of . . . calcium carbonate.

Whether a deal was struck or Mathews just showed up one day with a wheelbarrow, I don’t know, but the Times tells us that he was able to carbonate 25 million gallons of water with the marble chips that he collected from the construction site.

Today’s beverage industry is something that Mathews probably never could have dreamed of.  He’s buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.  His tombstone is, of course, built of marble.

A supermarket opened not too long ago in my neighborhood.  While it isn’t a Whole Foods, you might get the impression that it desperately wants to be one: it’s a double-level place with the requisite escalators, awkwardly polite employees, and a sprawling salad bar upstairs—the kind that features primarily hot foods but is still called a salad bar.  I haven’t sniffed around the salad bar.  A friend did.  He said that he stopped short when he noticed a tray full of chicken parmigiana which would have looked very respectable if it weren’t for the pair of eyeglasses nestled in between two cutlets.

The first time I encountered a salad bar was in the late ‘70s, in a Boston restaurant whose name I can’t recall.  That place was one of Beantown’s original salad restaurants, offering nothing but vegetable matter and an array of dressings, and very few protein choices.  I remember that my favorite combination there was grated carrot, shredded cheddar, and (fake) bacon bits, with plenty of Thousand Island dressing.  (And I wonder how I would up with coronary artery disease.)

At the same time in New York, everyone was bombarded with commercials for Beefsteak Charlie’s restaurants, centering around the irritating jingle “You’re gonna get spoi–oiled!”  (It’s on youtube, if you have nothing better to do.)  Part of Charlie’s allure was that the salad bar offered Endless Shrimp.  With shrimp in mind, I went there with a friend on my birthday.  The steak was absolutely forgettable, but it was one of the two times in my life that I ate my fill of shrimp.  150 of them, to be exact.  They were sitting in ice water, mealy smallish things that had to be shelled—but they were indeed endless.

Soon after, it seemed that the city was swamped with corner delis, each one featuring a salad bar and each salad bar offering about eight hundred food choices, hot and cold, $2.95-a-pound-your-choice.  They sprouted “windshields,” clear plastic panels designed to keep out germs along with foreign objects like eyeglasses.  And depending on their management, they had clearly different methods of operation.  In my old neighborhood (21st/Park), there were three in a two-block radius.  One had decently fresh food, meaning that I was never poisoned by the place.  But another, over on Fifth Avenue, was a puzzle: I would walk in at 11:00 pm and look at the remains of food that had obviously arrived at the steam table twelve hours before, hot and fresh (and identifiable), and was now petrified (and unidentifiable).  I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I occasionally ate a late dinner out of this place.  Happily, I’m still here to tell you about it.  Even better, that particular deli isn’t.

In New York, a sudden change in the weather; we’re suddenly into moist-and-humid summer.  That got me thinking about cooling devices of various types.  And I suddenly flashed on my previous apartment, which had a treacherous air conditioner and an even more treacherous refrigerator.

To be fair, it wasn’t the air conditioner’s fault.  The unit itself—well, it wouldn’t win any energy conservation awards, but it was literally the only model that would fit into its through-the-wall sleeve.  However, early in the game I discovered that the sleeve had been installed . . . backwards.  A very slight, nearly unnoticeable tilt downward in the sleeve’s design meant that the unit, which was supposed to empty its moisture out onto the street, would quietly drip it down the living room wall.  There was nothing to do about it but to find a large pot with flat sides.  I did.  It spent eight years being carefully leaned against the wall each night, gathering water from that air conditioner, being emptied each morning, etc., etc.  Some years later I repainted the living room and made another discovery; the nightly soaking had rotted the wall, all the way down to its original 1854 brick.  That area was so crumbly that it had to be spray-painted.

The refrigerator was a single-door model that had been installed second-hand.  It was yellowed and tired; its freezer was covered by a flimsy plastic door, which always closed crookedly.  It took half a day to freeze ice cubes.  All of this didn’t really bother me.  But—and this always made me grit my teeth—it had to be defrosted.

If you’ve never dealt with a manual-defrost refrigerator, you have my congratulations.  But anyone over a certain age or under a certain income level has very likely had a few run-ins.  I particularly remember my mother’s Norge refrigerator-freezer.  It was a handsome behemoth, trimmed in chrome, large enough to hold the whole family’s food.  But it had to be defrosted—
BEFORE WE CONTINUE, A NOTE.  For those of you who have never had the pleasure, here’s how to defrost:
Turn off the refrigerator.
Empty it.  If you’re a gambler, empty only the freezer (if you don’t mind having your refrigerated food dripped upon).
Find a place to keep your frozen-and-or-chilled foods.
If there’s food in the refrigerator, shut the door and go away for four or five hours.  Otherwise, leave the door open for quicker defrosting (but prepare for the possibility of having your kitchen floor flooded).
If you really want to hurry the process, place pans of hot water in the freezer (but prepare for the possibility that they might melt the frost only partway, fusing it into ice and making it even harder to remove).
Once the ice is melted, remove it from around the refrigeration coils.  Be careful.  If the ice is still frozen solidly around the coils, they can be damaged.
After all the ice is melted, clean the inside of the refrigerator, dry it, replace the food, turn it back on.

AND BACK TO OUR STORY.
—and there came the day, around 1962, when my mother had obviously had it with the process.  At some point in the story, I think an ice pick entered the picture, or perhaps a screwdriver.

At this point everyone in the family learned that the refrigeration coils were more fragile than anyone had thought.

To replace the freshly killed Norge, my parents bought a handsome new RCA Whirlpool.  Until it arrived, we used the Norge.  With a big block of dry ice on the bottom shelf, it worked out pretty well.

It was my monthly appointment to get clipped; and just as the shampoo girl was toweling me off, it hit me that the haircutting game has changed a whole lot in recent years.

The first haircuts I remember—well, those don’t count.  Actually, they were performed by my father, equipped with an electric clippers and buzzing away in the kitchen at my head, as I squirmed and my mother stood next to him with the vacuum cleaner going at full tilt.  Not the happiest moments. . . . Let’s try again.  The first professional haircuts I remember were performed by my cousin-by-marriage, who ran a barber shop in our neighborhood.  His shop looked exactly like everyone’s idea of a barber shop in those days; a man’s hangout but definitely not designed as one, just a place with mismatched chairs for waiting and a stack of Sports Illustrated, the requisite barber chair and mirror and shelf with a glass container of Barbicide holding combs.  Nothing in the place was interesting, except for the hot lather machine (a squarish chrome thing that operated electrically and made a grinding sound when he pushed on a lever to dispense foam when it was time for him to trim around the neck) and the framed barber’s license, with its regulation bad photo.  There had to have been a sink on the premises, but I don’t remember that anyone ever used it.  That shop was like every other barber shop I could remember during my formative years.  (One of them was different in that the magazine of choice was Esquire.  I was fourteen.  It seemed incredibly sophisticated.)

When I was a college freshman, I got a part in a play, that of a man from the Ozarks.  To get fully into character, I spent the rehearsal period growing a mop of hair as well as a bushy beard.  All well and good, but once the show closed, it was time for a haircut—but where to go?  A friend recommended not a haircut, but a Styling.  I’d never been Styled, and decided to try it.

The Styling place was unlike any barber shop I’d ever seen, with multiple sinks, special furniture, special lighting, the continual hum of blow-dryers, and trendily groomed Stylers running the place.  Giorgio, the Styler to whom I’d been referred, had a Perfect Head Of Hair and a moustache to match.  Delighted to be given so much raw material, he shampooed me, whipped out his scissors, and set to work.  At the end of an hour, I was Styled—and converted.

In those days Styling places were Unisex, which was initially a daring thing for women as well as men.  Before Styling, women were relegated to Beauty Parlors, which apparently were frilly and ultra-feminine and smelled of permanent wave solution.  Styling places were sociologically groundbreaking in that women occupied chairs next to men, and no one gave it a thought.  For that matter, over the years I had my hair cut by women as well as men.  So did everyone else.  (Does anyone remember the old Noxzema Shave Cream commercial, showing a “Swedish lady barber”?  Sexy!  Shocking!)

Fast-forward to Now.  There are some Imitation Barber Shops that have been opening in New York over the past year or so.  All of them seem to be patterned after the old-fashioned barber shop (except for the gigantic flat-screen TV mounted on the back wall).  The hair cutters are women as well as men; none of them give the impression of great mirth; all of them give the impression that they’re really good with a straight razor.  And while they offer shaves, I can’t help wondering if their $30 Deluxe Shave is really all that much better than the fifty-cent shave my cousin gave in 1965.

I’m more comfortable at my neighborhood Styling place.  Many of the magazines are of the ilk of Modern Bride, but the haircut is good.  And right behind the cash desk, I can see the bad photo on my haircutter’s license.

Summer is nearly here.  (And if you’re a New Yorker, you’re snarling as you read that line—at noon today, the temperature is all of sixty degrees.)  Coincidentally, I’ve been doing some research on the ways that urban dwellers used to survive the hot weather.  Air conditioning has made some of those ways obsolete . . . but did they have to go?

F’rinstance, take roof gardens.

We’re not talking Tar Beach here.  (For non-NYC residents, that’s the term for most apartment house roofs, especially when they’re not particularly inviting.  Like mine.)  We’re talking about commercial places that offer a welcoming atmosphere, possibly food and drink, perhaps a view.

Turns out that the idea of a snazzed-up roof didn’t take shape until about 1880, when a theatrical producer built a theater with an auditorium ceiling that could slide back in hot weather.  Audience members were invited to the roof to enjoy the view and promenade around the opening, hopefully with the benefit of a railing, to hear the performance below.  This was such a treat for New Yorkers that the producer built another theater, with a full-fledged roof garden.  Food, drink, an orchestra, a view, evening breezes; what’s not to like?

His competitors instantly took off, and within fifteen years there were nine major roof gardens atop New York theaters, every hotel had a roof garden, and there were scads of rooftop restaurants in every neighborhood.  Seems that the average restaurant of that type was perched above a two-story building.  They might have been modest places, but they advertised themselves extravagantly: “With the sky for a roof and the Hudson for a fan . . . ”  And there were plenty of them.  I know of two that were in my immediate neighborhood.  One of the buildings still survives, a squat little structure with a Texas Barbecue downstairs and a defunct Sleepy’s Mattress above.  The roof, which was set up with tables and trellises in 1910, is now crowded with air-conditioning equipment.  Is there a moral here?

Roof gardens and rooftop restaurants faded from the scene in the 20th century.  This might have had to do with the general introduction of A/C.  Also, rooftops were useless if it rained.  Or if it was very muggy.  Or in colder weather.

I didn’t think about rooftops much until last summer, when a friend invited a group of us to her place to enjoy her Madison-Avenue-in-the-Twenties rooftop.  She lives in a very modern building that took its rooftop responsibilities seriously; crowning its fifty stories was a well-appointed party space, nicely lit (and surrounded by a breast-high concrete wall, a comforting feature for acrophobics).  And even though it was a very warm evening, the high height gave us access to some refreshing breezes.  On top of it, the place offered a spectacular view from each side.  Far below, I could see other roofs.  Some of them were elaborately fixed up.  There were faint party sounds rising in the air.

Are roof gardens coming back? . . .

As someone whose list of prescription medications seems to be getting longer by the minute, I occasionally long for the good old days of pharmacopeia.

Back then, regular folks didn’t have to think about prescription drugs at all.  Those things were advertised only to medical professionals, in ads that showed up only in medical journals.  You and I didn’t have to read ads recommending Quaalude for “resumption of interrupted sleep,” or touting Nembutal suppositories for toddlers who might be nervous about examinations.  (I’m not making that one up.  Take a look.  YIPE.)

Babies cry for it?

If non-professionals were interested in learning about medicines, those ads were for nothing more threatening than headache remedies or heartburn relief, and they were where they belonged—on TV, with diagrams of Your System and announcers wearing white medical coats to reassure us.

Now, however, prescription goodies are pushed in print and over the air to everyone, in commercials that aim to be cute, or at least lighthearted.  But have you noticed lately that the actors in those commercials, almost none of whom play doctors, get the thankless task of looking straight into the camera and reading a list of warnings?

For instance, this happens quite frequently in ads for medications that treat . . . well, I’ll call it by its initials, E.D.  (Google it.  It’s right there.)  I have to hand it to the performers in those ads, male and female: They smile just the right amount and they don’t smirk at all.  This is admirable behavior when you’re staring into a camera and reciting, just quickly enough to make everyone realize that you’re not really comfortable, “Springadil may cause nausea, vomiting, falling hair, loss of consciousness, heart attack or death.  If you have any of these symptoms, see your health professional.”  Me, I wouldn’t be able to do it at the first attempt.  I’d need about eighty-five takes before I stopped laughing and got to the required twin-bathtubs shot at the end of the commercial.

Anyhow, I can’t decide if it’s better to see a small animated blob, playing Depression—or if we should go back to the Good Old Days, when the ad showed a glowering woman with the description, “Mabel is Unstable.”  Or perhaps we should go back even farther? . . .

Looking over last week’s scrawl about Beatlemania, it took a few days before I remembered that there was a whole other kind of music being heard in those days.

I remember my introduction to it very well.  My brother was home from college, bringing an armful of albums with him.  He put on The Sounds of Silence.  Although I was in my bedroom, the music drew me downstairs to the Hi-Fi like a magnet.  It was gentler music, minus the driving drum beat—and there were the lyrics.  As opposed to most of the pop music I had ever heard, the lyrics seemed to be the point of this music . . . and although I didn’t know the words “melancholy” or “elegiac,” I think I was experiencing those emotions for the first time.

Now, if I had been any older, or maybe a jot more intelligent, I would have investigated the world of folk music and discovered all sorts of riches.  But I didn’t.  In adolescent society, you were either a rock ‘n roll type or a folk music type—perhaps with Bob Dylan as the fulcrum between the two factions—but you didn’t really get to be both types.  Too bad.  Folk was a much more idealistic experience . . . write a lyric, set it to music, save the world . . . and it had very little show-business glitz about it.  Still, for a moment it seemed to me that anyone could become a worthwhile folk singer, given the right (acoustic) guitar . . .

As an adult, I admit that I didn’t seek out folk music.  However, it was wonderful to see Peter, Paul and Mary packing audiences into Carnegie Hall.  And I remember being excited, some time back, when I went to The Bitter End to see some friends play there.    (For anyone who doesn’t remember, The Bitter End was a Village nightclub, about the size of a large telephone booth.  In the early 1960s, nearly every major folk act played there at one time or other.  If I remember from my own visit, there were names, but not enough dates, scrawled on the walls.)

(Warning:  If you’re over fifty, this may make you feel OLD.)

Walking past the local Kewl store the other day, I was happy to see displayed in the window, along with the fake-antique LP turntables and the Lomography cameras, a CD set of Beatles hits.  Somehow it’s comforting that the Beatles, who were mostly responsible for a cultural revolution, have now turned Retro.

I wasn’t even eight years old when my sister and her best friend Liz burst into the house one afternoon with a copy of Meet the Beatles.  I didn’t know anything about it, nor did I understand their excitement—but I liked the music as much as they did.  Over the next few years, other albums by the Fab Four showed up on our Hi-Fi turntable, and they were supplemented by a small but steady stream of full-color fan magazines.  (I have the feeling they were tossed out at some point.  So much for the retirement fund.)  When the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, we were part of the 73 million (!!) people who tuned in.

My own contribution to Beatlemania came the following year when the movie A Hard Day’s Night was released and I won tickets—very exciting—in a radio call-in contest.  As the film was playing at the North Drive-In, my parents agreed, with only a bit of eyeball-rolling, to take us.  To prepare, my sister remembers, we cleaned the windshield extremely well; my father snickered that it looked as if it had disappeared.  He stopped laughing when we neared the drive-in and saw a long line of cars streaming down Route 11.  “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying.  As far as the movie itself, I remember sitting there and greatly enjoying it.  But I don’t remember anything about it.  Neither does my sister, she told me.  I tried watching it on TCM a couple of years ago.  I didn’t make it all the way through.

As with all overheated enthusiasms, our household Beatlemania began to fade soon after that, and by 1970 there were no more Beatles.  My sister had moved on to other types of Rock.  I had moved on, for some inexplicable reason, to Swing.  (This didn’t make me popular with my classmates, I admit.)

With these new CD issues, maybe the Beatles will get a whole new audience.  It wouldn’t be as hysterically worshipful; what with the current instant media, I get the impression that pop-group mania of this type probably won’t happen again.  In a way, that’s unfortunate. Most Baby Boomers remember Beatlemania as innocent fun.  And the fact that our parents viewed the Beatles as outlaws made it even more fun.

Such is the Parent-Child Music Thing.  Parents were shocked by Elvis in the 1950s.  For that matter, take a look at Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, with his rimless glasses and his schoolteacherish appearance: they were saying that his music was Dangerous and Unhealthy in the 1930s.  And a century before that, parents were horrified by their children’s insistence on dancing that filthy dance, the waltz . . .