Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Jean Shepherd and `A Christmas Story'


Originally printed in "Brookyn Daily Eagle"

It’s Christmas time, and once again we’re treated to showings of the holiday favorite “A Christmas Story.” The film has become so much a classic that it’s been turned into a Broadway play, and the house in Cleveland that was used as the Parker family’s house has been turned into a museum. Characters like The Old Man, bully Scott Farkas and the hillbilly Bumpus family, not to mention inanimate objects like the leg lamp, have become part of American folklore.

Lost in the shuffle, however, has been the author and narrator of the story—Jean Shepherd. Many of the millions of people who have seen the film, perhaps most, are only familiar with him through “A Christmas Story.” And that’s sad, because as good as it is, it only represents a small portion of Shepherd’s work.

Jean Shepherd was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Hammond, Indiana (called “Hohman, Indiana” in the film). The late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who lived there during part of his youth, knew Shepherd and his friends, although they were older than him. While the film takes place around 1940, the real events upon which it is based took place about seven or eight years earlier.

Like most men of his generation, Shepherd served in the military during World War II (his Signal Corps stories have recently been collected as “Shep’s Army”). Afterward, he drifted into TV and radio, but he didn’t become famous until the mid-1950s, when he began broadcasting one of the first talk shows on WOR-AM. About half of his show was dedicated to tales of his Indiana childhood and his Army days. The rest consisted on his observations of the passing scene. He commented on advertising, popular music (he loved jazz, disliked rock), sexual mores, suburbia, all-night diners, beer and almost everything else. He avoided politics, but at times he “got serious,” as he did after JFK’s assassination and again after Martin Luther King’s assassination. In between it all, he played hokey Dixieland jazz songs, accompanying them on the kazoo and Jew’s harp, and recited old-time folk poetry like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

In one of his best-known pranks, he began to talk about a non-existent sexy book, “I, Libertine,” supposedly written in the 18th century. He told his listeners to ask for it in bookstores. Eventually, the demand was so great that a publisher hired several authors (including Shepherd himself) to ghost-write the book.

Shepherd continued on, broadcasting every weekday at 10:15 p.m. and on Saturday nights from the Limelight in Greenwich Village. Thousands of young New Yorkers listened to Shep on their transistor radios under their pillows when their parents thought they were asleep. In 1977, he quit his radio gig. By this time, he was becoming known nationally. He wrote stories for Playboy and published several short-story collections. He also had a public television show, “Jean Shepherd’s America,” in which he visited different parts of the country. There was even an unsuccessful follow-up to “A Christmas Story,” called “My Summer Story.”

Shep died in 1999. After his death, his dark side was discovered: He had two children from an early marriage, neither of which he had seen for 30 years. In fact, he often denied that he had children at all. Still, I prefer to celebrate his contributions to American culture. Quoting Shep’s most famous catch phrase, I proclaim to everybody concerned, “Excelsior, you fatheads!”

Saturday, December 7, 2013

The Singing Dentist of Bensonhurst

By Raanan Geberer


"When you begin/Begin the beguine/It brings back the night/Of tropical splendor....”

Dr. Pearlman sang as he looked into Rob’s mouth and started poking around, the curbed probe in one hand, the tiny mirror in the other. Ever since Rob had moved to Brooklyn last year, in 1987, his father had tried to get him to see Dr. Pearlman as a dentist because Dr. Pearlman was a cousin and had grown up with his father in the East Bronx, and finally, here he was. Dr. Pearlman’s office was on the second floor of a rundown two-story building on a nondescript commercial street in Bensonhurst whose only redeeming feature was the Italian bakery next door. You walked down a long, narrow hallway to get to Dr. Pearlman’s office.

“A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H/ I got a gal in Kalamazoo/Don’t want to boast but I know she’s the toast/of Kalamazoo...”

Rob had never heard of a singing dentist before. Not only does he sing, he thought, but he seems to sing only the songs of his own era, which would be the late 1930s and early ’40s. It’s incredible that this guy is still practicing, he thought. He must be in his late 60s, past retirement age. He idly glanced at the wall – here was a diploma from “New York University Dental School, June 1948.” Probably went to dental school on the G.I. Bill, he thought. Suddenly, he became alarmed when Dr. Pearlman picked up a drill.

“What are you doing with that drill? Aren’t you going to give me an anesthetic or an injection?”

“Well, the X-rays show that the cavity is very small and very near the surface, so we don’t need it. Open your mouth—you’re so good, you’re the best, you’re the champ. Here it comes. I’m not lazy!

`I got spurs that jingle jangle jingle/As we go merrily along/And they say, ain’cha glad you’re single/And that song it ain’t too far from wrong’ ...You’re doing great! Don’t worry about anything. I’m the master! ...

"`In ‘76 the sky was red/Thunder rumbling overhead/King George couldn’t sleep in his bed/And on that morn/Uncle Sam was born’ ... You’re so good! Okay, rinse out your mouth!”

Rob bent over, grabbed a paper cup and rinsed his mouth. He watched the blood going down the drain. He had hardly felt anything. “There! That wasn’t so hard, was it? “ Dr. Pearlman asked. “I’m gonna do the filling now! You know, your father did some amazing, heroic things! Like the time he ran into the battlefield and carried the wounded lieutenant on his back to safety! They were gonna give him a medal for that, but, you know how it is!”

Rob had never heard that story before. Then again, his father rarely talked about his past. He was going to ask another question when....

“OK, we’re gonna put in the filling material next. Here it comes! Stay still! I’m not lazy!

"`Moon over Miami/Shine on as we begin/A dream or two that may come true/As the tide comes in.......’

"Okay, just a little bit more. Just stay still. You’re the best! ... Bor’chu es adonai hamvoroch/Boruch atoh adonoi hamvoroch leolom voed/Boruch atoh adonoi/Eloheynoo melech ha’olam' ... OK, we’re done here, kid!”

“I heard you singing that Hebrew brocho,” Rob said, referring to the blessing over the Torah that Dr. Pearlman had just intoned. “Wouldn’t those Hasidim I saw in the waiting room object if you sang that when they were here?”

“Fuhgedaboutit!” Dr. Pearlman responded, cheery as ever. “Don’t worry about them. They got nothin’ to say! OK, see you next time?”

“What should I pay?”

“Don’t pay anything! ‘’Cause you’re a relative, I’ll fix the insurance form so the price will be very high, so what they give me will cover what you should pay!”

“You don’t have a secretary?”

“Naah! I used to have a secretary, but if I did now, I’d have to charge you guys more! OK, kid! Give your regards to my father .....NEXT!!!”

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Bill Cosby's Right: Let's Tone Down Profanity



Originally published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

On a recent episode of the Jon Stewart Show, Bill Cosby surprised host Jon Stewart, known for using four-letter words (which are bleeped out), by asking him to curb his use of profanity. He mentioned that when he was young, when someone said a four-letter word, it was usually a prelude to a fight. Stewart, who was taken aback, asked whether Cosby and Richard Pryor hadn’t used four-letter words on stage when they were starting out. Cosby said no, because there were always cops around.

I plead guilty to using the “f-word” (usually when I’m angry). But many people use it to describe almost anything and everything, as an adjective, adverb, noun and verb. While it is surely one of the oldest words in the English language, its use in show business (with a few exceptions, such as the odd 1938 recording of “Old Man Mose” by the Eddie Duchin Orchestra) was pioneered by comedian Lenny Bruce in the 1960s. Bruce was a comic genius, and his intentions were certainly commendable: he wanted to do away with hypocrisy and portray daily life honestly.

But in doing so, Bruce opened a can of worms. What he was doing went way over most people’s heads. Profanity became a lazy way of getting cheap laughs. If you don’t believe me, go into any comedy club in the country. Bruce was about social commentary, but that social commentary has degenerated into the insulting shock humor of Howard Stern.

Fifty, sixty years ago, we were a nation of rules: open the door for a lady, don’t wear your hat indoors, get up from a subway seat to let an older person sit down, call an older person “sir.”  Those rules have disappeared. Again, in an effort to do away with hypocrisy, the hippies of the 1960s sought to do abolish the old rules. They thought they would replace the authoritarian society of the 1950s with one based on communal values, but that never happened. Instead, what eventually replaced it was one of extreme individualism, of sneering at others who are less successful. The hippies believed in free sexuality as an expression of honesty, but what we have today is free sexuality as a way to sell cars or soft drinks. I certainly don’t want to go back to the society of the 1950s, when James Joyce was banned. But someone like Miley Cyrus is no James Joyce.

Some people might say, “Why don’t you criticize the real problems of society, rather than someone dancing naked on stage?” But to me, these problems are part of the same bag.

On one side of the coin, we have corruption in government, cheating on Wall Street, huge corporations like Walmart paying subsistence wages, politicians refusing to cooperate with their colleagues across the aisle, manufacturers shipping what had been American jobs overseas, people not caring about the homeless and the poor.

On the other, we have movie stars gyrating like only porn stars did a few decades ago, violent gangster rap, a record number of divorces, a record number of children being born out of wedlock, kids disrespecting teachers, and, yes, the constant use of four-letter words in public.

Yes, these are two sides of the same coin. And that coin is the degeneration of American society into one ruled completely by self-gratification and selfishness.