All the Rage #38

Ah, youth.

*sigh*

Such fond and crappy memories, colliding into one another with the speed and abandon of my friends at any event with free food. Lately my mind's been drifting backward in time to the days when I wore grey slacks every day at St. Jude the Apostle grade school in South Holland, Illinois. Not that I'm old enough to have earned the right to nostalgia yet, but I figure I'd better enjoy the memories I have of my pre-teen years before I start my rock band, sell out to some big record label, get rich and drunk and laid, and finally soak my body with so much heroin that my brain seeps out from my ears and drips onto someone's hot dog--which is how Jimi Hendrix died, I think.

My youth is probably different from many of yours because for the most part I never had a bedtime when I was a child. Perhaps some would deem this an irresponsible move on the part of my parents. Looking back, I see it as the best possible thing they could have done. Because of their lenience, I was able to watch Johnny Carson work his talk-show magic every night at 10:30 p.m., long after all of my friends had gone to bed. Having to settle for Leno (the biggest sweat-act since Richard Simmons) and Letterman (funny, but no King of Late Night) is truly an injustice when you've seen the master at work. Buddy Hackett's dirty jokes, questions for Carnac "hermaneutically sealed in a pickle jar under Funk & Wagnall's doorstep," and the supple breasts of longtime Carson girl (and Jackie Gleason's wife in The Toy) Theresa Ganzell...I remember it like it was yesterday. Well, it practically was yesterday, but who's keeping score? Hell, WHO'S READING THIS?!

This arrangement was especially sweet because I was in afternoon pre-school and kindergarten and didn't have to wake up until 11 a.m. (And that's just one of the many similarities between kindergarten and college: staggering out of bed just before noon, often drunk, and spacing out for an hour or two in a classroom before returning home to watch cartoons.) Unfortunately, eventually I hit first grade and was forced to wake up every morning at 7 a.m.

So my late-night viewing habits drifted to weekends, where Saturday Night Live kept me rolling on the floor. By fourth grade, the glory days of 1984 SNL would arrive, with classic characters like Fernando, Jackie Rogers, Jr. (and his "Hundred-Thousand-Dollar JACK-POT...WAAAAAD!" which was a brilliant parody of Super Password that I still maintain is the funniest sketch ever to appear on the show), those "I hate it when that happens..." guys, and a gallery of dead-on celebrity impersonations by Billy Crystal and Martin Short. When I was in sixth grade I did this cute but embarassing skit for the school Talent Show in which I performed my impersonations of Buckwheat, Alfalfa, Robin Leach, Fernando, and a few others, all speaking to our school principal. It was my first public performance. If only I could have predicted then that I was starting on a road that would lead me to being featured on the internet, for millions of porn fans and technogeeks to enjoy and mock and hate...I might have slit my wrists with my Fisher-Price My First Suicide Kit.

My second grade year brought on my first pair of glasses, which were a set of frames somehow tied in as a promotion to the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I'm not sure exactly why; perhaps it was the way their dull brown color resembled the little alien's skin. At any rate, they had little metal boxes attached to each earpiece with the letters "E.T." engraved into them, and I thought that was really cool. This was ironic because for the longest time E.T. scared the living crap out of me. I lay in bed with my eyes wide open many a night, laying awake in fear that the cute little alien's family would get a bit ticked off at the way their kid was treated on Earth, return for revenge, mistake my house for Elliot's, and whisk me away forever, forcing me into a life of eating Reese's Pieces and dressing as a woman to atone for their child's humiliation on my planet.

I'm exaggerating, but I was scared of E.T. I was also scared of Darth Vader. I'll save that for next week, when I'll continue my traipse down memory lane with a look at the pop culture obsessions that consumed my grade school years: Star Wars, WWF wrestling, and Nintendo. I'll also continue acting as if you care about my past; if by chance you don't, come back next week anyway because there will be free food! It'll just spit right out of your disk drive, all hot and steamy. See you then!