IRV'S OUTTAKES

This is usually a week where I schedule a 'recap' and discuss your comments from the week before. But as I sat down this time, I realized there was nothing to recap!

Last week was just one big recap of my vacation, so what should I do? Review the recap? That would be a time waster for everybody. And now that I've used the word 'recap' more than I have in the past year, I'm stuck on what to talk about.

But wait--how about something a little different? In writing last week's recap (damn, I said it again!) of my vaca, I remembered that the original version was way too long and had to be drastically reduced (and if I thought it was too long, you know it must have been a beast!)

Anyway, my original idea was that since I was doing so much traveling, I would probably talk to, or spend time with, a lot of you guys during my vacation. So I challenged myself to come up with creative ways to mention as many of you as could within my vacation stories.

But alas, my verbosity got the best of me and in mentioning and describing as many people as I could, the blog got carried away and had to be cut down.

What got edited out was the intro, where I gave an example of someone in my past who tried to mention as many names as he could in a short period of time. But since that really had nothing at all to do with my vacation, cutting the story made sense.....

But now that I've got a little 'spare time', I'll tell that story right here. (Good thing I copy and save almost everything I do, huh?) It's radio-oriented and has a definite Zelig feel to it, so why not? We'll call it 'Irv's outtakes' and it gives you the unique opportunity to read something that originally ended up on the 'cutting room floor'.

What a treat, huh??

Anyway, this was it:

>>I'm not even going to assume that more than just a couple of you know who Jean Shepherd was: writer, storyteller, host of a nightly radio show, he peaked in popularity during my formative years; if you don't know his name, you probably know at least one of his creations: the short tale that became "A Christmas Story", broadcast every holiday season since 1997.

And as an adolescent, I was the cliched 'transistor-radio-under-the pillow' kind of kid. Baseball games, hockey games...I even listened to the Academy Awards on radio a couple of times when it ran past my bedtime and I was forced to my room. But every weeknight at 10pm I turned on Jean Shepherd, who somehow was able to tell stories about his life (and make up some others,) for a full hour every show.

This might have been one of early my inspirations in storytelling now that I think of it. If so, he was one hell of an instructor.

One night Jean talked about how many letters (letters, not emails, mind you) he used to get from listeners, asking him to say hi to them, or to their wife, or their mother. So Shepherd decided to take care of them all at once: "I want everyone listening tonight to send me a letter with your name in it. You don't have to say anything else, just write your name. And a week from tonight, I will collect them all and read as many of your names as I can for the whole hour!"

So naturally, the early Zelig in me got up the next day, clearly wrote my name on a piece of loose leaf paper, put it in an envelope, got a stamp, and sent it off to the address he'd given the night before. Then I excitedly waited for a week...

When the night came, I put Shepherd on my transistor and listened as he started reading off names. Naturally, some people couldn't help but write a little note or tell Jean a short story in their letters, so he read some of these as well. It was now 10:30 and he hadn't gotten to me yet.

10:45: He must have realized he was running short on time, as Shepherd now just started ripping through the letters, reading out names as fast as he could.

At around 10:55 I started to panic. Was he really going to go through this whole hour and never get to me? The audio engineer started sneaking the closing music in under Shepherd's voice--I think it was the 1812 Overture, the Lone Ranger's theme song. And at just around 10:59, as the music swelled to a crescendo to the point where it almost drowned out Jean's voice as he read faster and faster, I finally heard him say:

"...and here's Irvin Goldfarb slipping in under the wire..."

I was thrilled. The very first mention of my name on the radio!

*************************

The second time actually came shortly after. This one is a story I've probably never shared before. But since I trust every one of you (and I'm still short on stories,) I will tell it here for the first time:

As admitted in previous blogs, I was not only a committed AM radio listener as a kid, I was also addicted to network television (but weren't we all in the days before computers, iPhones and tablets?) I had my favorite shows, my favorite nights of the week to watch them, my preferred networks. And if it was "The Man From UNCLE", "Dallas" and "Family Guy", during other periods, when I was 12 it was, by far, "Mission: Impossible".

To this day I am still fascinated with the idea of a quiet mastermind--Jim Phelps (Dan Briggs during the first season, for those of you who are true TV trivia nerds--) staying one step ahead of everyone else and utilizing team members with different skill sets to make his targets always think exactly what he wanted them to think. Did it get a little hard to believe sometimes? Uhhh...yeah. (Not really sure how they made those absolutely PERFECT masks on demand every show...) But the creativity of the premise is undeniable and it's the reason that they're still making movies based on the show 55 years later.

(I think my favorite is still "MI: 4, Ghost Protocol". I saw Cruise scale the Dubai Tower in IMAX and almost passed out! BTW, I just discovered that the Dubai Tower is actually called the Burj Khalifa. Did anyone else know this?)

Anyway, "M:I" was on every Saturday night and I looked forward to it each week. Well, this one week I was a very bad boy: I was headed to the local candy store to invest in the new shipment of Marvel comics, when I realized I was still a few dimes short for the books I knew I'd want to buy. So on a whim, I did something I had never done before: I went into my mom's closet and found some of her old pocketbooks that I knew she hadn't used in a while. Hey, I didn't consider this stealing--I was just rummaging through some little-used items looking for spare change. Kinda like going through the seat cushions of a couch, right?

Nope, Mom didn't agree either. I had left some clue that someone had been in her closet (don't we always?) and my argument that it wasn't really 'stealing' didn't take. She was possibly madder (and more disappointed) than I had ever seen her, livid that her son had become a thief. My punishment? No TV for the rest of the week!

And yeah , 'the rest of the week' included Saturday...hence, no "Mission: Impossible"!

I begged. I pleaded. I cried. But when Saturday came and my parents were preparing to go out for the night, the instructions to my babysitting grandmother was: NO TV!

(Again, keep in mind that there were no initials yet to help me out of this predicament--no VCR's, VHS's, DVR's. The only way you could catch something you missed was by reading the description of the episode in the TV Guide, remembering the plot, and praying that they would re-run it sometime during the summer. I guess nowadays, parents have to punish their kids by banning all media platforms, huh? Good luck with that one!)

But even at that age, I could tell that my grandmother was not relishing her assignment. She had a sheepish, almost apologetic look on her face when she got her marching orders, and I could tell she was going to have a tough time keeping her word if I decided to get whiny on her ass.

But after asking her once pleadingly if I could 'just watch one show?', and getting a sorrowful shake of her head, I decided to back off and accept my penalty quietly, agreeing to turn on the big radio in the kitchen instead, and play some cards with Grandma. (No, I don't think it was three-card poker!)

Though my station of choice was usually the undisputed King of Top 40 radio, WABC, for some reason I turned to WMCA, the other rock'n'roll station in New York. The DJ that night was a guy named Gary Stevens who sounded like a kid. He wasn't one of my favorites, but he was playing good background tunes for a card game, so I kept him on.

(More useless trivia: Stevens later went on to be the head of Doubleday Broadcasting and then became a leading name in radio station investment banking. Amazing the stuff I've learned writing this blog!)

At the time, 570 WMCA had a contest called "Name it and Claim It". The rules were easy: when they announced that it was time for the game, they played a hit record, and the first (9th? 57th?) caller would win a copy of it. (Can you imagine calling into a radio station and winning a 79-cent record as a prize?!)

Sometime during our card game, the station announced it was time to play "Name it and Claim It" and I heard the intro to a song called "When the Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" by the Marvelettes, a fairly successful Motown girl band.

I jumped up from the kitchen table, grabbed the wall phone (!) and dialed MCA's number. To my amazement, rather than the busy signal I was used to getting when calling in to contests, I heard the phone ringing--followed by someone picking up--and telling me I was the correct caller!

As nervous as I was, I correctly identified the song, clearly enunciated my name and address so they could send me my prize, then hung up and excitedly told my grandmother that I had won and they'd be announcing my name on the radio when the record was over.

We both waited for the song to finish (never a favorite tune of mine, by the way) and when it finally faded out, Stevens came on the air to announce the winner. In my half-century old memory, he said something like this:

"'The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game' by the Marvelettes...and congratulations to----pause----Irvin Goslob of Valley Stream who was the first to identify it! He wins a copy of the song from your WMCA Good Guys!"

Did he really just say Irvin Goslob? Maybe it was Glofob? Can't recall for sure. Either way, he butchered it. Grandma was still impressed.

And of course, the capper came a week or so later when a small record-shaped envelope with the WMCA logo in the upper corner arrived at our house. I carefully opened the flap and pulled out the contents: a copy of "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game"-- smashed into little pieces. I sighed and tossed them all away.

Figured that's what I got for switching from WABC.

Oh yeah, and I made sure never to open my mom's closet again...

Talk Thursday

IG