Thursday, Oct 15
A little breathing space here. It’s MEA weekend, which is when the schools close down for two days to have a convention, or a caucus, or go the Caribbean and talk smack about this year’s crop of brats, I don’t know. Don’t recall these when I was a kid, but things were so different in my day that the teaches not only smoked, but smoked indoors. They had a lounge off the cafeteria, and a blue fog rolled from it all day long. Any kid who went in there came out like a doughboy after the mustard gas rolled over the lip of the trench. That’s if you dared to go in there. I remember doing so once, and everyone stiffened. You would not have been surprised if the English teacher rose, held out his hands palm-first, and used repelling beams to drive you back.
Harold! You revealed your power!
I know, Rhoda, but he had violated our lair. It had to be so.
So Thursday is light, except for column duty. No newscasts. Did a few today – the real Newsbreak, a practice Newsbreak in the new “Studio A,” and a run-through of the headlines. Went home, scooped up child, read a book while she did karate, then came home and did this and/or that.
More tomorrow, but for now: here’s a big thing which would be today’s blog post if I still put these things on the main page, instead of filing them away in permanent archives. Moonlight and Pretzels.
Back in a while with something else, but not before noon.
42 Responses to “Thursday, Oct 15”
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Bleh. This looks like some WPA project where half the budget got skimmed off the top. Maltin ignores it, and rightly so.
Of course, all day I’ll be singing, “Moonlight and pretzels, never out of date…Hearts full of hot dogs, jealousy, and hate….”
Depending on who was hiding out there, our HS teachers’ lounge was the same. Didn’t(or dasn’t, as Oma used to say) dare enter during the day, but when the crowd of us that did the musicals/choir/state music competitions used to hang out in the auditorium after school, we talked a classmate who worked there after school as a janitor(sorry, engineer) into letting us use his keys so one of us could leave cookies for specific teachers. They would simply be there the next morning, no “from”/explanation, fueling fevered(& sometimes paranoid) speculation by the staff, & amusing us no end. Kindness & a taste of surreptitious power. We were kind of odd teenagers, at that.
“Moonlight & Pretzels”–Good Lord. Well, Universal wasn’t exactly staffed by those who felt called to make musicals. Laemmele was a horror/thriller guy & he set the tone there.
James:
you completely missed the real story in Moonlight and Pretzels.
the real story is Leo Carillo, the “star” of the picture.
Most of your readers who know him will know him for one thing-
Ho, Cisco
Ho Pancho
In the 1950’s he was famous as the Cisco Kid’s dimwitted sidekick, Pancho.
Two decades before , as we see here, he played this type of Manhattan sophisticate (and ironically The Cisco Kid is an O’Henry creation). Contrary to his Pancho image Carillo was a well-educated, cultured man, the scion of a long-time California family.
You didn’t have MEA, because you went to school in ND! The “M” is “Minnesota.” I remember MEA weekends well, that was all through the 70s. Third weekend in October.
“The extent to which Hollywood explicitly endorsed FDR in the early-mid 30s never fails to amaze. I’ve never seen anything like it since.”
-where you been the last year, James? Or did I just miss the the sarcasm entirely?
Yeah, the propaganda in that movie is pretty blatant: FDR elected. Suddenly everything’s good again. That movie was definitely made before the 1940’s.
I haven’t seen Hollywood glorify Obama in the movies yet, at not that that explicitly. I recall earlier having seen some clips where movies were alos explicitly promoting the NRA (National Recovery Act). I don’t expect to see that with Obamacare.
I am so old that when I was in high school, there was a lounge for the STUDENTS to smoke in, blue fog and all. Before I graduated, the rules changed. They re-did the smoking lounge into a non-smoking Senior Lounge and made a new rule: teachers could still smoke in the teacher’s lounge, but students had to smoke outdoors. They didn’t, of course — they smoked in the bathrooms, and if you went in for any other purpose, the smokers would glare you right back out of there again. This made for some long days for the non-smoking portion of the student population.
Dang, James is too fast. Thought I’d be the only one who knew who Leo Carillo was. By the way, my first-ever TV appearance was on WJBF in Augusta, Ga., on the “Cisco Kid Hotdog Party” in 1956. I remember being disappointed that Duncan and Leo were not actually in the studio.
Whatever. As I’ve said before, not more cowbell, more ‘Diner’. BTW, I’d even support the MSM if you up’d the production a bit and stuck it on the StarTribune site.
Cheers.
My parents thought FDR was right up there with Jesus Christ. I suppose I thought so too, when I was a kid. Hey, he was on the new dimes and all! I know better now.
W. C. Fields called FDR “Old Gumlegs”, which is low and unkind, but illustrates that not everyone in Hollywood was enamored.
We had a smoker’s section outside the cafeteria in our Catholic High School. Teachers would frequently light up with the Students. And that was in ‘Anti-Smoking-is-a-religon-California’
Its also where bands could play at lunch. With all the smoke, it really did have ‘concert’ vibe.
My Minneapolis High School had the standard teacher’s smoking lounge; what made that unusual was the inordinate amount of time some teacher’s spent there. It wasn’t until years later that I realized it wasn’t normal for teachers to make an assigment during the first five minutes of the class, and then disappear to the teacher’s lounge for the rest of the hour. There were also a few teachers who did unauthorized drinking on a regular basis. Maybe this was because of the students; as a student body, we were no prize. In retrospect, I am filled with gratitude for the good teachers who mucked it out in that environment.
@RPD
It is done with TV now.
The best thing about smoking teachers in my high school was that they drove away the non-smoking teachers who ate lunch in their class rooms which gave us kids a place to hang out on a cold or rainy day.
(I should clarify that our cafeteria was converted to a library after the old library was torn down for being not up to earthquake code. I was in my home town a few months back and it appears the library has still not been replaced in the 35 since it was torn down. What do they do with that money?)
Sorry, Cory: it’s “O. Henry,” not “O’Henry.” I say that only because every morning I bicycle past a school named after him. As for what the teachers do in there, I cannot say, and would rather not find out. At the school where my polling station is, I saw a bulletin board devoted to the teachers – a chance to autobiographize. It just wasn’t right. Your own teachers should be fairly distant people: you don’t inquire into their personal lives, and you (or at least I) would be surprised if any ever confided anything in you. On this bulletin board, one teacher boasted of her vegetarian diet. Challenged to say something interesting about myself, I’m sure I could come up with something more welcome to parents and their children than the state of my bowels.
Once I had to visit the school nurse’s office due to a minor injury I suffered in P.E. (which was always a major injury to my self-esteem, but back in the day self-esteem was an elective and P.E. was required). I went by the teachers’ lounge on the way to the nurse’s office and took a furtive, guilty peek at my teachers pounding down those Luckies and Virginia Slims with mugs of reeking coffee. Eventually I developed a taste for the latter, but since I thought smoking was compulsory to the teaching profession, I gave it a pass.
When I arrived at Fayetteville Senior High School (N.C.) in 1962 from my DoD school in Germany, I was amazed that 1) there were smoke breaks FOR STUDENTS incorporated into the daily schedule, and 2) there was a designated smoking patio to which they could repair to puff their coffin nails. I guess it was the old Tobacco Road culture in one of its last gasps.
There was the Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin ducks into the teacher’s lounge to escape and sees the room full of slimy aliens.
“What was that?”
“Beats me, Fred.”
Our teacher’s lounge in elementary school had no windows, or ventilation, I guess, and the smoke would seep out under the door and into the hallway. My overarching memory of my third-grade teacher is her smoke/coffee breath. In junior high/high school, kids who smoked stood on “smoker’s corner” (or hood’s corner) across the street from the school, during breaks and at lunch. Pot smokers usually had to find a less visible venue. I had a high school vo-ag teacher who chain-smoked smoked in class. He was a Vietnam vet with PTSD (shaky hands) and I think our principal was too scared of him to call him on it.
Speaking of musicals, I have recently become a big fan of the TV program “Glee.” It’s “High School Musical” meets “Freaks and Geeks.” My favorite character is Jane Lynch, who plays a sadistic cheerleading coach who is the glee club’s archnemisis. It one of the few shows I sit down and watch with my daughters.
At Langley High School (class of 83) there was a smoking area on campus, but outside, into the mid-80’s at least. A covered area right outside the doors for when it rained, and an area known as “the hill” (because that’s what it was) where everyone went in good weather. As late as ‘83 the staff would ignore people smoking weed out there.
If there were a teaching job that included authorized drinking, I’d very much like to hear about it.
My high school’s band teacher (fittingly enough named Mr. Witzke) sometimes used liquid fortification to help him face the music.
My all-brick elementary school (Coloma Elementary – T Street Sacramento, CA) was closed due to non-compliance with CA earthquake code. Consequently I had to go to another school over a mile away, as opposed to Coloma, 7 blocks from my house. The City took over the property, and converted it into a Regional Recreation Department. For many years, all the community access cable shows were filmed there. Its a grand old building, and I’m grateful that they could keep it up and in use, but also disappointed. Merits code compliance for City workers, but school kids don’t have enough need? Meh.
Behind the Music, indeed.
“Wild Boys of the Road” was on TV the other evening, another “realistic but feel-good” movie from the ’30s. Despite the preachy ending, it seemed to be one of the better films of the genre and time. In addition, rather than the token shoeshiner it did take a stab at showing that poverty was integrated. (Which meant there were two black people shown instead of one)
Myxmaster FTW!!
@Chrees
Which was followed by the 1940 movie “Wild Girls of the Road”…so much for the “recovery”!
Not Hollywood yet–just the major news networks, along with some elementary schools. Trust me–Hollywood will soon be singing his praises on screen.
Jamcool, I saw that was on but just couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Obviously someone didn’t do their part after Wild Boys ended.
John:
D’OH! (not D. OH!)
You are right, early morning screw-up.
Actually, it’s William Sydney Porter.
OFF TOPIC: Mr. Lileks was just on the Hugh Hewitt Show, talking about how to punish the little kid that DIDN’T fall from/ ride the balloon today. James thought the punishment should be to make him RIDE the ballon. The obvious answer: the little kid should be grounded (OBVIOUSLY
)
Back to the broadcast, already in progress: in my high school, late ’70’s, we had a smoking area for the kids out in the rain. The idea was that kids would smoke anyway, so why not put it in a place that the janitor could more easily clean/ no judgementalism by the teachers, etc. What a crappy idea… except that is now what the smokers (regardless of age) are all forced to do now. And all of us non-smokers are forced to walk thru the gray haze to get to work, etc. Rather ironic. And now we have a set of permissive parents letting kids hang around experimental balloons, etc. The “Ballon Kid” will probably end up on the show “Intervention” one day, unfortunately.
I’m just waiting for the media to somehow credit Mr. Obama with bringing the ballon down safely.
So if someone wants to make a movie with their own money that paints a favorable picture of the president of united states, this bothers you?
@areader
They can spend their own money… Actually it will be wasting their own money or the money of their investors, since no one will probably see the movie. Hollywood did something similar shortly after 9/11 when they made movies critical of the military- no one was in the mood for it, and the studios lost a lot of money.
“Hope and Change” will be like “Moonlight and Pretzels” in ~75 years, and subject to lampooning in a 3-D video blog, with smell-o-vision. Anyone remember/ see “Primary Colors?”
shortly after 9/11
Actually it was closer to shortly after the invasion of iraq wasn’t going so well and no wmds were found.
Of COURSE! Because the Truth is ALWAYS what motivates Hollywood…
The college where I teach has a faculty lounge near my office. The first time I walked in, a number of older professors looked up, and for a second I felt as if I was back in high school and had walked into the teacher’s lounge there. Almost apologized, too.
Oops. Incorrect use of apostrophe. Bleah.
@browniejr
Actually, it was pretty much most of the last eight years. Wasn’t there at least four or five pictures, including “Stop Loss” with Cruise and Streep?
And recently, we’re reading over at the Big Hollywood site about the networks endorsing volunteer work, organized in part by the WH.
The thing I want to know about that movie is what the director was thinking in framing that final shot, what with the shocked eyes looming over the lowers.
Sorry, back to commenting about the site … I clicked through the “Next” button on the ’30s site and realized I missed a lot of movies somehow, including the pre-Code one with hints of hubba-hubba and the marijuana song.
For my book project, I’ve been researching the lives of writers, and came across a story about Katharine Anne Porter. In 1921, she was living in Mexico and tried some Mary Jane at a party. It was either pretty powerful stuff or cut with halluciongens, because she thought she could touch the stars and tried to do so by climbing onto the balcony. They got her down before she could fall and crash into some rocks a hundred feet below. She used the experience in her short story “Flowering Judas.”
One assumes that a number of Americans visiting Mexico brought back some souveniers for the neighbors to try.
Reminds me of the Jimmy Buffett line from “Pencil-Thin Moustache”: “And only jazz musicians / were smokin’ marijuana”
Stop loss was in 2008. There were alot of movies critical of Bush/Cheney policies, but they came out after and were a response to the invasion of Iraq. That’s a fact, and simply a counterpoint to the person above who said it started pretty much right after 9/11, which is not true. If you disagree, how about some facts.
@a reader
a reader is correct in that the march of dull anti-war/Bush films came after the Iraq invasion and the increasing unpopular support.
It probably seems sooner because I imagine that just before 9/11 the usual suspects in Hollywood were probably working on their “how Bush stole the election scripts” and then they had to switch to their “why did Bush let 9/11 happen” scripts which mostly got shelved in favor of the “Bush/Cheney stealing your liberties” and “Bush/Cheney evil war monger” scripts.
When you hold people in low regard it is easy to believe anything about them e.g. Rush Limbaugh this week.
@browniejr
No viable Nuclear WMD were found. Plenty of WMD were found. And WMD had been used on the Kurds before. Besides, mad dictators don’t kill people, only Nuclear WMD kill people.