Tag Archives: Men

Were Those Yellow Pants Hot as Venus? Or Cold as Mars?

14 Monday Jan 2013

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Which side is real? Painting by Julie Seyler

BY JULIE SEYLER

I received an e-mail the other day from an attorney. He had been opposing counsel in a case that we had settled about three years ago. His reply was in response to a message I had left on his voicemail concerning a completely new matter. We hadn’t spoken in the three years since the other case closed, but his e-mail said, in part: “How can I forget those yellow smoking hot pants!!!” “The sexiest … attorney at … ”

The hot pants were a pair of jeans, not “hot pants”. As background, during the long negotiations we had had a meeting at a crowded business function. The day we met I happened to be wearing jeans that were yellow colored. Amongst a sea of navy suits, pastel yellow stands out and we had joked about it. Anyway when I received the email I was a bit shocked, but not outraged. Really we had laughed about those yellow colored jeans. But, what made me not cast the email banter aside was a conversation I had had with my colleague, “Q.” He led me to see the vignette from an entirely different point of view.

When I told “Q” the anecdote, his first question was, “What did you say on the voice mail?”

“Nothing. My message simply said, ‘Hi, it’s Julie, remember with the yellow pants?'”

“Q” rolled his eyes and shook his head, “You made the first move.”

Huh??? I did not see myself as being at all provocative, but I listened. “Q” was giving me insight into the male psyche. He was helping me to “see” how men “see,” confirming the over-used adage that men are from Mars, and women from Venus. He was telling me that my use of the innocent phrase, “yellow pants,” could be interpreted as alluring; flirtatious. I would love to know what other men and women think, because my boyfriend, Steve, absolutely agreed with “Q”, whereas a female colleague’s eyes popped out in horror when I told her the story. Her immediate reaction was “How dare he!”

And that’s why this thumbnail sketch of male/female interaction is so intriguing. “Q”’s perception, and Steve’s concurrence certainly made me question whether I had (un)consciously sought an acknowledgment as to how I looked. It also led me to wonder whether men read very well, the little movements we make to (not) attract attention. Is it possible that they see right through us? Are women more naive than we like to believe?

And as for my reaction to the comment from the attorney about those “hot smoking pants?” It’s a snapshot of time travel.  In the ’70s when I was in my teens and a rampant and ardent worshiper of Gloria Steinem, I probably would have taken umbrage. Today, at 57, I am embarrassed to admit that what actually entered my mind when I received that e-mail was: “Would he still think that I was “sexy” three years later?” Geez how shallow and vain can you get?

When Print was the Touchstone of Journalism

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

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BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Frank-Journal News Pix

Frank, at the Journal News, working the slot on the news desk.

I am part of an ever-growing fraternity – former newspaper journalists. It has been sad to see the industry implode over the last three decades. Like most people who have worked in newspapers, I wish I was still doing it. But the combination of poor pay, anti-social working hours, and an industry that has been slowly going out of business for a generation, has produced a diaspora of journalists. My journey from newspaperman to lawyer/blogger is typical.

In my junior year of college, I started writing for the college newspaper. I loved it so much that I arranged an internship with the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, Massachusetts for my senior year. Over the summer before my senior year, I worked on a local weekly in my hometown. This was back in the days when newspapers were printed using linotype machines. These now-extinct machines consisted of a keyboard that created lines of type (similar to the striking keys on a typewriter) out of molten lead. As might be expected by the last two words of the previous sentence, this machine threw off a lot of heat – hence the term “hot type.”

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School Drills, Past and Present, Never Child’s Play

07 Monday Jan 2013

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A civil defense educational video on school preparedness for nuclear war in the 1950s.

BY BOB SMITH

I attended grammar school in Northern New Jersey during the early 1960s when the Cold War was in full bloom, with Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the desk at the United Nations and threatening to bury us all.

Teachers and schoolchildren, today, live in fear of random attacks by madmen with automatic weapons. Today’s threat is intensely personal – the shooter, often acting alone, stalks the halls and brutally murders innocents, one by one, at close range. The threat in the 1950s and 1960s was entirely anonymous – intercontinental ballistic missiles bearing nuclear warheads would launch from an ocean away and descend from the sky, killing millions.

Some elementary schools now have armed guards or run lockdown drills, in which the lights are turned off, classrooms are locked, and students hunker down in the dark, hoping the door doesn’t open. We were afraid, just as schoolchildren today may be, as we, too, prepared for the unthinkable.

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The Un-Friendly on Facebook: Ex-Wife, Peeing Dog, and Smeared Pudding

03 Thursday Jan 2013

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BY BOB SMITH

Bob FBI recently got a Facebook friend request from my ex-wife. Isn’t that oxymoronic? We couldn’t be friends in the real world, so why is it okay to be electronic, virtual friends? Christ, if we didn’t have to actually spend time together we might still be married. Maybe it’s the nature of electronic friendship. In the pre-Internet world I grew up in, real-world friends were people who were there for you, as in physically proximate; nearby – not just out there somewhere. With virtual friends, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter a bit where they’re physically located because most of them don’t have a real-world relationship anyway. And friends actually like each other, don’t they? That was the main reason my ex-wife and I split up – we didn’t. But virtual friendship doesn’t require sharing any true affection; each “friend” just has to be curious about what the other person’s up to. If you post enough facts and photos on your Facebook page, your “friends” can peruse your entire life without making contact at all – apart from stroking the keyboard.

What do we get out of these remote non-relationships? I just went through Facebook and took a tour through the lives of a number of my electronic friends. I saw the following:

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No Trouble With the Curves

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

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Photo of a photo of a A. Jaffe from 1951

Photo of a photo of a curvy A. Jaffe from 1951

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

As an over-50 male, I am sorry to say that the women that Hollywood is putting up on the screen these days as the new models of feminine beauty often leave me cold. When I see people like Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller or Olivia Wilde, all I want to do is feed them. Have a chocolate shake. Gain 20 pounds. Grow some curves!

I think that men who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s may have a different idea of the perfect female figure than young men today. We over-50 men first noticed women at a time when the feminine ideal was Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield. Oh sure, there was also Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, but these were women admired more for their faces than their bodies. If you asked any teenage boy in the 1960s which movie star had the best figure, he was more likely to say Elizabeth Taylor or Raquel Welch than Doris Day or Jane Fonda.  Even on television, the most popular mouseketeer among boys was not Karen or Sherry or Darlene. It was the full-figured Annette.

Our fathers and grandfathers shared this admiration for a female figure that was, in their words, “healthy-looking.”  The ideal then was the voluptuous Gibson Girl look of the early 1900s. That was continued into the 1930s with chorus girls in Busby Berkeley musicals showing a lot of meat on their bones -especially around their thighs. I don’t know whether those women would be considered beautiful today, but I do know that in the 1960s, women who by today’s standards would be considered fat, were held up as the feminine ideal.
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What I Want For Christmas: A Bunch of Feel-Good, Extremely Formulaic, Holiday Movies

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

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Hearts trump

Hearts trump.
All drawings, and photo, by Julie Seyler.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I have had a Christmas tradition for the last several years: I set my TiVo to record a couple dozen Christmas movies, and then I watch them for weeks and weeks. Sometimes I run into Valentine’s Day. Why do I subject myself to what are often horrible movies – formulaic and predictable to the extreme? Because that’s what I want at Christmas. No surprises. Just assured, feel-good happy endings with not a few tears.

For example, recently I watched a film on The Hallmark Channel called “Come Dance With Me.” Andrew McCarthy plays an ambitious finance professional who meets up with a woman who runs a small dance studio. Of course, McCarthy’s client wants to rip down the dance studio and put up a mall, or something else that makes a lot of money. McCarthy falls in love with the woman, and then faces the classic question found in almost all Christmas movies. He actually stops a co-worker and asks him, “If you had to choose between love and money, what would you choose?”

Hearts-3/Money-2

Hearts-3/Money-2.

The co-worker says he would try for both, but McCarthy won’t let him off the hook.

“No, if it was just one or the other, what would you choose?” The co-worker opts for money. And of course, that’s the same choice that Ebenezer Scrooge and Henry F. Potter make in “A Christmas Carol,” and “It’s A Wonderful Life,” respectively. But McCarthy, being the protagonist of the piece, must choose love over his job.

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My 40th High School Reunion: Same Cast, Acting Like Adults

17 Monday Dec 2012

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RobertSmith1

BY BOB SMITH

Because of the decline I might see in my classmates, and by the same token, what they might see in me, I was rightly apprehensive about attending my 40th high school reunion recently. As expected, our bodies are flabbier, our hair is grayer, and our faces are more wrinkled.

Bob today

But it was also strangely comforting, because the cast of characters have remained essentially the same.
There’s the gay guy all the straight guys hated in high school because the girls loved him when they would hardly give the rest of us the time of day. Here he is again – well-groomed, neatly-dressed, smiling and drawing women in like moths to a flame. And all for naught. All for friendship.

The pretty girl, who was really smart, is now a super-accomplished professional something-or-other, and her eyes are pulled three quarters of an inch closer to her ears on either side. Yes, she’s had some work done. She still looks pretty. But with eyes that shape, she might be mistaken for one of the Siamese cats from “Lady and the Tramp.”

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I Want What She Has: Big Muscles

11 Tuesday Dec 2012

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Muscle Chick by Julie Seyler

Muscle Chick, by Julie Seyler

By FRANK TERRANELLA

When I was 12, I arm-wrestled a girl and lost. I had not entered puberty yet, and the girl had. As I remember, it wasn’t even close.  The girl, who was the same age as me, had initiated the match.  She asked me to show her my bicep muscle. Perhaps she was flirting, but I was oblivious. When I flexed my arm, practically nothing popped up. The girl smiled, suppressing a giggle. She also did not have a defined bicep, but she had a thick arm, and was simply much stronger than me at that age. From the moment she engaged her strength, and started to push against my hand, I simply could not stop her from pushing my pre-pubescent arm down to the desktop. She was proud of herself, and when we argued about anything thereafter, she would flex her arm and say, “Remember, I’m stronger than you.”

Soon after that, I entered puberty, and within 12 months, when I flexed my skinny arm, a hard, round muscle popped up. It was truly amazing to the girl. She knew that I had not started lifting weights, or even exercising.  Just on the basis of being a boy, I had developed a bulging bicep muscle bigger than hers.  And to add insult to injury, she found out when we had our re-match that I was now just a little bit stronger than her also.

I was never a gym rat in my teens and never had athlete-sized biceps. But like most men, I developed biceps in my teens that were bigger than those of the women I came across. While they were just average by male standards, I was confident that I was not going to lose a strength contest to any woman I might meet.

Then I hit 40. I noticed that my biceps did not have the peak they used to have when I flexed them. I noticed there was more fat on my arm covering the muscle.  By the time I hit 50, I noticed a decrease in arm strength.  Lifting heavy items to put them on a top shelf was not as easy as it used to be. I started to read articles in The New York Times and elsewhere that said I was losing one percent of my muscle mass each year. This was alarming.

And then I started noticing that many women were developing  biceps as large or larger than mine. I was walking in Midtown Manhattan one day, when I saw a young woman with biceps the size I had formerly only seen on men. These were not cute fitness biceps from aerobics; these were cannonball-sized guns on a beautiful woman.  And I loved them on her! And beyond that, I wanted them on me.

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Hanging On to (And Finally Letting Go Of) the Chooba Diamond

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

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the chooba diamond- drawing by Julie Seyler

A Little Chooba Diamond on Her Hand.
Drawing by Julie Seyler

BY BOB SMITH

Have you ever heard of the Chooba diamond? I invented it when I was 11.
In 1965, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons had a pretty big hit on pop radio with a song called, “Let’s Hang On.” It’s a bouncy anthem about love gone wrong featuring Valli’s powerful falsetto, and one of the verses begins like this:

That little chip of diamond on your hand
Ain’t a fortune baby but you know it stands
For the love (A love to tie and bind ya)
Such a love (We just can’t leave behind us) …

The chorus exhorts the girlfriend to:

Hang on to what we’ve got
Don’t let go girl, we got a lot
Got a lotta love between us
Hang on, hang on, hang on
To what we’ve got.”

Somehow, I misunderstood the first line of that verse.  I thought Frankie said, “that little Chooba diamond on your hand,” instead of “chip of:”

I’d had zero experience with diamonds (or engagement rings, or girls, for that matter), so I  assumed Chooba was a designation of origin for a rare type of diamond unknown to me.  The “ain’t a fortune baby” line made sense because he did say “little,” after all.  So in my quaint understanding, Frankie had purchased an engagement ring for his girl set with a minuscule, but nonetheless highly-prized and mysterious, “Chooba diamond.”

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Fortunate Son Number 234

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

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draft card

My son most likely will never receive a draft card – is that a good thing?

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

I was looking for something in a drawer in my bedroom recently, and came across a relic from the 1970s – my draft card.  It occurs to me that the Baby Boomer generation is in a unique position when it comes to military service. While we were the last generation of men in recent times who were saddled with compulsory military service, most of us didn’t serve.  So we are unlike our fathers, who mostly did serve, and unlike our sons, who may never have experienced the threat of compulsory service.

I think that every man my age remembers going down to the Draft Board and registering.  Those of us who were more fortunate were able to claim college or other exemptions.  The less fortunate got their induction letters, and were sent to war.

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