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An ‘Exit’ Strategy for Terminally Ill

15 Thursday Jan 2015

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Exit

BY BOB SMITH

I read an article recently in The New York Times about a not-for-profit organization called Final Exit Network (FEN), whose slogan is “Supporting the Human Right to a Death With Dignity.” Humans have a “right” to death with dignity? Tell that to the freight train bearing down on your disabled vehicle stuck on the tracks, with you inside unable to unclick the seatbelt.

Of course, the FEN’s specific focus is narrower: “to work toward obtaining the basic human right of competent adults to choose to end their lives on their own terms when they suffer from irreversible physical illness, intractable pain, or a constellation of chronic, progressive physical disabilities.”

To fulfill that mission, the FEN will tell you how to end your life. They have what they call the Exit Guide program — kind of the opposite of a life coach — where qualified individuals receive “relevant information, home visits if possible and a compassionate presence for individual and family.” First you must join FEN and submit an application, along with a doctor’s evaluation of your condition and prognosis — like a note from Mom telling the teacher it’s okay to send you home early. If you’re sick enough, and if you can attest that neither your family nor your primary caregiver will interfere, the FEN folks will assign you an Exit Guide.

From the guide, you’ll get “detailed information about the method [FEN] recommend[s], and the inexpensive equipment you will need to obtain.” Because in many places it’s a crime to help someone die, FEN never supplies equipment, but the guide “will provide you with information on all alternatives for care at the end of life, including all legal methods of self-deliverance that will produce a peaceful, quick, certain and painless death.”

And what do they often recommend? Asphyxiation by inhalation of helium.
You get a tank of helium, the same stuff they use at the party store to make festive floating balloons. You attach vinyl tubing to the tank, and run the open end into a large plastic baking or turkey brining bag. Then you securely tape the bag around your neck, and turn on the gas.

I can’t decide whether or not this is right or wrong, necessary or not. Instinctively it seems abhorrent; unthinkable. But then, I’m not living in the constant hell of pain that the people who seek out FEN’s services apparently seem to be enduring.

But I’m uneasy with the associations the helium exit brings to mind. I’ve seen people at parties inhale a lungful of helium, which allows them to talk for a few seconds in high-pitched, squeaky cartoon voices. It’s pretty funny to see a burly guy transformed into Tweety Bird at a party. But is it dignified to die that way? I guess if you’re in the bag making your exit, you’re not talking much.

And the bag itself, used to bake a roast, or to brine a turkey, is usually such a happy thing. You put something really good into it and it comes out better. When you’re done using that bag for its intended purpose, you’re warm, well-fed, and very happy. Even the vinyl tubing is a party accessory — it’s just like the tubing that attaches the plastic spigot to the beer keg at our summer parties.

Thank God I’m not in a position to consider using FEN’s services. I just wish they’d come up with a “method of self-deliverance” that doesn’t make me think of so many silly, happy things. Death with dignity? Maybe. But please, not death with Daffy Duck.

Finally. My Own Edge Over Mysogyny

25 Thursday Sep 2014

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Strength of the Isus

BY LOIS DESOCIO

I’ve been in a nest of men lately since my recent divorce after a 30-year marriage. Some of them are married to friends, or in a committed relationship. Some are single, and have never been married. Some are divorced. Some are friends. I’ve dated a few.

And more than a few are good men. But as a middle-aged woman who is single for the first time since her 20s, I’ve been reminded personally, all too often, that sexism is ageless. A few die-hard mysogynists have flown by.

But I’m now like a fine-grained whetstone. As an older woman, I’ve noticed that my feminist edge has been honed over the last three decades. My whittle-down skills are fine-tuned. And comparable to a 59-year-old slab of good old Wisconsin cheddar – I’m sharper with age.

It’s a given that men’s behavior towards women is as disparate as stone and cheese. But my little slice of change is that I have no use for the stinkers among them – to those who believe that masculinity means mysogyny. I no longer bother to slice through the bad parts to get to the good. I toss them – every bit of them – without pause.

It hasn’t always been this way. I would take the verbal, physical and emotional abuse personally when I was in my teens and my 20s. I had a what-did-I-do-wrong approach. Let me slice through your layers for you! I want to help you understand who I am – how smart I am.

To any man that would diminish me, whether in the workplace, or in my personal relationships, I figured it was smart to be coy. I would try to see his side. This hen didn’t want to ruffle any rooster feathers. I smiled. I played the game. I would give in. And eventually give up. I figured I must be doing something wrong. Let me fix me. Because that would fix them.

When one man in particular would yell “I am woman!” in a condescending, mocking voice, every time I spoke my mind, I would instinctively knock myself down a few pegs. My own in-my-head demand – Stop talking, Lois! – would shut me down.

And often, I fell right into the stereotype – I cried like a girl.

As for cat calls, hoots from men, and behavior from some that reduced me to body parts: Oh! They think I’m beautiful! That’s what I’m supposed to be.

I felt I had no tools to handle it any other way. It was uncomfortable. I knew I deserved better. But I took it as the norm.

Because, back then, to me, to survive as a girl meant to play with the boys. They ruled.

So, dare I write this – I’m feeling a change in attitude beyond my own. I see the tolerance meter towards sexism shrinking among women. And men.

There is a plethora of online platforms which allows women to reach a wide audience. They are standing up to the abuse, the misogyny, the dismissiveness, and the cluelessness in a way that I couldn’t. I didn’t know how.

So bravo to the female journalists, like ESPN anchor Hannah Storm (who is 52), who are “driving the story, providing a perspective that their male counterparts simply cannot” on the Ray Rice assault on Janay Palmer, and the N.F.L’s subsequent sloppy handling of it.

To quote Jonathan Mahler, in his article about Storm for The New York Times: “The proliferation of female broadcast voices covering this story is a testament to the progress women have made in a profession that was once a male bastion.”

He continues to ask if this is a “watershed moment,” or ” … just the temporary effect of a news cycle.”

No matter – a layer has been removed. More men are listening.

And kudos to the 20-somethings, like college student Emma Sulkowicz, who has tirelessly dragged a 50-pound mattress around the campus of Columbia University and has pledged to do so until her accused rapist is expelled from the same school. She has helped to blaze a path of awareness, straight to Washington, to legislate against, and shut down, the rape culture on our college campuses.

Thank you, Emma Watson, for your eloquent, “game-changing” speech to the United Nations that defined feminism as a theory, not a rally cry against men.

I have no doubt that every single woman, from 18 to 80, has experienced, at some point in her life, sexual harassment. She’s been diminished, groped, humiliated, physically abused, verbally bashed, emotionally dismissed, laughed at, or all of the above.

Every. Single. One.

And I have no doubt that, like me, many women of my generation felt it was amiss – wrong. But fell into line because that was the wisdom of the day for those of us who were less resolute, and were not as self-assertive, as the feminists of the 19th and 20th centuries, who cast that first stone, and whittled, piece by piece, through the mess that is mysogyny.

Because no matter how you slice it – it stinks.

Circus Drive-In Clown Not a Sign of the Times

17 Wednesday Sep 2014

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Circus

BY BOB SMITH

There’s a clown on Rt. 35, just south of Belmar. He leers over the top of the Circus Drive-In sign with its Broadway-lit letters and neon-highlighted arrow pointing to the parking lot. But this is a sad day for the clown because, as the announcement board reads, “SUNDAY SEPT 7 LAST DAY OF THE SEASON.”

The Circus Drive-In opened in 1954 and, although the building appears to be well-maintained, its style is dated. Its circular roof has wide red and white stripes that hang over the facade so the whole place resembles a big-top tent. Cutout clowns, along with female performers that appear to be acrobats, stand hand in hand on the roof.circus 3

A metal awning with the tent motif stretches out from the right side of the main building, providing covered parking for maybe a dozen cars. A sign on top proudly proclaims “WEATHER-PROOFED CURB SERVICE,” meaning they bring the food to you right there in your car so you can eat without ever having to set foot in the Circus itself. You can even buy souvenir t-shirts bearing an image of the iconic sign and the restaurant’s slogan, “I’M WITH THE CLOWN” (which your spouse may or may not appreciate).circus 2

The menu, as you might expect from the décor, is heavily laced with cheese-laden appetizers, steaks, ribs, chicken, burgers, dogs, battered fish platters, and five varieties of French Fries. Oh sure they have salads, but eating green is clearly not what the clown is about. If you’re with the clown, you’re gonna eat grease.

I pulled in last Friday afternoon, just two days before lights out, but I couldn’t bring myself to order any food. It’s not that I wasn’t hungry, and I’m not averse to the occasional artery-busting plateful of mouth-watering, deep-fried everything. But, senseless as it seems, because the Circus opened the same year I was born, I felt somehow responsible for it, as if I had conceived of its garish style and approved its throwback menu selections.

I was embarrassed to be there.

1954 was the height of the post-war baby boom, and most people in the U.S. were feeling optimistic about the future. Good jobs were plentiful. Gasoline cost about a quarter a gallon, and you could buy a brand new Ford for less than $2,000. Cigarettes, not considered harmful at all, were still promoted in magazines and on billboards with ads featuring images of doctors and babies – even Santa Claus.

The Circus Drive-In must have been a pretty cool place to idle in your shiny metal machine, unfiltered Camel dangling from your mouth, waiting for your double cheeseburger, shake, and fries. The Clown’s gleeful smile must have felt exactly right for the times.

But look what’s happened since: assassinations, suicide bombings, terrorists beheading journalists, war after war after bloody “police action,” natural disasters, exotic diseases, overflowing jails – the list of modern ills is as expansive as the country’s 1950’s dreams. The Clown’s smile today feels forced; almost cynical. The Circus Drive-In’s season may have just closed on September 7, but the season of our optimism from which it sprang ended, sadly, many years ago.
circus 4

Hello 50. Goodbye Creativity?

26 Tuesday Aug 2014

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franks 54BY FRANK TERRANELLA

Have you ever noticed that creative people create their best works while they are young? Whether it’s musicians, authors or artists, it’s an inconvenient truth for those of use on the right side of 50 that creativity declines with age.

I know I may get arguments on this point.

People will inevitably point out the exceptions to the rule as disproving it. But if you look at the great creative works in history, you will find that the overwhelming majority of them were created by people under the age of 50. Some of that is due to the fact that many great artists die young —  Mozart was 35; VanGogh was 37; Fitzgerald was 45. But among those who do not, most find their later years much less fruitful from a creative standpoint.

There are lots of examples, but I will pick just three from the 20th century. Example one is Orson Welles. Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 26. He never attained that level of creativity again, and made his last film when he was 50. Example two is Truman Capote. Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s when he was 34. He wrote his last great work, In Cold Blood, when he was 42. After that it was all downhill. Example three is Albert Einstein. Einstein came up with the Theory of Relativity when he was 26. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics when he was 42. Although he lived to be 76, his later life produced no other creative breakthroughs on a par with his earlier work.

So why is it that most creativity comes in the earlier years of life? Frankly, I don’t know. Is there something in the brains of younger people that dissipates over time and blocks creativity? Anyone who has ever had a stroke of creativity will tell you that when they were creating, it was like someone else was inhabiting their body directing the genius. Composers talk about sitting down at the piano and composing a hit song in as long as it takes to play it. Creativity, when it comes, always flows out so fast, it’s an effort to write it all down quickly enough. The very word “inspiration” comes from the Latin “in spirito” meaning literally “possessed by a spirit.” This is exactly the way artists talk about the process of creating their most brilliant works.

Perhaps the human mind as it ages becomes less welcoming to this process of being possessed by creativity. Perhaps there is an unwillingness to just follow the dictates of the spirit as we grow older. Isn’t this the idea of “old people” that we had when we were young? Yet there were always exceptions to the rule. Most of us have memories of an older relative who didn’t act his or her age, and we loved them for that. So certainly we can be inspired and possessed by creativity in old age. It’s just less common.

Famously, Grandma Moses did not begin painting until she was in her 70s. Fortunately, she lived to be 101. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote great works like the Mass in B minor into his 60s. Woody Allen’s output has not lessened with age. He was 76 when he wrote and directed Midnight in Paris, which won him an Academy Award.

Clearly, inspiration can still occur in later life. I think the trick is not to settle for a comfortable existence where life has an unchanging routine. If the spirit moves you to pull an all-nighter to create, open your mind and let it flow. Creativity may prefer youth, but we over 50s can still claim our share. Go Woody!

Ukraine Crises Stirs Memories of 1960s Russian Showdown

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

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russia 5BY MARGO D. BELLER

Anyone who grew up during the 1960s remembers “duck and cover.” At an alert, crawl under your desk and put your arms over your head, and hope the nuclear bomb lobbed by “the Russians,” as we called what was once the Soviet Union, would miss and hit elsewhere.

There was a time my boomer friends and I laughed at that memory. Today, watching the 24-hour coverage of the Ukraine crisis, we are not laughing. We’re back to fearing the Russians again.

Those of us who study history, or in my case is married to someone who does, see a strong parallel between Vladimir Putin sending Russian troops into Crimea to “protect” the ethnic Russians there, with Adolph Hitler sending German troops into the nascent nation of Czechoslovakia to protect the ethnic Germans in 1938.

You might remember what happened a year later when Hitler’s troops went from “protecting” to invading, this time Poland.

In today’s world, we have instant and constant bombardment. You can watch an invasion as it happens, not wait as our parents did to read about it in the newspapers. There are tweets, blogs and Facebook posts.

I find it overwhelming on a normal day, and these are not normal times.

Back in the 1960s, I did not understand the implications of what we were doing when we went through the “civil defense” drills and hid under our desks. But there was a real fear in the adult world the “Russians” would lob missiles at major cities, as the Cuban missile crisis showed.

My parents and their generation were finally feeling some economic security after growing up with immigrant parents trying to “make it” in the new world. They feared another world war, only this time with nuclear bombs.

“The living will envy the dead,” the Communist USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev supposedly said, perhaps mocking as he quoted from Revelations in the Bible.

Boomers, until recently, have had it easy. We grew up comfortable, and took it for granted we’d go to college and live better lives than our parents because that is what they wanted. The USSR disappeared. The US “won.” We spent our money, and buoyed the economy.

We’re older now, and times have changed.

Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high (particularly for us over 50), and those who can’t afford to retire keep working. There is fear of another economic recession. Now, like our parents, we might fear a nuclear war with the Russians.

Perhaps we can ignore the crises in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan (unless we have a personal connection, of course.) But for me and perhaps you, Ukraine puts us face to face with the Russians again, the “Evil Empire.” At a time of economic instability, that only heightens the tension.

We’re beyond “duck and cover.”

Remember, it wasn’t Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that ended the Great Depression, it was World War II. If Ukraine escalates, that economic “lift” could happen again.

We boomers won’t pay that price. My nephew and his generation will.

Oscar Musings

03 Monday Mar 2014

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One is missing.

One is missing.

BY JULIE SEYLER

There are no doubt thousands that turned a blind eye to the Oscars. They have no interest that Jennifer Lawrence was wearing a strapless red Dior, or that she was up for her third Academy Award nomination in four years, and she’s all of 23. But there were millions of others who had one foot in the door, anticipating tucking into a fun night of watching who’s wearing what, and wondering whether this year’s host, Ellen DeGeneres redux, could top Billy Crystal’s Hannibal Lecter skit during the 1992 awards show, when some of us had not even reached 40 years old. Geez Louise, it seems like yesterday. All in all I thought Ellen DeGeneres was a mighty generous, relaxed and comfortable host, although the morning after comments from friends have weighed in with “too much”, “boring”, and “not edgy enough”.

I adored watching Angelina Jolie accompany Sidney Poitier to announce Best Director (Alfonso Cuaron for “Gravity” – that movie swept up). The man who starred in “A Patch of Blue” (1965), “To Sir With Love” (1967), “The Defiant Ones” (1958) and “In the Heat of the Night” (1967) is 87 years old. I can watch Sidney Poitier movies over and over again. He’s such an incredible actor.

I was in complete agreement with Bill Murray about Amy Adams dress. It was a knock-out.

It’s always a trip to check out the cosmetic surgery procedures, and this year, Goldie Hawn sort of made me gasp. I recently watched “Butterflies Are Free” (1972), for the first time and I think she may be 27 in that movie – a real pixie. I guess she is still going for the pixie look – don’t think it quite works at 68. Her smile was the same though.

I rarely relish the acceptance speech because it can be so predictable – the winner rattles through the prepared list of thank-yous, while at the same time making the PC call out to their fellow nominees. Yawn Yawn. However, I applauded Jared Leto for his for Best Supporting Actor for “Dallas Buyers Club” and Darlene Love for singing thanks for “20 Feet from Stardom.” Definitely want to see that movie.

I had seen all of two of the nine nominated movies. “American Hustle,” which I found captivating from the moment you see Christian Bale’s oversized exposed belly, and “Her,” to me a puzzlement as to why it was even on the list. Love with an operating system? I guess the novelty, along with the possibility that, yes, it really could happen in the not so distant future, kept it in the game. It turned out I do not have my hand on the pulse of the voters. Her won for best original screenplay. It was original, even if I found it a bit enervating.

The whole month of February had been one big celebration on TCM because every movie aired was, or starred, an Academy Award nominee or winner. In fact I saw a few starring Jean Hersholt. I mean they always give out the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. It was nice to put a name to a face.

But my favorite part of the evening is when the room goes silent, and the film is rolled for the tribute to the persons that have died during the past year. It is a trip down Memory Lane to see the actors, directors and other legends of Hollywood lore, some of whom I grew up with, that are now cast in movie heaven. In a weird way, it marks how quickly time has flown, and will fly. While I knew Shirley Temple and Philip Seymour Hoffman, both of whom passed away in the past month would be honored, I’d forgotten that Joan Fontaine and Julie Harris and Peter O’Toole had also died this past year.

So now we know that “12 Years a Slave” won Best Picture, and Cate Blanchett won Best Actress, and Matthew McConaughey’s hero is himself in 10 years. I’ll definitely be tuning in next year to see who are the winners for the 87th Academy Awards. I love them!

Seattle? A Miserable Sports City? Not Today

02 Sunday Feb 2014

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seahawk redo

BY JEANNETTE GOBEL

America’s Most Miserable Sports City? This, from an article in Forbes Magazine from July of 2013, by Tom Van Riper:

The city of Seattle hasn’t had it easy, sports wise. Its former NBA club, the Sonics, left town in 2008. This past year efforts to get pro basketball back to the city by luring the Sacramento Kings fell short. The NFL Seahawks made a gallant playoff run behind young quarterback Russell Wilson, only to suffer a gut-wrenching 30-28 loss to Atlanta one roushy of the conference championship. The loss marked the Seahawks’ twelfth trip to the NFL postseason in their 37-year history, none of which have ended with a title. Altogether, Seattle teams have competed in 115 cumulative seasons, advancing to at least the semifinal round of the playoffs 11 times, with just a single ring by the 1979 Sonics to show for their efforts. It earns Seattle the top spot our Most Miserable Sports Cities list, just a hair ahead of Atlanta, a town whose history is loaded with Braves’ postseason flops and which lost its NHL franchise not once, but twice.

I remember reading this article and thinking, “Great, could we leave this status behind if the Seahawks have a great season and somehow, make it to the Super Bowl?”

Fast forward to January 19, 2014. Our Seahawks beat San Francisco in a final seconds, tipped pass away from Crabtree by Richard Sherman in the end zone. Our shot at redemption awaits us today as our best-defense-in-football, Seahawks, square off with the best-offense Denver Broncos.

Seattle will be cellar-dwellers no more, not with this incredible Seahawks football team and its regular season record of 13 and 3. It’s been a blast connecting with old friends, and new, on Facebook during the games. Our need to vent and cheer is quite deserved. Whether it was Beast Mode, Marshawn Lynch going for yardage, or Richard Sherman executing a pick six in the other end zone, we did it!!!

The 49ers were vanquished once again at the Clink (Century Link Field). Our Seahawks earned their second trip to the Super Bowl. The din of the 12th man at the home games can still be heard for miles. There is no hushing the 12th. There is a buzz in the air, an excitement never before felt in the state of Washington, because as they say,” When you play the Seahawks, you play the entire state.”

School kids are having 12th contests, Boeing is flying its Seahawks painted 747-800 freighter around the state today in a pattern saying, 12, and even new flavors of Skittles have been created for our Beast Mode, Marshawn Lynch.

NFL Seahawks jerseys sales are through the roof. Who wouldn’t want a number 25, Richard Sherman, jersey? Best cornerback in the league. Believe it! Ask anyone in the state of Washington, or Puget Sound, or anywhere on the globe who is a Seahawks’ fan, and they will tell you that this year is something amazing.

Whether or not we win (and we will), this event catapults Seattle out of its label as the most miserable sports city in the country. With a victory over the Denver Broncos, our city will be rid of this dubious honor. Heck, even if we don’t win, the fun is getting to the Super Bowl.

Even our nails say Go Hawks!

Even our nails say Go Hawks!

Go Hawks

Go Hawks

Guns, Yet Again

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

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at the movies 4

BY JULIE SEYLER

The story about the 71-year-old Tampa citizen who shot a man dead for texting during the previews of a movie on a Monday afternoon is no longer breaking news. It’s been replaced by the shooter at the mall in suburban Maryland, and no doubt in a week that will be replaced by a story about a gun-toting citizen walking into a school. But for now, I’ll stick with the stream-of-consciousness thoughts that were provoked by the matinee gun-toting citizen.

You know, if he’d shot the movie screen out of fury for the insane assault of the violent-spewed previews, and mind-numbing commercials that drone on for thirty minutes before we get to see the film we had the privilege of paying $16 to see, I would have gotten it – albeit with outrage that he had a gun in his pocket.

But that wasn’t the case. The gun toter was mad at the audience member because he was checking in to see how his 22-month daughter was faring while the previews were blasting. And even if this man had been texting his bookie during the movie, and threw popcorn, laws that permit one to rely on a gun to solve one’s annoyances are a problem we, as a society, face. Why do state legislatures permit the carte-blanche purchase of a device that shoots someone dead at the slightest affront to their personal space?

I get it. The electees are following their constituents’ wishes. The Florida voters made it legal to walk around carrying a gun. I guess they see no difference between a gun and a cellphone; both are necessary accessories. But why consciously choose to hand over the right to own a device that can kill over cell phone use to just anyone? Does it boil down to the NRA’s successful brainwashing campaign that the Second Amendment guarantees an unfettered Constitutional right to buy a gun and wear it anywhere?

There are laws concerning the consumption of toxic chemicals, the age you can purchase liquor, and buckling up before driving. They are on the books to cut down on unnecessary death. But when it comes to killing on a personal whim, there is a massive outcry that says “hands off,” and this mass keeps growing in power – screaming “Don’t mess with my Second Amendment rights,” as if Second Amendment rights are the equivalent of one’s genitals.

It’s nuts. It’s scary. And it’s going to get worse as this country moves closer and closer to a vigilante society. The NRA keeps rolling along – a centrifugal force that, with its well-orchestrated PR campaign, and ever-expanding donor dollars, seems to gain power with each shooting incident. There are no 50 shades of gray in the NRA. When Dick Metcalfe, a die-hard NRA supporter, and life-time pro-gun advocate, wrote an article in Guns & Ammo magazine that firearms regulations did not infringe on one’s Constitutional rights, he was freezed out of the organization and painted a traitor to the cause. To the NRA “regulation,” is a four-letter word. For the rest of us, let’s hope we are not at the mall on the same day that someone, carrying a gun in his pocket, is having a hissing fit.

Beach Cinema: The Way it Was

27 Monday Jan 2014

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Beach marqee

BY BOB SMITH

My favorite nostalgic movie theater is the Beach Cinema. Located on Main Street in downtown Bradley Beach, its old-fashioned marquee juts out over the sidewalk, proudly displaying the title of whatever movie is “Now Playing.” That’s right: instead of ten or more screens, the Beach Cinema has one movie playing on one screen. If you don’t like it, go someplace else.

The throwback to the middle of the last century continues as you enter the tiny lobby, with the ticket window on the right and the snack stand on the left. The decor is dreary postwar – high ceilings, plaster walls, and framed movie posters, with an “updated” splash of groovy plastic signage for the snack stand.

There are old-time prices, too: $7.50 for an adult ticket, and a mere $3.50 for a large popcorn. Unlike today’s typical multiplex snack, the “jumbo” popcorn isn’t the size of a small trash barrel, and it doesn’t come with free refills. If you eat all the popcorn in your modest cardboard bucket before you run out of movie, you have to ante up again.

The seating is a sea of upholstered metal chairs straight out of your basic high school auditorium – functional, reasonably comfortable, but a far cry from the semi-reclining leather seats in today’s typical high-end theaters. They’re fine for sitting and watching a movie, but don’t expect to get too comfortable. On the walls flanking the screen are what look like two old-fashioned balconies, but there aren’t any seats up there – they’re just for show. One of these days the old codgers from the Muppet Show are going to pop up there and start their goofy banter.

The pre-show entertainment isn’t an endless trailer for new TV shows, slick cars and trucks, and this season’s iteration of Coke. In fact, there’s nothing on the screen at all before the movie, but a projection of the monogrammed initials “BC.” My wife says it stands for Beach Cinema, but I’m pretty sure it stands for “Before Christ,” in honor of the theater’s founding.

While you ponder that mystery you can enjoy piped-in elevator music from the 1940s, featuring cheesy orchestral arrangements of show tunes like “Some Enchanted Evening,” and “On The Street Where You Live.” If you don’t feel old when you walk in the door, you sure do after ten minutes of that. And the night’s entertainment consists of a single “Coming Attraction” – a preview of the next movie coming to the Beach Cinema, followed promptly by “Our Featured Presentation.”

But my favorite part of the Beach Cinema experience is the men’s room. Not only does it feature gigantic ceramic urinals that look like old-time bathtubs standing on end, it has the only commemorative bathroom plaque I’ve ever seen. That’s right – screwed to the wall just above eye level to the left of the urinals is a plastic sign that reads, “This Urinal is Dedicated to George H. Moffett, A Devoted User And Favorite Palace Theatre/Beach Cinema Patron Since 1935.”beach plque urinals

Beach plaqueHow do you even qualify for the dubious honor of having a public urinal named after you? Does “devoted user” really mean “weak bladder?” (FYI, the toilet bowl and the second urinal remain unclaimed, so we all have something to aspire to.)

Because it’s a small-town movie theater, lots of people know each other, and there’s plenty of animated conversation before the show starts. I’ve also never seen anyone disrupt the film with loud talking or taking calls on their cell phone. And the audience routinely applauds at the end of the movie – if it’s a good one. If it’s a stinker, they just file quietly out.

Is it a great theater? Not by today’s standards – not by a long shot. But it’s clean, convenient, and cheap, and the people who work there, like their customers, are friendly and polite. And for a discount price, I get to go to the movies the way they used to be when I was a kid. Worth every penny. Bob BC

Christmas Decorations: I Don’t Want to See You in September

08 Tuesday Oct 2013

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Frank xmas

Too soon to be awash in evergreen and sparkly lights.

BY FRANK TERRANELLA

OK. Now they’ve gone too far. Christmas advertising this year began in September! Some stores are now beginning the holiday season as soon as they take down their back-to-school decorations. The Hallmark Channel is advertising its Christmas movies already.

Now, I love Christmas as much as anyone, but do we have to celebrate it for the entire fourth quarter of the year? There was a time, not too long ago, when Thanksgiving was the Christmas firewall. Nobody dared begin Christmas advertising until the turkey was cleared from the table. All this pent-up Christmas demand soon erupted into a media-created shopping holiday – Black Friday. And as soon as that became established, it became necessary to advertise the pre-Black-Friday sales beginning just after Halloween.

Halloween held up for many years as the new Christmas advertising firewall. In fact, all the attention that Halloween received as we focused on it as the prelude to the Christmas season transformed it from the kid’s day it used to be to a sort of Fall Carnivale. It’s much more popular as an adult holiday today than it ever was when we were kids.

But now it seems that the Halloween firewall is giving way as well. Oh sure, the Rockettes don’t open their Christmas show until just after Halloween, but especially in the online world, Christmas in October and even September is a reality. Think I’m exaggerating? Have a look.

The commercialization of Christmas is nothing new. In fact, it was the theme of, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” nearly 50 years ago. But what we have today is simply out-of control capitalism.

Religious Christians have long complained that American society has secularized Christmas to the point where it is no longer recognizable as a religious holiday. I think that the fact that many American children of Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist backgrounds hang up stockings and await the visit of Santa Claus every December 25th is a testament to the fact that there is no longer any Christ left in the Great American Christmas. And I think that’s OK – as long as we recognize it for what it is.

American retailers have created a winter holiday that, coincidentally, corresponds with the date of the religious observance of the birth of Christ. It’s not the Christmas of Silent Night – it’s the Christmas of Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Religious Christians have to accept that their holy day has been co-opted. They need to think of their religious Christmas as a separate, parallel-track holiday that they can observe in religious ways separate from the Santa Spectacular.

But even the secular Christmas has to have its limits. Christmas sales are becoming as unseemly as those Going-Out-of-Business sales that last for months. I know that there is no hope of rolling the commercialization back to after Thanksgiving. That ship has sailed. But can’t the honchos of television agree not to show Christmas ads until November? And while we’re at it, can we perhaps not begin the 2016 presidential campaign for a few more months?