Strange Roads

I just returned from East Lansing, where Toni and I attended granddaughter Alissa’s senior art show, entitled “Strange Roads” and featuring nine large photo compilations that seamlessly grafted together several landscape scenes. As she said, none are real places but imaginary blendings of fond memories of the past. One of them, entitled "New Water," for example, combined a scene of Niagara Falls (where we all went a year ago) with a waterfall we took her and Miranda to the summer before. Two of the photos contained scenes from near our house, one of the woods (entitled "Between Trails") and the other of the Lake Michigan dunes. She managed to get each of her three siblings in a piece. She also made use of photos that she took while in Scotland. Her four housemates were all there and happy to see us. They are hoping to tour Europe together this summer. I talked with three of Alissa’s professors, who were very complimentary about her talent, and several of her friends, including a guy named Sean, who told Toni and me that we reminded him of his own grandparents, who he had been very close to while they were alive.

Before the show I looked through one of housemate Bree’s (same name as the Jane Fonda character in “Klute”) textbooks, an anthology entitled “Race, Class and Gender in the United States.” It included an interview that my favorite oral historian Studs Terkel did with C. B. Ellis, a former Klansman who came to admire Martin Luther King and worked on behalf of poor Black people. Ellis, who died in 2005, said, “It finally came to me that I had more in common with poor black people than I did with rich white ones.” Terkel later said that the Ellis interview confirmed his optimism about the human condition by showing that people can change their minds.

On the way to IU Northwest for a pre-tenure meeting (a new yearly procedure the university has set up to weed out underachieving faculty) I heard Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” on the car radio. I am a big fan of the Detroit rocker, and his music especially lends itself to being played loud while driving. Two of my favorites are “Hollywood Nights” and “Roll Me Away.” "Night Moves" conjures up images of making out at the drive-in, a favorite pastime of teenagers of my era.

Out past the cornfields when the winds got heavy
Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy
Workin' on mysteries without any clues
Workin' on our night moves
Tryin' to make some front page drive-in news.

Until the summer after I graduated from Upper Dublin High School in 1960 most of my drive-in exploits were either with a bunch of guys or with girls who didn’t want to move to the back seat. I tended to ask younger girls out and was too insecure to try to date people my age that I would have preferred such as Gaard Murphy, Judy Jenkins or Pam Tucker. One time Ronnie Hawthorn and I tried to sneak in by hiding in Pete Drake’s trunk. Pete opened the trunk in sight of the ticket booth, so we were busted. They tried to make us pay double but settled on just charging us regular price. After I started dating Toni in the summer of 1962 (having met her at a Philadelphia law firm where she was a secretary and I a “mail room boy”), I recall taking her to the Paul Newman movie “Hud” at the 309 Drive-In and missing much of the action. When Patricia Neal won an Academy Award, I could barely remember what role she played. One time we parked in a long driveway leading the the Van Sant farm, and Fort Washington’s Chief Ottinger, the father of high school class mate Alice, interrupted us. Since Toni lived in Philadelphia, I found it difficult to find out-of-the-way places near her neighborhood. Once we were cuddled up and heard a train whistle getting louder and louder. The locomotive passed within a few yards of where we were in my ’56 Buick.

I awoke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain't it funny how the night moves
When you just don't seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in.

With autumn closing in and I was due back in school at Bucknell, Toni and I had one last date. On the car radio came Jimmy Charles’ “A Million to One,” and I got Toni to get out of the car and dance with me. Two years before I had gone off to college and promptly forgot my summer girlfriend. This time I missed her terribly, exchanged letters several times a week, and knew I was truly in love.

Ron Cohen loaned me “Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture” by Alice Echols, whose book “Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75” I read with interest several years ago. I was not into disco but have to admit I loved John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” and the BeeGees songs and the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” from the soundtrack. Two of the six chapters in Echols' book deal with the popularity of disco among gays, including “The Homo Superiors: Disco and the Rise of Gay Macho.”