Vacation Memories (The United Nations trip-part 2)

(For those of you just joining this story, you can read part one here.)

When our bus rolled into New York city I could feel the city pulsing with life. I took one look at the tall buildings, the crowds, the traffic, the busy people, the sun light glinting off the thousands of windows, the signs, and I felt like I was home. For a kid who had spent the first ten years of his life in Detroit and then was forced to live in the country, first in Michigan and then in Virginia, New York was heaven to me. I was in love with everything about the place, well everything that I could see, of course they weren't about to take busloads of kids from out of state to the slums or to the rough neighborhoods of NYC, so we saw only the best parts of the city.

When we got to the hotel I found out that we were joining up with teenagers from Maine, Louisiana, and Nebraska. It was a pretty wide ranging group of kids and I remember loving that there were so many young people like me across the country. Our hotel was near the Wintergarden Theatre and I remember that this theatrical abortion was playing at the Wintergarden at the time:

I remember thinking, "Who would be dumb enough to shell out all that money to go see a bunch of guys who are not the Beatles sing Beatles songs?" But sure enough there were people dumb enough to go do that, just like in a few years people would be dumb enough to put down their hard earned cash so they could go see Starlight Express.

The people who sponsored the trip wanted us all to meet and hang out with kids from different states when we were in NYC so I had to room with a guy from Louisiana. He wasn't really my idea of a great roommate, he was a shade thick and he constantly complained about how much he hated New York and being around all those "Yankees." I finally told him that I loved the place and that if I could I'd live there all the time and could he please shut up or keep his complaints to himself.

Since I had a provincial dullard for a roommate and I had a gal who let me kiss on her and hold her hand, I ditched him when ever I could so I could hang with Cynthia and my friends Jeff and Heidi. We were an inseparable foursome that week, if we could manage it we would all eat together, sit together on the buses, sight see together, and attend all the UN functions together.

The focus of the trip was spending time in and learning about the United Nations and we spent most every day of that week in New York doing just that. We took tours of various parts of the building, heard lectures on UN related things, and we got to sit in the big conference room where they had all the names of the countries on the many desks. I got to sit at the Outer Mongolia desk, I was stoked. One day at the end of a lecture on economic theory by a Japanese diplomat they decided to let us ask questions. Some dude raised his hand and he asked if the diplomat thought that Japan and the US would ever get into another war. I could see the color drain from all the chaperone's faces when that kid asked his question and as the diplomat was laughing off the question but still trying to answer it I saw one of the chaperones leading the kid who asked the question out of the room by his ear. I took me a minute to make out who it was they were leading out, it was, wait for it, wait for it, my roommate from Louisiana. I never said anything to him about it, I figured he had suffered enough and that everyone else was going to make fun of him and I also thought that if he heard me making fun of him he might smother me or something in my sleep.

It was not all lectures and UN tours that week, we got to go on many sightseeing trips and we even went to a Broadway show. We got to see and go up in the Statue of Liberty, in those days I had no fear of heights and I remember loving the view from her crown. We got to see the Empire State building, in those days it was still a big deal. We went on trips to Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Saks. The Broadway play they took some of us to was The Wiz, others went to see Doug Henning's magic act on Broadway, and we had the worst seats in the house but I didn't give a shit, I was seeing a Broadway musical! We also got to go to Radio City Musical Hall where we got to see the Rockettes and some shitty boxing kangaroo movie starring Elliot Gould, during which young Cynthia grabbed my hand while I was kissing her and put it inside her blouse. Needless to say I was in heaven in the dark of Radio City Music Hall for a few minutes.

All in all it was a great and glorious week. I can still remember the sounds, the sights, the weather, how the food tasted, in short most everything about that trip. I remember how cool, temperature wise that is, and dark the hotel lobby was. I remember thinking how cool it was that the hotel had a mezzanine and that the sodas in the drink machines were the outlandish price of 75 cents each, I was used to 25 cent sodas. I can remember how the elevator smelled and how funny it was to see all us kids sitcking our heads out of the windows so we could talk back and forth without the adults hearing us.

When Friday rolled around I was sad to be leaving New York and all the friends from Nebraska, Maine, and Louisiana that I had made behind but I was also excited because us kids from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina were going to go to Niagra Falls and on into Canada and then swing back down through Gettysburg before heading back to Virginia. I still had another week of being with Cynthia and Jeff and Heidi and another week of not being around my awful cousins and crazy aunt.

To be continued...

Vacation memories (The United Nations trip-part 1)

That's me and Cynthia Holloway at Niagara Falls in 1977 or '78, I honestly can't remember the exact year any more. This photo is from a trip I won as a result of winning an essay contest. I was the southwest Virginia winner of the "What the United Nations Means to Me" essay contest that was sponsored by the Oddfellows and Rebekkah lodges of America.

I wrote some dopey essay extolling the UN and how it was going to bring peace to the world in my lifetime. While the UN does some great stuff, UNICEF, UNESCO, and other things as well, it's fallen far short of the hopes I had for it while I was still a pimply horn dog teenager. There were about four or five of us in my high school that wrote essays and I was shocked to learn that I won. I was even more shocked to find out that what I won was an all expense paid trip to the United Nations in New York City. I was over the moon excited and I was even more pumped when I found out that not only was I going to go to the Big Apple for a week, I was also going to spend three days in Washington DC sightseeing and go through Baltimore and Philadelphia on our way to NYC. I also found out that after my week in NYC was up our bus tour of pimply way too smart for our own good horn dog group of teenagers was going to go to Niagara Falls and then on our way back home we were going to stop in and tour Gettysburg. I was wild with excitement because I was going to see the places I had read and dreamed of for years. And best of all I was going on my own, that is to say no family was going with me. I was ecstatic to be escaping my asshole cousins, my domineering, crazy, rageaholic aunt, and the small hick town I was living in.

The trip started out kind of odd, I had to hook up with the tour in Roanoke, VA which was about three hours northeast of where we lived at the time. In order to save a few bucks and to make sure I got to the Oddfellows lodge in Roanoke on time Aunt Rageaholic drove me up the night before I was supposed to join the tour and we stayed in the home of some people we knew who used to live in Lee county, the Colliers. To say Bill Collier was a strange man is an understatement. He was an oddball from the word go who seemed to take an instant dislike to me from the instant he laid eyes on me, and his dislike seemed to grow more every time our paths crossed later in my life. I was convinced that he would make sure we did not get out of his wretched house in time for me to make the bus but thank goodness my fears were never realized because I woke up at the butt crack of dawn and I insisted that my nut bag aunt take me to the Oddfellows lodge right then. After she had a cup of coffee and after old Bill Collier gave me the stink eye for about 20 minutes we finally left and she dropped me at the lodge.

To be honest I was petrified at having to meet all new people but I was also glad that I was going to be doing it without any of my family around, which meant that I could be myself without having to worry about them making fun of me, mocking me, or snitching on me for having opinions and tastes different than the ones Aunt Rageaholic tried to shove on us. I kept quiet as I met some of the people I would be traveling for the next few weeks but I noticed a striking girl with a pretty smile and a nice demeanor from Elizabeth City, NC and I kind of gravitated to her. I was far too shy to make a pass at her but I think I did flash her a goofy smile and I let her see me reading Robert Graves I, Claudius, I was hoping she'd be impressed at how smart I was.

While I was dreaming about smooching the girl with the honey accent and the pretty smile, a funny looking guy from Lynchburg sat next to me. He cracked a lame joke and told me his name was Jeff Tyree. I instantly liked him and we began joking around and an instant friendship was born. We became fast friends for the duration of the trip. When they finally herded us onto the bus he and I sat together and I told him I liked the girl from North Carolina but that I was too shy to do anything about it. He said to hang tight and he'd figure out a way for me to meet to her.

Somewhere near Washington DC our bus stopped and a gaggle of girls from Maryland and northern Virginia joined our group. Jeff instantly took a liking to one of them, a pretty young brunette by the name of Heidi who hailed from Silver Spring, Maryland. We could tell she came from a rich family but she was as nice as she was pretty and Jeff made his plans to be her "trip boyfriend."

He and I roomed together that night in Washington, as we would through out the trip. In Washington we got to see some of the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington monument, the FBI HQ, we took a tour of the Treasury building, and much more. And more importantly Jeff managed to hook up with Heidi (and by hook up with I don't mean have sex, I mean sit next to, hold hands with, and kiss on, innocent teenage stuff) and he got Heidi to buddy up with the gal from NC, Cynthia Holloway.

After a few action packed days in our nations capital we began our march to NYC. Through some convoluted machinations I ended up sitting next to Cynthia and I even managed to talk to her. Whatever I said worked, it must have been my non stop cheesy jokes and inane patter because it surely wasn't my looks as you can tell from the photo above, and we hit it off. I nearly died when she said I could hold her hand and kiss her. I felt like the biggest stud in the world by the time we got to NYC a few days later, I was on top of the world.

To be continued...

I'm a horrible unpatriotic American

I totally forgot it was flag day until I saw Quaker Agitator's post about it. Man that pisses me off that I forgot it because I was going to write a biting piece about assholes who celebrate flag day and who look down on anyone who doesn't celebrate it like them. I was going to tell the story about when I was at a sales conference in Akron, Ohio when I worked for Myers Tire Supply and our national representative for Coats/Ammco products told us that he was a super America loving guy because he left his flag up way past flag day and that maybe we were not as patriotic as him if we did not do the same thing. But now I can't do that.

But I can tell you I love flags, always have.

This is my favorite flag. It represents all of us and it's a color that looks good on me when I wear it. And it matches my eyes.

I like this flag because I like Sweden. They have a great socialist economy, long ass winters, beautiful women, and innovative film directors. Incidentally, that's not a cross on the Swedish flag, that's a sword. Same thing on the flags of Norway and Finland. I have a sticker of this flag on the backglass of my little Nissan pick up truck.
I have this one on there as well. I dig Australia and I dig their flag. I hate their current Prime Minister but one can't have everything. I believe the stars represent the Aussie states. And the names of those states would be Drunken, Psychotic, Somnambulent, Chaotic, Troubled, and New South Wales.

This is a flag I have come to love not only for it's cool ass design but also for what it represents. It represents the fact that the European Union is not allowing some corporations to do their predatory business over there the way they do it over here. It's a cool ass flag and it's a cool ass thing they're doing standing up to the piggish corporations like that.

Well here we are at the end of this post and shit, I almost forgot to put the ol' red white and blue on here. I better fix that right away before Malkin and O'Reilly have my unpatriotic ass deported or thrown in Gitmo.

Ahhh, there we go. These colors don't run baby.