When in doubt, punch 'em out

I saw a band Wednesday night called Reggie and the Full Effect. I was only vaguely aware of this band before seeing them, but my girlfriend wanted to go, which pretty much meant that I wanted to go. So we went.

Reggie and the Full Effect isn't a lead singer and some additional musicians as the band name suggests, but a joke or gimmick over which Midwestern kids exchange knowing winks. It's like Ziggy Stardust with less dedication to the illusion. Imagine "This Is Spinal Tap" without going balls-out parody. The balls-out aspects of Bowie or the Tenacious D duo is what make their gigs work. With Reggie, who performed at the surprisingly quaint House of Blues venue, I was mostly unaware something was supposed to be funny or ironic.

Darius Rucker was not technically Hootie. Eric Clapton was not technically Derek and Joseph was never in a band called The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

And apparently, James Dewees is not technically Reggie.

Besides all the identity confusion, the show wasn't bad. It was loud. Generally speaking, loud equals good, or at least not bad. And because the show was neither despicable nor remarkable, it should come as no surprise that my intention isn't actually to discuss the show.

I'd much prefer to address the show's bouncer standing directly in front of the stage.

What is it about certain shows of certain bands that attract certain kids who act like dipsticks in order to replace the entertainment the band fell short of providing?

For the final third of Reggie's performance, punkie teens with skinny jeans and overly decorated hoodies found it entertaining to crowd surf their way toward the 12-foot-tall bouncer. It didn't take long for these goobers to figure out that the House of Blues wasn't going to eject crowd surfers from the concert. Instead, it instructed its security force to lift the sugar-high 90-pound skater kids off their hand-mattress and place them gently back on the ground from whence they came. That's it. No warning, no three-strikes-you're-out, not punch in the eye sockets. Nothing.

The main house bouncer manning the area directly in front of Reggie's caterwauling was bigger than Olympus. Unfortunately for him and anyone hungry to see some blood, the bouncers are forced to set each of the crowd surfers back onto the floor with the same ease you and I would set down a bag of recycling.

How agitating must that be?

GETTIN' THE FULL EFFECT: Although this is Reggie, this was not the Reggie
show I was at. I included this photo from a House of Blues in Myrtle Beach,
SC to approximate what those little punky bastards must have seen moments
before making the bouncer's night a little bit more awful.

With each new (and sometimes repeat) surfer, I watched assuming this would be the punkass to tip the bouncer's scale. I watched each incident hopeful that now would be when one of the little jerks would have the Twinkie-goo slapped out of him. I'm not sure what's more amazing, that the bouncer never snapped or that the teens kept trying their luck.

The kids became so enthralled with the spectacle of the lift 'n' set that they threw up devil-horns to their friends as soon as the bouncer's massive forearms closed in around them. I swear I saw one of them texting while they were being set back on the ground.

OMG!!!!
bowncers got me
C-ya ROTFL!
peece ;b

I imagine there's not an abundance of employment positions available for 850 pound dudes and therefore the house bouncer didn't want to lose his job. This is the only reasonable explanation as to why he didn't punch holes in the brains of half of these kids. It seems however, like the bouncer could have creatively dissuaded the continuing behavior. I mean, perhaps wearing a t-shirt warning that "Bitches get stitches" would have dissuaded a few. Or even better, what if the bouncer just wore a bikini brief and a tanktop? It was hot in the House of Blues and the big fella was sweaty. Who's gonna want to get a bear hug from that? What if the bouncer greased his torso with Crisco, Vaseline, or chicken fat? It wouldn't do a whole lot for total prevention, but you certainly wouldn't have repeat offenders or previous surfers recommending their actions to friends.

Get creative.

Or get permission from management to start beating some rock 'n' roll manners into the next crowd-surfing wave of text-happy grope-jockies.

Idiot Child-isms, part 1

I've got to wonder if most little kids were as stupidly carefree as I was. I look back on my childhood and reel at the idea that I'm still alive. Not only am I still alive, I am still well liked (sorta). Between the things I did and the things I must have said as a child, I feel like I was in the running to be the first 3rd grader to ever warrant a punch in the nose by an adult.

I don't know what I said exactly, but having spent a great deal of my last ten years around little kids, I am fully aware that they often say what they think and knowing some of the things that I thought when I was their age... my God, how am I still alive?

1) I used to think that anyone wearing sunglasses while walking their dog must be blind.
When I was younger, there was some sort of disconnect between my view of the average person wearing sunglasses and someone walking a dog wearing them. Both my mother and father wore sunglesses regularly (like you know... when it was sunny), but as we didn't have a dog, the juxtaposition of dogs and sunglasses was never forced upon me.

My folks didn't own a car until I was five, so we got used to walking to a lot of places. And when we'd walk the streets of Chicago on nice days, I probably spent a lot of time either pitying people who owned dogs or being scared to death that owning a dog in the first place probably meant you were on your way to goiing blind.

2) I used to think the Beach Boys were all homeless.

This one makes a little more sense if you understand that I grew up in a mid-western metropolis during the 1980's. I knew much of homelessness and next to nothing about the surfer lifestyle except for old Gidget reruns and Beach Boys music. What I saw of homelessness was gnarly unkempt hair, harsh skin, a life of little movement, little motion, seemingly little ambition. No one ever discussed what surfers or beach bimbos did when it was too cold to hang around the sands. Therefore, I never saw Dick Dale in an alleyway wearing three jackets and a wool hat. It never occured to me that the boys from Endless Summer weren't huddled around a trashcan fire in some city park.

Let's face it, beach bums i nthe summer are the same as honest to goodness bum s in the summer. That same gnarly unkempt hair that I saw in Chicago was described by The Sufaris as "an Ocean Doo". Surferes were outside all day getting tanned, hobos are outside all day getting tanned (against their will).

To a five-year-old boy, sitting around is sitting around. No mother is around to haul the bums off to the grocery store with her and no mother is around to take the Beach Boys off to kindergarten; what did I know outside of that?

This was a mistake that could very well have changed the course of my life, had I not wisened up sooner than I did. I held the Beach Boys in very high esteem as a young child. For me to assume they were homeless could have ruined my life had I decided I wanted to be just like The Beach Boys.

3) I used to think God was a Tyrannasaurus Rex.

Alright stick with me here.

When I was little I questioned absolutely nothing. I took in information as it reached me and filed it away without further inquiry. And when I was little everything in my life told me that the King was the highest form of power. Obviously, here in America, the President is the highest form of power, but fairytales and Disney movies don't have presidents they have kings and queens.

So there's that: Kings and Queens were the highest form of being.

Then on top of that, I was fascinated with dinosaurs. It seemed my mother and I would travel to the Field Museum of Natural History once a damn week and we always looked at the old dino bones. What boy wasn't fascinated with dinosaurs? I'm sure there were a few, but I've never met any of them. Anyway, for those of you who shared my fascination with creatures from the jurassic period, I ask you: what was the most common moniker of the 

Tyrannasaurus Rex? 

Correct answer: "The King of the Dinosaurs".

Now, when a five-year-old is faced with "the past" there seems to be a limited amount of information available to them. Stuff happned before we were born, but how much? And when? And who? The five-year-old me understood this:

*dinosaurs are no longer with us
* dinosaurs were here before human beings were.
* dinosaurs ruled the earth.

Okay. So basically, there was a period of time wherein dinosaurs were the alpha and omega of species and that the T-Rex was the leader of all of them. The T-Rex was the boss, the president, the king and queen. But they're not around anymore. We talk about dinosaurs, we hear about them constantly, but we'll never see them. They aren't on earth.
Now hopefully you're putting yourself in my five-year-old shoes and connecting how I might confuse God with a T-Rex. We went to the Field Museum more than we went to church, we saw pictures and visual representations of both, but never a living breathing version of either and both were the be-all-end-all. Period. There was nothing bigger and badder than a Tyrannosaurus Rex and there was nothing bigger and badder than God.

Well, the only way that could happen was if they were one-in-the-same.

So be it. Good for God to make good despite those stubby useless hands.

4) I used to think that rats were male and mice were female.
The details of my sexual education remain, to this day, quite fuzzy. According to my recollections of events long past, I used to think that a mouse was a female version of a rat.

Similar to the bull and cow scenario.

I also remember believing that two mating mice must both be female and were therefore lesbians.
At nine-years-old, how did I know what a lesbian was? I remember watching the Fievel movies and wondering why some of the mice appeared to be male.

Tom and Jerry was also confusing to me.

But then again, those were cartoons. Not real life.

The strangest aspect of this whole portion of my life is that I knew what Lesbianism was before I knew that mice ran in two genders. That, my friends, is a clear-cut case of "putting the cart before the horse". Why I chose to believe my half-cocked theories of gender specific species instead of allowing Timothy the Mouse from Dumbo to prove that male mice existed and that Lesbianism amongst mice was nowhere near as prevalent as my young mind inexplicably believed, is beyond me.

But let's face it, I was a confused youngin'.

I can't wait to grow out of it.

Sweatpants and Irish Catholics

When you are a high school freshman and the rest of the school feel like seniors, your best friend Ben, shows up to the first class on the first day wearing brand new blue jeans. Not a day has gone by where you can remember Ben ever wearing anything but sweatpants.

Ben is to sweatpants what the Yankees are to pinstripes.

What Milton Berle was to cigars.

The problem isn't that he's wearing jeans, or that everyone else in school also seems to be clad in denim, but that you are not wearing them and everyone notices. How did Ben get this important memo and you didn't? And why was there no mention of him switching his new clothing line for the fall semester?

You wonder if Ben even had anything to do with the decision. Maybe his parents knew what fashionable highschoolers expected of the incoming class and so they went to the Gap for him, laid the pants on his bed and told him they were for his own good.

Where were your parents you wonder? Had they dropped the ball? Were they social outcasts as freshman too? Never before had you imagined the social standing of your parents during their tenure at high school so pertinent to your immediate present. If your parents were dorks, then they will be helpless to defend you from the same fate, as thusly proven by your bright red sweatpants, tapered elastically around your lower calves.

This pants conundrum will prove to be the starting thread in the unraveling sweater that is your friendship with Ben for the following months to come.

* * *

It is the very first morning of high school. You are no less sure where your algebra classroom is as to where the nearest bathroom to your locker might be. You know nothing, but already you know that you've started all wrong.

Your first impression is going to take months to recover from.

This morning, all the underclassmen gather in the mammoth high school auditorium for freshman orientation. You are one of the first freshman there.

Where is everyone?

You assume everyone else is doing something much cooler. They're already mating under the bleachers. Or maybe they're still asleep high school doesn't scare them as it scares you. You wonder if Ben has a girlfriend already. You imagine he does and he's with her right now instead of taking his seat at the mandatory orientation, You imagine getting up and finding all the cool kids paired off one-by-one.

Tens go with tens.
Geeks with geeks.
Football captains with cheerleader heads.

You imagine that you've already been cut from the baseball team even though tryouts arent for another six months and the only available girls left are the ones wearing headgear and memorizing the periodic table of elements.

This is your fate. If it weren't your fate, you'd have worn blue jeans today.

* * *

Eventually your fellow high schoolers file into the auditorium. They arrive in bunches.
Scads.
Posses.
Revues.
They pile, not into seats, but into seating arrangements. Rows of six or seven. Columns of four or five. You sit there alone and wonder how all these kids in t-shirts of bands youve never heard of know so many people already. You wish you had planned better. You should have gathered every friend you had from junior high, set a meeting time and arrived in the auditorium together.

That woulda been cool.

Is entrance-planning cool? It is probably a good thing that you didn't entrance plan; that may have been a bigger faux pas than wearing red sweatpants.*

You look at all the other boys surrounding you and wonder where you went wrong. Where did they get their hair mousse? And where did they get those cool jogging shoes with pockets and pumps and multiple colored laces? Those are cool. So cool in fact, that you've never even noticed they existed until this precise moment.

Then there are the girls.

Where did all the brown-haired girls go? You cannot recall ever seeing so many golden-haired blonde girls before in your life. This is Illinois, not Malibu. Before, it was 45% brunette, 45% blonde plus that one freckled redhead who drew on her arms in pen all the time. Now it's almost entirely made up of shiny, shimmer-haired blonde girls.

Your entire class has seemingly turned into button-nosed blonde girls who haven't yet noticed you share this earth with them, opting instead, to notice some other boy five aisles away (wearing blue jeans) giggling the entire time.

So much giggling.

Why do high school people giggle so much? Sometimes they giggle even when no one has said anything. You imagine all your classmates taking some giggle drug (do they make giggle drugs? You haven't a clue. Just another thing everyone else is ten steps ahead of you on).

Anyway, you imagine your classmates taking their giggle drugs underneath the bleachers when everyone was finding first-day mates and kissing and complimenting one another on their awesome new blue jeans.

They did all this while being blotto on giggle drugs.

* * *

Your suburban town has a high Irish-Catholic contingency. And not that there's anything wrong with Irish-Catholics, but they tend to name their offspring after Saints and there are only a handful of saints to choose from. This is important to note only because everyone filing into the seats around you in the auditorium seems to be named either Pat or Katie.

You are sure you've never been amongst as many Patricks and Katherines as you are right now. There are hundreds of
them. And if they're not Patrick they are Pat, Paddy, P-Train, or just Ps. And if they are not Katherine or Kathleen, they are Kates, Kate, Katie, Kat, Kit-Kat, Katty, Kitty, K-tizzle, or just K.

This name thing is gonna wear on you before the end of the year.

You watch as Katie fixes her ponytail around her sun-kissed blonde hair.
You watch as Pat fiddles with his puca-shelled necklace.
You realize your mother would think this garb entirely inappropriate for the first day of school.
They look like they slept in their clothes.
This is what you're thinking as you undo the zipper on the red sweater vest you are wearing.

Katie and Pat eventually part ways, take their auditorium seats and nonsensically giggle amongst one another. You imagine they will be dating by weeks end (if they are not already). You imagine that their love is true and beautiful and they will go to the same college and become beautiful model-slash-lawyers and get married and all three of their perfect children will be Gerber Babies and happiness will follow them everywhere. And they will have a dog and name it Happiness, which will literally follow them everywhere! They will live the perfect life because they are wearing blue jeans and their mother named them after Irish Saints.

High school is going to ruin you.

Your only saving grace is if you can manage to make friends through another manner outside of dress and social standing.

Soon after you are struck with the crippling fear that dress and social standing are the only avenues of any importance in high school.

You continue to think this throughout the length of the boring freshman orientation, during which you learn nothing except for the names of the eight peers sitting in your immediate area. You only learn this because the principal of the school ordered everyone to introduce themselves to those immediately surrounding one another; like at Christmas Mass. One of the students in your immediate vacinity is not named Pat, but Steve. He is chubby and has, what appears to be, baked beans stained on the front of his Over 40 and Feelin' Foxy t-shirt.

Although it is difficult to tell, you think he might be balding which is really bad luck for a fourteen-year-old boy.

It guilts you to think it, but if there is anyone in worse shape than you, its Steve.
Steve says, "Dude, thats an awesome vest. Where did you get your vintage stuff?"
Steve is distracted and you never answer his question.

If Pats go with Katies, it appears you go with Steve. And youre in deep, deep trouble.

As Steve exits the auditorium ahead of you, when the orientation is over, three girls named Katie join him.
They seem to be old friends. He kisses one of the Katies on the cheek.

At this point, you have no idea how anything works anymore.

======================

* The more you look at your own sweatpants, the more you realize how faded they've become since you bought them. Faded red. Thats basically pink.

You're wearing pink sweatpants on the first day of high school and you want to shrink. Shrink and die.