Staying Sane at Chuck E. Cheese’s

Remember childhood birthday parties?

I do.

My most memorable childhood birthday party was venued at a kid’s party place called Chuck E. Cheese’s. It was tagged as “a place where a kid can be a kid.” They could have added, “and where a parent should be on Xanax.”

Chuck E. Cheese’s, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: the video arcade, the restaurant, and the pit of plastic balls. For a brief period of time in my life, it was the place to be. Nintendo was still a few years away, and a room full of video games was a fantasy that most kids had only heard about in books. There was also skee-ball, and a mechanical seat that spun vertically on an eight-foot disc, just so that no parent would be deprived of the anxiety that a kid would fall on their watch. There were no windows, and the dim lighting punctuated by glowing neon beckoned children as they ran from game to game, their little pockets filled with tokens that bore the visage of Mr. Cheese. It was a lot like a casino.

The restaurant area was next to the arcade. I don’t remember them serving anything other than pizza. Even then, it was not so much pizza as a child’s conception of pizza. It was as if someone had taken an already baked crust, poured on tomato sauce straight from a jar, threw on a few individually wrapped slices of cheese, and placed it in a microwave that said “Fisher Price” in the top right corner. A pie of this toy pizza cost only $15, with an additional $3 for Maalox.

Whilst dining, the children were entertained by band of robots dressed to look like Chuck E. Cheese and his entourage. When the music played, the robots would jerk their heads and shoulders around, and their arms would hold up instruments. If you ate enough pizza, you could pretend you were seeing Joe Cocker dressed as a mouse.

The best part of hosting a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s was that the kids were constantly running around and screaming. In the melee it was hard to keep track of which kids had been picked up by their parents, and which ones might be still be snorkeling in the ball pit.

My father went looking for the missing, but he was told that you had to be under 4 feet tall to enter the pit. So he had to rent an ocean-floor sonar scanner to find the rest of my guests. While the machine was on someone thought it was a video game and lodged a token in the circuits, and my father couldn’t get his deposit back.

Finally, the guests had either left or the search ended, and my parents and I sat amidst a pile of wrapping paper, pizza crusts, and a cake that an aspiring acupuncturist had poked with a thousand stabs of a plastic fork. I don’t remember blowing out the candles, and I don’t remember unwrapping the gifts. But the look of relief on my parents’ faces as we walked to the car will stay with me forever.

Did you have a memorable birthday party as a child? Did you ever throw your child a birthday party and survive?

Inspired by “The Birthday Party, by the numbers,” by Leanne Shirtliffe at IronicMom.com.

Posted on 6 June 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 15

Mash-Up, June 4: Kristen Lamb, How to Write Funny, Paul Johnson

This week we review a blog post from Kristen Lamb, a book titled How to Write Funny, edited by John B. Kachuba, and a blog post from Paul Johnson at The Good Greatsby.

Kristen Lamb is the best-selling author of We Are Not Alone and Are You There Blog? It’s Me, Writer. Read these books if you want to write. In the 21^st Century, like it or not, a blog, a Twitter account, and a Facebook fan page are the holy trinity of an author’s platform, and Kristen wrote the bible.

On her blog, Kristen gives additional lessons on social media and the craft of writing. Every one of her posts answers a question I had in my head before I visited her site.

For example, Kristen’s recent post, “Scene Antagonists–The Making of a Hero”, discusses the scene antagonist that drives the inner change of a character. After I looked up what antagonist meant (it means the bad guy), I wanted to know how an antagonist would work in certain humorous books, where the main character’s obstacles are of his own doing.

I asked this in a comment to the post. Kristen’s articulate answer was (1) be careful of literary fiction, which must be read in the context of the time it was published, and (2) even those protagonists’ inner turmoil must be externalized to tell a good story. For years I had wondered why my every attempt to create a buffoon fell flat on the page. Now I know what was missing. There must be an anti-buffoon.

I’ve learned other great lessons in writing humor from the aptly titled How to Write Funny, an anthology of essays and interviews from accomplished humor writers. It’s an old cliché that humor cannot be taught. But this book does not really teach humor. Instead, it demonstrates how to find and release the humor from the dysfunction that lies within and around us. Chapter 14, on the 7 Commandments of Comedy Writing, is alone worth the price of the book. That is, unless you are completely humorless, which explains why you are reading my blog.

And last, but certainly not least, is one man who does not need to learn anything about writing humor. His name is Paul Johnson, and his blog, The Good Greatsby, has become a daily treasure. Writing comedy is hard. Writing publishable comedy every day seems next to impossible. I keep looking in the website’s source code for elves that do the writing at night, but all I saw were semicolons, backslashes, and a half-eaten oatmeal cream pie.

One of Paul’s recent gems, “Food Pyramid We Hardly Knew Ye”, discusses the United States Department of Agriculture’s decision to change the food pyramid to a food plate. The very idea oozes with comedic value, and Paul capitalizes on it nicely. If you want to start each day with a laugh, bookmark TheGoodGreatsby.com.

And that’s a wrap. Enjoy the weekend.

Posted on 4 June 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 12

The Facebook Page Neurotic

Everyone wants to be liked by other people. Even people who mow their lawns at 7 o’clock on a Saturday morning want to be liked by other people. But measuring exactly how many people like you is difficult. People might come to your party just for the peach cobbler.

Facebook pages, however, measure exactly how many people like you. And being liked is completely different from being friends. Lots of people are friends with people they don’t like.

I created a Facebook page to measure exactly how many people liked me, and because of this cryptic passage I read at location 195/542 in Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Writer:

“All writers need a fan page.”

I created the page, uploaded a photo, wrote a self-serving blurb, and picked a gender. I started inviting my friends to like me so that I could get the magic 25 needed for a username. I wanted a username so that when I make business cards, the URL to my Facebook page is a neat “facebook.com/username” instead of the messy “facebook.com/firstname-lastname/longstringofnumbers.”

And I wanted my username to be exactly the same as my Twitter handle, MarkKaplowitz. When you go through life with a first name that ends in the same letter and sound that begins your last name, you always fear that the two names run together in speech and that people won’t know where your first name ends and last name begins.

I think about the others who face this issue: Julia Allison. Michael Lewis. Adam Morrison. Jennifer Runyon, who played Gwendolyn Pierce on Charles in Charge. Roald Dahl. David Duchovny. William McKinley. Julius Caesar (using the Anglicized pronunciation). These high achievers somehow got the world to know their first and last names. When I saw that HTML was treating all names, big and small, on a lowercase basis, I worried that my concatenated k’s would be seen as one. I needed a way to show differentiation.

And then I stumbled across Jody Hedlund’s Facebook page, with “AuthorJodyHedlund” as its username. So it was possible! I practiced typing my social media contact information on an imaginary business card:

http://twitter.com/MarkKaplowitz

http://facebook.com/MarkKaplowitz

Something was missing. Then I saw it:

http://twitter.com/MarkKaplowitz

http://facebook.com/MarkKaplowitz

Killer! The capital M, lowercase k, and capital K were dressed like the Blue Devils drum line! Now no one would be confused.

My 25th like arrived last Friday afternoon. With shaking hands I went to Facebook’s username portal, and was curtly informed that “MarkKaplowitz” was taken, just like that Steven Spielberg miniseries about aliens.

Who was this thief, this scoundrel, this cur, this knotty-pated fool who dared to take my username?

I scrolled down and found my answer. It was me. I had stolen my own name.

A few months ago, Facebook had offered me the opportunity to pick a username for my personal profile. I had clicked on “confirm” because I like to click on things. And Facebook’s help page said that usernames could not be transferred, period.

I searched for another way. I found a post from August, 2010 that explained that one could release a username from a profile, and then immediately claim it for a page. But the comments indicated that this strategy became risky in November. I could not take risks.

One of the comments to that post proposed filing a Facebook copyright infringement claim against yourself. I was skeptical but desperate. I filled out Facebook’s form. It asked for the name I was claiming and typed “markkaplowitz” and hit submit. I wanted quick resolution, and a few seconds elapsed before I’d realized what I’d done.

I had forgotten to type “MarkKaplowitz” as I’d planned. My business cards! My perfectly aligned usernames! My dispelling of confusion!

I received an email from Facebook confirming receipt of my request to transfer “markkaplowitz” from my profile to my page. I drafted this reply:

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,

I make reference to the username “markkaplowitz” that is currently the subject of a copyright dispute. In the event I prevail against myself, I would prefer that the username for my page be entered as “MarkKaplowitz” with the first letters of my first and last name capitalized. Makes it a little easier to read. Sorry for being such a pain. I love what you’ve done here. I did not see The Social Network.

Sincerely,

Mark Kaplowitz

As the cursor stood poised over the send button, a voice inside my head said, “Don’t push it.” But a louder voice said, “Follow your dreams.” So I sent the email, went in the bathroom to throw up, and stepped outside for some fresh air.

I walked to a park, took a seat on a bench, and watched people. A mother licked her hand to wipe her child’s face. A guy in a backwards baseball cap scratched his chin while his girlfriend sent a text message. A silver-haired man in a seersucker suit strolled by with a house cat on a leash. The world showed nothing but indifference.

I went back to my computer. No emails from Facebook, no change to the username. I tried to blog, but the words weren’t coming. I needed that username.

As the hours passed I became convinced that I would not get the transfer. I would have to be “MarkKaplowitz2” or “TheRealMarkKaplowitz” or “ThatGuyWhoWritesThoseRememberWhenPostsOnSchlabadooDotCom.” My business card would look messy. My career would stagnate. I would grow old on that park bench, telling myself over and over that I never should have sent that email.

And then I refreshed my page for the millionth time and saw that the username had been transferred. It was “markkaplowitz” without any capitalization. And I thought to myself, “You know, it looks kind of chic in all lowercase. Maybe I should change my Twitter name to all lowercase. For the business cards.”

Thanks Facebook!

Have you created a Facebook page? Did you have any difficulty choosing a username? What are your thoughts on capitalization in URLs? What are your thoughts on crazy Facebook obsessions?

Posted on 3 June 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 20

From Seditionist to Blogger

In high school I authored and distributed an underground newspaper. I believe this was a step towards becoming a blogger.

My friend Darren and I had the idea of starting a literary magazine, but we needed funding for printing and the pizza parties that were required for every school club. We asked the administration for help, but the entire arts budget had been spent on glitter. So we took our operations underground.

The first thing we did was pick pseudonyms. Darren chose “A. Hamilton” because he wanted to express his belief in liberty and the nobility of the fourth estate. I chose “Zack Morris.”

Then we had to name our paper. Our high school mascot was the eagle, and so we decided on The Eagle’s Nest. Had I known that Adolf Hitler’s World War II bunker complex was also called the Eagle’s Nest, we might have chosen something else. But these are the quirks of history.

We gave The Eagle’s Nest a serious tone to appeal to a higher class of reader. We wrote articles about the quality of the school lunch, the demeanor of the custodians, and the girth of the cafeteria monitors. We wrote editorials protesting the archaic practice of running during gym class. We wrote fake interviews with teachers and students. We crafted syllabi for classes that did not exist. And at top of the issue, in a little box, was our journalistic creed:

If it’s not in here, we don’t give a s#!%.

We wrote the first issue on Darren’s computer one Saturday afternoon. I had the more trusting of parents, and thus the copying job fell to me. On Sunday night I asked my mother to drive me to Kinko’s.

“Of course, my pumpkin pie,” she said. “What do you need?”

“Oh, uh, nothing,” I said, curling a manila folder.

I made her sit in the car while I made the copies. It took only ten minutes. I came back home with a box under my arm, went upstairs to my room, closed the door, and thought about the meaning of freedom.

And then we received a call from Darren’s mother. “Do you know what they’re doing?” I could hear from the receiver that my mother held a few inches away from her head. “They are going to be handing something out to the kids at school! Something with bad words in it! They are going to get expelled and won’t get into college! We have to stop them!”

I tried to imagine how Darren’s mother found out. I pictured a deposit of laundry, a neglected computer screen, and a long interrogation.

Although my mother did not confiscate the copies and put them on top of her armoire next to my slingshot and BB gun, she persuaded me to seek administrative approval for my subversion. Darren and I agreed, through intermediaries, to postpone distribution, and the next day my father took me to the local law library to read and copy First Amendment cases. It was not my idea of radicalism. At least we went for ice cream afterwards

After a flurry of letters with the school’s lawyers, citing cases that involved Vietnam-era black armbands, Vietnam-era anti-draft t-shirts, and students who wanted to wear tissue boxes on their feet, a deal was struck with the principal. We would show him the paper we wished to distribute, and he would make “suggestions.” A memo went out to all teachers advising that Darren and I would be distributing an underground newspaper in between classes. The arrangement was not what we’d had in mind. We were not really fighting the establishment, and we were not really hiding our identities.

But when that first issue of The Eagle’s Nest was out there at last, and I saw my peers reading my “Elegy for Tater Tots” and laughing out loud, I thought to myself, “I like this.”

How about you? Was there an earlier moment in your life that led to blogging?

Posted on 1 June 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 13

Remember Happy Meals?

I do.

All meals have the potential to be happy, at least the ones that do not contain kale or anything else that belongs on a tree. But a Happy Meal can come only from McDonald’s.

A Happy Meal was designed for children. The food of the Happy Meal, to the extent it could be called food, was no more or less happy than a regular meal at McDonald’s. If you counted the effects of age on the alimentary canal, the food was probably much happier for children.

The Happy Meal’s happiness was in the packaging. The burger and fries came in a little cardboard box with artwork and puzzles on the sides, and closed up at the top with a handle in the shape of double arches. Inside the box, alongside the meal, was a toy, a small plastic piece of junk that would spend ten minutes in my hands, and 10,000 years in my parents’ basement.

I insisted upon Happy Meals every time. The design and theme of the box and toy would change every few weeks or months, and I had to have the new one. Sometimes the theme was based upon a movie that McDonald’s thought would increase the desire for sugar, salt, and fat. Other times it was seasonal, like a Halloween themed box with witches riding french fries against a full moon.

The boxes were shaped so that one could be fit inside another, and stacked as high as the laws of physics would permit. After a few months I had stack of Happy Meals taller than I was. It was my monument to life. Sometimes I would sit in my room and look at my tower, and imagine it reaching to the sky, with a spiral staircase leading up to an observation deck and souvenir shop with snow globes containing miniature versions of my Happy Meal tower.

When the tower reached the ceiling of my bedroom, I started another one. Before long I had a city, Hamburglars and Grimaces watching over me like cathedral gargoyles. I was re-zoning the downtown when my parents finally said something.

“Mark, we need to talk about your Happy Meal boxes,” they said. “We think they are a fire hazard and your grades are suffering.”

I was having a little trouble seeing them around the towers of Happy Meals. One of the boxes was decorated like a house, and had a perforated window that I opened to watch my parents leaving my room, shaking their heads.

Unable to reach my family, I invited my friends to see my work. “Thanks for coming over, Clarence. Please sit over here by the East Tower. Oh wait. I had to remove the chair to make room for the pavilion and carousel. I guess you’ll have to stand.”

After a while my parents stopped coming in my room. They would leave my dinner outside my door and knock three times, so that I knew it was not other kids trying to steal my Happy Meal boxes. Although the only dinner that held any interest for me was a Happy Meal.

My parents had stopped taking me to McDonald’s, though, forcing me to rely on other parents. I would tutor their dim children in math or social studies in exchange for rides. Even when my parents cut off my allowance, I managed to scrape enough change together by recycling soda cans that I found in the garbage bins at school. My teachers thought I was setting a great example, and gave me an “Enviro-Kid” award that I taped to my bedroom wall, facing the Ronald McDonald Senior Living Center that I had erected next to my hamper.

I came home late one night with my latest acquisition—a Roman Empire themed Happy Meal, decorated like the Coliseum, with lions dipping gladiators in sweet and sour sauce—to find my whole family sitting in a brightly lit living room.

My father stood up, walked over to me, and gently took my Happy Meal from my hands. My mother gave me hug and directed me to the sofa next to her. My brother, a good four inches taller than the last time I’d seen him, looked worried. The cardiganed man on my other side, who introduced himself as Dr. Burger, said that he was there to help.

I looked at the ground and saw a suitcase. This was actually happening. I asked if I go up to my room and get something. Dr. Burger said that I could not, and my family nodded in agreement. They wouldn’t even let me see my boxes one last time.

I was taken to the Ronald McDonald Home for Wayward Teens, and shared a room with a young man who was battling addictions to methadone and the little animal figurines that came in boxes of Red Rose tea. For weeks I was under constant surveillance, and if I tried to stack something on top of something else, I was given a shot of electricity and placed on the “no dessert” list for that night.

I was so happy when it was time to go home that I did not notice the back roads route we took to avoid the strip of fast food restaurants. There was a “Welcome Home” banner above our television, and a wide open space on my bedroom floor. It was like being in another kid’s room.

The other day I saw a boy carrying a Happy Meal, probably made from recycled Chicken McNuggets. The boy looked happy. I hope I did too.

Thanks to Jay Kaplowitz for the topic.

Posted on 30 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 15

Mash-Up, May 28: David Bouchier, Clay Morgan, Leanne Shirtliffe

This week we review an essay from humorist David Bouchier, a blog post from Clay Morgan at eduClaytion.com, and a column from Leanne Shirtliffe that was published in the Calgary Herald.

David Bouchier is an award-winning essayist for National Public Radio and author. Originally from England, he relocated to New York’s Long Island, in search of, I imagine, more traffic. His humor column “Out of Order” appeared in the regional Sunday edition of the New York Times for ten years until 2003. The Song of Suburbia, a collection of humorous vignettes about trying to make it in the suburbs, is ever at my side.

David Bouchier’s writing is polished, lively, and funny, and he regularly treats the public to a featured essay on his website. His most recent such piece, The Anxious Traveler (May 27), highlights the comic irony of our oppression by the very means of travel that were designed to empower us, a topic near and dear to my heart.

Our next piece comes from Clay Morgan via his website, eduClaytion. Clay is a writer, professor, and speaker from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has a particular interest in using pop culture references to reach a generation of students that are often considered unreachable, as Clay explains in this guest post that appeared on Lessons From Teachers and Twits. His ebullience is part and parcel of his work, and every visit to eduClaytion puts me in a good mood.

This week, Clay writes a touching and funny memoir of “Macho Man” Randy Savage, a professional wrestler who brought life to the World Wrestling Federation from 1985 to 1994, and whose own life ended on May 20th when he suffered a heart attack while driving his truck and crashed into a tree. Clay’s prose resurrects those gladiators in colorful briefs, sparring with metal folding chairs, and catapulting off the ropes onto their supine adversaries’ glistening chests and faces.

I saw the moves all over again: the body slam, the pile driver, the back body drop, the airplane spin, the gorilla press gutbuster. Was it honest athletic competition, or staged entertainment? Either way, I was glad it happening on the television instead of in my living room.

And last, but not least, comes a piece from Leanne Shirtliffe, who blogs at IronicMom.com about her misadventures raising twins. Her work will bring a laugh if you have children, or even if you don’t have children but have seen examples of them on television. Her article titled “Water, kids, and failed experiments” (Calgary Herald, May 26) is about keeping your cool when your child discovers the garden hose.

What is it with kids and hoses? Sigmund Freud had an explanation, but this blog is geared towards a general audience. Leanne wisely ignores the psychology, and takes her child’s fascination with aplomb and humor; a lesson in parenting, and a lesson in writing.

And that’s a wrap. Enjoy the weekend.

Posted on 28 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Why the iPhone is Perfect for Writers

Last year I submitted a piece by email to my local newspaper for Op-Ed consideration, and then left for a four-day bachelor party in Florida. When I was able to see straight again at the close of the trip, and got to an Internet connection, I saw that I had received three emails from the newspaper’s Op-Ed editor. She had wanted to run my piece in the Sunday edition but needed to talk to me about it, and all she had was my email address. I frantically called her Monday morning, but it was too late.

Missing a publishing opportunity because of missed email was a bitter pill to swallow. I swore it would never happen again. You might be thinking that I could have avoided the problem by including my cell phone number with the submission. But then I wouldn’t have this little story.

Getting an iPhone solved the problem of the missed email. But I’ve discovered two other advantages that have improved my life as a writer. It allows me to take notes without looking like I’m taking notes, and it allows to me read without looking like I’m reading.

For years I carried around a little notebook. If I thought of something, I would write it down. The problem was that people sometimes acted funny when they saw me taking notes. “What are you writing?” they would ask, or “Are you writing about me?” or “Can I read what you wrote?” or “I’m going to take that notebook when you are sleeping and read it!” That kind of attention affected my prose.

With the iPhone, however, they don’t know I’m taking notes. They think I’m just texting or, better yet, playing a video game. Sometimes I angle the device this way and that to make it look like I’m racing a car. And as soon as I’m done recording my thoughts, with one tap I can email the notes to myself for later use, with no crumpled up receipts to clutter the coffee table and spark an argument.

Reading books in public used to be a problem, too. Bringing War and Peace to the dinner table was generally interpreted as rude, no matter which translation. One evening as I dined with family, I noticed that someone was holding his iPhone under the table to watch a YouTube video of washed-up celebrity chefs falling down flights of stairs. I asked my fellow diners why he was allowed to watch a video, while I was not allowed to read. Everyone stared into their mashed potatoes.

The message was clear. There was a double standard for new technology and old.

The iPhone has made it possible to read at the dinner table again. I read books on my iPhone and everyone thinks I’m on Facebook looking at wedding pictures of people I don’t really know. Attending parties with a book, even a book that had received good reviews, always met with stares. Now people just stare at their devices, as I stare at mine. Just like with the notes, an unacceptable rudeness masquerades as an acceptable one.

And sometimes when the party’s over, and the potato salad scraped off the plates, and I’m back in my room, alone, I pick up a notepad and a book…and find them both a little heavy.

What’s your experience been? How has an iPhone (or similar device) changed your life as a writer? Or are you still carrying around a notebook and getting weird looks?

Posted on 27 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

How I Started Blogging

My first blog was created in the fall of 2008. America was in the midst of a Presidential election, and debate was fierce. While showering I came up with a few ideas on how to solve the financial crisis and the exploding cost of healthcare. I published a few posts sharing my views, and dreamed of appearing on television news programs with the words “Freelance Public Policy Expert” floating under my talking head.

When I clicked on “publish” it was as if a jolt of electricity had gone through my body. I imagined that my post would instantly show up on everyone’s screen like that persistent prompt to download the latest version of Abode Flash Player. Now our leaders would know what to do. But none of my posts got any comments, or any views, and every Sunday morning it was the same group of politicians, journalists, and well-established experts on the Meet the Press instead of me.

My second blog was daily vignettes and flash fiction. I wrote about annoying cell phone conversations and chronic snifflers and people who carried large pieces of luggage onto commuter trains during rush hour. I wrote a story about a device called the Descriptionizer Functioner, even though I did not know what it did, and another story about a man who can’t find parking in Manhattan until a UFO vaporizes a parked car right before his eyes. I had a great sense of accomplishment with each story, but still no one was reading. I figured it was because my characters had no depth.

At no point did it occur to me to tell anyone what I was doing.

Then it was early summer and getting hot, and I was taking another stab at the collected works of William Shakespeare. I try this every summer. I was supposed to have read Hamlet in the 12th grade, but I was busy slacking off at the time. Better late than never, I decided a great way to learn the play was to write a humorous parody of it and post my work to a blog. I wrote it up, and then I moved onto Macbeth, which I liked because it had lots of rhyming and is very short. At last I had found my blog concept. I would write a blog making a parody of each Shakespeare play. But I hit the wall at King Lear. At first I thought my problem was that I did not understand the text. Then I saw the movie – the recent one with Sir Ian McKellen – and realized that the play is just really disturbing.

Then I was blogging journal entries about my daily life. I wrote about coffee and cat food. I wrote about looking for a copy of a video I made when I was running for class president. I wrote about my office mate who seemed to do nothing but sip soda and chew gum. And then I got bored and stopped.

The blogging thing just didn’t seem to be working. I was glad I hadn’t told anyone about it.

Then I was home for Columbus Day and considered loitering in front of a convenience store to pass the time. Suddenly I remembered a cartoon show called Beavis and Butthead that had aired on MTV in 1993. I remembered how fond I had been of that show, and how the base and tasteless humor had spoken to me at a time when I was fairly base and tasteless myself. And I saw how I could write a post about it. The short post occurred to me all at once, and after I wrote it I thought of other things that had changed in the last few decades.

The topics seemed inexhaustible. I blogged for a few weeks, and mustered up the courage to tell my mother about it. I got decent feedback from my mother, and then I told my wife. My wife gave me decent feedback, too, especially after I shoveled the driveway and took out the garbage. Then I told my dearest, closest friends. Then I told my Facebook friends. And I saw that the feedback was good. I kept blogging for them, and then one day I was Freshly Pressed and had the greatest experience I know as a writer – being read by thousands of strangers.

And now I can’t stop blogging. I think about it when I’m supposed to be paying attention to people who are talking to me. At least I have an inexhaustible concept for posts. “Remember when…” There’s no end to that! No way would I ever break with such a concept.

So what’s your story? How did you start blogging?

Posted on 25 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember Using Paper Maps?

Remember using paper maps to get places?

old map — Map Reproduction Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library

I do.

Today people have talking computers suctioned to their car windshields to guide them to places they’ve never been. But when I was a kid we had only paper maps to scream at when we got lost. And each other.

The maps were a sagging bulge in the pouch at the back of the passenger seat of my father’s Renault, and covered our general traveling region: upstate New York, New England, and other places that put ketchup and mustard on hamburgers unless you asked otherwise.

I don’t think a single map, once unfolded, has ever been folded back again. It is the law of entropy. No matter how many diagrams and colored tags I used, I could never get the map folded up sharp and neat like it had been on the rack at the rest area store by the Roy Rodgers and the machine that flattened pennies. The best I could do was crumple the map into something approaching a rectangle, and squeeze like I had to nail a sforzando on an accordion.

And that was just putting the map away. Reaching for the map was even more dangerous. It often ripped. Once we were negotiating around the Boston Museum of Science, and my father needed me to navigate instead of watching my breath condense on the window. But the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had become a stack of paper that I flipped through like I was counting money. Then a pigeon flew away with one of the sheets, and we could not find our motel again.

Before long trips I would spread the map or map pieces before me, and trace our intended path, imagining our car following the same red-lined trajectory as the plane in the Indiana Jones movies. Sometimes my father would whistle the Indiana Jones music while I did this. When we got lost, the whistling ceased.

“But where is the dang exit?” he would ask rhetorically on the shoulder of Interstate 95, the skies darkening, and motel vacancies vanishing by the second. “The number is right next to the highway on this page, but all I see is another sign for corn.” I wanted to help him at these times, but the only things I knew how to do with a map was trace my finger along it.

The best was the time my grandparents took my brother and I to Disney World. My grandfather was following a set of directions that he’d written down on a piece of paper, and my grandmother was reading them back to him as he drove. “It says take Exit 16 A-B,” my grandmother said.

“What’s A-B? I never heard of an exit that ended in A-B.”

“Well you wrote it. Don’t blame me.”

We passed Exit 16 A, and then we passed Exit 16 B. But no Exit “A-B.” The next exit was Exit 17. So we had to get turned around in a swamp, asking an alligator for directions that were not remembered because we all thought someone else was listening. I thought I could hear the fireworks at the Magic Kingdom over the Yiddish being screamed two feet away from my ear. Eventually we pulled over, and after more careful examination my grandfather concluded that the directions were supposed to say Exit 16 A or B. “Exit A or B,” he kept saying as we pulled into our lodgings, dreams of long lines and expensive souvenirs already dancing in my head.

Today these dramas are played out with sterile soft-spoken machines that says things like, “Turn right,” and “Recalculating; Drive…three…blocks…then…turn left.” The computer should say, “Recalculating; Pull over…and…bang your head against the…driver’s side…window.” That would add some of the old excitement that made family trips memorable. Screaming at a machine is just not the same.

Posted on 23 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember Action Figures?

Remember action figures?

I do.

Like all my childhood desires for material things, my yearning for action figures began at another kid’s house. One Sunday afternoon, my parents consulted the magic directory of boys my age who lived nearby, and conveyed me to a house I’d never before seen. And as I entered the boy’s den, it was as if I had discovered an underground city of gold.

In this room were these little plastic figures. Properly known as “Masters of the Universe,” I referred to them by the name of their fearless leader, He-Man.

The display was intoxicating. It seemed like there were hundreds of figures standing up to greet me. My new best friend let me touch them, pick them up, and pretend that they were mine for a few seconds before he took them away, wiping each one down with a sanitized cloth.

As I held He-Man aloft and gazed into his noble face, the first thing I learned was that the figure made me feel powerful and special and convinced that I had to own one. The second thing I learned about action figures was that it was very dangerous to get the web of skin between thumb and forefinger near He-Man’s rotator cuff or hip.

For the rest of that school year, the only thing that I believed would brighten my little world was to own a He-Man figure. “He wants these things called Masters of the Universe,” my mother told my grandmother as my birthday approached. “Just ask for those at the store.”

But instead of the He-Man figure I wanted, my grandmother got me a button shirt that my mother made me wear whenever we went to my grandmother’s house. “I looked all over,” my grandmother said, “going from store to store, but no one had ever heard of the ‘Masters of the Human Race.’ Where are you supposed to find these things?”

Eventually my prayers were answered, and He-Man and a few of his friends had taken the place of my real friends and family. But He-Man needed a place to hang out. The hero of Eternia could not very well lie around on my bedroom floor like in some flophouse. Fortunately, the Mattel company had conveniently solved He-Man’s housing problem by producing a replica of Castle Grayskull, where He-Man went to see the Sorceress, usually after a long wait in the reception area and a $25 co-pay.

All I wanted was that Castle Grayskull. As the holiday season approached I told my parents and everyone I knew that I wanted Castle Grayskull. I pined away at school, my coloring uncolored before me, imagining how Castle Grayskull would look in my room. I pictured how I would wake up every morning, and open its gates, and greet He-Man and his entourage. When I frolicked on the splintered and nail-exposed wood of the playground, I pretended that I was He-Man patrolling the ramparts of the Castle Grayskull that would no doubt soon be mine. And as I laid my weary mop-head to sleep at night, I could see the outline of the great toy sanctuary in the shadows that danced on my cartoon wallpaper.

But my Castle Grayskull never came. I received other toys, toys that time forgot, but my He-Man figures remained nomads on my bedroom floor, and eventually had to opt for a Velcro-sneaker shoebox with a sign out front that said “Interdimensional War Vet – Please Help.” Years later, as I was concluding my therapy, I found out what happened.

“I spoke to the mother of that boy you used to see,” my mother said. “You know, the one with all those He-Man things. And she said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t buy that stupid Castle Grayskull. It’s $30 for a plastic piece of junk.’ So I got you something else instead. I hope that was all right.”

Sometimes I wonder if my life would be any different if I had gotten Castle Grayskull instead of the corduroy shirt with the cat face on the pocket. I found a semi-used Castle Grayskull on eBay, and the small product image sent a shimmer of the power down my spine. But I couldn’t bring myself to enter a bid. For He-Man, and for me, you can’t go home again.

Posted on 19 May 2011 by Mark Kaplowitz 0