Dig That Crazy Bird

The Scooby Dooby sisters, Millie and Ellie were oblivious to the fact that it was the third Thursday in November. Millie industriously painted a stiff, wooden chair with Duco house paint. At first she applied a red coat but then decided to go abstract and add small slashes of yellow and green, making the Jackson Pollock scene. Ellie busied herself brushing her hair 100 times, a favorite pastime particular to blonde girls.

Millie found herself stuck to her paint brush as her hair got stuck to the quickly drying paint on the brush. "Ow! Not cool! Sis!!"
Ellie found herself in a similar predicament when her brush got deeply tangled in her hair and she couldn't pull it out anymore. "What a drag! Sis!!!"

Millie raced over to her sister with a big paint brush dangling from her hair like a clunky ear ring. "Help, my branches are all stuck!"
"Mine too!"
Ellie began pulling the paint brush out of her sister's hair as Millie reached over to pull the hairbrush out of her sister's head. Both of them twisted and cussed as their groovy crash pad door opened and their rich, fat, gray-haired mother strode in wearing her customary pill box hat, silver fox mink stole and Cartier pearls.
"Oh, girls, what foolishness are you up to now?"
"Mother!!!" they wailed at the same time.
Mother Huntington rolled her eyes and grabbed a rusty butter knife from the kitchen. "How many times have I told you girls to cut that monstrously long hair of yours? Oh well, I suppose this'll do. Once I cut your hair and you change out of your rags you're coming home for Thanksgiving dinner".
"Mother!!" they both wailed.

**********************

Although Millie and Ellie were hip, card-carrying beatnik sisters they were strictly trust fund brats and had to put up with occasional inconveniences like family get togethers, i.e. Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner was held at the Huntington family's stuffy Park Avenue penthouse with the gray-haired squares sitting at the large dining room table and the youngsters sitting at the tiny Japanese-style table.

"Hubert's closing a highly lucrative account in Tokyo, even as we speak. They're selling low after that terrible war", Mother Huntington told the guests. "We're doing our part to help those unfortunate little Buddhist peasants". The guests nodded, grunted with a few "here heres" and sipped their expensive wine. There were several candelabras at the table even though the dining room had the brightest chandelier money could buy.

"Bodhisattva bebop", Ellie whispered to Millie. "Dad's making the Buddha scene".
"I dig, chick. I'm just jazzed Mom didn't get a chance to slash all our weeds".
"Zilch, baby. As soon as she copped my locks off that crazy brush I split out of the pad".
"Me too, baby. And she didn't get a chance to flip our threads, either!"
They both giggled, but Millie quickly frowned when Grimly the butler placed two heaping plates of Thanksgiving dinner in front of them.

"What's with the feast? Maaaannnn!"
"Hold the banquet, baby, I don't dig".
"Thanksgiving dinner", Grimly announced, "Per Lady Huntington's request". He dashed away, disgusted by the scruffy debutantes sitting Indian style on the floor by their meals. He looked back and caught a sight of Ellie taking off her moccasins and shivered with disgust, dashing into the kitchen.

Millie began industriously building an abstract sculpture out of her mashed potatoes and stuffing, building an upper tier of yams and stacking the rooftop with slabs of turkey.

Lady Huntington glanced over at her daughters' kiddie table, did a horrified double take and stopped her dissertation on Coco Chanel's latest collection.
"Millicent, what on earth are you doing?" Everyone at the adults table stared at them with smarmy disdain.
"I call it 'Ode To A High Rise'", Millie tossed her hair proudly. "Isn't it the most?"
Lady Huntington turned three shades of red and roared, "Child, you'll be the death of me yet!"
"Must they be here? The air has a faint...aroma...of narcotics", a silver-haired man with an enormously red face burbled.
"That's patchouli, Gramps!" Millie purred.
"Oh, alright, get out. Oh, these unruly children!" Lady Huntington poo-hooed.

"LET'S SPLIT THIS WAX MUSEUM!" Ellie grabbed Millie's hand and they promptly walked out the door, but not until Millie stopped at a bowl of fruit.
"Wax fruit!" Millie smirked, "You cats must be putting us on!"
"OUT!!!!!!"

**********************

Millie and Ellie made a detour home to their favorite coffee house, The Pony Espresso, where coffee, chess, and their hipster crush Scruffy worked. Dave Brubeck was blasting on the hi-fi and a few scattered beats were sitting around reading poetry and sketching with plates of food by their side.

"Dig that grocery store rebop, Sister", Millie whispered to Ellie, "Is today Food Day?"
"Gadzooks", Ellie scratched her head, "Foodarama, like feast-a-rooni".
Scruffy ambled up to them as they sat down at a table.
"Aloha, chicks", Scruffy brought over a tray with two espressos, the way the girls liked it, hot and strong. They thought Scruffy was hot and strong, too. "Got some atomic bomb juice, on the house".

Millie grabbed a chess board from the book case in the corner as Ellie asked Scruffy, "What's with the food scene, Daddy? I don't savvy, Pappy".
Scruffy stroked his groovy goatee and said, "You don't dig, Baby? Today's Thanksgiving Day. We give thanks for giving and today I'm making with the banquet scene".
"Coolness! Lay it on me, Hepcat".
"Grab a plate and pile on some grub - it's on the pub".
"Solid!"

The two girls ambled over listlessly to the buffet table. Ellie put two cubes of yam, three teaspoonfuls of cranberries and half a slice of pumpkin pie. Millie piled on a tablespoonful of bread pudding and half a slice of mince pie. She grabbed three pecans for later if she got hungry.
"I'm gonna get so stuffed", Ellie mumbled.
"I dig, like my plate is jammed like Grand Central Station", Millie peered at the meager helpings.

They put their food down and started playing chess. Scruffy walked up and said, "Happy Thanksgiving, chicks".
"Yeah, like Happy Thanks for Giving, Scruffy. You're the most and squares are toast".

An old math professor came in and started reciting some way out poetry about the Mayflower and Pocahontas being a real gone squaw and the pilgrims wearing those crazy toppers and the two girls felt warmer than they felt in months. The food grew cold on their plates but they couldn't guzzle their coffees fast enough! Like, Endsville.

Rock & Roll Confidential Part 6

As far as I'm concerned punk rock started with this Craig Godlis photograph published in Andy Warhol's Interview in 1975 depicting Television collaborators Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell in their most raggedly ragged ramshackle glory. Their music fell short of their wild looks but this photo pretty much lit the fuse to what was to be The Sex Pistols look and what eventually would become "punk fashion".

Here's an ad for The Mercer Arts Center from The Village Voice during the summer of 1972. If you look down at The Oscar Wilde Room you'll notice a bill for "The Dolls of N.Y." (!). It doesn't mention the other acts performing like Suicide, KISS, Queen Elizabeth featuring Wayne County or The Stilettos (Deborah Harry), among others.
I didn't catch the blurb for the Dolls so I missed them (sorry), but I did catch the Off-Broadway production of "One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest" (predating the movie, BTW) which was very good featuring Lane Smith in the role of Randall McMurphy. Lane Smith later played Perry White on the ABC-TV show "Lois and Clark".

In the late 1960's Frank Zappa extensively advertised Mothers of Invention albums in Marvel Comics. This great ad designed by Cal Schenkel was on the inner cover of a giant-sized Spider Man Special comic.

Here's an ad for Led Zeppelin playing The Rose Palace in Pasadena, California with Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity opening. The cost of a ticket was only $4 back then. Those were the days.


Pictured below is a press photograph of Sparks seen performing on "American Bandstand" around the era of "A Woofer In Tweeter's Clothing" (1973). While I'm not the world's most foremost authority on all things Sparks-related they're probably doing "Wonder Girl" or "Girl From Germany". Notice the cartoon sledgehammer Russell Mael is sporting.

G.I. Joe and I

Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols once remarked that “every bloke has a bit of ginger in him” and dammit, he’s right. I get a warm glow in my heart when I apply my light blue eye shadow and work that sweet lip gloss like a cheap dame, but nothing can compete with that guy who stole my heart in my flaming youth. I called him my Joe, but everyone knew him as “G.I. Joe”.

“G.I. Joe” made the scene in the early Sixties and made my pulse pound like crazy until The Beatles came along. He was manufactured by Hasbro Toys from Rhode Island, where I actually lived at the time (1962). In fact, there was a kid in our school named Danny Hassenfeld who we treated like a rock star because his uncles were in fact the Hassenfeld Brothers (hence “Hasbro”).

G.I. Joe was brilliant because finally there was a Barbie doll for boys, if Barbie killed Krauts and drank beer at the local PX. They all had a rugged scar running across their cheek and looked like they could kill Ken in their sleep. It was a major toy-making phenomenon and probably the only important thing to come out of Rhode Island*. When G.I. Joe first started out they confined him to the basic World War Two army soldier model. Once he took off, however, they made a Navy doll, an astronaut doll, a frogman, a Green Beret (topical for the Vietnam War), and then they got foreign on us: there was the British soldier, the bitchen French freedom fighter with beret and black turtle neck sweater (!), and accessories! There was the space capsule complete with 45 rpm record, jeeps, fire trucks, and I made my Dad crazy driving me around to toy stores scoring this junk. I’m surprised he didn’t kill my annoying ass. We even got the enemy G.I. Joes: The Japanese WW II soldiers, the German stormtroopers (I’m sure my father was thrilled to have that shit in his house), and of course the surrendering Italian fascists. No, I made that last one up.

But things got weirder by the day: just for shits and giggles I filled out a Barbie sweepstakes blank at the toy store and quickly forgot about it. When I came home from school my Mom said, “A big parcel came in the mail today for you, Andy”. Kids love parcels, yeah? I won a Francie Dream House and a Twist and Turn Barbie! Shee, yeah! Let me tell you, that TNT Barbie was one happy playgirl, pouting those sweet bee-stung lips of hers as TEN G.I. Joes sat around her serving her by her molded vinyl bed. Even the Nazi was down for it. The sailor might have been watching the astronaut bend over a few times, though. I would pose my studly servicemen around this hot little ingénue while my transistor radio blared The Kinks, The Turtles and Billy Stewart yodeling “Summertime” like Jackie Wilson on crystal meth. G.I. Joe was the awesomest pal a little boy could ask for. And I haven’t killed anybody.
________
*Next to me, of course.

The Screaming Bean

1954, Greenwich Village:
Millie and Ellie, The Skooby Dooby Sisters were hanging out at their wickedest coffee emporium, The Pony Espresso, playing chess very intently.
Millie lifted her head and peered through her ratted out brunette locks and mumbled, “Like can you imagine tape recording The Steve Allen Show off the boob tube and you could like play it over and over again?”
“Man, you’re getting too abstract for me. That’s almost as crazy as cats typing out messages to each other on a telephone they carry around in their back pocket!” Ellie coolly sniffed.
“A telephone – in your back pocket? Chick, you’re on a wilder rocket ship than me. But dig this, imagine typing your poetry on a typewriter and seeing it on a way-out TV set and cats from all over the world can read your crazy scrambles?”
“Yeah, dig, and they can print it on a tiny printing press next to the typewriter.”
“Man, are you crazy chicks drinking your tea or smoking it?”
“Scruffy!” they said in unison.

A quick word about Scruffy: His real name was Sterling Holloway Scarborough IV, and received an even larger trust fund than both transistor sisters combined, a secret he kept hidden better than they because boys keep secrets better than girls. Scruffy always managed to maintain his cool with only one exception, and that was when people assumed he was from the New Haven Scarboroughs who worked the galley on the Mayflower, which he wasn't. He was of the Newport Scarboroughs, who actually helmed the Mayflower. Such class distinctions were not to be bandied about. It was rumored he was the more affluent nephew of writer William S. Burroughs.

“Chicks, you better like cool on the smoke signals”, he growled with his piercing blue eyes blasting through his ruggedly good counter-culture looks. The sisters both stared at him with hipster love. “Hey! Dig the square tourists!” Scruffy grinned. “The golden-agers coming in at 2 on the clock!”
A very harried, well-dressed elderly couple raced up to the Skooby Doobies, and stared at them incredulously.
The elderly woman clutched her handbag and gasped in horror. “Oh! There you are, we searched high and low for you girls! Glenn, will you look at them?”
“Yes dear, I’m looking at them”, a dapper old man in a topcoat complied.
“You girls look like a pack of gypsies.”
“Yeah, well”, Millie’s left leg and right eye twitched nervously. “That’s like, your opinion, man”.
“Man? Man?? Did a sick raccoon apply your make-up? Didn’t you learn anything in finishing school?”
“Muth-errrrr…”
"You wanna, like, transpose that in a major key?"
“Look at your father. You’re breaking his heart! Do you enjoy breaking your father’s heart?”
“Well, actually dear, they're not as bad as those hooligan doctors trying to ruin my business by that dreadful report they released yesterday. Imagine, cigarettes killing people! Did you ever hear such trash!”
“That’s alright dear, we’ll be summering in the Hamptons with the Kefauvers. We’ll get old Estes to break up that gang.”
“Blast that Estes, I’ll call old Tailgunner Joe McCarthy on them, my old Air Force chum. He’ll sort those scoundrel butchers and run them back to medical school. Cancer, of all the confounding crazy ideas.”

Mother Huntington said, “You can’t believe the filthy hovels we trudged through to find you girls. First we went to the Two Much!”
“Went there yesterday”.
“And then we went to The Screaming Bean.”
“Screaming Bean? Made the scene at The Bean last night, Mama Rebop”.
“After that ordeal, we went to that flea pit The Psychiatrist’s Kouch, and promptly walked out.”
“The Psychiatrists’ Kouch? Man, that pad’s for squares.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, children. So then we went to The Eye Ball 8 Ball”.
“Did we go to the Ball this morning?” Ellie asked Millie.
Millie’s eye twitched nervously. “Aw, lemme concert trate…was it on Bleecker and Houston?”
“No, doll, that’s The Neurotics Club”.
“McDougal and Central?”
“Nix, baby, that’s The Stone Cold Dragg. That’s for square Jane tourists.”
“We ever make the scene at Magick Carpet Ryde?”
“Yeah, but they like, 86’ed us from there, remember?”
“No. We must have boppin’ around The Eye Ball 8 Ball, then.”
“Crazy!”
“You girls are crazy, and we’re going home. Right now!” Mother Huntington ordered.
“What are you doing, Eleanor? Why are you stroking your hand?”
Ellie’s eyes glazed. “Dig, I’m not stroking, I’m petting Katmandu. You’re giving her middle class persecution complexes.”
“What is she talking about, Glenn?”
“Dear, this opium den smells just like that Hindu costume party the Van Gelders threw at their estate at the Breakers after their hostile takeover of the First National–“
“Dig, Mommy-O, Katmandu is like our invisible cat, you copy, jane?”
“Why of all the nerve, talking to your mother in such a fashion. Young lady, just remember one thing: I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it!”
Millie and Ellie’s eyes widened and looking at each other, cooed, “Craaazzzzy”.

Scruffy elbowed the the girls’ parents gently further and further out of the club and into the rainy street. Millie turned to Ellie and looked upset. “Hey!”
“It’s my turn to pet the cat. Hand her over, chicky baby!”
Ellie lifted her arms and dropped the invisible pet to her sister. Millie smiled. “Katmandu, you dig us. You’re no square poppa”.

The Hip Chicks

Bend me an ear and I'll tell you all about the two coolest chicky babies to ever grace the Village. They had the rattiest hair and the craziest clothes and made the scene wherever they went. These way out sisters were far out > Someone said their real names were Millie and Ellie and they came from a very prosperous family from Cape Cod. They lived off a trust fund and went vacationing in the Hamptons every summer, but not without bundling up and covering their tender skin from the big-bad wicked sun. They envied the way twins would always swing by the same handle, so they went by the same name wherever they went: Skooby Dooby. Either one would answer to the name, so one of them was bound to answer you.

They would get a fucking generous stipend from their parents at the end of every month, which they kept more private from everyone than Allen Ginsburg's sex life. The dough would get spent on tights, pot, bongos and bullfight posters. Some of the coffee cans in their pad held espresso beans and some held endless rolls of hundred dollar bills.

Whenever they'd get bored playing chess and sipping coal-black java, they'd quiz each other about great Presidents.
"So, like, who's a bigger swinger?" the blonde Skooby Dooby asked her sister. "William Henry Harrison or Chester A. Arthur?"
"Ohhh, man", mulled the brunette Skooby Dooby, "William Henry Harrison is the most, like you dig?"
"Crazy!" the blonde Skooby Dooby said.
Some Audrey Hepburn wannabe snob in a little black dress, pearls and little white cotton gloves walked right by them.
"Hey, hey, Godiva, you're stepping on my cat, dig?" the blonde Skooby Dooby pointed at the uptown sister.
"What cat?" the snooty dame whined. "I don't see a cat".
"Hey, like, you're stepping on our invisible cat, Katmandu. Katmandu don't like dig your vibraphonic vibrations. Get on your way, like way out".
"Invisible cat? Chester A. Arthur? You girls are insane".
"Yeah, well", the brunette Skooby Dooby was twitching nervously, her left leg shaking uncontrollably from ingesting too many shots of capuccino, "That's like your, um, like opinion, you know?" Her right eye started twitching in rhythm with her leg. "You like dig, Square Jane?"
The owner, a ringer for Maynard G. Krebs, came up to them in his smelly sweatshirt, given to him by Gregory Corso, and asked, "Ex-squeeze me, is this girl bothering you ladies?"
"Yowzah, Scruffy", Skooby Dooby said, "this, like debutante from Squaresville University is trying to break up our, like, transmission".
"Yeah, um and she stepped on Katmandu!"
Scruffy ushered the rich girl out of the cafe, but she stopped and stared at the blonde Skooby Dooby intnently. "Ellie, is that you? Omigod! Ellie Huntington of the Cape Cod Huntingtons, I don't believe it! The sorority misses you! What are you doing here?"
The brunette's left leg and right eye was twitching faster and harder, "No man, we don't know any El-Seven Humdingertons, Scruffy! Scruffy! Show her the way, way out!"
“No! Seriously! Elzie, don’t you recognize me, Bibzie Hollingsworth! What are you doing in that crazy get up? What did you do to your hair???” she gawked as Scruffy gently gave her like the old heave-ho.

As soon as she was thrown out of the coffee house, Millie looked at Ellie. “Wow, bad scene”.
“Like, purple nightmare”.
“Yeah…….so…..who’s the craziest cat, William McKinley or Millard Fillmore?”