Radioactive Toy

Turn it up!

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Lou.  Was I the same Bob Lefsetz who worked at Camp Tohkomeupog in the summer of ’71?

I went to Jewish camp growing up.  Where the focus is more on the social than the physical.  And I’m not gonna complain much about that, everything I know about sex I learned at Camp Laurelwood.  I may not have touched any boobies, intentionally anyway, but that’s where I learned what "stacked" meant, it’s where I had my first two girlfriends.  And I’ve been looking them up on the Internet since 1995. And I finally found one.  I know it’s her because I found a picture.  She’s living in a different state, she’s standing by a horse, but it’s her. As for the other..?  It’s hard to look up women online, because they’ve gotten married and changed their last names.

Not that I’d e-mail either one of them.  It’s kind of a private fantasy, a link to the past, evidencing that it truly exists, that I’m linked to who I once was.

I only worked at Tohkomeupog for one summer, but like Jill and Betsy, it’s indelible in my brain, even though I’ve never been back, even though I have no contact with anyone I knew there.

Until yesterday.

I know, I know, Facebook.  I don’t play on Facebook for this very reason, I don’t want to hear from everyone I ever knew.  Oh, I want to hear from some of them, but open the floodgates and you never know what will float through amongst the flotsam and the jetsam.  Or, as Fran Lebowitz said on HBO, we move to the city to leave our past behind, to gain anonymity.  That’s what I love about the city, no one knows who I am, no one’s talking behind my back, I don’t have a pre-established identity, forged years ago that those in my town won’t let go.

Or those in college.

I went to a small school.  1800 students.  Everyone had a label.  And it was at Middlebury that I met Bob Mauro, who offered up this summer job.  I needed to do something, I had to earn money, my parents weren’t going to let me skate, so I said yes, even though I was anxious I might have a bad experience, like the one the summer before at that camp in the Catskills.  But Bob testified.

Actually, I heard from Bob a few months back.  He’s got a kid who’s a musician.  He told tales from Middlebury about me that were completely different from my perspective, and insightful.  Now that we’re grown up, we can reveal our truth.

Anyway, yesterday, deep inside my inbox, I found an e-mail from Lou.  He discovered me on the Rhinocast.  Am I the same Bob Lefsetz who was a counselor at Tohkomeupog?

OF COURSE!

And then it was like "Same Old Lang Syne".  Catching up, comparing notes.

Was he the same guy with the gold bike, had we ridden up to North Conway together?

YES, HE GOT THAT CRAMP ON THE ROAD TO ATTITASH!

I remember it like yesterday.  And Lou does too.

How did I get from there to here?

I told him.

And then asked him the same question.

There was a degree at Villanova.  A masters in biology.  And then an unexpected turn into medical publishing.  He’d gotten married, he had two children, one with a job of his own.

My story is different.  I always knew what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be.  I wanted to write for "Rolling Stone", but a creative writing teacher at Middlebury was so discouraging, failed to get me to such an extent, that I gave up.  I moved to Utah and became a freestyle skier.   A starving freestyle skier.  Who eventually escaped to L.A. and law school.  I felt I’d get a good job and go skiing two months a year, thirty days in the winter, thirty days in the summer.  I thought it would take ten years.  I’m finally getting close to that goal, decades later.  As for writing?  I practiced law for ten minutes, as Jackie Mason says, "Not for me.", had a movie business gig, then a big time music gig and then I was on my ass and starting over.  In the movie business, and then with this newsletter, in print, when the only people who knew about the Internet were those who invented it.

Anyway, with hindsight Lou regretted that he hadn’t made a career in music.  But he was still a fan.  He dropped some names of bands. And said he was into prog rock.  And in a follow-up e-mail today, he attached a picture, of himself at ProgDay, a prog rock festival in North Carolina.

It was still him.  I could see through the years.  But what truly stunned me was I was unfamiliar with this festival that Lou had traveled over numerous states to attend.

Google is my friend, it wasn’t hard to be informed about ProgDay, I started a response, saying I knew Derek Shulman of Gentle Giant and when Jason ran Lava at Atlantic he signed this band…

You get old and it takes a while for your brain to cycle through your mental rolodex.  Let’s see, the lead singer was Steve Wilson…PORCUPINE TREE!

And that’s when I remembered "Radioactive Toy".

This was not on either of the Lava albums.  It was the opening track on a boxed set that the manager sent.  But it was this track I could not stop playing.  I pulled it up in iTunes.  It sounded so GOOD!

Prog rock has a bad name.  The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame just about ignores it.  But for a time in the early seventies, ethereal music by skilled players constituted a giant niche.  But unlike metal, prog rock has never really come back.

But Roger Waters can tour "The Wall" and "Radioactive Toy" is cut from the same cloth.  But it’s different.  But it’s fantastic.

We never forget who we are, where we come from.  And this bag of memories on our back gets ever more heavy.  Some try to jettison it. Create a new face, forget their old friends.  But that ex-spouse is still out there, as are your other mistakes as well as your joys.  And your knees start to buckle under the weight, it’s hard to slog forward.  But we do.  In a world where it’s all about the shiny, fresh and new. What to do?  Play a record.  That’s how the people of my generation cope, when they’ve got more questions than answers.  We put on music and let our minds drift…

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