I read in the "Wall Street Journal" that bowling is making a comeback.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not talking about the wii version, which is almost as good as the real thing, but the one with the sixteen pound balls and the oiled lanes.\u00c2\u00a0 The one I was religiously addicted to in the early sixties.<\/p>\n
That’s where I first heard the Beach Boys.\u00c2\u00a0 Via the jukebox at Nutmeg Bowl down on Kings Highway.\u00c2\u00a0 After you bowled your strings, you hung out.\u00c2\u00a0 Even at age 10.\u00c2\u00a0 Polished your ball, ate french fries and listened to the jukebox.<\/p>\n
But that wasn’t as much fun as tobogganing with my family at Fairchild Wheeler Golf Course.\u00c2\u00a0 My father purchased a seven seater.\u00c2\u00a0 I remember winter Sundays whooshing down the slope to the sand trap. Not that we always made it that far.\u00c2\u00a0 Usually the toboggan would start going sideways not long after we pushed off.\u00c2\u00a0 And then it would flip over and we’d be spewed all over the snow.<\/p>\n
But then we became skiers, converted on our trip to Mt. Snow in February 1964.<\/p>\n
But the journey to Bromley the following Christmas was a bust.\u00c2\u00a0 You see it rained.\u00c2\u00a0 We went for a lame lunch of canned spaghetti at a long gone restaurant in Manchester and retreated to Connecticut the following day.\u00c2\u00a0 And when it came to February vacation, my parents were wary of repeating the process.\u00c2\u00a0 They didn’t want to risk being rained out.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead we went to the Concord.\u00c2\u00a0 My mother shushed me down by recounting how a friend of a friend, an intermediate skier, had found the skiing satisfying.<\/p>\n
I wouldn’t go that far.\u00c2\u00a0 There were a couple of t-bars, slopes longer than those I’d first experienced in Bobby Hickey’s backyard, I went every day, but I was disappointed.\u00c2\u00a0 My parents made it up to us by going to Stratton the following month, but I remember more than the skiing at the long gone Concord.<\/p>\n
There was the dining room.\u00c2\u00a0 Where the menu was irrelevant.\u00c2\u00a0 My father told me we could have whatever we wanted.\u00c2\u00a0 Both lox and blintzes.\u00c2\u00a0 It didn’t matter whether we ate them.<\/p>\n
Then there was the indoor pool.\u00c2\u00a0 A sweatbox that made the local JCC look like a spa.<\/p>\n
I didn’t do much hanging out in the teen room.\u00c2\u00a0 But I remember the music playing through the overhead speakers.\u00c2\u00a0 It was Jay and the Americans’ "Let’s Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key)".\u00c2\u00a0 The follow-up to the sixties gem "Come A Little Bit Closer", "Let’s Lock The Door (And Throw Away The Key)" was what today would be called a throwaway.\u00c2\u00a0 But none of the songs we heard on the radio back then were categorized as such.\u00c2\u00a0 They were hits.\u00c2\u00a0 Which we knew every lick of.\u00c2\u00a0 Every single track from the Beatles on.\u00c2\u00a0 But what came before?<\/p>\n
The Concord was not only about food and sports.\u00c2\u00a0 Every night there was entertainment in the nightclub.\u00c2\u00a0 Where you pounded sticks with wooden balls at the tips on the table instead of applauding.\u00c2\u00a0 And the last night we were there the headliner was…Neil Sedaka.<\/p>\n
I had no idea who he was.<\/p>\n
My older sister kept referencing "Calendar Girl".\u00c2\u00a0 My brain didn’t click.<\/p>\n
And my father kept calling him Neil "Sebaka".\u00c2\u00a0 Which he then chuckled and said meant "dog" in Russian.<\/p>\n
I didn’t care.\u00c2\u00a0 Although I loved the Four Seasons, I was a dedicated fan of the British Invasion.\u00c2\u00a0 I looked forward after the Beatles, not back.<\/p>\n
And then this grinning Brooklynite took the stage and in a moment out of "Dirty Dancing" started singing hits I didn’t think I knew but had somehow penetrated me, had become lodged in my DNA.<\/p>\n
"Calendar Girl" was great.\u00c2\u00a0 But the finale, the piece de resistance, was "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do".<\/p>\n
I wasn’t the only one addicted.\u00c2\u00a0 Elton rescued Neil’s career in the seventies, putting out "Laughter In The Rain" on his Rocket label.<\/p>\n
But now even Elton no longer releases records.\u00c2\u00a0 No one wants them.\u00c2\u00a0 Even if they’re good.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s become calcified in the audience’s memory.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s a has-been.<\/p>\n
But maybe at some point we all become has-beens.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we all start looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, remembering a better time, before all the losses of life accumulated and started crushing us under their weight.<\/p>\n
That’s what songs do.\u00c2\u00a0 They bring you back.\u00c2\u00a0 When I heard "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" on XM twenty minutes ago, I was in junior high school, living upstairs in my parents’ split-level, my father was still alive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I read in the "Wall Street Journal" that bowling is making a comeback.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m not talking about the wii version, which is almost as good as the real thing, but the one with the sixteen pound balls and the oiled lanes.\u00c2\u00a0 The one I was religiously addicted to in the early sixties. That’s where I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-ph","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1568,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions\/1568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}