A Bridge Too Far from Barton Park
By Milt Abel | August 30, 2010
A Bridge Too Far from Barton Park
This past Thursday was my son’s 16th birthday, and while we celebrated as a family that night, we decided to throw him a surprise party with his friends Saturday at Barton Park here in Oregon. Specifically his mother, my wife, decided to throw the surprise. My job was to stay out of the way; she very organized and determined and when she has a project clamped between her teeth; it’s a lot like that great line from the film Shawshank Redemption “Get busy living, or get busy dying” only you substitute her project for living, and dying, in this case, means you aren’t helping enough.
The plan was to have a dozen or so of his friends ‘surprise’ him at a reserved picnic site inside Barton Park and then go for a lazy inner tube float down the Clackamas River and we pick the gang up downstream and shuttle them back for hamburgers and hot dogs and some birthday cake. That was the plan. And we executed the plan, only losing five kids along the way. Acceptable losses, right? Most made it. And that’s good, right? By the end of the day I was thinking about books of survival dramas and movies of loss and punishment, as I punctured party balloons as quickly as I could.
It all started badly because it started late. Noah, my son, was to be driven out to the park by me after his high school football scrimmage. Everyone was supposed to be waiting by 2 o’clock when we were to pull up and they all would jump out from behind trees and yell ‘surprise!’ -you’ve got to do this sort of thing while their young, or have a working defibrillator. My job was to tell Noah that it was a just a family river outing and his late afternoon and evening would be free to spend with his friends ‘where ever they are, and whatever they’re doing right now because I have no idea.’ This lying business is tough. On our drive out I got a call from my wife that they weren’t ready and that I had to circle in a holding pattern, delaying the birthday boy’s arrival so decorations and late arrivals would be ready. Noah got curious when we got lost for the fourth time and I wasn’t upset. He asked a lot of questions that I tried my best to answer as if I wasn’t lying; but to me they sounded too incredulous, “I’m getting lost a lot because I was recently kicked in the head by a donkey, eh unicorn, oh I forget. It was a hard kick.”
He was genuinely surprised when everyone jumped out, and I was too. My surprise was their stealth. I knew they were there, I was looking for them, but I couldn’t spot anyone, except for Waldo and his red-and-white striped scarf. We heard varying amounts of time needed to float from our location in Barton to the Carver Bridge, our planned pull-out point. The times varied from two hours to four, and as we waited for more kids to join, and talked and joked around, it soon became no longer mid-afternoon, but late afternoon, and I began to urge everyone to get stated or drop the folly. Fourteen kids set out in tubes and a raft at 4PM with me telling anyone who would listen, “paddle.”
My wife and I had a couple hours to ourselves as we waited for the phone call to come get them. It was a coolish August afternoon, with a breeze, and the decorative ribbon strung with balloons would hum when the wind really picked up. After two hours we thought Janie might as well get down there and meet them, just to expedite things. She took off in the car and I soon got a call that there were kids walking back to out picnic site on the side of the road. They had gotten out early because the water and weather was just too cold and they were freezing. I left out belongings unattended and fetched them back, quizzing them about the conditions and news of the others. I soon learned others had dropped out too, and were making their way back.
In all, five of the fourteen kids gave up because of the conditions, and as we waited for the rest of them to show at Carver, the two to four hour float became a full four hours and counting. I starting thinking about how we were going to explain to those kids’ parents how we ‘lost’ nine kids on a popular river and why we didn’t call the helicopter search and rescue crews sooner. I’d visit them in them in the hospital as they recovered from frostbite (the river was cold) and try and avoid the scowls from their parents as I placed flowers next to the bedpan.
They eventually showed, four hours and fifteen minutes after they left and by the time they, and their rafts, were transported pack to out picnic site we were in total darkness. I had set out the hamburgers and hot dogs in assembly-line fashion to be consumed in a hurry because we only had 15 minutes left on site before closing time. I looked at the plates and cups all lined up for those who were hungry, to come in from the cold and feed themselves, and it looked just like a meal stop for a search crew, the kind of search crew needed to find kids lost on a river. They all ate and recovered, but that image of the waiting food gave me the shivers.
Topics: humor | please add Comments »
Black Oak Casino
By Milt Abel | August 24, 2010
Black Oak Casino
For a three day road trip into California I spent Thursday, August 19th performing at the Black Oak Casino located in the Sierra foothills in Tuolomne, CA. It’s one of the nicer Indian casinos I’ve worked in the past few months. A great showroom -no cover charge folks! and a producer, Del Van Dyke, who knows comedy and comedians and brings in some good talent; for you to watch for free!
There’s a problem with no cover charge, people can disrespect what’s happening on stage. It’s a truism of stand-up comedy: the more people pay to see a show the better an audience they become. There are lots of reason in play why this is true, people comfortable with themselves (and their pocketbook) are more likely to laugh than those who are worried and insecure, there’s also the the urge not to defeat yourself and your money by investing some hope and eagerness into the success of the performance. This cost-to-appreciative audience ratio drops off at a certain point, “Emo Phillips is funny, but he’s not $375 a ticket funny. This has become no laughing matter!”
So when a show is free you take your chances as a performer. And when there’s no door to walk in or out off to rejoin the casino floor, audience members are more likely to get up and leave to answer a text, or drop a roll of quarters, after a joke they didn’t appreciate rolls quietly around the room. They also can show no respect to the comic himself. Which happened to me. A drunk, attractive girl, who was obviously used to getting whatever she wanted, no matter how rudely she behaved, because she was cute and around men who were also drunk, just ruined the last five minutes of my show. When you finally lose your patience and tell someone to “Shut up!” not once, but three times, literally those words, “Shut up!” and she just thinks she’s being cute by continuing to talk and interrupt and stand up and wiggle her ass; as I relive the event for adding it to this blog I wonder how much jail time I’d gotten t if I started to strangle her -at least she’d have been quiet during the choking.
The next two days were spent in my old stomping grounds of South San Jose. I was at my mother’s house to help her with a list of chores she was no longer able to do herself; jackhammer up some sidewalk and hot-iron brand some of her water buffalo -wait, that’s the wrong list. The actual chores were to fix a leaky faucet and a get a automatic garage door to stop making sounds like it was giving birth each time it opened or closed. Those and a few other ‘honey-do’s’ were completed, I even had time to run around my old high school’s, Leland, track one afternoon.
Leland High School’s most famous alumni now has to be Pat Tillman. They named their track and stadium after him. A stand-out athlete in high school and college who became famous for quitting the NFL to join the army and serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. He serve in Iraq for the invasion and then came home for ranger training and was redeployed to Afghanistan where he became (in)famous over his death by friendly fire. A famous soldier, who’s anti-war sentiments were circulating, was killed by three head shots while no others in his party were hit. No evidence of enemy fire was ever produced.
After a garage sale where our house’s stuff and few others were pooled to offer a real supermarket of crap that we all no longer wanted, -but hoped others would pay us while we made them carry it away, a hodgepodge of families and backgrounds sat around for a beer and conversation. When the conversation moved to each or our kids, I decided to slip in a joke I had thought of recently and give it an airing and gauge the reaction.
I mentioned I had noticed that in the early teen, even tween, dating rituals all three of my kids had broken up with whoever they were ‘going’ with before they were dumped. The slightest hint through the gossip grapevine that so-and-so was leaving meant a preemptive strike to save face. Very immature. I mentioned that this was the thinking Bush used in invading Iraq and I got laughs from the liberals present while another manipulated soul responded angrily, “You tell that to the three thousand people that died on those towers!” Even Dick Cheney had to admit, eventually, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
But the man thought he was doing what was best, confronting me over a flip comment about serious consequences. Pat Tillman got shot in the head three times for doing what he thought was right. All I got was an angry retort.
When I jogged around Pat Tillman stadium on a sunny, August afternoon, it was too hot for a man in his fifties to be out running around. Not healthy. I had planned to run my usual three miles but I quit after only one. It was my choice.
Topics: comedy, humor, travel | 2 Comments »
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