james poyner's Open Salon Blog

Back to the Future of Rock 'n Roll

Mon, 9 Apr 2012 08:04:53 -0400

The biggest surprise about seeing Bruce Springsteen April 4 for the first time in 28 years was that there were no fire engines in the parking lot when we streamed out with the 20,000 other fans into the chilly late-night breeze. After all, my favorite rock ‘n roll arsonist had just burned New Jersey’s Izod Center to the ground.

On his first major tour since 2009 and the death last year of beloved sax man Clarence “The Big Man” Clemons, Springsteen had driven the 75 minutes up the Garden State Parkway from his longtime home in Rumson to promote his 17^th album, Wrecking Ball. My presence there to bear witness to a performer who didn’t get the memo that he is 62, that the 21-time Grammy winner and Oscar owner has nothing left to prove as America’s troubadour laureate was due to my three kids. Nick, the second oldest, had heard his mom complain for years that I’d never taken her to see The Boss in his home state where we’ve lived for 19 years. He took matters into his own hands by getting his sister Mary Allison and older brother Noel to chip in with him on two scalped general-admission tickets for us down on the arena floor.

When I left Texas, a state that has never been accused of having self-esteem problems, to live in Jersey all those years ago I was struck by the lack of identity my new home seemed to have. Indeed, the state suffers outright from an inferiority complex, routinely the butt of jokes on the late-night talk shows not to mention Jersey native Jon Stewart’s frequent “Daily Show” parodies of the Garden State. There’s also the image-wrecking damage Snooki has done.

But, then again, Jersey produced Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen.

I first saw Springsteen electrify a stage in 1980 or so, then again in 1984, both times in Dallas. And I always told my kids that, in my opinion, he now owns the mantle of the greatest rock-song writer of my generation, particularly after the tragically premature losses of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

Our tickets had stated a start time of 7:30 with no warm-up act. We raced to the Izod Center by 6:30 and were inside before 7. While a few roadies climbed rope ladders to man spotlights and cameras above the stage, the arena was virtually empty except for a hundred or so fans on the floor. After procuring the vital concert accoutrements of two Heinekens for a mere $8 each, we strategized where to position ourselves on the floor for the best view of the stage, about 25 yards away. However, with a wife who is, maybe, 5’2”, strategy was kinda a waste of time unless I planned to perch her, Mardi Gras style, on my shoulders, which undoubtedly would have been discouraged by the dozens of concert staffers milling about.

We found a spot along the arena’s railing and promptly met a 53-year-old mother who had brought her 21-year-old son. “He needs to see this guy,” she earnestly told us, as any good mother would. I overheard a fellow, maybe 45, behind us tell his buddy this was his 50^th Springsteen concert. While the reserved seats were still largely empty as 8 p.m. approached, the floor was beginning to fill; and even in such a small sampling you could see people spanning every one of the four decades Springsteen has been working on putting a hole in the pick guard of his favorite solid-ash Fender.

The general-admission section had no seats, but they would have been superfluous. After a 30-minute delay, Springsteen suddenly appeared, exhorting, “Get your lazy asses out of those seats!” And nary a butt touched a very pricey reserved-seat cushion all night.

I haven’t yet bought Wrecking Ball; but it was obvious from the show’s opener, “We Take Care of Our Own,” that the album is an excellent bookend to 2002’s The Rising, the latter a documentation of the pain of 9/11, the former a tribute to the resilience of those ravaged economically since then.

For my money, precious few American-born rock acts have weathered so well, much less continued to produce new work. The 61-year-old Tom Petty comes to mind. Maybe Jon Bon Jovi, who grew up 12 years Springsteen’s junior up the road in Perth Amboy and released The Circle in 2009. I’d add Aerosmith, but the boys from Boston haven’t released a new album for eight years as 64-year-old front man Steven Tyler continues to battle his demons and trade bon mots with J. Lo on “American Idol.”

Bruce continues to write and experiment and be heard as if he’d conned Ponce de Leon into revealing the location of that fountain of youth. Maybe it’s because, much like Guthrie and Seeger and Dylan, Springsteen hitched his wagon to the Steinbeckian world of working-class people in an America that increasingly has been polarized economically into haves and have-nots. Unfortunately, there seems to be no end in sight for his source material. As he said in the intro to “Jack of All Trades,” one of the 13 tracks on Wrecking Ball, “There are a lot of people out there who lost their homes, their jobs, their dignity in the worst economic downturn of our lives.” After a reminder to give generously to volunteers outside for the New Jersey Food Bank, he softly growled the song’s opening:

I’ll mow your lawn
Clean the leaves out your drain
I’ll mend your roof to keep out the rain
I’ll take the work that God provides
I’m a Jack of all trades
Honey, we’ll be alright

When Springsteen sings it, you want to believe, even though a cynic might scoff at his populist image when reading about his multiple residences, including a horse farm, or the horse he almost bought for $850,000 for his equestrian daughter, Jessica. Too, T-shirts for sale in the concession areas for a whopping $45 didn’t exactly scream “man of the people;” but Springsteen acknowledged the paradox when commenting on the plight of much of America.

“We opened this (arena) 30 years ago,” he told the audience, referring to a series of 1981 concerts that were the facility’s first paid events. “Back then it was named after a person; now it’s named after a shirt. Times have changed.” Now, so many people struggle, “while rich guitar players get all the breaks.”

Through the night he interspersed six of the new album’s songs with a few from The Rising, which, on paper, was a setlist guaranteed to have you dialing a suicide hotline if not for the simple grandeur of the lyrics and the beautiful imagery. Perhaps the somber material reflected his mood now, performing without his sidekick Clemons, who died of a stroke last June as one of only two members left of the original 1972 lineup of the “E” Street Band. Five songs into the show, Bruce introduced the latest version of the band, sporting a five-piece brass section that featured Clemons’ nephew, Jake, on tenor sax.

"Are we missing anybody?” Bruce asked the crowd. “Do I have to say the names?,” referring to Clarence and keyboardist Danny Federici, who died in 2008 of melanoma. “All I can guarantee is, if you're here, and we're here, then they're here tonight. So raise your voices."

And the minions responded with a roar, with some on the floor waving head shots on sticks of Clarence. Then Max Weinberg, the band’s drummer since 1974, started the runaway-train beat that opens “Candy’s Room;” the crowd, an impromptu Tabernacle Choir, belted the lyrics for all they were worth:

She says, Baby if you wanna be wild,
you got a lot to learn, close your eyes,
Let them melt, let them fire,
let them burn
Cause in the darkness, there'll be hidden worlds that shine

Anne and I had slowly migrated toward the center of the floor, desperately trying to find a crack in the crowd to allow her to catch a glimpse of the considerable action on stage. We found ourselves next to a woman who was a good inch shorter than Anne. At least Anne had company. Fortunately, there were very good elevated screens she could watch while absorbing the sound and fury that I had long forgotten about my concert-going days.

I was just tall enough to see Springsteen and his crew, including his wife of nearly 21 years, Patti Scialfa, between swaying heads and uplifted arms. As a longtime shutterbug, I couldn’t resist sneaking a small point-and-shoot camera into the show, knowing that I’d never get past security with my big Canon and its 300mm zoom lens. In olden times I used to routinely enter concert venues with my camera bag and snap away at B.B. King, Alvin Lee, Ian Hunter and others. Sadly, most of the Springsteen pictures are shaky and of poor quality, but a couple convey a bit of the excitement of the show. I’ll rationalize the soft focus as an homage to French Impressionism.

A shot of the big screen when Bruce sang "Jack of All Trades."

The Boss and wife, Patti Scialfa.

Anne's unfortunate view for much of the show.

Just as we were resigned to Anne being trapped in a forest of shoulders, The Boss disappeared from the stage into the crowd and jumped up on a platform not 15 feet in front of us for a couple of verses of “Johnny 99,” playfully reaching down and grabbing a fan’s beer and swigging it. We could confirm that Bruce, a bit thicker perhaps than in his salad days but in great shape nonetheless, can give any TV evangelist a run for his money when it comes to introducing his flock to the Holy Spirit. Rather than jump down and return to the stage the way he came, he simply fell back on top of the crowd, allowing lucky hands to provide that “human touch” to gently transport him back to the band.

Bruce quenches his thirst with a fan's beer. Note the headshot of Clarence Clemons in the corner.

As good and powerful and cohesive as the setlist had been to that point, perfectly setting up a chilling “The Rising,” it wasn’t until the band finally reached back to the album that put them on the map, Born to Run, and Bruce blew that little harmonica riff over Roy Bittan’s tinkly piano to open “Thunder Road” that I was transported back to my youth. Involuntary tears ran down my checks while looking up at the big screen at the singer and hearing the lyrics:

Darling you know just what I’m here for
So you're scared and you're thinking
That maybe we ain’t that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night

Turning 56 next month, I’m old enough now to understand that lyric and pray that Bruce was right when he released it in 1975 as a writer much older than his 26 years. As the song approached what would have been Clarence’s classic sax overlay, his nephew stepped downstage, pointed to the heavens, then blew the roof off just as his uncle would have wanted. Bruce bear hugged Jake at the song’s finish, the set’s end.

Springsteen paused briefly to chug a drink amid deafening cheers of “Bruuuuuuuce!” before launching a six-song encore that featured, of course, the iconic “Born to Run,” his most performed song. As a high-school theater teacher, my wife is more of a Broadway musical type than a rocker, disturbingly including Air Supply and Barely Man-enough (read Manilow) in her album collection when we were dating almost 30 years ago. But even she started bouncing up and down when that unforgettable guitar opened that classic paean to freedom without regret.

A photo montage of Clarence flashed on the big screens during the show’s finale, “10^th Avenue Freeze Out.” For this, Springsteen returned to that nearby platform, holding aloft his microphone like the Statue of Liberty, legs spread wide, to capture the singing of 20,000 fans who didn’t need the marijuana tinging the air by then for their high.

For Clarence.

The show clocked in at just under three hours, an hour or so less than the two marathons I had witnessed in Dallas all those years ago when Bruce would tell the crowd “we ain’t goin’ home ‘til you do.” Perhaps 62 does make you a bit more rational about your body (though he still did his patented running knee slide the width of the stage at one point in the show). With more than 40 tour stops, including a grueling campaign through Europe, before the end of July, Springsteen is taking a page from James Brown’s book as “the hardest working man in show business.”

After nearly three decades, once again seeing the guy who had made the Jersey Shore’s Stone Pony a rock ‘n roll shrine, the guy who had provided a soundtrack for my life astride that platform in front of us like a Titan, I was reminded of the chiseled-in-stone quote from rock critic/producer Jon Landau in a review of The Boss in 1974, my senior year in high school: “I have seen rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

As a “Jack of all trades” these days, I was comforted to see that, 38 years later, Bruce still is.

The luckiest parents in the world.

****

P.S.: Like me, Springsteen has three children, two in college, one in high school. I hope they treat their dad as well as mine treat me. My two sons and daughter are in the world now, living with honest hearts and an optimism intrinsic to their youth, striving in their chosen fields with a work ethic that astounds but doesn’t surprise me. After all, they had a great example to follow in their diminutive mom, her affection for Barry Manilow notwithstanding. And maybe I didn’t do anything bad enough to screw them up. My vocabulary is too limited to describe my pride in them. Thanks for the tickets, kids. Thanks for knowing what makes your father tick.

Tarantulas in Heaven

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:03:15 -0400

My mother, Mary Ellen Poyner, died at 81 last Monday. As her second-born and oldest son, I delivered this eulogy based on important memories I have of her. Though she had been in declining health for awhile, when her time came I still felt unprepared when my brother called to tell me a heart attack had done its work while she was in the hospital with pneumonia. Now I’m an orphan.

The earliest memory I have of my mother was when I was five or six years old. On a broiling day under the West Texas sun, I was playing in the sand pit that was our backyard. I looked up from my toy trucks and saw coming down the driveway right at me a huge, black, hairy tarantula. To me, it was the size of a dinner plate. I had it on good authority from my older cousins that tarantulas liked to leap for your face and sink their poisonous fangs right into your nose, which would subsequently turn black and fall off.

I bolted for the kitchen door, screaming my head off, barely able to get the word “tarantula!” out of my mouth to my mother who was preparing dinner. “Where?” she asked. All I could do was point to the yard. Without hesitation she moved toward the door, reaching for a straw broom on the way out. I timidly followed, making sure to use her for cover.

Mother spotted the tarantula rhythmically moving its eight legs right toward us. 20 feet. 15 feet. 10 feet. I anxiously grabbed her dress and cowered behind her, awaiting the spider’s fatal leap at us. Before I could squeal, Mother hefted the broom high into the air like an executioner’s ax and brought it down squarely on the pink sand. She lifted the broom to reveal a flattened, lifeless spider, then turned toward the kitchen, tossing over her shoulder, “Go wash up. Supper’s almost ready,” as casually as if she killed huge, nose-biting tarantulas on a daily basis. I remember standing there in the sand, slack jawed, watching her go back inside. I remember that it was the first time I realized that she had unimaginable strength, that she was more than the person who fed me, clothed me, and washed the sand out of my hair.

Mother was a child of the Great Depression, living a hardscrabble childhood with her six siblings (another had died in infancy). She never knew her mother, Ethel Banks Lollis, who passed away of pneumonia when Mom was just a baby. The oldest sister, Nancy, helped raise her until dying at a young age from cancer, while her much older brothers rode the rails seeking work. Crippled by polio, her father, John Henry Lollis, made a meager income going door to door on crutches selling small household items such as thread, razor blades, and pencils.

My childhood was hardly the lap of luxury, but I remember feeling as though it were when she told stories of growing up in Dust Bowl Oklahoma and northern Texas, of dropping out of school in the eighth grade to get a job to help out the family. After such somber stories I would sit on her lap and put my arms around her neck and promise that when I grew up I was going to buy her a big red-brick house with a brand new car in the driveway. She would laugh and tell me not to worry about that, that she was just fine where she was.

But if anyone ever deserved those things, she did.

When I was in the fourth grade, Mom was the room mother for the class, primarily responsible for arranging our parties throughout the year. The fourth grade was a tense year for me mainly because a classmate, a girl named Leona, delighted in terrorizing me on the playground. Leona was four and a half feet of pure mean who would knock you down and wail on you at the drop of a hat. Her nickname for me was “basketball head” because it was true that I resembled Charlie Brown--only with freckles. All I had to do to hear that derisive pejorative was to make eye contact with her. At our Valentine’s Day party Mother appeared with a plate of decorated cupcakes for the class. Upon seeing her, Leona beelined across the classroom toward me--and I braced myself for yet another insult. Her typical scowl, though, was replaced by a look of wonder when she softly said, “Your momma sure is pretty.”

And I realized she was. With raven hair and ivory skin, she looked liked a brunette Betty Grable in the glamour portrait she had posed for at 18, already a mother of a two-year-daughter, my oldest sister, Connie. It was easy to see why she had caught the eye of my father more than 60 years ago in the coffee shop where she waitressed.

When I was a teen-ager I had my share of rebellious attitude, growing shoulder length hair to the chagrin of my father and delighting in playing my rock albums at window-rattling volume. Most of my mother’s communication to me then consisted of admonishments to clean up the landfill that my room had become or to “turn that damn stereo down!” One Saturday morning, though, with Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years” cranked up on the turntable, she appeared in the room. I was certain she would reach for the volume knob herself. Instead, she sat on my unmade bed listening intently. When the song was over, she said, “Play that one again.” And I did so another two or three times, stunned that my ancient mother of 43 could appreciate my music. “Good song,” she observed of the tune whose lyrics are about misplaced priorities. Hers never were. She returned to her housework, leaving me to ponder yet another side of her I never knew existed.

Other than relatives, Mom had only one friend, Hazel, who had grown up with her in Oklahoma. They got together once or twice a year over the decades and traded progress reports on their children and grandchildren on the telephone until Hazel died a year or so ago. From time to time we would suggest places for her to go to socialize with other seniors, but Mother never showed an interest. She had a certain shyness, I think, that only her cats over the years understood. Her world revolved around her children, especially after James Davis Poyner, her husband of more than 50 years, died five years ago. She saw us through many ups and downs with a quiet humility and a grace that grew over the years.

“Just because you kids are grown,” she used to say, “doesn’t mean I get to stop worrying.”

In my last conversation with her on the telephone, we fell into an uncharacteristically broad discussion of the economy and the election year and crazy politicians. I mentioned how much I disliked the governor of New Jersey, where I’ve lived with my family the past 18 years, and cracked that if he walked in front of a bus tomorrow I wouldn’t shed a tear. “Oh, now you know you don’t really mean that,” she scolded me. While she could spot what her father used to call “educated fools” a mile away, she could never wish them ill. As my son, Nick, observed when I broke the news of her death, “She was the nicest lady I ever knew.”

I am the last person in the world to claim to know anything about Heaven. However, I’d like to think that she is there with her siblings and her husband and her cats Cotton and Henry. But if all of God’s creatures go there, I’d advise the tarantulas to make themselves scarce.

Mary Ellen Poyner, 1930-2012

Christmas Without Duke

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:12:29 -0500

I haven't posted in a good long while. In fact, a weird sort of writer's block kept me from sustaining any piece. But this year's Christmas letter ended that--I hope. Regardless of circumstances or beliefs, I hope you use today to embrace your family in gratitude for what you have instead of remorse for what you don't.

December 19, 2011

Dear friends and family,

I miss that damn dog.

I’m reminded of that for the millionth time after watching a Kevin Spacey movie early this morning in which his character’s Jack Russell dies suddenly. Mary Allison arrived for the holiday last night after driving 12 hours from Charleston and wasn’t here 30 minutes before she said, “I wish Duke were here.”

We all do.

In May, Duke, a month from his 12^th birthday, was diagnosed with cancer that had produced a tumor near his heart and lungs. Periodic treatments allowed him to hang on until we got back from a long overdue trip to the Outer Banks in late August when, two days after our return, he simply couldn’t get up on his own anymore. He looked up at me with exhausted eyes as if to apologize for the inconvenience. I managed to get him up and out into the front yard where I sat with him all morning, a perfectly beautiful, almost-fall morning, stroking his head and hoping he would just go to sleep for the last time. But we weren’t that lucky. Anne came home from school, and we drove the hour south to his specialist for the last time.

Intellectually I had made the decision months ago to let him go when it became obvious his quality of life was compromised. Still, feeling his heart beat stop under my hand after the injection induced a form of shock that made me feel as if I were watching events through a window, as if it were all happening to someone else’s dog, not mine. The vet cried; I could not.

I’ve cried many times since then, though, reminded daily of how subtly and thoroughly Duke had become intertwined with my routine. These past years off of Wall Street, working at home on various cabinetry projects, I had Duke in my line of vision most of the time out in the garage or on the driveway, conversing with him about the world’s troubles. Being the smart dog that he was, he never disagreed with me, instead pushing his head up under my hand for a scratch between the ears. Throughout the slow, sometimes painful process of developing my solo carpentry business, Duke had become a vital emotional shock absorber simply by basking in the sun in a pile of saw dust, calmly yawning occasionally as a sign that things were cool and everything would work out in the end. Four months after his death, the jingle of keys, sounding like the dog tags on his collar, still makes me involuntarily turn, expecting to see him, tail wagging, in a doorway.

Some of you may note that there was no Christmas letter last year. The short explanation is that a depression, brought on by the sale of our home of 17 years to clean up a balance sheet ravaged by recession and college tuition, had caused writer’s block. The sale of the place where we had lived longer than any other during our nearly 28 years of marriage had left us unmoored and uncertain of the future.

Staking out his territory

The transition was cushioned somewhat by the constant of Duke and his faithful cat Molly following us to a nice rental home only five blocks from our former address. For months Molly would trek back to her old chipmunk-hunting grounds, sometimes requiring us to drive over and retrieve her when she didn’t come home for a couple of days. Duke, on the other hand, instantly took to the new digs on a wooded cul de sac that features a creek in back, working diligently to pee on every new tree in a three-block radius to establish his territory.

Looking back, though, I should have written a 2010 letter. We had lots of good news to at least partially offset the gloom of the move. To wit:

Oldest son Noel’s move to Los Angeles in January of 2009 resulted in a job as personal assistant to a film director who landed a gig directing a Kate Hudson movie based on the best-selling novel Something Borrowed. Not only was it shot primarily in New York in the spring of 2010, allowing us to see Noel fairly often and sit in on the shooting of some scenes, but it marked Noel’s debut as a professional film actor. In one scene in the movie he is a law student who shushes the stars for talking too loud in the law library. In another he’s sitting in a law class in the background, slightly out of focus and expertly saying absolutely nothing. Total screen time? About 3.5 seconds but enough to make him eligible for future royalties should this movie defy all logic and become a cult classic on late-night cable.

When the movie came to Summit in May of this year, we rounded up a dozen or so friends to go see it. We hooted and hollered obnoxiously in the little theater when Noel’s face appeared and then again when he was listed twice in the closing credits as “law student” and assistant to the director.

After Anne’s musical in March, a rousing production of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” we paid Noel a visit in Los Angeles in April just before the movie’s opening. By then he already had moved on to his current position with an internet marketing firm where he produces web commercials for big brands such as Kraft and Clorox. He recently got promoted to being in charge of all video production. At last we heard from him the words every parent longs for these days: “I finally got benefits.”

However, his dream of directing a full-length feature one day has not been shelved. Far from it. He now has a manager who is hawking his screenplay, written and rewritten over the past three years, to various studios. The latest word is Katherine Heigl’s production company is kicking its tires. More recently, he cajoled numerous professionals, including equity actors, to help him shoot a 10-minute film he wrote and hopes to enter into film festivals next year. L.A. is becoming his oyster.

At long last, done with tuition!

A couple of weeks after Noel’s cinematic debut, our youngest, Mary Allison, took the stage to accept her magna cum laude degree in elementary education at the College of Charleston, winning the top award in her department to boot. But, coming home to a train wreck of a teaching-job market in New Jersey, M.A. was beginning to wonder when her career would leave the launching pad. Then she got a call from a large county school district 30 minutes outside of Charleston. Would she be interested in teaching remedial English to fifth graders? With visions of returning to a waitress job in town and the urging of her parents, she said yes. And before we knew it, she and I were driving to Charleston to spend a frantic week finding an apartment and furnishing it from scratch before she began her job in early August.

During that week I spent more continuous time with my daughter than I had in the previous four years. While it was a challenge to get her past the college-student mentality of wanting to furnish her spiffy two-bedroom pad with roadside cast-offs, when I finally got her into shopping mode we were off to the races. Took care of her Christmas presents for the next 30 or 40 years.

A couple of weeks later Anne and I ventured down to our old stomping grounds, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a beach we had taken the kids to for a good 10 years or so but hadn’t visited since M.A. started college. The trip coincided with Anne’s 39^th (ahem) birthday; and we were in a bit of a wistful mood with none of the kids around, something I was determined to shake with a nice bottle of red and giant T-bones on the grill of the beach house we had rented.

As we sat down to relive our Texas heritage of rapaciously ravaging red meat, we heard a noise on the nearby staircase. Just before I thought I was going to have to defend m’lady from an intruder, our second son Nick jumps up over the stair rail and yells “Surprise!” with his girlfriend Jenn close behind. Seems he had gotten the address of the beach house from his sister, who had gotten it from me under the ruse that she wanted to send her mom a birthday present.

Nick took four days off—a lifetime to him—from the coolest job on the planet to make his mom very, very happy. For more than a year now, he has worked at The Specialists, a company in New York City, putting his sculpting skills to use fabricating props including all sorts of weapons for movies and television shows. His machine-gun ammo belts appear every night in the hottest musical on Broadway, “The Book of Mormon.” He’s also developed a free-lance business that has included doing makeup for music videos and bizarre busts for Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball Tour.

When you get a chance check out his company’s website at http://thespecialistsltd.com/services .

And you can see his macabre heads in the clip of the HBO Lady Gaga special about three minutes in where she plays a pipe organ with the heads arranged around her at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMmynhnaZFk .

Dodging a hurricane

We were evacuated from the Outer Banks a day earlier than planned because of Hurricane Irene. Rather than go home, however, we stuck to our plan of driving the minivan on down to Charleston to spend the weekend with the newbie English teacher, even though at first it seemed we would be driving straight into the storm. I had to deliver a three-section home-entertainment cabinet I had designed and built to round out M.A.’s furnishings. Fortunately, the storm juked further east, sparing Charleston.

While back in this historical capital of the South, we had a chance to visit Mary Allison’s relatively new school in the rural town of Moncks Corner and meet some of her fellow teachers and principal, a burly ex-football coach who sang her praises effusively but warned that “she needs to go home earlier than 6 p.m. or she’ll be dead by Christmas.”

Still alive and well, she already has demonstrated her mother’s dedication to the field, trying to find new ways in her two two-and-a-half-hour classes to improve the reading and writing skills of her 30 students, most of whom are at least two grade levels below where they should be. Many of the kids are from impoverished homes; some, she has discovered, are from abusive homes. Mary Allison is learning quickly that a teacher can do only so much to turn such situations around, but it doesn’t keep her from trying. Early on she gave them an assignment to write about their heroes. One boy wrote that she was his hero because “you’re the nicest teacher I’ve ever had.” Her dearly departed grandmother, an elementary-music teacher for more than 30 years, would have been proud.

When we returned home, grateful that all three of our children had found work in their fields in a still-crappy economy, we had only two days left with Duke. We had gotten him as a puppy in 1999 off of a North Carolina farm owned by friends’ relatives. While visiting M.A. at her nearby summer camp on the Neuse River that year, we stopped by the farm and learned that a stray Labrador mix had dropped a shockingly diverse litter in the farmer’s garage. We went out to the backyard to a pen corralling all of the puppies, all adorable as puppies always are, and noted in particular the chocolate Labramutt with the big brown eyes. When we turned to walk back to the house, Duke managed to squeeze past the pen’s gate and follow us. I picked him up and stared into those soulful eyes…and that was that. As Anne always said, Duke chose us.

With Noel flying in with Maria, his girlfriend of nearly two years and also a Summit High graduate, and Nick hopping a train from Brooklyn, we’ll have them all back at once for a few days. And I’m sure we’ll all sit around Anne’s extravagantly lit tree by the fireplace with a little ache in our hearts that a family member is no longer with us. As the new year starts, though, we hope to find another “rescue” puppy after we close the deal we have in the works to buy a house similar to the one on Joanna Way 15 mnutes or so further north in West Orange.

As the song says, “time wounds all heels,” or something like that. Here’s hoping that 2012 is a good year for you and yours. And make some good memories, for in the end that’s all we really have.

Your pal,

Jimbo

Epitaph

Duke was a happy goin' farm dog who lived for the simple things in life: walks, playing, food (mainly people food) and family. Always waiting with a destructively wagging tail to greet us at the door when we came home. I have never known any other dog to sprain his tail from being so happy or jump in a lake to swim to his family on a boat or eat an entire Easter cake. Duke cared for all of us and we all cared for him deeply. He was a great dog, friend, and Poyner. There will never be another companion like him. He will be missed, but we all know that it is a scientifically proven fact that all dogs go to Heaven, where the floor is littered with leftover plates for them to lick.

Nick Poyner, Sept. 2, 2011

Masters Baiting Over Tiger Woods

Fri, 9 Apr 2010 11:04:32 -0400

I am not, let me say at the outset, an avid golf fan. I do, however, often enjoy watching the final nine holes of a tournament on a lazy Sunday afternoon—especially if Tiger Woods is in the hunt.

The media mania surrounding Tiger’s return from self-imposed exile after revelations of his seedy, sadly mortal sexual escapades causes me to ponder many things, not the least of which is the country’s constant preoccupation with celebrities and its insistence that said celebrities fulfill to the letter an unwritten code of ethics as figures who are unilaterally chosen to be role models for our toddlers. That goes double for sports celebrities because they do something—play a game—that is introduced to children at an early age. A philandering Nobel winning physicist never seems to make CNN or Fox News if he or she is caught swapping protons with a slut.

For all the gnashing of teeth and the stern finger shaking that takes place at the corporate and fan level over such tawdry, titillating tales of libido run wild, America almost always seems to forgive—or at least forget—the desecrator of our Puritanical code. Really? Yes, really. Ask Kobe Bryant—or the sponsors who dropped him when he was charged with sexual assault only to return when the “charge” was reduced to merely having an adulterous adventure—no more or less adulterous than those of Tiger.

Tiger is so contrite he now plays the game on his knees.

Photo by Jaime Squire/Getty Images

This week’s moralizing from the chairman of Augusta, Bill Payne, epitomized the harrumphing around the land over Tiger’s indiscretions. Payne was quoted in The New York Times on Wednesday: “Our hero did not live up to the expectations of the role model we saw for our children.”

Please, spare me the moralizing from a club that continues to live in the Stone Age by not allowing female membership. If Payne were really that upset why did he allow Tiger to enter the tournament? Easy. America is long on moralizing as long as it doesn’t cost any money, which banning Tiger undoubtedly would have done for all the parties putting on Masters.

Too, America loves to look down from its Mt. Olympus of rectitude and bestow forgiveness after an appropriate period of contrition on the part of the guilty. As much as we idolize our sports heroes, we love it even more when they prove themselves to be even bigger fuck-ups than the average Joe or Josephine.

Tiger is just another example of a syndrome Tom Wolfe coined in Bonfire of the Vanities: Master of the Universe. When so much money and so much adulation is showered on an individual he can come to believe that codes of conduct and often laws as well are only, as Leona Helmsley once infamously observed, “for the little people.”

But, short of breaking the law, should we care a twit about celebrity behavior? Well, technically, Tiger did break the law in Florida and many other states that still consider adultery a crime, typically a misdemeanor. But I don’t believe any charges have been filed against him. The tacit lack of enforcement of such statutes makes all the sermonizing about Tiger’s behavior even more specious.

I’m reminded of that news photo from 1996 at the funeral of former French Prime Minister Francois Mitterrand that shows his wife standing next to his mistress at the service. How many chuckles have the French had over--among many, many other things--our preoccupation with Tiger’s sex life?

Here’s a thought: If our country is so shaken by Tiger’s debauchery, if male professional sports figures are so very important to the upbringing of our darling tots, then let them take steroids--nay, demand it. Not only will they hit farther, run faster, and set more records, their sex drives, ironically, can be reduced as the result of tiny testicles.

Hey, that reminds me of that Don Ho classic: “Tiny testicles in the wine….”

So, after the first round in the Masters yesterday, Tiger is, once again, in the hunt for the green jacket, as if all the scrutiny, the breathless reporting about every new discovery in his sexual dossier over the past five months had never happened. Reportedly, after a slow start to his round, he found a groove in the back nine and finished only two strokes off the lead with his best first round ever at the tournament, a 68.

And the crowds cheered wildly….

Two Gal Pals and a Quest

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:01:06 -0500

My wife, Anne, met Suzanne when she started teaching at Turner High School in 1982. At a pep rally for a Halloween football game, they were the only two teachers who dressed up in costumes. Sitting together in the bleachers seemed the right thing to do. Anne introduced herself as the new English/theater teacher; Suzanne taught history.

They hit it off immediately. Both were single after first marriages to guys who thought they were marrying subservient homemakers whose biggest thrill would be bringing martinis to the door for them when they arrived home from work every night. Both were liberals. Both loved the performing arts. Both liked to go out occasionally for a drink and a smoke.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I passed the critical Suzanne test when Anne and I started dating. I met them at a hotel bar, and we sat around for a couple of hours drinking Amaretto and soda with a twist of lime. (You can put away a dozen of those and still drive.) The next day, Anne called me and told me that Suzanne had liked me, thought I was okay, not an asshole. That was a relief because I realized then that a thumbs-down from Suzanne might have been difficult to overcome because they had become inseparable, very sisterlike, by then.

They teamed up to teach an innovative class called The American Experience, which combined English and history in a coordinated curriculum. English assignments had something to do with the period of history being studied. It was an honors class and a big hit with the students.

Together they created the annual Faculty Follies, a series of satiric skits, songs, and dances performed by the faculty members to the delight of the student body of more than 2,500. Suzanne would go on to earn “master teacher” status and speak at teacher conventions and sponsor student government as well as, most recently, the cheerleader squad at Creekview High, where she now teaches after 30 years about 10 minutes north of Turner.

Anne (left) and Suzanne on stage during the Faculty Follies circa 1984.

I genuinely liked Suzanne as well. She was/is an interesting person. Suzanne kept up with politics, had lived for several years in Saudi Arabia when her father, a lifer with Mobil Oil, had taken an assignment there. She had participated in sit-ins protesting the Vietnam war while a student at the University of Texas. She was a beauty-pageant winner whose talent was an outstanding voice. She had worked summers in a musical troupe that performed at Houston’s Astroworld amusement park. One of her buddies there was a tall, gangly guy named Randy Quaid, who occasionally brought his baby brother, Dennis, to watch rehearsals.

About the time Anne met me, Suzanne met Hoffman Reese. Soon double dates were the norm. They married a few months after we did. After a couple of years, Anne and Suzanne were pregnant at the same time. They had each other to get through those nine months, went to joint baby showers together, and generally glowed together, looking like bookend fertility goddesses.

Amy Reese was born on New Year’s Eve, eight days before our son Noel showed up. Both families started going to the same liberal Methodist church. We bought a house just blocks away from the Reeses. For the first five or six years of their lives, Amy and Noel were together often, trick-o- treating together, sharing Christmases and Easter egg hunts. More than once the moms joked about Noel and Amy getting married one day.

Noel and Amy when they were about 4.

But we moved to New Jersey in 1993 when Noel was 7. The Reeses, including Amy’s brother, Alex, came up a summer or two later. We had a big time in the Big Apple.

Every other year we’d generally go back to Texas for Christmas, always spending a night or two with the Reeses. For the first few years after our move Anne would drive with our three kids back down during the summer for a couple of weeks, allowing the kids to catch up with one another.

By the time Noel and Amy entered high school, though, the trips back to Texas were less frequent, although Suzanne did make it up for Anne’s surprise 50^th birthday party. About five years ago, Anne went back to Texas to visit family and spent a couple of nights with the Reeses.

While Anne was there, Hoffman died in his sleep.

I got the call from Anne when I was about to enter a movie theater with colleagues from the small firm in New York at which I was working at the time. The shock of his death has never totally worn off, and the trauma to the family was almost unendurable.

Almost.

Hoffman’s death was a financial hardship for Suzanne, but she nevertheless managed to see her two kids into college. Alex is finishing a business degree, while Amy, with the help of scholarships, graduated in 2008 from SMU with a degree in business communications.

In high school Amy, an honors student, had been on the drill team; at SMU, something similar called the Pom Squad. It was a way for her to apply 15 years of dance lessons. All of that came in handy for what became her quest two years ago.

She found what she was looking for, something that would make her feel special—at least for now.

Amy Reese in her second year as a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader last weekend as photographed by Sports Illustrated's Bob Rosato.

When Suzanne told us that Amy was going to try out for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, our initial reaction was that Amy was too smart to be just a piece of eye candy, exploited for the entertainment of a bunch of hormonal adolescents and men who act like adolescents.

Then we watched the CMT reality show about the tryouts for the squad. Several hundred girls, including Amy, showed up to win a spot on the 36-girl squad for the 2008 season. We saw Amy interviewed several times on the show; and, as the weeks went by and the group was narrowed down a la “American Idol,” we began to realize just how grueling the process was. Looks alone didn’t cut it. Dancing the 50 precision routines alone didn’t cut it. Looks and dancing ability didn’t cut it if the women in charge of the selection process discovered anything untoward in the girls’ background. I remember one girl who had made it through the first two cuts but got the axe because pictures of her bombed at a party had hit the Internet. Another girl was released because she looked “too much like a stripper,” according to the squad’s choreographer.

We knew the outcome of the show before the final selection because Suzanne had called us to tell us a couple of weeks before the episode’s airing that Amy had, indeed, made it. Still, it was exciting to watch her selection, especially given that the final round was against returning squad members, all of whom must try out every year.

Then we hoped that Amy’s theory was sound about exposure (no pun intended) on the squad helping her land a marketing job or position that would put her degree to work. The Cheerleaders, dating back to the early ‘70s, have been the subject of movies, television programs, and books. They have traveled the world and are easily the most recognizable squad in the NFL. (Oddly enough, the New York Giants don’t have cheerleaders.)

These girls do not seek out the squad because of the money--$40 a home game that doesn’t cover the gas cost to travel to the frequent rehearsals that make holding a full-time job difficult for many. First-year squad members typically don’t participate much in the paid appearances, and there are strict rules about making appearances on your own if your Cheerleader status is mentioned at all. (Amy had to decline her own high school’s invitation to be in the Homecoming football parade.)

The pictures shown above were of Amy at the Dallas-Philadelphia playoff game last weekend. The proud momma sent them to us via email.

Anne tells me that Amy recently got a job doing contract bidding in the construction industry, one of the few positions that has the schedule flexibility to allow her to make all the rehearsals.

Early on, when we voiced some skepticism about Amy trying out for the squad, Noel was quick to cut us off: “She’s going after a dream,” he observed, “and I think that’s pretty cool.” Noel, who went to Los Angeles with little money and no car to seek his place in the film industry, understands such thinking.

When we went back to Texas for the holidays in 2008, Anne and I met Suzanne and Amy for dinner. Amy had autographed pictures of the squad, which she had to pay for herself, to give to Noel and his brother and sister.

This past Thanksgiving, we hosted some neighbors who have three sons college age and older. Watching the Cowboy game in our basement, Noel was quick to point Amy out to our guests as the television camera panned the squad during a break in the action. They predictably whistled and cat called and giggled like eight-year-olds. Sigh.

But Anne's reply to Suzanne after getting the pictures resonates: “She’s working hard and seems to really love this, so more power to her!”

The wife, right as usual. Amy, you go girl.