Spitball Army

More buttons, this time from an assortment of events:

The two buttons above were created to help promote a couple of stage productions put on by Harvard theatrical groups while I was an undergrad, between 1978 and 1982.  RAISIN was either A Raisin in the Sun or the musical Raisin (I am guessing the former), and CURSE was probably endorsing Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class.

Boston’s First Night celebration was created in 1976 as an alternative to the traditional New Year’ Eve pointy hats and bar scene.  I attended it in 1986.  It was a pretty amazing event, spread out all over the city, with ice sculpturing in courtyards, musical performances in churches, dance tableaux performed in store windows, and general merriment and fellowship despite the freezing temperatures.  Purchase of a First Night button admitted you to the enclosed events.  The event still works in that way.

As a contrast, the City Stages Festival in Birmingham used the button initially as an admittance device, but not many years later issued the buttons only as souvenirs.  Many people would attend wearing hats with each past year’s button attached to the hat brims.  The first City Stages was held in 1989; the last was this summer nearly past, 2009.

Club 47 was a coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at or near the location of the current Passim, I have been told.  From 1958 to 1968, it was active as a testing ground for folk singers (before they were called “singer-songwriters”), some of whom would move on to the New York scene and, from there, launch nationally.  As part of Harvard College’s 350th anniversary in 1986, “folk singer” Tom Rush organized a Club 47 reunion concert that was held in Harvard Yard.  Joan Baez, Livingston Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, duo Buskin & Batteau, Peter Kean, and Rush himself entertained a crowd – which included me – under the trees and stars.

Tom Rush was a guest lecturer for a Folklore & Mythology course I took my Freshman year.  It wasn’t a lecture, per se, but a morning folk concert in Sanders Theatre (our classroom).  Professor Albert Lord introduced Rush and they discussed the ballad origins of song.  Tom Rush then serenaded us with folk songs from those historic eras, as well as some songs of his own.  I don’t have a button from that class, but I do still have my notes.

The 1985 New England Patriots football team (based in Boston) went to Super Bowl XX, stirring up a frenzy in Beantown, only to lose to the Chicago Bears in a game that wasn’t very close.  The spirits of the city’s sports fans were then buoyed by the 1985-86 Boston Celtics basketball team, who went all the way to #1 in the NBA finals.  The winning streak seemed unbelievably unstoppable when the Boston Red Sox entered baseball’s World Series against the New York Mets.  It was at about this time that someone made the button pictured above, appropriating a favorite Masshole phrase (right up there with “wicked,” as in, “That’s wicked cool” or “She’s wicked smart” or “It’s wicked hot out here”).  Not much later, Bill Buckner, afflicted by the Curse of the Bambino, let a ground ball roll between his legs in Game 6, forcing a seventh game in the series, and the Red Sox team’s eventual loss to the Mets.

Here are more found things from one corner of one room of my little house.  This little batch, like the last two posted, are buttons, proclaiming support for certain “causes.”

After the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant (near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) in March of 1979, several advocacy groups against the use of nuclear power sprouted in America and, by the following year, became a strong political and environmental movement (does this movement still exist?).  A group of musicians banded together, gave themselves the name Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), and held a series of concerts in New York and California.  I’m sure these two buttons come from that time period, which straddled my sophomore and junior years in college.  I once owned the No Nukes record album (a lot of my favorite artists of the time were involved), as well as a book entitled No Nukes: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power.

The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers today is nearly 5,000 Harvard employees strong. It was voted in on May 17th, 1988, a year after I had moved from Cambridge.  I would date this button’s addition to my collection at somewhere between 1984 and 1986, so the Workers Union was apparently a good long time in the making.

I was a regular blood donor for several years in a row, including the years I lived in Massachusetts.  There was nothing unpleasant about donating blood at the Harvard Drives, where you would lay on your back on a table in Memorial Hall, gazing up at the wooden rafters and stained glass windows, listening to the non-specific buzz of activity echoing through the cavernous building.

I had thought that this button was a politically-oriented one, perhaps for a workers’ union or labor movement.  Using an online Spanish-to-English translator, it was revealed that “Nos esforzamos mas” is “We try harder,” the Avis Rent a Car slogan.  Oh well.

Unfortunately, this was a lost cause, but I was behind it.

Chris Matthews interviewed Willian Kostric earlier this week, after Kostric appeared at a rally outside President Obama’s Portsmouth, New Hampshire town hall meeting, with a loaded gun strapped to his leg.  There is some of Matthews’ typical haranguing of the guest, but also some good back-and-forth between the two men (who seem to exist at the two extreme ends of the political spectrum).  Especially interesting: the question comparing one’s right to bear arms anywhere vs. the appropriateness and wisdom of doing so at such an event.

(continued from Reunion Journal: 31 July 2008, part 2)

The Las Vegas Airport terminal is busy.  Not overwhelmingly so, but steady streams of travelers are moving in all directions along the walkways.  There is no airline representative at our gate but, by simply reading the Arrival/Departure screens banked against the wall, we determine the gate location of our connecting flight.  Then, we enter the human flow.

I am hungry, and have my eye out for some place to grab a quick bite.  We turn a corner and I spy a vending cart with a basket of bananas, the peels just beginning to turn brown (thus, at the absolutely perfect point of ripeness).  I slide out of the flow and purchase one.  With the banana slipped safely into a pouch in my backpack, I get moving again.

Diane and Walter are right there alongside me.  We encounter a smattering of doltish travelers, trying to fight their way through our group by shoving us, “ooph”ing, and kicking the bags that we are toting.  Three to four feet away, to our left, the human flow that is going in their desired direction is neither crowded or disturbed.  Walter seems agitated.  I most certainly am.

Out of nowhere, a man appears, walking in a straight line toward us, directly down the middle of the terminal walkway.  There is nothing remarkable about him except that he is glaring straight ahead, seeming to have no peripheral vision, and oblivious to the oncoming human traffic.  A man in a gray suit is walking by his side.  I observe, as we approach him, that the crowd parts for him quite naturally.  Then, when he gets closer to us, I see why this might be so.  He is wearing a metal grate over his face, similar to a baseball catcher’s mask.  I can’t help thinking of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, being transported across the airport tarmac on a cargo dolly.  The man brushes my left arm, marching right between Diane and me.  Diane turns her head and looks in my direction.  The encounter has made an impression on her: her eyes are wide…like saucers.

We reach our destination, and find that we have about half an hour before we can board the plane.  Walter leans over and says something in Diane’s ear.  She nods.  He places his bag against the wall next to where we are standing and leaves us.  As fortune would have it, there is an electrical outlet right at my feet.  I open up my laptop case and begin re-charging the computer.

After about fifteen minutes, Walter returns with news that he has won ten dollars in a slot machine.  “Ten dollars?” Diane asks excitedly.  “Let’s go buy something to eat with it!”  Walter tells her that he bought a beer with his winnings.  The beer, of course, is gone.  Diane directs Walter’s eyes to their bags and heads off on her own to find some nourishment.

The Las Vegas airport – the Las Vegas McCarran International Airport – has a distinctive feature that I have never seen before in an aviation terminal: slot machines.  Lining the walls of the corridors are banks of gambling machines, rows and rows of token-fed boxes lit up and flashing with reds, whites, yellows and greens, pulsing with an electric glow that pulls the eye and demands to be fed.  Where there is an area of open real estate that isn’t taken by a gift shop or restaurant or information booth or bar, there are more slot machines.  They click and they whirr and they ding and, I would imagine, become more and more occupied as the day grows on and the resistance of travelers is worn down by long waits and alcohol consumption.  On this day, the machines seem to be making noises for their own benefit, and are largely ignored.  It is still rather early in the day.  Some of the stools permanently attached to the machines are getting use as seating for the adjacent waiting areas.

(photo: spitballarmy.com)

I succeed in avoiding a political discussion with Walter by engaging the elderly couple seated next to me in conversation.  They are headed for a two-week vacation in San Diego and have scheduled their entire stay at the Hotel del Coronado.  I ask them, somewhat inappropriately but jokingly, if they are spending their life’s savings on accommodations.  They reply by nodding in the affirmative.  She smiles, but neither of them laugh.  The husband speaks for both of them and tells me that they had dreamed of staying on Coronado Island for their honeymoon decades ago, and are only now getting the chance to go.  I notice that his wife is using a walker.

Diane returns to the fold, having purchased an apple.  We eat our snacks: my banana, her apple.  Eventually, we are notified that it is time to board the plane to San Diego.  I unplug my laptop from the wall, pack it up, and join my fellow passengers for the last leg of the trip.

(BlackBerry photo: spitballarmy.com)

Returning to my automobile last week after a swim, I almost stomped upon the Cornwall peninsula in the YMCA parking lot.  Mere minutes later, the sandal on my left foot (the potential stomper), broke irreparably.  That’s some rough terrain!

(image: http://www.4hotels.co.uk/)