CHAPTER 1 ~ STORYLINE SAMPLER Welcome to our second book. It is our grandiose goal to enticingly engage you in a joyful journey through an amazing array of tantalizing topics. In establishing our objective, we sought to achieve the perfect balance of educating our audience as well as entertaining you. Please prepare yourself for an eye-opening and mind-expanding menagerie of research and revelations upon which we have wantonly worked for the past five years. We are two retired school teachers who have honed our writing skills while composing the full-page feature which comprises the back page of our local paper every week. Just to play around with the numerology piece, we have written about a million words in our collective literary career and we are about to share with you, in this book, what we consider to be our best 50,000. It’s Tim and Deb’s Greatest Hits, so to speak. But we realize that the numbers alone don’t tell the whole tale. In the end it comes down to quality not quantity. Think about it this way. There are a billion people in China. Do you know what that means? If you live in China and you‘re a one-in-a-million kind of guy, there’s a thousand other guys just like you. So in our quest to entertain you, we will not be restrained by the nuances of numerology. We plan to execute an overall style which runs the gamut of emotions. On occasion we hope to move you to tears, but for the most part we’re haranguing for humor With that in mind we hereby offer up a first chapter sampler of what you can expect throughout this book. It will be our goal to entertain as well as educate you on a vast variety of topics. Our purpose having been thusly established, here’s a sumptuous sampling of snickering snippets we hope leaves you tempted to turn some more pages. PINK PANTIES ~ We spent Halloween 2018 at an Alice Cooper concert in Syracuse and it was a seasonally exciting experience. The last time we had seen the band was during our senior year in high school. One rite of passage that we will always be able to claim is that the ultimate Alice Cooper anthem “School’s Out” was released during our senior year. The lyrics “School’s Out Forever” resonated in our hallowed halls as we cleaned out our high school lockers for the final time. During those years, we enjoyed Alice Cooper’s extreme eccentricities such as his androgynous look, female first name, and wild eye makeup; it was all part of the show. But we also remember our parents being skeptical of the whole thing and it was a skepticism that swirled through the psyche of the conservative Middle American subconscious. 1 Back in the day vinyl record albums were released with the record slid inside a paper sleeve for protection. The paper sleeve was, in turn, slid inside the album cover. In another example of how this band continually pushed the envelope, when it came to the record sleeve for the School’s Out album, Alice Cooper purposefully passed on the paper and playfully put on the panties. The original release of the album featured the record slid inside a pair of pink panties rather than a sleeve of white paper. We actually just checked for this on eBay and original School’s Out albums, with the panties still in good condition, are selling for $250. That provided ample impetus for us to sally forth on a foray up to our antiquated attic and see if we could find our old original album. Fortunately the valuable vinyl was located intact, with panties. The doubly good news for us is that Deb only wore them a few times. What can we say? We were crazy kids. FAREWELL TO A FALLEN FRIEND ~ Tim taught high school English for 33 years and it is not unusual for us to run into former students who are anxious to convey how impactful he was on their lives. In a related story, on the morning of July 3, 2017 we received an email informing us that Scott Reese, one of Tim’s former students, was dying of cancer and his family reached out to us to see if we could use our connections to score tickets for him to see his favorite group, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who were performing the following night in Canandaigua, New York. Fortunately we were able to come through for them, and the entire backstory is one of the few tear-jerking components of our book. What follows below is an inspired paragraph we wrote after having made all of the necessary arrangements with the outdoor venue director Heather, and walking up to the top of the hill to take it all in as we waited for Scott’s arrival. As we contemplated the obituary we knew we would soon be writing, the following paragraph formulated in our brains. As the shimmering sun serenely sets on the summer shoreline we watch the cacophony of cascading colors create a Canandaigua crescendo as they reflect off the water. “This is,” Heather says, “one of my favorite things to do if everything down below is copasetic.” As the three of us stand at the very top of the hill overlooking the lake it becomes a transcendent moment. The Seneca Indians bestowed the name “Canandaigua” upon this setting because, in their words, it meant “the chosen place”. For this brief moment, frozen in time, there is a Great Spirit enveloping us with the realization that the Senecas chose wisely. Connecting the dots on this timeline, you may have already realized the double irony that within two months Scott Reese and Tom Petty would both be dead. Always remember, you don’t have to live like a refugee. 2 HIGH SCHOOL HILARITY ~ As we mentioned in the previous story, Tim taught high school English for 33 years and here is what he considers to be his funniest story from that teaching career. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was a part of his curriculum every year. The go-to high school movie version of Romeo & Juliet has traditionally been Franco Zeffirelli’s classic 1968 film which starred Olivia Hussey as the 14-year old Juliet. A key point in the story occurs when Romeo and Juliet wake up after having spent their wedding night together. Juliet was played by the amply endowed Olivia Hussey and, for a split second, when she gets up to say goodbye, her bountiful breasts spill out of her robe and, let’s put it this way … if the movie had been made in 3-D, some people in the front row could have been seriously injured. While the view lasts only a split second, for the 14-year-old boys in that classroom it was a second that may have lived on for hours, or days, or weeks. When Tim was wrapping up class, he would usually close by asking if anybody had any questions. The end of class, on what became fondly remembered as the Day of the Bouncing Boobs, was always a little different with the kids kind of looking at each other waiting and wanting to say something about the risqué shot, but not knowing how to do it without coming off as crude or crass. So usually nothing was said, the bell rang, and the kids went on their way. Only once in 33 years did one of Tim’s 14-year-old freshmen perfectly thread the needle. Here’s the favorite line of Tim’s teaching career. During the aforementioned end-of-class Q & A one freshman boy raised his hand, and in a casual reference to the buxomly bare-breasted Olivia Hussey scene proffered the question, “Mr. Smith, was Juliet really only 14 years old?” PAUL IS DEAD? ~ Next we will share with you what was one of our favorite concluding paragraphs. The topic of the piece was the 1969 hoax that Beatle Paul McCartney had died in a car accident and been replaced in the band by a lookalike. Of course it wasn’t true, but there was a few-month-long fall frenzy that year where the planet was perplexedly paralyzed by the preposterous proposition purported about poor, poor pitiful Paul. Of course adding an element of interest to this storyline was the fact that the Beatles collectively denied culpability in the collaboration of clues 3 which fanned the fire fueling the hoax. That being said, those British boys are sometimes full of Irish blarney. Beginning with the Sgt. Pepper album in 1967 the preponderance of cleverly included clues seemed to confirm that the Fab 4 was having some fun with their fans, including us. We closed this piece with the following paragraph. We were totally immersed in the frenzy when we were in high school and the story was initially breaking. As a matter of fact, the storyline overlapped precisely with the months that we were first dating, serving to create the perfect double bonus. It gave us something to talk about before we started having sex. That was a good thing because we’ve barely spoken to each other since. SEXUAL FANTASIES ~ One of our most well- received pieces was when we created a game that people could play in their cars while traveling through Central Pennsylvania. Might seem like an odd pretense but there’s a method to our madness. If you were to travel from Canada to Key West you could get from Niagara Falls to Key Largo without ever leaving expressways except for one 72-mile stretch in Pennsylvania.