So I was exchanging Christmas decoration photos and video with my friends, and this is what I sent, you guys. I snapped the pic, sent it to our chat, and then I saw the tee-shirt Joey got from his friend at work, draped on the chair right there. Doh!
Y'all, it is the Feast Day of our only Klingon saint! Here's the deal...when I wrote the post titled "Smile When You Bless The Gagh!" in order to explain how I am sure that Santa is definitely a Klingon, I hadn't realized that many other me's agree! So here's an illustration by graphic artist Brandon Carr that pretty much nails it. Don't you just love it when you find your fellow travelers?
The tree is up at Jackson Mann! I think it gets all gussied 'n lighted up this weekend. The school kids make ornaments, the city puts lights on and there's usually some kind of lighting ceremony. Me and Joey attended one year when Mayor Menino was still kicking around (I liked him). So this means the Harvard Ave lights are about to flick on for the season. I'll go picture-taking next week. I love Christmas in Rock City! 🎄
*Note. This post was about actual Allston
Christmas. Not Allston Xmas, what Rock City's genial citizenry calls late August/early September. That is a neighborhood-specific season, short but chaotic, as the Sun gets less intense about his work, and single flip-flops begin to materialize in the streets, discarded during some end-of-school-year walk-of-shame just before the students all clear out of Rock City for another year. Year-round residents navigate chock-a-block Uhauls and Riders and out-of-state SUVs piloted by bewildered parents. At all hours the members of this honking horde finally find the Mass Pike entrance and get the hell outta here, and they leave behind their security deposits along with towering piles of books, kitchen appliances, musical instruments, furniture, toys, clothes and whatnot, through which the locals go "picking" or "junking" for what treasure they may seek. I'm pretty good at it. Mark your calendar.
Long ago in a galaxy we 40-somethings refer to as "childhood," we built a cherry Kool-Aid world with rad high tech toys like Lite Brite, Etch-a-Sketch, and Slinky...a popular (*cheap*) birthday present. Imagine every one of us rug rats fighting over a toy you play with on the stairs. We made our own fun, too. Get a pair of tube socks and you could slide across the linoleum, or shuffle out some sweet static on the shag carpet. I'm sayin', a kid in 1970s America could make a pretty good time out of not-much, because we had a ton of not-much.
There wasn't much on TV either, so you watched your favorite shows, which aired weekly on specific nights. There was one TV and four channels, so there were fights over who got to pick until bedtime, then the adults watched boring shows (Dynasty, Flamingo Road) followed by the news, until the TV went off overnight. I don't mean the TV got turned off...I'm saying the broadcast transmitter shut down its signal and went to static until morning.
In our house we loved Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Dukes of Hazzard, Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. Up until they started to air commercials for the Star Wars Holiday Special, we thought Battle of the Network Stars was the absolute peak awesome sauce of "special" programming. I mean I assume we went apeshit over the idea of a Star Wars special, but I can't verify, because personally, somehow I have no memory of seeing The Star Wars Holiday Special. I might have blocked it out. We'll come back to that later.
Life Day
The Star Wars Holiday Special takes place in a vague point along the Star Wars timeline, opening with the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon—Han Solo and Chewbacca are attempting to evade a garbage scow in a tense scene. Evasive maneuvers! It's a promising start, but the excitement is woefully betrayed by the next million minutes. There's musical numbers, comedy skits, and at one point there is an un-related cartoon for no reason.
The whole thing hinges on Chewbacca's plight of making it back home for the Wookie holiday. Back on the Wookie home planet his family waits for his return. There's his son Lumpy, and his grizzled father whose name, cringeworthily, is Itchy. His wife Malla is anxiously awaiting Chewbacca and the family bickers because of the tense situation. There are long...surprisingly long...spans of angst-ridden Wookie howling, which is the loudest kind of Wookie howling. It just keeps going on, while Malla urgently seeks news of the Millennium Falcon's whereabouts.
The Guest Stars
Art Carney, Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman and Diahann Carroll. Put another way: who? Even my cool teenage cousins weren't old enough to know any of those people, which begs the question, "Who dafuq was this special for?" Kids, in theory, but in that case, they couldn't have gotten Wonder Woman or the Fonz at least so we'd have some joy of recognition? Performances include Bea Arthur (pre-Golden Girls!) as a bar owner who intones a ponderous ballad that lasts about a week. Harvey Korman does a few different skits, like one where Lumpy reads a technical manual and Korman appears to be acting out the instructions. What fun‒a dramatic reading...of instructions? Was this some sort of zany wacky fun for Grandpa? Although it could be suggested, with that skit, that Harvey Korman may have invented Max Headroom.
The Tech
Our shit was still analog in those days. Lest we forget. A Slinky is a coiled spring. Etch-a-Sketch let us scrape right-angles with magnets. And Lite Brite's entire operating system was a light bulb. In the Star Wars Holiday Special, there was great promise in the cool factor, like when Malla places video calls to Luke, Leia and Art Carney (okay?) to see if any of them had heard from Chewie or Han Solo, because they're still not home and it's almost Life Day. Kudos for the sci-fi, because video calls weren't a common thing yet. But those scenes, as it turned out, were the only appearances of our beloved Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and R2D2. I am sure my cool teenage cousins said "Aw maaaan! Rip off!" There's promise when we notice that Chewbacca's son Lumpy owns that cool hologram game table from Star Wars. You know, when they're heading to Alderaan and Chewie plays a game against R2D2, when C3P0 says "Let the Wookie win, R2!" But Lumpy uses the game table to call up a hologram dance troupe, and they jump around for about a month. Bor. Ing. There's even a Virtual Reality visor.
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As kids we saw more cool tech in sci-fi and fantasy and the world has a lot of people to thank for today's devices. Most of which are used for porn. And I don't even mean guys like Steve Jobs. I mean the nerd herd who popularized this stuff, artists and writers like Bruce Vilanche. The Star Wars special showed us VR on November 17, 1978, with a Wookiee head-mounted display. And yes, of course it was used for a wack segment of Wookie space porn. The company that would later become Sun Microsystems would put out the first virtual
reality(VR) products almost a decade later, in 1987, including head-mounted displays (HMDs)and data gloves.
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The Space Porn
The award for Most Awkward guest performance goes to Diahann Carroll. Again, I looked it up to see where we kids might have known her from when the Star Wars special aired. According to my research, she was on Milton Berle. Again: WHO WAS THIS SPECIAL FOR? In her scene, Miz Carroll emerges from a kaleidoscopic field of light as a mermaid sex vixen, and all of this action appears inside the Virtual Reality visor worn by Chewbacca's dad while everyone waits for the Millennium Falcon to arrive for Life Day. What to say about this scene? It's pretty much soft space porn. Working a lotta bare shoulder action, mermaid sex vixen sighs and undulates and croons. She porn-whispers "I am your fantasy." The old ass Wookie grunts and moans in his special chair. She says, "I am your experience. So experience me." He seems to be doing just that. She says, "I am your pleasure. Enjoy me. This is our moment together in time that we might turn this moment into an eternity." She sings a song for about a million hours. And let me hit you with that again:
"This is our moment together in time that we might turn this moment into an eternity."
Dude, what.
The Mental Block
We would have given up our Reggie Bars for anything Star Wars-related, so I should remember the special. But I don't. Does anyone remember it? Maybe we were so sugar-torqued that we couldn't sit through all those loooong, boring guests. I know we definitely for suresville would not have sat through that softcore cyber booty scene with a mermaid lady and a old-ass Wookie. Our brains would have sent alarms and we'd be a streak of flammable pajamas racing away in a flurry of Hawaiian Punch and Cookie Crisp crumbs.
But now that we're older and we have more viewing options (and weed) the Star Wars Holiday Special is available on YouTube, and we'll probably stream it several times each and every holiday season. Have a Life Day party. Smoke it if it's legal, and have a happy Life Day! ⭐
On Saturday afternoon, The I Want You opened for the Weisstronauts' annual holiday bash. Joe and I took the opportunity to host a lovely after party. An "after party" that starts around dinnertime? Perfect. These days, that is about my speed. That's not an "aging scenester" thing...yes, I'm aging but even when I was the right age to head out to someone's basement at 3am after band load-out, I didn't. I pretty much always wanted to go home and jettison my bra and let the silence supercede the deafening ring of rock and banter. I loved going out to rock shows, but my love affair with "silence" burns quietly eternal.
Some are born dorks. Some achieve dorkness. Some have dorkness thrust upon them.
Today on Deep Space Nine (Netflix), Worf told everyone that the legendary Klingon warrior Kahless had said "Great men do not seek power, they have power thrust upon them." I yelled, "That was Shakespeare, mofo!" Then I messaged Joe this outrage. He was at work. So he said, "I'm gonna go find some lunch." What he meant by that is, "You're a huge dork." Later when I explained in greater detail, knowing that he wanted to hear the whole thing, with pictures and footnotes, he said "You're a huge dork," and then added "...but you're MY huge dork" and made me a cup of green tea. You guys. I should not be finger-wagging about a Klingon on this, the feast day of Saint Nicholas. That's like watching Rudolph and telling everyone that Santa is a tool. Okay, bad example. Rudolph. Santa is a tool in that.
Painting of St. Nicolas, our only Klingon Saint.
The figure of Saint Nick is said to have inspired the legend of Santa Claus and the legend of Krampus.
A blend of Santa & Krampus is as Klingon as you can get.
Imagine a mythical race, fiercely honorable, loyal and ruthless. This is a people proud and strong, rigid about the line between right and wrong, a beastly nature quick to punish those who have acted badly, respectful and rewarding towards those who act with honor?
Yeah, that's a Klingon. Fa la la la la la, la la, la laaaggghhh! Today is a good day to diiiiie...!🎅
As an aside: I find lots of threads connecting the plays of William Shakespeare and the Star Trek universe. The Klingons aren't the only ones who pull from the bard, but they're certainly super duper good at it. Here's a little piece of fun for you...
Who Said It? The Klingon or the Bard?
1. "Great men do not seek power; they have power thrust upon them." 2. "If we are mark'd to die, we are enow to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor." 3. "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." 4. "Today is a good day to die." 5. "Go honor the valiant who die 'neath your sword, but pity the warrior who slays all his foes." 6. "By the doom of death end woes and all." 7. "You cannot loosen a man's tongue with root beer." 8. "A man cannot make him laugh, but that’s no marvel -- he drinks no wine." 9. "Life every man holds dear, but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life." 10. "Honor is more important than life."
Who went to Cardullo's for Torrone?
Marone, the place was a madhouse! On a Friday at Christmas? You don't say.
Do you know this box? For the un-initiated, this is a box of Italian nougat candies. They come in lemon, orange and vanilla. In our house, mom placed them on the Christmas tree along with the candy canes and popcorn balls. Torrone is individually boxed. I used to wrap the individual boxes (after I ate the candy) in bits of wrapping paper because they were just the right size for the Barbie Dreamhouse.
