Your Witness

Today I got an unexpected letter: handwritten, in the type of handwriting that made me think the sender was older, from someone I've never met who lives about 10 or 15 miles from here. It was a letter exhorting me to become a Jehovah's Witness, and inviting me to a church. The sender, a woman (according to her signature), helpfully enclosed a tract about the serenity that awaited me if I became a Jehovah's Witness, and the eternal damnation that was my future if I didn't.

Although I support some of the group's pacifist beliefs, and applaud the many contributions they've made to civil liberties in this country — the First Amendment would be a mere shell if not for many of the Witness' historic court cases — I think I'm going to pass.

As an advertising writer who's written many direct response campaigns, I wonder how successful this one will be. The rule of thumb for the success of a direct mail campaign is this:

50% of the success or failure of a direct mail campaign can be attributed to the mailing list

30% depends on the offer being made

20% hinges on the design and writing

Granted, study after study shows that a personalized, hand written letter gets much higher results, so we can assume that last 20% is taken care of. The offer — eternal salvation — seems pretty strong. (Certainly stronger than the other piece of direct mail I received today, which was a buy one, get one free offer on a Big Mac.)

But I think the mailing list — Jews who have never expressed any interest in Christianity in general, or Jehovah's Witnesses in particular — might be the problem. Surely there are other groups, such as people who are already Christian, that might offer better odds of success.

The real question, of course, is who this woman is, how she got my name and address, and why she decided to invite me to her church. I man, my wife is Catholic, but I've never received a solicitation from any Catholic church (although I did once give a check for $350 to the Baltimore Archdiocese, but that's another story.)

I might follow up with the woman and see how the campaign is going. Or I might just go get myself a free Big Mac.

Strike

Everyone should have a childhood friend who is at least foot taller, and preferably of a different skin color.

I did — my best buddy, Alvin, ultimately grew to 6' 6", exactly a foot taller than me, and was (and is) as brown as I am white. We were the interracial Mutt and Jeff.

When I was a teenager I had hair down the middle of my back. When Alvin an I would hitchhike together, we'd wait a long, long time for someone to give us a ride: 90+% of the population was guaranteed to dislike one of us on sight.

Alvin's whole family, in fact, was the Land of the Giants: his brother was well over 6 feet as well, his mother was around 5' 10", and his father, who'd once played in the Canadian Football League (he was a lineman) was one of the largest human beings I ever saw. To this day, he's the only person I ever saw pick up a sofa by himself and carry it up a flight of stairs.

I remember one time Alvin, Alvin's brother,  his father and I went bowling. His father, whose name was Marvin, had never been bowling before, for some reason, and when we arrived at the bowling alley the three of us began giving Marvin a stream of unsolicited advice. As he picked up a 16 pound ball — the heaviest in the place — our advice became critical. "No, Dad, stand this way." "No, put these fingers in the holes." "Don't start from there, start from here."

Alvin's father got madder and madder. Finally, he yelled give me the damn ball and get out of the way, took one step and launched the ball down the alley. It bounced once and slammed into the pins, shattering two of them.

Needless to say, it was a strike.

He picked up another ball. This one bounced twice on the way to the pins, which exploded when the ball hit them. Another strike.

His third ball broke another pin on the way to strike three.

At that point the manager approached and nervously asked us if we could either stop shattering pins or perhaps do our bowling elsewhere (or not at all). Marvin was convinced he'd made his point, and none of us were going to argue with him.

Needless to say, we all decided he'd won.

It's In The Bag

Our weekend at the beach ended the way I always like a vacation to end, which is to say it involved a car chase and a narrow escape from an angry pursuer.

And, of course, a big bag of trash.

My wife's sister and her husband are on an Alaskan cruise, and so they offered us their house, which is just a couple of miles from the Delaware beaches, for the weekend. Because we didn't want to put trash in their trash can that would sit for a couple of weeks until they returned, we brought one of those giant lawn and leaf bags with us. and used that to collect all of our trash for the weekend.

Sunday comes, and my wife suggests that we drop the bag of trash in a dumpster behind a nearby grocery store on our way out of town. Sounds like a good idea to me, so with the car packed we head to the store, with the bag jammed between the dashboard and me in the passenger seat.

We pull around the back of the grocery store, and there sit three dumpsters and one sign "Not for personal trash. $500 fine." Out of the six of us in the car, I'm the only one who notices the sign. I don't say anything, but get out of the car and look around. No one in sight (we're behind the building). I gently put the bag of trash next to the dumpster, turn to get back in the car, and

"Hey!" The yell is much too deep to be my wife and children. I jump back in the car. "Go! Go!"

Around the corner roars a large, older blue pickup truck, from which a large man is yelling. He is pissed.

My wife starts driving out of the parking lot, the truck with the yelling man in hot pursuit behind us. Who is this guy? Why does he care? I have no idea.

We race to the parking lot exit, ready to make a left turn. There are no cars coming from the right, but a long line coming from the left. My wife hesitates. The blue pickup is behind us, and the yelling man is opening the door to get out.

I yell for my wife to go, and she races out of the lot. The man closes his door, but it's too late: the line of cars has blocked him from turning left out of the lot to follow us. My wife drives off, with all of us peering anxiously out of the back window of our van. Is he after us? Have we given him the slip?

As we're watching, I tell the kids about the sign threatening a $500 fine. Our 13-year-old son: "Did it say anything about going to jail?"

That opens the floodgate to questions from all four children. "Do you think he's still following us?" "Can he follow us home?" "Will he call the police?" "Will they come after us?"

I assured them that the Delaware police were unlikely to follow us to Maryland to pursue the crime of illegal dumping, though I don't even know that what we did was illegal. (In retrospect, legal or not, it wasn't a very nice thing to do, and we should have found some other spot for our trash bag.)

Anyway, if you don't see any posts from me for 30-60 days, you'll know why.

Rahsaan

Jazz has always been known for its eccentric characters. There was pianist Thelonious Monk, who would sometimes stop playing in the middle of a solo, leap to his feet and begin dancing, Why? Just because. There was Sun Ra, who claimed to be from another planet (generally Saturn).

But perhaps the most eccentric, as well as arguably one of the most talented, was Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Kirk played a variety of instruments, some of his own design, often simultaneously. A one man horn section, he could play three different horns at once — fingering one with his left hand, one with his right, and playing a drone note on the third. He was a walking encyclopedia of jazz, with his solos spanning the range from Dixieland to Duke Ellington to bop to what we would now call post modern, a genre that Kirk pioneered.

A master of circular breathing, a technique that enabled him to play without pausing for breath, Kirk could be both lyrical and intense, often at the same time, hilarious and jaw droppingly ground breaking. (He could also play through his nose as well as his mouth.)

Ian Anderson's (Jethro Tull) flute technique is a third-rate Kirk imitation. Entire horn sections have tried to duplicate Kirk's feats, and it took a three-man section to do it.

Kirk's music was both deep and joyous. If you want the history of jazz in one package, one of his anthologies might fit the bill.

Money Honey

Four times I've had a bank or brokerage try to give me money that wasn't mine. Twice I've been successful in returning it.

The first was when I was 16, and withdrew $100 from my checking account. I dutifully handed my passbook and withdrawal slip (yes, this was awhile ago) to the teller, who just as dutifully counted out 10 bills and handed them to me.

Ten $100 bills.

"Ma'am," I said, "I think you should count these again." "Why, didn't I give you ten?" she asked. I silently handed her the bills and my passbook. She looked at the bills, and her face turned white. A $900 shortage in her cash drawer at the end of the day? She would have been fired, and possibly liable for the $900.

She was so stunned she never thanked me. No big deal.

The second time was one morning, many years later, when I stopped at an ATM (not at my bank) for cash on the way to work. It was about 8:45 a.m., 15 minutes before the bank opened. When I got my cash, some $20's were stuck together, so although I'd asked for (and was debited) $40 I received twice that.

Seeing the employees inside the locked branch, preparing for the day, I thought I'd do the right thing. I knocked on the door.

A couple of them shook their heads "no," pointing to the clock on the wall to indicate the branch wasn't open yet. I held my money up and pointed to it.

They shook their heads "no" more vigorously. I pointed to my money more vigorously. They. no doubt thinking I wanted to complain about not receiving ENOUGH money, continued to shake their heads and indicate that they had no intention of even coming to the door and talking to me, let alone letting me in.

I needed to get to work and decided I'd been as honest and helpful as I was going to be, and left. That bank is now out of business, perhaps because of the great customer service.

The third time I received money that wasn't mine, it wasn't from a bank and it wasn't money. One month when opening our brokerage statement (it was Merrill Lynch at the time), I thought we had an unusually high amount in our account. Had one of our stocks or mutual funds suddenly skyrocketed without my noticing?

I scanned the statement and discovered the culprit: there were 1,000 shares of Kansas City Power and Light (why do I remember that?) that we hadn't bought and didn't own that had mysteriously found their way into our account. According to the statement, they'd been in our account for a couple of weeks.

I called our account manager, who wasn't at all alarmed. Nor, it seemed, did he know who owned those shares, but he assured me he'd find out and our next statement would be correct. I asked him what would have happened if I hadn't called him, and he assured me, "Oh, we'd have discovered the mistake."

Maybe so.

The last time was, coincidentally, at the same ATM of the same bank where I'd tried, unsuccessfully, to return the extra $40 I'd actually received. One lunch hour I withdrew some money and was startled to see on the receipt that my checking account had a balance of just over $30,000. (Just over $300 was probably more accurate.) Wow, $30,000 in "found" money.

I rushed back to work and asked the comptroller, who was a friend of mine, what my liability would be if I withdrew that $30,000? Would I have been arrested?

"Well," he said, "if the $30,000 COULD have been in your account for real, the worst case scenario would be that you'd have to give the money back once the error was discovered."

"How would the bank know or prove that the $30,000 wasn't a legitimate number? I asked."

"They look at your average balance over the last couple of months and see if a  $30,000 balance would be an assumption you could reasonably make. Do you typically have $30,000 in your checking account?"

The look on my face answered the question. His advice: "Don't withdraw the money. They'll figure it out."

And they did.

I was sorry when that bank went out of business. I had good luck at their ATMs.

Food Fight

I've had some of the best and worst service I've ever received in a restaurant at Bob Evans, a place I only go to when someone else makes me.

The worst service happened one evening when I told our four children I'd take them out to dinner if they could agree on a place, and they chose Bob Evans. Not my top 10, but they agreed with a minimum of arguing, and I thought I should encourage this temporary cessation of the sibling rivalry hostilities by being supportive.

The hostess gave us the back room all to ourselves, and our server was prompt with drinks and order taking. The food arrived in a timely fashion. Well, all of the food except for mine.

The kids dug in while I sat. And sat. Our server, who'd been very attentive up to this point, was nowhere to be seen. Finally I walked up to the counter and spoke to the person who turned out to be the assistant manager.

When I asked where my food was, she assured me everything we'd ordered had been delivered to our table. I assured her it hadn't. Then (I'd ordered a salad with fried chicken strips on top, can't recall the name), she'd told me that they'd been unable to prepare my salad because "we had to turn off the deep fryer to clean it."

I told her I couldn't believe they'd turn of their deep fryer in the middle of the dinner hour, when a high percentage of the menu items were deep fried. I also asked how my children were able to get their french fries if the fryer was out of commission.

Finally, I said, "Please don't lie to me. If someone forgot to turn my order in, or forgot to make it, just tell me."

She assured me that wasn't the case. Since my children were done eating by that time, and we were ready to go, I told her just to forget it. "We can make it for you to go right now, at no charge," she said.

"I thought your deep fryer was shut off for cleaning."

"It's working now."

"No thanks, we'll just go."

A year later Bob Evans redeemed itself, sort of, to me. Our son, Adam and I were in Detroit for a long weekend (he was in his car phase at the time, and we went to visit several auto museums as a father-son trip). I let him choose the restaurants, and our first night he picked the Bob Evans near our hotel.

The manager, alerted by our server that with our accents we were probably from out of town, stopped by our table to say hello. He and Adam chatted about the origami figures Adam had made from our placemats while waiting for our food (Adam is an origami expert, which is going to look great on his college applications). Hearing we were from Maryland, he exclaimed, "I have a great gift for you. It's perfect for someone from Maryland. I'll be right back."

Two minutes later he returned, beaming, and gave us his gift: a map pinpointing the locations of every Bob Evans in the continental United States, complete with addresses and phone numbers.

I wa speechless. Though not with delight.

Politically Correct

In this political season, it seems appropriate to mention that I once lost a job — well, I was fired, actually — over a political candidate.

The candidate was an evangelical Christian, very conservative. The owner of the ad agency where I worked had been a long-time supporter of him, and when he decided to run for president she was ecstatic. (Much of the agency's staff was less so, but that's another story.)

She offered the agency's resources — I believe she initially proposed charging $1/month — and we became his advertising and marketing agency. Immediately shredders, locks on doors and an upgraded security system appeared, and all employees were directed to drop what they were doing and begin working on his political campaign.

I, politely and professionally, asked not to be assigned to the project and, much to my surprise, wasn't. One other employee, an art director, asked for the same treatment, and he received.

Now, when you turn down the company owner's pet project, you can assume that you should update your resume, because your time at that company is about to come to an end. I redid my resume and cleaned up my portfolio, just in case.

The months went on, his campaign began to sputter, and despite the regular messages on our paychecks about who our next president would be, he withdrew. Life seemingly returned to normal.

A couple of months later I was suddenly dropped from the distribution list for memos that went to everyone in the department. My assignments dried up. Clearly, in the mind of the agency president I ceased to exist.

I bet someone in my department $50 that I'd be fired on a Friday two weeks in the future, at 3 p.m. The bet was that I was correct within an hour.

I actually got fired a little after 2, and collected the $50. More importantly, I was able to clean out my desk, say my goodbyes, and leave before rush hour (the agency, which no longer exists, was in Washington, D.C.)

Interestingly, when I told friends and family at the time I asked not be assigned to the account, I received all kinds of reactions. Some folks said, "Good for you." A few said, "You're an idiot." My parents, rabble rousers from way back, were proud of me.

My favorite part was trying to explain to the folks at the unemployment office why I'd been fired. This was one they'd never heard before.

The art director who'd also not worked on the account? He quit before he was fired, and hasn't worked on a political campaign since.

Nor, in fact, have I. Though, to be honest, no one has asked.

NRBQ

For my money, NRBQ remains the best bar band in the world: that is, the line-up with guitarist Al Anderson remains the best bar band in the world (later incarnations didn't compare).

The name stands for New Rhythm and Blues Quartet, but rhythm and blues is about the only type of music the band doesn't play. Who else could put together a set list that featured Johnny Cash, Thelonious Monk, Carl Perkins, Sun Ra, traditional tunes and their own wacky paeans to girls, marijuana, cars, dictionaries, biting dogs and Moon Pies? WHo else could cover the themes from Bonanza and old John Wayne movies? Who else could jam with Carl Perkins, Keith Richards, Skeeter Davis and the young lions of jazz?

Just to prove their versatility, the band had a gimmick they employed at live shows for years: pass a box through the audience and invite audience members to write song names on scraps of paper and drop them in the box. Later in the show, the band would randomly draw one or two slips of paper out of the box and attempt those songs. They always succeeded.

Bassist Joey Spampinato was good enough to be tapped by Keith Richards to play in the backing band in Richards' film about Chuck Berry, when the Rolling Stone guitarist could have called any bassist in the world. Keyboard player Terry Adams, sometimes brilliant, sometimes catatonic, recorded an album in which he led several jazz masters (and more than held his own).

They've backed wrestlers (Captain Lou Albano) and rockabilly singers (Perkins), played music from the 1950s and music from outer space, and presented some of the tightest and sloppiest live shows on the planet. Never imitated, never equalled, they're more fun than any other three bands you can name.

Quick Hit

Award for the best title for a live album (best live album remains, of course, James Brown Live At The Apollo) goes to The Replacements, one of the best things to ever come out of Minneapolis-St. Paul (Prince and Husker Du would be the others). Known for their drunken, lurching live shows, where wrong chords sometimes battled with forgotten lyrics, the 'Mats' (fans affectionately dubbed them The Place-mats) live album is named, appropriately, The Shit Hits The Fans. The album is better than you might think.

Lost

A person with no sense of direction probably shouldn't be a navigator in a sports car rally. That, at least, sums up my rallying career to date.

Now, when I say no sense of direction, I mean I once took a wrong turn in a hallway in the middle of the night and walked into a closet instead of the bathroom. (Luckily I realized my mistake in time.) Truly, I think I could buy a GPS for my car and deduct it on our taxes, claiming medical necessity. I get lost constantly.

The first rally I ever did was with my first wife, and I suspect my poor navigational skills were part of the reason why we divorced. God, did we argue that day.

After that, I began rallying with my friend, Elliott, and what a pair we made.

Elliott had an old, bulbous Saab, with manual steering and a steering wheel the size of a pizza pan (for leverage to turn the wheels, I suppose). It was, as I recall, a Saab 96, with a four-speed on the column. It was slow and not very powerful, which proved to be a problem.

If you've never been on a sports car rally, here's how it works: every car has a driver and a navigator, A few minutes before the start (cars generally start one at a time at five-minute intervals, give or take) the navigator gets a set of instructions that involves following difficult directions (sometimes only using clues or riddles) to specific points in specific amounts of time. Teams must make their way to a series of checkpoints, each of which must be reached at a certain time. (And by certain, I mean to the second: teams get a point for every second early or late to a checkpoint, and a winning team might get through 7-10 checkpoints and only have 20 points.)

Sometimes the navigator is given a distance and needs to calculate the speed at which the team should drive, sometimes the opposite. Experienced rally folks have sophisticated computers in their cars. Novices, such as us, have a calculator, a couple of pencils and a pad of paper.

I should have known how the event was going to go for us when I gave Elliott the first direction 20 seconds into our first rally. "Left! Left! Turn left now!" And turn we did, into a parking lot.

"This can't be right!" And we were already a minute behind.

Now, what happens during rallies is that each checkpoint has a couple of folks staffing it, and they pack up and leave after the last car SHOULD have come through. Elliott and I employed the same strategy in every rally: get hopelessly lost, than have to drive like maniacs to get to the next checkpoint before it closed. At awards ceremonies, as winners came forward with their scores of 20 points or 30 points we scanned the leader board for our score, which was always in the thousands.

We got lost every way you can get lost. We'd pass signs that said Now Entering ________ County when the directions had made it clear that the entire rally was going to remain within the county we were leaving. We'd see other cars we were sure were in our rally (and had started long after us) going in the opposite direction. ("Think we should turn around?" "Uh, yeah.")

The Turn Around Strategy — second only to our Drive Like Maniacs Strategy — ultimately proved our downfall.

On a narrow country road in the middle of farm country, we realized we were hopelessly lost. In attempting to make a U-turn, Elliott got stuck in a ditch.

Since he was driving, I was the one who had to get out and push. The tires spun, covering me with dirt and mud, but the car stayed stuck in the ditch. As we pondered what to do, a farmer came along in a truck and, in less than two minutes, pulled us out of the ditch and got us back on the road. We gave him our heartfelt thanks, and as he left the trouble started.

Elliott took one look at my dirt and mud covered clothes, and reached a decision: "You can't get in my car." "What?" "You're covered in mud. You can't get in." "I'm covered in mud because I had to push your car out of the ditch you drove into. Stop wasting time, we gotta get going." "I don't want my car to get all dirty."

Finally, Elliott relented and let me in. We drove until we saw a Burger King, and I tried to clean myself up in their bathroom.

That, I think, was our last rally. We're still very close friends — I've known Elliott for 30 years — and since that rally, which was 20+ years ago,  we've never had a disagreement.

Nor, now that I think about it, has Elliott ever asked me for directions.

Bar None

Sitting through my nephew's Bar Mitzvah this weekend reminded me of why I like ice cream.

Prior to my Bar Mitzvah, I went to three years of Hebrew school, which meant classes after my regular school at the synagogue one or two afternoons a week (I can't remember the exact schedule).

Next to the temple was a Dairy Queen, and occasionally when the six boys in that class arrived before Hebrew school started, we would go to the Dairy Queen for a cone.

One day we arrived at the temple and the rabbi hadn't. The doors were locked. So we went to the Dairy Queen and bought ice cream, and then sat on the steps of the temple with our book bags and ice cream cones, waiting for the rabbi.

When he arrived and saw us he was furious. Why? Because the ice cream wasn't kosher. Even though we weren't inside the building with it, he felt we were being blasphemous in some way.

He yelled at us for awhile, and then said, "I suppose you'd rather eat non kosher ice cream than study the Torah." Before we could admit that, well, ice cream was preferable to Hebrew School, he hit us with the worst punishment he could think of: "Fine, sit out here and eat your ice cream, then."

We spent the entire class period outside, while he sat inside the building. No doubt he felt that by denying us our Hebrew studies he was causing us great sadness.

It was the best class we ever had.

This End Up

I once dated a woman who was finishing up her residency as an OB/GYN at the University of Maryland Medical School, and our one date at the theatre proved to be much more of a comedy than the show's producers intended.

It was a one man show with, I think, Jason Robards; probably the life of Mark Twain, but I'm not sure. Halfway through the second act, an older gentleman in the front row collapsed.

Just as in the movies Robards stopped the show, broke character, and bellowed, "Is there a doctor in the house?"

My date leaped out of her seat and began rushing down the aisle towards the front. On the other side of the theatre, a man jumped out of his seat and also scurried to the front.

My date and the man arrived at the passed out theatre goer at the same time. "I don't know how much help I can be," my date said. "I'm Obey/Gyney."

The other man looked at her for a second. "I," he said, with a funny look on his face, "am a proctologist."

They called an ambulance.