BOFOH Bits

Amid all the reams and wads and stacks of information (and "information") available on the World Wide Web, there's relatively little written about a topic near and dear to my heart: Gaslight Village. I suppose that's only natural; nobody really remembers Pete Best (forget about Stu Sutcliffe), no one writes scholarly biographies of Shemp Howard, and good luck finding someone who's heard of the DuMont Network.

All of these, of course, were in some way overshadowed or even made obsolete by contemporaries (unless you're one of the four people in the world who believe Shemp > Curly, to which I can only say this: no). It was Gaslight's fate to be the ugly corporate stepsister in the empire of Charles R. Wood -- now fondly remembered as a philanthropist, but for us the man who employed most of the teens in the Tri-County area and screamed at a significant percentage of those -- to the legendary Storytown, soon to be known as The Great Escape and eventually to become a part of the Six Flags universe.

The conceit -- the shtik -- the premise of Gaslight Village was a "Gay Nineties" theme. I think I'm safe in saying the concept predated the use of "gay" to mean something else entirely... but in either case it's kind of a hard theme to carry through in an amusement park. There is something vaguely old-fashioned (maybe even musty) about T-shirt shops and skee ball and bumper cars, but maybe more '50s than '90s.

I landed at Gaslight in the summer of 1978 more or less by accident: our high school did The Music Man for our spring musical, and 2 of the guys in the show's quartet decided that was a great path to a summer job (that didn't involve too much work), but the other 2 guys weren't interested, so I was invited to join.

The revised quartet was hired, and a couple or 3 times a day we'd put on red vests and straw hats and belt out "Lida Rose" and "You Gotta Have Heart" and... a bunch of other barbershoppy stuff. However, if you do the math, that's only about a half-hour a day, and Charles R. Wood wasn't about to pay 4 teenagers a day's wage to sit around for all but a half-hour a day.

So Jeff & Steve ran rides, and Kevin & I became grounds boys. I was always assiduous about my duties; there were several spots scattered throughout the park that were polished almost to a gleam. It's possible that, in an effort to be polite, I might have made conversation with young ladies that might have been located in the vicinity of those locations.

As dedicated as I was to keeping my corner of Lake George popcorn- and cigarette-butt-free, my ambition was always to make it to the Opera House, the park's "dinner theater" (okay, snack bar theater). The theater featured 7 shows a day -- the old-fashioned mellerdrama, with a clean-cut hero rescuing the innocent heroine from the dastardly villain, 4 times a day; and a full-fledged ice show, performed on an ice rink about the size of your dining room table, 3 times a day. Seriously, I have about half that much ice in my drink right now. Anyway, suffice it to say there was always a very clean spot in the Opera House doorway.

In the course of time -- lots of time; I worked at Gaslight for 6 summers, so that's more than one calendar year -- I was to weasel my way into the Opera House, bit by bit. Towards the end of my second summer when everyone quit, I joined the cast of the mellerdrama. The show, which narrowly missed a Tony Award nomination for Best Amusement Park Parody/Ripoff of a Recently-Popular Movie, was entitled "Star Squabbles"; I played the character role of Kindly Old Okee Dokee. A character role, if you're not theater-savvy, means you don't get any funny lines and you don't get to do anything in particular; you're there mostly to give the hero somebody to talk to. Occasionally you get to do Exposition, meaning you say something like, "Look, Fluke (the hero's name was Fluke Skycrawler), we're on a spaceship!" so the audience can figure out what the scenery's supposed to be depicting.

The acting... um, performing?... no, stage gig only lasted about 2 weeks, but I got to wear stage makeup and a wig made of the finest yak hair (and from the smell of it, the yak was using it on my day off), and get paid, and not sweep any grounds, so I felt myself Quite the Big Cheese Indeed.

Overall, during those three long summers of custodial servitude, I had the opportunity to fill a lot of other roles that even today lend my resume a madcap air that would otherwise be lacking:

• - opening cages, backstage, for the tiger show
• - onstage announcer for the performing bear act
• - actor in the Keystone Kops pie fight

But I may be proudest of my lighting work for the ice show -- which started while I was still working grounds; eventually, the show's impresario/skating magician, Ron Urban, came to trust me sufficiently that he handed me the show's running order and asked me to devise my own light cues. Not to mention that I ended up dating the girl who ran the other spotlight, for over a year!

But it wasn't till my fourth year at Gaslight that I reached the apex: Singing waiter in the Opera House (incidentally, we always called it the Big Old-Fashioned Opera House, or BOFOH -- hence BOFOH Bits). I've been asked this a lot: you don't sing while you're waiting on tables, but from the bandstand between customers. I featured those well-known Gay Nineties standards, "I Get a Kick Out of You" and "All the Things You Are". We were, as I said, basically a snack bar -- pizza, pretzels, soda, and beer -- so the combination of an average check under $10 and my own uniquely winning personality meant that I sometimes made as much as double figures in tips.

This is when it gets tricky to write. I did have a great time in my three Opera House years; we became in a lot of ways a family, or at least a team, in a fashion that just didn't happen in the rest of the park. In fact, I was really prompted to write this by recently reconnecting with a bunch of my old OH pals via Facebook (hi guys! love ya...).

I also know that I'm unusually susceptible to the Good Old Days virus that makes (almost) 30 years ago look like a lot more fun than today, and perhaps than it did then. Plus I have to be unusually careful about accuracy with a group of fellow survivors auditing me.

And... I'm afraid I'm not wholly up to the challenge of capturing what it really felt like: to be on the doorstep of adulthood, taking my first real steps toward independence, trying to figure out -- painfully at times -- who I really was, experiencing the exhilaration and devastation of my first truly adult romantic relationship.

I do remember a lot of snapshots, flashes really, like in the old prison movies when the spotlight sweeps across the darkened prison yard:

... a lot of laughter, feeling like we were banding together against a mob of surly and cheap tourists

... going out dancing with the gang after work, and on top of "having a great time", feeling that swell of "hey, I'm a grown-up"

... timing my trip past the side of the ice cube so I could do my "special cheer" just as our star skater, Kim, was finishing her routine

... sitting on the bench outside the kitchen door crying because someone had said something like "Hey, why do you have to be so sarcastic all the time?" -- and thinking Big Thoughts about "Who am I really?"

... feeling jealous when new people came to the Opera House and acted like they belonged there, when it felt a little like they were horning in on My Thing.

... driving away from the last time we were all together, in September of 1983, knowing in my heart (and the pit of my stomach) that something important in my life had just come to an end, something I'd never get back -- and getting stopped by the cops on the way home for running a red light because I was in such a daze.

I realized suddenly while writing this (although to be honest it's taken me almost 2 months to write) that I'm actually glad Gaslight's closed. Like I said, I'm jealous: the place was special to me in a variety of ways, some obvious and some not so much, and somehow to have it go on without me doesn't seem right. I know that's a Mark-centric view of the world... but hey, it's my blog.

So to CD and O'B and Kim and Jeff and Leslie... and to Amy... and Steve, Ron, Bernie, Chucko, Warren Boden, Anne Bishop, and Bob Carroll (but not to Fred Dufel) -- thanks so much for being part of my life. I promise not to blame you for any of the less-desirable aspects of who I've become, and I leave you with this thought:

• Just remember that sunshine always follows the rain,
• So wrap your troubles in dreams, and dream your troubles away.

Upholding More Than One Tradition

For some reason when I think of doing a travel piece, my mind always goes straight to Kerouac. This despite the fact that I've never read On The Road (but if you're a Frequent Reader you know that my titles, in particular, trend toward the pretentiously literary). It's also true that there is a long and honorable tradition of the Comic Travel Piece; I myself have read such essays ranging from Twain, to Benchley, Perelman, and all the way up to P. J. O'Rourke (but perhaps my favorite example of Travel Literature is Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty"). I have it on good authority, however, that none of those worthy creations mention children's museums, zoos, or amusement parks. Of course, they're most likely more entertaining too.

I decided to forgo the obscure road-related puns in this title; I refer rather to the fact that each summer we go on a family vacation, and each summer I write about it. I'm not offering any warranty that this will be in the same league as any of the guys mentioned above.

Vacation doesn't inspire coherence, so instead of a linear narrative, consider this a series of snapshots. Maybe I should have titled it "Postcards from the Edge".

• $ For any trip, I marshal the full resources of the 21st century: Internet research, including directions from destination websites; full turn-by-turn directions, calibrated to 0.1 mile, from Google maps; and, starting this year, GPS as well. Despite all that, I still had several moments of (if not outright lostness) at least uncertainty. North Carolina in particular has a disturbing habit of combining & then re-dividing their numbered routes. So I asked my dad; he told me that in the late 40s he made three round trips from New York to California. They did have basic roadmaps, but no "interstate highways", and no way to really know what was up ahead; they drove until they found a "tourist cabin" where they could stay the night.


• $ We passed some of those developments bulit practically in the interstate breakdown lane. It's too bad nobody still bakes pies & leaves them on the windowsill to cool, because if they did, you could snag yourself a good snack from the right-hand lane. They had that sign that says, "If you lived here, you'd be home now"... but I couldn't help thinking it should really read, "If you lived here, you'd be wondering what on earth possesed you to spend all that dough on a place where cars are always going through your front yard at 70 mph."


• $ With regard to E-Z-Pass: what took me so long? Some of these highways now have Express E-Z-Pass -- you don't slow down or even drive through the cattle chute; just keep on rolling, they'll get your money. What's more, you can even pick up an e-z-pass transmitter at the grocery store!


• $ Parents traveling with relatively young children do well to deploy several weapons, including extra snacks, electronic games, and a portable DVD player... however, the two most important words to keep in mind: suite hotel. For me, it would be difficult to survive a vacation where lights-out was at 8 every night -- so the separate bedroom is indispensable. Caution: for some chains, "suite" means "has an armchair and a mini-fridge", so don't be fooled by cheap imitations.


• $ Best thing about crossing old Mr. Mason & Mr. Dixon's stripe: Chick-Fil-A. It turns out that there are some in the northeast; the nearest one to us is only 150 miles away. But they're easier to find in the South -- in fact, when I finally got a chance to enjoy my visit, it was here. I don't understand why I can't get a chicken sandwich that good without paying my way into an amusement park.


• $ Twice in a row while visiting Baltimore, my wife pulled off one of those deals only she can, to get things people don't want to give us. We went for the stadium tour at Camden Yards: first she got the parking guy to let us park (in the "wrong" lot) for free, even; then when the tour was sold out after only the other three of us got in, she met the tour guide and talked him into letting her come along after all. I don't know whether it's "feminine wiles", or "selling ice to Eskimos", or The Power to Cloud Men's Minds... but I'm sure glad she's on our side.


• $ Later on in Baltimore, I was going to put my credit card in the parking meter when a guy slipped in ahead of me, stuck in a card, and pulled out a $2 ticket. He said, "I'll give you this $2 ticket for $1 cash." I had about 4 seconds to think about it, so I said, "OK, sure." As I walked away, I decided it must have been some kind of scam -- stolen credit card? -- but I'm still not sure exactly what happened there. In any case, I was able to park all day long in a major American city for $4!
• $ It's good that my literary ambitions are basically drained away by this blog (and, of course, all my Facebook masterpieces), or I would be tempted to write the definitive guide to Children's Museums of the Northeast. This trip brings me to 5, lifetime, I believe -- plus at least 5 other museums with varying degrees of family-friendliness. There is a Children's Museums association, but I'm starting to suspect that the certification process is mostly a formality...
• $ The sequel would be a compendium of hotel pools -- as soon as my fingers un-prune enough that I can hold a pen.
• $ One of the charms of the road trip (or indeed, of getting out of bed each day) is the chance to see something you've never seen before. Quite often it turns out to be something you never imagined wanting to see, but that's another story. For this trip, my nominee for Eighth Wonder of the World was: a restroom hand dryer that actually dries your hands. It's called the Xlerator and after seeing it in action, I can only conclude that it's powered by the same engine as the Boeing 737. The only downside is that every time I use it, it sets my watch back about an hour.

Ten days, 1800 miles, 6 states, 4 hotels, 4 visits to the beach, about a dozen visits to souvenir/gift shops, and all the fast-food cheeseburgers you can eat. Actually a few more than you can eat. In any case, it sure is good to be home. I think I'm going to stick to the roads that are too small to have numbers for awhile.