Thud: Growing Up With The Bee Gees

My version of the Red Ryder BB Gun: “Bee Gees Gold.”

I was thrilled to receive a gift of a Bee Gees puzzle from my younger sister Lars last month.  This is not a joke: I was thrilled to get a 200 piece puzzle of the Bee Gees.  I love the Bee Gees, and not in the half-assed way that it’s become acceptable to love the Bee Gees, either.  They’re not a “guilty pleasure.”  Nor is “their early stuff actually pretty good” to me.  I love the disco stuff from the 70’s just as much as I love their British Invasion stuff.  They were my first favorite band.  I grew up with them.   My love, like all first loves, is crystalline and perfect: unencumbered by the cloudy complications that attend my “grown up” affections.   (I love Neko Case, for example, but I’ve backed away from her latest work, which seems stiff and agenda-addled to me.)  As a Bee Gees fan, I’ve become accustomed to snide comments and backhanded compliments.  After all, the Bee Gees have been given a bad rap. When called upon to do so, I’ve been their defender and I’ll defend them again in this story.  Like the contents of the box handed to me by my sister, this story is a jumble of pieces of the past: a past as distant as the summer of 1981, when my love for the Bee Gees became a full-tilt obsession and as recent as May 27, 2014, when I attended Barry Gibb’s “Mythology” Tour at the United Center in Chicago.   

Jive Turkey Thanksgiving

We’re having Thanksgiving dinner today, but it’s not Thanksgiving. This is a totally bogus holiday, culminating in the partaking of the jive turkey.   Today we celebrate the Totally Bogus in all its many vestiges, from the deviously “counterfeit”  to the flat-out “wiggity-wiggity-whack.”   Jive Turkey Thanksgiving is so Totally Bogus, it’s the Courtney Love of holidays: a holiday that stands before us in tattered evening wear,  confronting us with face smeared out of focus with streaked makeup and multiple plastic surgeries, a holiday that declaims from the top of its rattling lungs: “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.”   Jive Turkey Thanksgiving is, in fact, the only real way to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday that is in itself notoriously jive-ass from top to bottom.

Getaway! Day 3

Awww…

• Mabel has befriended a bossy little girl she calls “Emma” and a preternaturally small boy she calls “Dandle”.  The two indulgently attempt to coach Mabel into joining them in song but Mabel, never a slave to the agenda, regards them with stoney superiority.
• A sign at the entry of the park reads “Michigan Critical Dunes.”  What makes them “critical”?  Did they, too, drive here from the suburbs in a foreign car festooned with hipster stickers, an MA folded up in the glove box?  No?  Well, just who the hell do they think they are, anyway?