Week 3, baby!
How about that major sports event last night? Super Bowl [insert proper Roman numerals]! Pretty cool, am I right? So glad [insert team name] won the game. They earned it!
And the commercials! Oh, man! Can you believe [insert celebrities’ names] did that? Never thought I’d see the day they’d parody [insert movie, character, pop culture event]!
Oh, well. It’s all over until next year. Let’s get to this week’s Dispatch:
1) When I was 19, I worked at a snack bar in the Poconos. It was just me and one other guy, and it was located in a ski resort that was more interested in selling timeshares than anything else. The snack bar served breakfast and lunch. It was easy diner fare like bacon and eggs, pancakes, and waffles in the morning, and burgers, sandwiches, and soup in the afternoon.
One of us would work the counter (taking orders and working the register), and the other person would cook. We switched off duties every day, so if I cooked on Monday, Tuesday meant I’d be on counter duty. On days off, the one person working would handle both duties – take the order, cook the food, and ring up the customer on the old register that didn’t even have a spool of paper for receipts the entire six months I worked there.
We were never really busy because most of the patrons were timeshare salespeople and resort workers. And maybe on weekends, we’d get some people who were hanging around, waiting to hear a pitch on why they should buy an overpriced timeshare.
I didn’t make much money working that job. Just barely enough to put gas in my car and maybe take my girlfriend out to dinner once in a while. The bulk of my measly paycheck went towards the rent I had to pay my father and stepmother so I could sleep in their unheated basement.
One of the benefits of the job, however, was that I could eat for free when I was working. Which didn’t do me much good when I wasn’t working, and my father and stepmother insisted I was only paying them for “room,” and NOT “room and board.” But my girlfriend was a college student and still lived at home with mom and dad, and most nights I could eat a home cooked meal at their house. I repaid them by washing dishes afterwards, and doing some yardwork on weekends. I didn’t feel like that was enough, though.
I would sometimes take food from the snack bar. Make myself a couple of sandwiches or a couple of burgers if I was going to be off work the next day. I justified it as: “Hey, if I was working, I would be allowed to eat this. So why couldn’t I take it with me to eat later?”
In that same resort, next to the snack bar, was a bar. A bar bar. The snack bar closed at 4:00, and the bar opened at 5:00. Once in a while, one of the bar’s employees would forget to lock their storage room.
I wasn’t much of a drinker back then, but my girlfriend’s mom would have a few vodka tonics every night. Once, to show my appreciation for allowing me to use her home as my second home, and feeding me dinner fairly regularly, and allowing me to sleep over once a while as long as I slept on the floor of my girlfriend’s room and didn’t stray from that spot (Ha, right!), I pilfered a bottle of vodka from the bar and brought it to her.
None of this is the point of my story. Bear with me a little longer.
The stolen vodka elicited a bunch of questions from my girlfriend’s mother. Such as, what else was I doing? Was I stealing other things? I admitted to taking extra food here and there.
Then my girlfriend’s mom asked me, “Do you play the piano?”
Now folks, I thought this was an odd segue. How did we go from asking about stolen goods to inquiring about my musical abilities? But as I said, girlfriend’s mom enjoyed her nightly vodka and the bottle I brought her was being put to use, so maybe that had something to do with the abrupt change in subject.
“No,” I answered. “Never played the piano.” I admitted, though, that I had played a clarinet in music class back in middle school.
My girlfriend and her mother broke into uproarious laughter. You would have thought I had just delivered the best joke ever. They were practically clutching their sides from laughing at what I said. In between trying to catch her breath, my girlfriend kept saying, “He’s so green.”
Finally able to compose themselves, they explained that “playing the piano” was street slang for “stealing money out of the register.” I nodded along, but had to tell them that I had never heard it phrased that way before. They assured me, oh, that’s definitely the street slang for it. But obviously I was a young, naïve man (“green”), and of course didn’t know much about street terms. This is what my girlfriend and her mother told me.
Now, folks…
I grew up in a family where the majority of men were smalltime criminals. They stole, they ran cons, they bought and sold stolen merchandise, and occasionally they dealt drugs. They also had much shadier friends. I never heard anyone refer to stealing money from the cash register as “playing the piano.”
I worked a variety of retail jobs and saw people get fired for stealing money. Never heard it referred to as “playing the piano.”
I worked at Borders (briefly) where one female coworker was stealing so much out of the registers, the police set up a sting operation and caught her. Never heard anyone say she was “playing the piano.”
Over the decades since, I’ve read a ton of classic crime fiction and contemporary crime fiction. I’ve read true crime books and seen more than my fair share of true crime shows and docudramas. Have never heard the phrase “playing the piano” in regards to someone stealing money from the cash register.
All of this is to say:
I sometimes wonder where they heard that phrase. A street term? The closest my girlfriend and her mom got to the streets was when they’d drive down to the city to go Christmas shopping at Bloomingdales. Or maybe over the summer when they would vacation in the Hamptons.
I often wonder if someone told them that “playing the piano” bit as a way to mess with them. Like that episode of THE OFFICE when Darryl teaches Michael some phrases “to help with his interracial conversation,” but it’s just gibberish, nonsensical stuff.
2) I think anyone over the age of 6 knows those slips of paper in fortune cookies are all preprinted in some factory somewhere and there’s nothing magical about them. And yet…
And yet I’ve never been able to eat one of those cookies without reading what’s on the paper.
I know it’s bullshit. I know it’s all vague phrases that can be interpreted a dozen different ways. I know I’m going to forget what the slip of paper says almost as soon as I put it down. But I’ve never been able to eat a fortune cookie without reading what’s on that slip of paper.
3) Saw a post someone made about favorite and least favorite superhero movies. Maybe this is a hot take, but…
I’ve never understood why WATCHMEN, Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s 12 issue comic book series, was not better received. It’s pretty faithful to the comic, even using much of the same visuals and dialogue, and keeps all the main story beats.
The few changes Snyder made, honestly, I thought improved on the story (and this is coming from a major Alan Moore fan, by the way). So why the disdain from the fans?
4) What I’m watching:
Still on Season 4 of SEVERANCE. Latest episode (episode 4) had me yelling at the TV for the first half of the episode because it seemed like one of those episodes someone writes for “filler.” You know:
“We need to build up to this, but we can’t do it too fast, so we need an episode here that makes us feel like we’re making progress. But really, we’re just spinning our wheels.”
In the old days, comic book readers would recognize it as a fill-in issue. Something to give the creative team time to catch up on the main story. In the world of TV sitcoms, they used “clip shows.”
I was proven wrong in the second half of the episode, though, as some major events took place, and there was a big reveal.
I predicted the big reveal from the first episode of the season, by the way. (It’s true! I’ve got a witness!). Nice to see it wasn’t dragged out to the end of the season. That was a good twist.
Also caught YOU CAN COUNT ON ME, a 2000 Kenneth Lonergan (MANCHESTER BY THE SEA) film, starring Mark Ruffalo, Laura Linney, Matthew Broderick, and Rory Culkin. It’s a dramedy about a sister trying to reconnect with her estranged brother, and also dealing with a new boss at work and life as a single mom.
It’s more entertaining than I’m making it sound, although it took a bit to get going (my opinion). Seeing Matthew Broderick in his usual third banana role got me thinking:
After FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF, playing the smart-alecky, quick witted, always-one-step-ahead title character, he switched to playing “the uptight guy” in every movie thereon. The uptight boss (YOU CAN COUNT ON ME), the uptight teacher (ELECTION), the uptight husband (pretty much every movie).
Wonder if that was intentional, or just the way it worked out. Anyway…
5) What I’m reading:
LET’S GO PLAY AT THE ADAMS’ by Mendal W. Johnson is one of those books I nearly turned my nose up at based on the plot description, which sounds like a mix of LORD OF THE FLIES and Stephen King’s GERALD’S GAME. Since it was originally published in 1974 and was long out-of-print, the fact that a publisher decided to reissue it made me give it a look. I downloaded a sample and it was enough to keep me reading, so…
Yes, I have some issues with it. There’s a suspension of disbelief needed for some of it, and many instances of, “If this character would just do such-and-such, they could get out of this situation.” I’m still reading, however, because as schlocky as the plot may be, and how naïve (or stupid) the main character might be, the author delves into some nice bits of psychological deep-diving and character introspection.
And I’m hoping for some serious come-uppance for a few characters.
Or most of them, really.
But I have a bad feeling there won’t be.
That’s your Dispatch for the week.
Slade Grayson is a writer who relies on the kindness of strangers. And readers. And sometimes strange readers. You can buy his books here, or buy him a coffee here.