Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Tar-zen's Day Off - Part III

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

Last time on Philosophy for a Hungry Planet:  “In my case, things had really had turned out well, and at that point, all I had left to do was to walk up to Jennifer Batten, look her straight in the eye, and say, “Here’s your vintage Pez dispenser.”  And if I could’ve just done that, it would’ve been great.  But that, of course, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…”

And now, the conclusion of “Tar-zen’s Day Off”…

My adventures never seem to work out quite the way I plan them to.  And sometimes, that’s not such a bad thing.  I suppose it’s all just somehow connected to what an adventure comes down to for me. Now, my father is a guy who always expects the absolute worst, so if he goes on an adventure, and everything doesn’t just go to hell right in front of him, then the whole affair has been wildly successful as far as he’s concerned.  He’s a man constantly surprised and delighted by normalcy.

For my mother, though, a successful adventure is all about the plusses and the minuses.  It’s about the ratio between what went right and what went wrong.  And after a certain percentage of things have gone right, the adventure is a success no matter what else happens.  So, if she has two hours to go shopping and wants to hit five stores (and she could do it, too, because the woman is a genius at the art of efficient shopping—it’s like she was born in Terminator mode), lots of different things can happen.  If, of course, she just gets through the five stores, it’s a success even if she doesn’t find anything.  But if she goes through five stores and finds three things on sale, it’s cause for a medium-sized celebration.  If she finds something on sale in all five stores, that calls for a parade. However, if she gets through three stores without finding anything and then gets a flat tire, the adventure isn’t a success.  But that just basically means that she has to get the tire fixed and then claim “do-over” status for the next day.  I mean, my mom is not a woman who accepts defeat.  If, however, she gets through three stores, then gets a flat, then finds a pair of shoes on sale for 85% off at a store while she’s waiting for my dad to come and get her, then the whole adventure is a raging success.  I mean, 85% off anything pretty much trumps any disaster of any type when you’re shopping.  So, my mom never really knows if an adventure has worked out until she gets home and does the math.  

In a way, I’m kind of like a combination of both my parents when it comes to adventures.  Like my dad, I usually expect the worst.  I just don’t plan for it like he does.  I just sort of sit around vaguely fearing it.  And like my mom, I look at the ratio of good and bad things that happen when I decide if an adventure has been successful.  I try to take everything into account, and I tend to be rather generous with myself.  But I’m also very different than either of my parents because to me, every adventure comes down to a moment.  It comes down to The Moment. And whether or not The Moment comes off right is the biggest factor in how successful the adventure really is to me.  The only thing is that half the time, the moment that I think is the The Moment doesn’t turn out to be The Moment at all.

Driving into downtown Toledo with my friend on the Saturday afternoon of the guitar festival was like driving into the opening scene of an old Star Trek episode.  Now, Star Trek was interesting because you could tell what was going to happen just by the way the episode started.  If they got shot at before the opening credits, you knew the whole episode was going to be about outsmarting some vicious enemy race of green Orion pig-people, one of whom Kirk would inevitably fall in love with.  If they went into a time warp and found themselves sitting in paisley shirts in the front row of a Jimi Hendrix concert, you knew that they were going to have to figure out how to restart the warp engines and create a time distortion using nothing but some old tabs of LSD and a discarded bong.  If they beamed down to a planet whose atmosphere was composed almost entirely of milk, butter, eggs, and assorted breakfast meats, you knew that at some point, McCoy was going say, “I’m a doctor, not Paula Deen…or Jimmy Dean…or whoever!” and that the crew was going to have to eat its way out of danger.  I mean, science fiction is nothing if not predictable.

The Star Trek episodes that I liked most, though, were the ones that started off when the Away Team beamed down to a planet that was deserted but shouldn’t have been.  The first line of those episodes was always, “Where is everybody?”  and let’s just be clear that as least as far as TV shows go, no good ever comes from asking that question.  On Star Trek, it always meant that some nameless, faceless security guy in a red shirt was going to get attacked by some weird alien creature that looked like a big flying piece of barf.  And you always knew that was going to happen because any Star Trek character who wasn’t a regular was inevitably going to get killed or podded or disfigured in some horrible way before the first commercial came on.  Those people just never fared well.  And then no matter what form the attack had taken, the next line would always be, “What is that thing?”   That’s the most popular line in science fiction.  Oddly enough, it also seems to be the most popular line in teenage romance movies.  But I digress.

Anyway, going into downtown Toledo was just like landing on a planet with an infestation of flying alien barf creatures.  It’s not, of course, that there actually were alien barf creatures flying through the air.  That would’ve just been weird, even for northeast Ohio.  It’s just that the whole town was completely deserted.  I mean, I have never seen an urban area so utterly devoid of human activity in my life.  There were no stores open.  There were no cars on the street.  There were no people anywhere.  From what I could see, not even homeless people want to hang around in downtown Toledo on a Saturday afternoon.  And I was going to say to my friend, “Where is everybody?” but I figured there was no point in setting that tragedy in motion, so I just kept it to myself.  Luckily, though, neither one of us was wearing a Red Security Guy Shirt of Death, so I figured that we had at least a pretty good shot at making it to the guitar festival alive.

The festival itself was held at the Toledo School for the Arts, and it was actually a very nice place.  More than that, though, it was populated.  And I found that oddly comforting.  I mean, you can only watch so much science fiction before you need a good dose of regular old humanity to calm you down and reassure you that you are, in fact, on planet Earth.  A Valium often doesn’t hurt, either.

When we got into the actual festival, the first thing I wanted to do was to go up to the room where Jennifer Batten was chatting and signing things between shows.  But I just wanted to peek in.  I mean, up until that point, I’d only ever seen her on YouTube.  As far as I knew, she actually was only three inches tall and only appeared for five minutes and forty seconds at a time. I really didn’t have a sense that she was a real person.   To me, she was kind of like a tiny, on-demand eclipse.  Only with a guitar. 

So, I figured that before I actually had to talk to her, I should try to get my brain around the idea that she wasn’t just a musically-gifted little imp who had somehow escaped from my computer and run off to Toledo.  Otherwise, the only thing I could’ve thought to say to her was “What the hell are you doing here?”  And that kind of stuff just tends to make people think you’ve got a whole collection of tin foil hats somewhere.

Needless to say, then, I was perfectly happy to just hang around suspiciously in the doorway, looking scared and vaguely fearing disaster.  To be honest, I’m really quite good at that.  Luckily, though, my friend was with me, and it was (thank God) trusty companion to the rescue again.

Now, the thing about trusty companions is that more than just being the voice of reason, they’re also action-oriented.  They do stuff.  They’re brave.  I mean, think about it.  Was roaring out in the Batmobile to catch criminals really ever Batman’s idea?  Oh sure, he’d hang around in the Batcave and talk about what the Riddler was probably doing, but it was always Robin who basically said, “Holy ‘and-gee-we’re-just-sitting-here-scratching-ourselves,’ Batman!”  That was what really got things going.  And that always seems to be the way it goes.  The Lone Ranger would probably just ride around in circles shooting off his guns without Tonto to say, “You get that the bandits are right over there, don’t you?”  And even in the old movie Gunga Din, it’s the trusty companion/water bearer Gunga Din who takes the initiative during the final battle to climb to the top of the tower and signal for help.  Of course, he gets killed in the end (typical), but at least he takes action.

I think my favorite brave trusty companion, though, has to be The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.  He’s almost foolishly brave, but he’s also a guy who can make a decision.  After all, he’s the one who really leads the charge to steal the Wicked Witch of the West’s broom.  True, the others are there, but The Tin Man is, well, a little hesitant, and The Cowardly Lion is, well, cowardly.  And Dorothy just isn’t any good when it comes to doing battle.  I mean, she never even puts down her purse-basket.  It’s like fighting alongside the Queen of England.  But The Scarecrow has a plan.  He goes in there hell-bent for leather and flying monkey ass.  He’s kicking butts from the word “Go!”  And when you stop to think about it, his bravery is really something because it’s not like he is the toughest character around.  The Cowardly Lion at least has big lion teeth and claws.  And The Tin Man actually has a weapon.  But The Scarecrow is made of straw.  He’s fragile.  For Christ’s sake, he’s flammable.  But he’s the main trusty companion and the bravest one there.

But maybe even more than that, The Scarecrow is really loyal.  I mean, when you think about it, Dorothy Gale is really just a young woman from Kansas on a crime spree.  In the course of the movie, she kills two people and slaps an animal.  Of course, she doesn’t mean to kill The Witch of the East when she first gets there.  She just lands on top of her.  So, that’s like vehicular homicide but with a house.  But then The Good Witch of the North comes down, steals the ruby slippers, and puts them on Dorothy’s feet.  So, that’s conspiracy to commit robbery right there.  And of course, Dorothy doesn’t actually mean to kill The Wicked Witch of the West, either (although, let’s face it, she’s not too broken up about it).  So, that could just be second-degree manslaughter.  But then, she takes the broom.  So, then it’s felony murder.  I mean, if Jack McCoy had been running the D.A.’s office in Oz, he would’ve fried Dorothy Gale up in a skillet.  But The Scarecrow is always there for her, defending her actions and taking her side.  He’s like the perfect public defender.  And when Dorothy leaves Oz, she tells him that she’ll probably miss him the most.  And that’s probably true.  After all, given the string of felonies she commits as a teenager in Oz, she’s probably going to need a good lawyer at some point in the future when she gets back to Kansas.

Fortunately, I was pretty sure that meeting Jennifer Batten wasn’t going to involve quite that much intrigue or anywhere near that level of violence. I mean, I just don’t have the delinquent potential of a Dorothy Gale.  And I haven’t got a house to drop on someone.  Besides, it was a guitar festival, not a scene out of Dog Day Afternoon.  Al Pacino wasn’t prancing around in the hallway yelling, “Attica!  Attica!”  So, it probably wasn’t the toughest challenge my trusty companion had ever faced, although it may well have been the strangest.  Anyway, my friend did a very smart thing and just started walking around in the room looking at various displays.  So, I managed to pry my bony fingers off the doorjamb and follow her.  And the next thing I knew, we were standing at the t-shirt and CD table…five feet away from Jennifer Batten.  The Moment was at hand.  At least that’s what I thought.

Both my friend and I had gotten t-shirts and CDs, and my friend stepped right over to have her CD signed.  Like I said, trusty companions are nothing if not action-oriented.  Then it was my turn.  I actually had a picture that I wanted to have signed, so Jennifer Batten signed it.  Then with all the coolness I could muster, I said, “Oh, and I have something for you.”  And then I pulled out…the Pez head!  I handed it to her and said, “I’m Retroversion on Twitter.  Here’s your vintage Pez dispenser.”  Now, I have to admit that it took her a second to remember the tweet exchange, but she seemed pleased nonetheless.  After all, adults are a lot like children in some ways:  giving them toys makes them happy even if they have no idea why they’re getting them.  So, she immediately put the Pez head in her purse and zipped it up.  I mean, even if there had been some terrible mistake, it wasn’t like I was ever going to see that Pez dispenser again.  It was like “Score!  Pez head!”  She actually did remember the tweet exchange, though, and she laughed, thanked me several times, gave me a high-five, and really did seem to get a kick out of the whole thing. 

So, it had gone off well.  And I got a kick out of it, too.  After all, Jennifer Batten is so good at playing the guitar that it’s almost scary, and even though I’d only ever seen her as just a little tiny bit of a person on my computer, she always seemed kind of larger-than-life to me.  But there at the Guitar Fest CD and t-shirt table, she seemed like a regular person who just liked to laugh and play music and write goofy things on Twitter.  Right at that moment, she didn’t seem so much bigger than I was.

And then she stood up.

Jennifer Batten, Dear Readers, is eighteen feet tall.  I swear to God.

And I don’t know exactly what it was that threw me, but let’s just say that if I had ever believed that she actually was just a miniature guitar player who lived in my computer, I was rather thoroughly disabused of that notion right then and there.  I mean, the woman is tall.  I felt like a kinder, gentler version of Dorothy standing right in front of the great and powerful Oz.  I started feeling around for my purse-basket and looking for Toto.  I had an almost uncontrollable urge to curtsy.  I began to wish I could just go back to Kansas.  And I’m not even from Kansas. 

And then it happened:  I had a vowel movement.  It was like I suddenly realized that I would likely never have the chance to talk to this person again in my life and so I needed to say everything I had ever thought of saying to anyone anywhere ever right at that moment.  It was like I opened my mouth, and the entire contents of every page on the entire Facebook website came spilling out of my head as one long series of incomprehensible guttural noises, grunts, and squeals.  And the whole time, I just kept thinking, “Is she getting taller, or I am falling down?” 

Luckily, my friend pulled me out before I completely lost consciousness.  It was like something out of a war movie where one guy gets shot and the other guy has to drag him to the nearest aid station.  Then again, this was the Toledo School for the Arts, not a scene out of The Guns of Navarone.  It’s not like there was a MASH unit anywhere around.  So, my friend dragged me down to the cafeteria and got me some water and chips, and that seemed to speed my recovery right along.  Food is always the best medicine.  My friend has a couple of kids, so she has special mom-knowledge and knows stuff like that.  My only regret was that I hadn’t thought to bring along an oxygen tank and a tranquilizer gun for myself.

Fortunately, with the encouraging words of my trusty companion, I got back on my feet pretty quickly.  True, I had wrecked my own moment, and under my dad’s theory of a successful adventure, there was no hope.  Everything had gone to hell right in front of me.  Under my dad’s logic, something like this was a perfectly good reason to just go out, find a cliff, and throw yourself off it.  But under my mom’s theory of adventure accounting, enough things could still go right to make it all a success. 

So, at that point, I pretty much had two choices:  I could hang in there and try to get enough other things to go right to make the adventure work out, or I could throw myself off a cliff.  In that light, it wasn’t such a hard choice to make.  I really wanted to live.  Besides, we’d left my friend’s car in Findlay at Jeffrey’s Antiques, so I figured that I at least owed it to her to survive long enough to give her a ride back.  I mean, even the worst disaster of an adventure doesn’t really justify stranding someone in Toledo.

Anyway, my friend and I went to see Jennifer Batten’s show about an hour later, and it was really great.  I’ve heard her describe what she does as “multi-media for ADD,” and it’s kind of true.  She plays electric guitar in sync with backing tracks that she’s already recorded while films that she’s made show on a giant screen.  And it’s not namby-pamby, make-you-feel-all-warm-and-tender-inside, New Age-y music.  It’s some serious hard rock and fusion.  So, you sit there and there’s so much coming at your eyes and your ears that it just overwhelms you.  And it’s really cool.  You just really get carried away by it.  I mean, it’s really something, and I have to admit that I was surprised at what a powerful experience seeing her play live was.  But even more than that, the whole show was a huge plus on the big adventure balance sheet.  I was going to be back in the black in no time.

After the show, my friend said, “Let’s go get our t-shirts signed,” and then she just walked over and started talking to Jennifer Batten.  And all I could think at the time was “You’re a braver man than I, Gunga Din (just don’t go up in the tower).”  And it was totally true.  If it weren’t for my trusty companion, I would’ve still been on the other side of the building clutching the doorjamb.   Either that or I would’ve been lying on the floor in front of the CD and t-shirt table.  Crying.  Whatever the scenario, it wouldn’t have been pretty.  So needless to say, I was really happy to have had such a good friend and trusty companion with me. 

Anyway, when my turn came to have Jennifer Batten sign my shirt, I just kind of thrust it forward and grunted.  That seemed like the safest move for me.  So, she signed the shirt, and I managed to mumble “Thanks” and started to walk away as someone else came up.  But as I was walking away, she said, “Hey, thanks again for the Pez.”  And right at that moment, all I could think of was that commercial from the ‘70s when the little kid gives Mean Joe Green a Coke.  Mean Joe just power-drinks that Coke, and as the kid is walking away, he says, “Hey, kid.  Catch.” and throws him his jersey.  Then the little kid goes, “Wow, thanks Mean Joe.”  I’ve seen that commercial a million times, and it’s so touching that it almost makes you cry.  But right at that moment, I really understood exactly how that little kid felt.  I very nearly said, “Wow, thanks Mean Jennifer,”  and I was almost surprised not to have heard the “Have a Coke and a Smile” jingle playing in the background.  Luckily, though, none of that happened.  If it had, I would almost certainly have burst into tears, and at that point in the day, I really felt that Jennifer Batten and I had been through enough together.

On my way back home, I was doing the adventure math in my head, but I already knew that in the end, this adventure had been a parade-level success.  It was right up there with finding something on sale in every store.  I mean, in all honesty, Jennifer Batten is an extraordinarily nice and friendly person, and the only thing even remotely intimidating about her is how well she plays the guitar.  And even though a few things on my adventure had gone wrong, more things had gone right.  My balance sheet was definitely in the black, and it was actually one of the best adventures I’ve had in a very long time.  When I got home, the first thing I did was call up my mom and tell her all about it.

The funny thing is that despite everything that had happened, I never quite felt like I got The Moment.  And I missed that because to me, The Moment is kind of like magic.  It’s the thing that makes me realize why I even went on the adventure to begin with.  It’s what made it all worth doing.  So, even though the adventure had been a success, I still felt like it wasn’t over.  And indeed, it wasn’t.  The next day, I went on Twitter, and there was a tweet from Jennifer Batten.  It said, “Thanx Ohioans for coming to the shows and esp 2 the ladies bearing a vintage pez!  It pays 2 tweet!” But what really capped the whole thing off and ultimately turned out to actually be The Moment of my whole adventure was the last line of the tweet.  It said, “Next time bring me a Chevy Silverado…”  I laughed out loud when I read that.  I thought it was cheeky.  And I like a little cheek in a person.  But even more than that, it made me realize that I love a challenge and that sometimes doing something goofy just because you can is reason enough.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy. 



© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Tar-zen's Day Off - Part II

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

Last time on Philosophy for a Hungry Planet:  “Of course, the festival itself and all that the trip entailed would’ve made my imaginary stalker proud, and I would definitely have been someone worth following on that day and maybe even for several days before that.  But that, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…”

And now, Part II of “Tar-Zen’s Day Off”…

You really have to wonder sometimes what makes people want to go on an adventure.  It’s the same sort of thing, I guess, that makes little kids want to stuff crayons up their noses or that makes usually rational adults decide to remodel their kitchens even though they know absolutely nothing about home improvement.  There’s something sort of silly and maybe even downright stupid about it, and one part of your brain knows it.  So, while you’re sizing up the difference between how big a crayon is and how big your nostrils are or peeling up perfectly good vinyl flooring just because you’ve got the power tools to do it, one part of your brain is going, “What the hell?” 

But another part of your brain is thinking about how you’ll be the envy of every kid in the second grade when you show up with crayons hanging out of your face or how jealous your new kitchen floor is going to make the people next door.  And that part of your brain is going, “What the hell!”  It’s a challenge.  It’s an adventure.  And most people just can’t walk away from either.  That’s what makes humanity great.  It’s also what keeps pediatricians and general contractors all over the world in business.

My whole adventure in Toledo started one day on Twitter when Jennifer Batten said that she wanted a tornado machine.  She put out a tweet that gave a link to a piece of art a guy had created that was basically a tornado chamber and wrote, “If you loved me, you’d buy this for me.  K?”  And I thought that was funny.  But more than that, I thought it was cheeky.  And I like a little cheek in a person. So, I replied to it and said “I can’t afford to love you.  How much art is involved for just a general sense of fondness?”  And then, much to my surprise, she tweeted back, “Hmmm…maybe just a vintage pez dispenser : ).”  So right then and there, I decided that when I went to Toledo to see Jennifer Batten play, I would give her a vintage Pez dispenser.  It would be an adventure. And it would be less trouble than remodeling a kitchen…and far less painful than the crayon thing.

Now, I was never that into Pez heads as a kid because they just weren’t that big in my neighborhood.  And besides, I was a SweeTart devotee.  My favorite was the giant SweeTart.  It was about the size of a hockey puck and took just about as long to gnaw through.  I mean, eating one of those things was a project.  By the time you were finished, your tongue was so swollen that you could hardly speak and several of your teeth were usually loose.  But, God, they were good.  I’d eat little SweeTarts if I couldn’t get a giant one, and failing that, I went for Smarties.  So, I never knew too much about Pez.  They just didn’t register on my candy radar.

But if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s find things.  In fact, sometimes I even lose things on purpose just so I can find them later.  And I’m particularly good at finding old things because there are only two rules to doing it:  know what you’re looking for, and know where to look.  But even beyond that, I was raised on shopping.  It’s in my blood.  The first book I learned to read was called Ann Likes Red, and it was about a little girl who goes shopping for a complete outfit—dress, shoes, hat, gloves, and purse.  I myself felt no connection whatsoever to the character, but I was totally into the story.  The only part I didn’t like was that Ann’s mother was apparently OK with paying retail, and in my family, that was like being OK with committing a felony.

Anyway, step one was to learn everything I could about vintage Pez stuff.  I figured that would take about an hour.  I figured wrong.  The sheer amount of information available on collecting Pez dispensers is mind-boggling.  I mean, it’s like a shadow industry.  It’s like people are dealing them out of the backs of unmarked vans in alleys all over the country, and I wouldn’t be surprised if trading in vintage Pez dispensers is propping up puppet governments all over the world.  And everything I read pretty much boiled down to one thing:  there are a few things you can look at, but dating Pez heads is really hard (and anyone who has ever dated a Pez head will back me up on this…but I digress).  Anyway, I finally got a decent idea of what I was looking for, so I turned to my local network of vintage stores and dove in.

Now, one of the other, lesser-known secrets of effective shopping is knowing who to be when you walk into a store.  People always say that you should just be yourself in life, and as a general rule, I agree with that.  You should be yourself.  You just shouldn’t do it all the time.  As I’ve learned from watching my parents work over pawn shop dealers and outsmart used car salesmen through the years, when you’re awash in the world of the previously-owned, being your honest, genuine, trusting little milquetoast self isn’t going to get you anything but screwed.  You have to be whoever you need to be if you want to get the best deal.

My father, of course, excels at implying that he’s somehow connected to the Mafia or is part of some secret government agency, but when I go into an antique and collectibles store, I turn into Omar Shariff in Lawrence of Arabia.  I’m not exactly sure why.  It probably has something to do with the lighting.  But I become dark and swarthy and mysteriously handsome.  I may even grow a mustache.  I’ve never actually checked.  But above all else, I become remarkably and almost magically shrewd.  I slice through rows of collectible merchandise, my black robes fluttering behind me.  I cut through stacks of vintage clutter, my eyes keen to the best deals.  I am, without a doubt, the courageous leader of the Bedouins, capable of magnificent and heroic feats of commerce.   I am a shopping force to be reckoned with, a master at the art of haggling, a whirlwind of consumer savvy, a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman…no, wait a sec, that’s Victor/Victoria. 

Anyway, there were no vintage Pez heads to be found in any of my usual stores.  In fact, there were no vintage Pez heads to be found in my whole freakin’ town.  So, I may have been beloved as the brave leader of the Bedouin nation, but I was completely and utterly denied as a Pez collector.  And yet, I refused to give up because if there is one thing I know for sure about finding vintage stuff, it’s that in the end, it’s a lot like setting up the perfect one-night stand:  you have to know what you’re after and have a good idea of where you might be able to get it, but ultimately, it all just comes down to luck and dogged persistence.  

So, at 5:15 pm on the day before I was supposed to go to Toledo, I found myself 42 miles from home, standing in front of the pearly gates of collectors’ heaven:  The Heart of Ohio Antique Mall.  I didn’t actually fall to my knees and call out to God, but it would’ve been appropriate.  The Heart of Ohio is one of the biggest antique malls in the United States, and it’s the mother ship to collectors across the Midwest.  And it’s also a lot like a bordello—you’ll find what you’re looking for, but you’ll pay retail for it.

Anyway, I quickly realized that being Omar Shariff would be of no use whatsoever in that situation.  I mean, becoming dark and swarthy and mysteriously handsome just isn’t all that helpful when you’re a woman in a hurry. What I needed was Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, a ruthless shopping machine perfectly willing and able to push small children and old people out of the way if necessary.  I also mixed in a little Jim and Tammy Bakker and managed to convert three store employees to my search using nothing but a detailed description of the beauty of my vision and the promise of the glory that would await us all when we found a vintage Pez head.  If I had tried a little harder, I probably could’ve gotten them to give me all their money, too.

By the time they closed the store at 6:00 pm, my flock and I had managed to look in all of the 350 showcases in the place.  We had covered most all of the booths, and in the end, there were seven Pez dispensers.  Seven.  Out of 116,000 square feet of stuff. Five of them weren’t really vintage, so that left me with an easy choice between just two.  I picked the one that I thought was Porky Pig since it was in the best shape, but I have to admit that he was kind of a strange looking Porky Pig.  He had some seriously pronounced cheekbones, and his ears were slanted back and kind of pointed.  He actually looked sort of Vulcan and really just ever so slightly evil.  But he was a vintage Pez.  Mission complete.  Zero casualties.  It was everything a cyborg shopper could hope for.

And yet, one thing about it all didn’t seem quite right.  That Pez dispenser was just too clean.  Now, there are very few times in life when you actually want things to be dirty.  I mean, when you’re doing laundry, you don’t want the clothes to be crusty and mildew-ridden.  Just that kind of “worn once” feeling will do.  And when you take a shower, you don’t want to rinse yourself off and see water that looks like it came out of a drainage ditch pouring off your body.  Most people don’t ever want to be that dirty.  In fact, I think most of the cleaning we do is really about feeling like we’re restoring order to chaos, and you don’t need to have to remove a layer of visible filth do that.

But when it comes to old stuff, a little dirt isn’t such a bad thing.  You expect a little old dust pile-up in the crevices.  You aren’t surprised by a slightly sticky feeling.  That stuff is like your guarantee of aged-ness.  You don’t want to find it on old people, but you do want to see it on old stuff.  So, having a clean Pez dispenser made me more than a little paranoid.

Anyway, I ended up finding out a couple of things about that Pez head.  First, it was made sometime in the late 1960s, so it was vintage, despite how clean it was.  And it wasn’t Porky Pig.  It was Practical Pig from The Three Little Piggies.  He was the responsible pig in the bunch who always ended up having to make some sort of device to trick the Big Bad Wolf and rescue Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig, both of whom were just kind of like your basic stoner pigs—not real smart but really into having a good time.  So, it always fell to Practical Pig to save the day, which he inevitably did through wit, ingenuity, and quite often, sheer guile.  For a barnyard animal, he was pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, Practical Pig should’ve had a hat.  And he didn’t.  And that was a problem.  I was sure that I would stumble on one eventually, but unfortunately, I didn’t have “eventually” to work with.  I was leaving for Toledo early the next morning.  And as I sat in front of my computer searching for every antique store between my house and Toledo that would open early enough for me to go there before the guitar festival, I realized that this had become more than just an adventure.  This had become a quest.

Of course, when you really stop to think about it, pretty much all good adventures involve a quest.  And it’s usually a quest for an object that isn’t all that important in and of itself.  I mean, to get back to Kansas, Dorothy has to bring the Wizard of Oz the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.  That’s her quest.  She has to go get a broom.  If I was the Wizard of Oz, I would’ve asked for something better, like maybe that huge crystal ball the witch has.  You could probably get some serious cash for that on Ebay.   And if I was Dorothy, I would’ve just gone to the Emerald City Costco and bought a broom.  I mean, seriously, how would the Wizard ever know?  He doesn’t do his own shopping.  He never leaves his…wizard room.

Anyway, I found myself at 10:15 am on the morning of the guitar festival standing outside Jeffrey’s Antique Gallery in Findlay, Ohio, 45 minutes away from Toledo.  Jeffrey’s is the sister store to the Heart of Ohio, and even though it’s not quite as big as the mother ship, it was the biggest place between my house and Toledo.  It seemed like my best shot at either finding Practical Pig’s hat or a completely different vintage Pez head. 

I was meeting a friend there, and that was a good thing.  A trusty companion is an essential element in a good quest because if you go out questing on your own for too long, you tend to get a little weird.  After all, a quest is really about getting completely obsessed with finding a somewhat trivial object, and at a certain point, you need someone who hasn’t been sucked into your quest to pull you out of it.  You need to have a voice of reason so that you can be as unreasonable as you have to be to go on a quest in the first place.  Without a trusty companion, you’re pretty much working without a net.

Of course, it doesn’t always work even if you do have a good, rational companion.  I mean, look at Moby Dick.  Starbuck spends the whole novel saying, “Look, Ahab, let’s just catch some whales and go home.  We don’t need to be chasing that white one all over hell and back.”  And you’d really think that Ahab would’ve listened to him considering that Moby Dick had already bitten off his leg.  You’d just think Ahab would’ve learned not to mess with that whale.  But of course, Ahab won’t listen, and he ends up getting pretty much everybody killed.

But think about how different the story would’ve been if Starbuck had said, “Look, enough with this white whale thing already.  Do you not get that this fish is crazy?” and Ahab had said, “You’re right.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  That bastard whale already ate my leg.  Let’s just go home.”  It would’ve been a very different novel if Ahab had only listened to his companion.  True, it wouldn’t be great literature, and no one would’ve had occasion to name an entire chain of coffee stores after the first mate, but at least the story would’ve had a happy ending.

Of course, in contemporary times, it seems like the trusty companion has fared a little better.  Then again, maybe not.  I mean, Goose is the voice of reason in Top Gun on Maverick’s insane quest to reclaim his family’s honor (which is kind of worthless since both his parents are dead and he himself has no children), and Maverick gets him killed.  And then, of course, in Road House, Sam Elliot shows up as the trusty companion/mentor to Patrick Swayze, who is hell-bent on using his clout as a bouncer to bring true justice to some dipstick town of about 30 people…and Patrick Swayze gets him killed.  So, maybe the moral of the story here is that the next time someone offers you a job as a trusty companion, you might want to think twice before you take it.

Anyway, I don’t think my friend had thought much about any of these issues because she agreed to meet me at Jeffrey’s Antiques and to go along on the final leg of the quest.  And besides, I had no intention of ejecting her out of a fighter jet even if the quest did go bad.  I mean, the woman has a family, for God’s sake.  The only thing I wish is that we would’ve at least had some questing knight gear.  But these days with all the heightened security around, no one is likely to let two women in metal helmets with swords pass without at least some suspicion.  And beyond that, shopping in a suit of armor is harder than you might think.

At any rate, I had already gone into the store and converted at least one employee to my quest before my friend arrived.  And as I was standing outside making a mental note to myself to start a ministry when I got home, she pulled up, and our quest began.  And I have to say that as trusty quest companions go, she was really quite excellent, especially given the relative amount of danger she’d put herself in just by taking the job.

Jeffrey’s itself isn’t exactly the easiest store to navigate around in, and most antique malls are like that.  In a way, they’re disorienting like casinos are, but they’re not that way on purpose.  It’s just the enormous amount of stuff in every booth that makes it hard to take it all in.  But I have to admit that my friend was even more diligent than I was when it came to looking through things.  I was on hyper-quest by then.  I had gotten to the point where I actually believed that if there was a vintage Pez dispenser in that place, it would call to me.  I would be able to smell it from 50 feet away.  I would hear tiny squeals coming from its tiny Pez head.  So, you know, I had kind of lost my perspective.  I was just using The Force at that point.  But my trusty companion just kept moving along at a steady pace through the store while I attempted to commune with the great Pez god in the sky.

After we’d looked through every booth there, we had found only one Pez dispenser in the entire store.  It was a Santa Claus, and it wasn’t as old as the one I already had.  So, I started to get a little dejected.  And it was then that my trusty companion did what the best trusty companions do:  she reminded me that the object of the quest didn’t need to be perfect.  I already had a vintage Pez head, and as she saw it, “That’s gotta get you something.”  Translation:  enough with the white whale already.  And she was right.  After all, it wasn’t like Jennifer Batten was holding my mother hostage and was going cut off her fingers unless I delivered an absolutely perfect vintage Pez dispenser.  I mean, the whole adventure started with a tweet, not a ransom note.  And I have to hand it to my friend—she was the voice of reason when I needed one.

As my trusty companion and I got into my car and continued our trek to Toledo, I realized that in an odd sort of way, the hatless Practical Pig kind of was the perfect Pez head to give to Jennifer Batten.  After all, besides just playing the guitar and writing music, she also does glass art and steampunk sculpture.  And she made most of the films that go with her songs.  All in all, she’s a rather handy person, and if there was someone who really could make a cool hat for Practical Pig, it would be her.  So, I guess that in the end, my quest had worked out in just the way that it should have.  And maybe that’s why people go on adventures in the first place—just to see how things are going to turn out.  In my case, things had really had turned out well, and at that point, all I had left to do was to walk up to Jennifer Batten, look her straight in the eye, and say, “Here’s your vintage Pez dispenser.”  And if I could’ve just done that, it would’ve been great.  But that, of course, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy. 



© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.