7 July 2007
Cathie was my best friend when I was in my early teens. She was Crosland’s sister, and Crosland was a friend of my brother Steve, and Crosland was also called Steve – but let’s not confuse things. You get the idea, though. We were a tight-knit, almost incestuous crowd.
Crosland was my first boyfriend, and we went steady for two weeks when I was in seventh grade. He was tall, big-boned, with a wicked sense of humour, and, due to the early onslaught of puberty and testosterone, had the distinction of being the only kid to ever get thrown out of eighth grade for growing a beard.
All the other girls in my class had boyfriends and were going steady so I asked Crosland if he would mind going steady for a couple of weeks to improve my cred among the popular girls. It was sweet of him to help me out. It didn’t work, of course.
His sister Cathie was also tall and big-boned, with that same wicked sense of humour that seemed to be inherited from their mom who once told Cathie and I that the surest form of birth control was to learn to say,“Cool it, sweetheart!” in a way that showed we really meant it.
While I went to the local Catholic school, Cathie had the bad luck to go to Bellflower High, which languished in the bottom two percent for achievement of all the schools in the United States. It was a staunchly blue collar area, mainly skilled and unskilled manual workers, and I guess they thought there wasn’t a lot of point wasting money on educating their children.
Bellflower was situated in The Flats, that part of Greater Los Angeles which, unlike Beverley Hills and Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley is, well…flat. It had sprung up on farmland after the Second World War to satisfy the housing needs of all those veterans cashing in on the GI Bill which gave them cheap mortgages. It was relentlessly dull and, outside of the small plots of grass in the backyards of those GI Bill houses, everything seemed to be covered in asphalt. To counter this dullness, the city council voted to cheer the place up by painting some of the asphalt areas green to resemble grass. But it did not look like grass. It looked like green asphalt.
Bellflower had only two famous sons as far as I knew: the banjo player from the 60’s group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the heavyweight boxer Jerry Quarry who was also known as the “Bellflower Bomber”. I doubt if Beverley Hills can boast a heavyweight boxer among its famous sons.
There were two grade schools that sat opposite the street from each other. Saint Dominic Savio, known as SDS, which was the Catholic school, and Ed. C. Lewis, the public school. California was so full of migrants after World War Two, that it was hard to find a native Californian, and Bellflower seemed to be comprised of Irish Catholics from the Midwest whose kids went SDS, and Southern Baptists who came, unsurprisingly, from the South, and whose kids went to Ed C. Lewis. A lot of tribal enmity went on and I remember a public school kid taunting me with, “You Catholic!” as if it were a bad word. Not knowing how to respond, I retorted, “You Public!”
The boys from both tribes regularly met up after school to thump each other, and once our school was daubed with graffiti that said: “SDS STANDS FOR SOME DUME SCHOOL!” I refer you back to my previous comment on the standard of education in Bellflower.
Cathie introduced me to her friend Carol, whose family had not long arrived in California from the backwater of Big Bay, Michigan. They lived in one of the only really old houses in Bellflower – a former clapboard farmhouse that had a cast iron bath like the ones in the Laurel and Hardy films.
Everybody in Bellflower seemed to have a gang or a tribe and we thought we ought to form one too. So we went off to the Goodwill shop to see if we could find some second hand clothes that would make an appropriate uniform for our gang. We found a bunch of old fashioned dresses that had probably belonged to someone’s deceased grandmother at the turn of the century (like 1900 I’m talking about here not 2000). With the proper bonnet, they would have made us look like extras out of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. On the basis of these dresses, we formed a singing group called “The Girls They Left Behind” with the motto, “The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine; and the tongue that drops acid shall never touch mine.” (Acid was LSD, for those who are too young to know that, which is probably just about everyone these days.)
The only gig we ever did was for the USO at Camp Pendleton, for a bunch of very horny soldiers who would have wolf whistled and cheered if we’d just got up there and farted. But of course we were total crap, and we were never asked back.
At that point we realised that we were “The Girls They Left Behind for Obvious Reasons”, and resolved to find a new image. A movie at the local drive-in would deliver it.
The Parmount Drive-In was a local hangout because you paid by the carload, so you could cram in as many of your friends as would fit in your car. You sometimes had to watch the movie with the windshield wipers on and the tinny mono speaker hanging on your car window produced truly terrible sound. But that wasn’t why you went there.
I had my first date at the age of fifteen at the Paramount Drive-In, with my brother’s friend Larry, otherwise known as Bandito Bob (for absolutely no reason I can think of!), and another couple. It was there I learned what the B-movie was for. After sitting through “Valley of the Dolls”, an unbelievably crap movie from an unbelievably crap novel by Jacqueline Susann, the B-movie came on. After a few minutes I noticed there was a disconcerting amount of breathing going on in the back seat. When I turned around to see what was going back there, I caught a glimpse of a guy biting a breast which I assume was not his own. When I turned back, I saw Bandito Bob taking his glasses off and getting ready to dive in at the drive-in. Fortunately, Mrs. Crosland had told me how to handle this situation and Bandito Bob was forced to watch the movie all the way through.
A few months later the featured film playing at the Paramount Drive-In was a biker/girl gang flick called “The Mini-Skirt Mob”. Full of tough talk and big hair, the movie followed the exploits of a girl biker gang who were bent on revenge against the leader’s ex-boyfriend because he had betrayed Bikerdom by settling down with a “nice girl”. The whole thing ends in a hail of Molotov Cocktails in the desert, and Cathie, Carol and I thought it was one of the worst films ever made. So we decided to call ourselves the Mini-Skirt Mob.
This required a whole new image, attitude and theme song, which was duly written:
“The Mini-Skirt Mob,
The Mini-Skirt Mob,
Caused many a heart to flip!
The Mini-Skirt Mob,
The Mini-Skirt Mob,
Caused many a head to split!”
No shrinking violets, us! We were now a girl gang!
Unfortunately no one took us seriously. Even when we kidnapped Dirty Dave and refused to let him go until his friends came up with a ransom in chocolate chip cookies! They were too stoned and needed to hang onto the cookies in case they got the munchies; so finally, after a night of terror, in which he was tied up and held against his will for four hours by three women in mini-skirts, we let Dave go. For some reason, he pleaded with us to stay and we had to kick him out.
We obviously needed to become more frightening, and it was about this time that Cathie had a birthday and was given a Milton Bradley ouija board with a plastic pointer and printed instructions on how to contact the Sprit World. It was our destiny, we realised, to take the Mini-Skirt Mob into the Black Arts and become witches.
Our first experiments with the occult were pretty disappointing. The pointer would either not move at all or just fall off the board. After a while, we could just about get it to answer a question by slowly inching to Yes, No or Maybe. (What’s Maybe about anyway? You need to contact the Spirit World to get a Maybe?)
The Sprit of the Board was just shy, I guess. Because after a while it moved more fluently; and when I asked it when I would next get a letter from my boyfriend Gypsy, it spelled out "Thursday". And you know what? I got a letter from him the next Thursday! Spooky, eh?
Once we got used to the Spirit of the Board, the pointer began to speed up. I asked it if I would marry Gypsy and it said no. I asked it when I would next fall in love and it told me that I would be seventeen and that it wouldn’t work out. It told me that my next love affair after that would be when I was twenty-three! Anything we wanted to know, the Spirit of the Board would tell us!
After a while we became quite chummy with the Spirit. He told us he had been a soldier who was killed during the American Civil War. His nickname, he told us, was Banana which I thought was a completely crap name for a Spirit of the Board, but it was his board I guess. We asked Banana about his experiences during the Civil War and if he ever smoked dope. (Okay, this was the late Sixties, right?) He told us that there was no marijuana but that he did do “Nightshade”.
For a while we liked being witches a lot, and we spent hours on that board. Carol made herself a red witch's robe and Cathie a black one. We learned about spells and Tarot cards and all manner of fortune telling, just in case Banana didn’t have the full scoop. But then we got bored. And sceptical. Until the Spirit wouldn’t talk to us any more and Banana went back into the box.
It was not a wasted exercise, however. A couple years later I had to do a project for Sister Marcellina’s religion class. These were intensely ecumenical times and the assignment was to prepare and give a talk to the class about a non-Catholic Christian religion.
Basically, I just couldn’t be bothered doing a bunch of onerous research about something I couldn’t care less about. So I turned for help to my sisters in the Church of the Latter Day Mini-Skirt Mob. And we invented a new religion: Lethenium Mysticism.
Lethenium Mysticism was born in New England in the Seventeenth Century, when witchcraft had been driven underground by the Salem witch burnings. A small tribe of white witches had converted to Christianity but continued to practice witchcraft in secret, forming the secret church of Lethenian Mystics which is still in existence today as a tiny Christian sect. The cult does not have priests, but priestesses, since women are considered better conduits to the spiritual than men. A priestess is trained from the age of seven in the White Arts, and wears a black robe until, at the age of sixteen, she is confirmed in a “Witching Ceremony” where she is given The Red Robe, symbol of the Lethenian cleric.
See? You’re almost believing this aren’t you? I accompanied my talk with Polaroid photos we had taken, starring Cathie and Carol and even Carol’s unwitting mother, pretending we were at a Witching Ceremony where Carol had been given the Red Robe. I even brought the Red Robe (that Carol had knocked up one bored afternoon on her Singer sewing machine) for the class to examine. What was I thinking of? How could I possibly have expected to get away with that? But I did. I got an A.
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as I child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man (or in this case a woman), I put away the things of a child.” And so we did. By the time we graduated from high school the Milton Bradley ouija board and its plastic pointer had been packed off to some charity shop somewhere (but not a Christian one since such boards are conduits to Satan) along with The Red Robe and the old-fashioned dresses of The Girls They Left Behind. And the mini-skirts. We grew up and grew away, which is the way of things.
Though I thought I had my future all planned out, it worked out different, as I guess it usually does. I didn’t marry Gypsy. Instead I fell in love at seventeen, and again at twenty-three. And, some years later, I was reading about soldiers in the American Civil War, and I discovered that a commonly used drug of the time was Belladonna, derived from Nightshade.
If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.
Cathie was my best friend when I was in my early teens. She was Crosland’s sister, and Crosland was a friend of my brother Steve, and Crosland was also called Steve – but let’s not confuse things. You get the idea, though. We were a tight-knit, almost incestuous crowd.
Crosland was my first boyfriend, and we went steady for two weeks when I was in seventh grade. He was tall, big-boned, with a wicked sense of humour, and, due to the early onslaught of puberty and testosterone, had the distinction of being the only kid to ever get thrown out of eighth grade for growing a beard.
All the other girls in my class had boyfriends and were going steady so I asked Crosland if he would mind going steady for a couple of weeks to improve my cred among the popular girls. It was sweet of him to help me out. It didn’t work, of course.
His sister Cathie was also tall and big-boned, with that same wicked sense of humour that seemed to be inherited from their mom who once told Cathie and I that the surest form of birth control was to learn to say,“Cool it, sweetheart!” in a way that showed we really meant it.
While I went to the local Catholic school, Cathie had the bad luck to go to Bellflower High, which languished in the bottom two percent for achievement of all the schools in the United States. It was a staunchly blue collar area, mainly skilled and unskilled manual workers, and I guess they thought there wasn’t a lot of point wasting money on educating their children.
Bellflower was situated in The Flats, that part of Greater Los Angeles which, unlike Beverley Hills and Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley is, well…flat. It had sprung up on farmland after the Second World War to satisfy the housing needs of all those veterans cashing in on the GI Bill which gave them cheap mortgages. It was relentlessly dull and, outside of the small plots of grass in the backyards of those GI Bill houses, everything seemed to be covered in asphalt. To counter this dullness, the city council voted to cheer the place up by painting some of the asphalt areas green to resemble grass. But it did not look like grass. It looked like green asphalt.
Bellflower had only two famous sons as far as I knew: the banjo player from the 60’s group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the heavyweight boxer Jerry Quarry who was also known as the “Bellflower Bomber”. I doubt if Beverley Hills can boast a heavyweight boxer among its famous sons.
There were two grade schools that sat opposite the street from each other. Saint Dominic Savio, known as SDS, which was the Catholic school, and Ed. C. Lewis, the public school. California was so full of migrants after World War Two, that it was hard to find a native Californian, and Bellflower seemed to be comprised of Irish Catholics from the Midwest whose kids went SDS, and Southern Baptists who came, unsurprisingly, from the South, and whose kids went to Ed C. Lewis. A lot of tribal enmity went on and I remember a public school kid taunting me with, “You Catholic!” as if it were a bad word. Not knowing how to respond, I retorted, “You Public!”
The boys from both tribes regularly met up after school to thump each other, and once our school was daubed with graffiti that said: “SDS STANDS FOR SOME DUME SCHOOL!” I refer you back to my previous comment on the standard of education in Bellflower.
Cathie introduced me to her friend Carol, whose family had not long arrived in California from the backwater of Big Bay, Michigan. They lived in one of the only really old houses in Bellflower – a former clapboard farmhouse that had a cast iron bath like the ones in the Laurel and Hardy films.
Everybody in Bellflower seemed to have a gang or a tribe and we thought we ought to form one too. So we went off to the Goodwill shop to see if we could find some second hand clothes that would make an appropriate uniform for our gang. We found a bunch of old fashioned dresses that had probably belonged to someone’s deceased grandmother at the turn of the century (like 1900 I’m talking about here not 2000). With the proper bonnet, they would have made us look like extras out of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. On the basis of these dresses, we formed a singing group called “The Girls They Left Behind” with the motto, “The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine; and the tongue that drops acid shall never touch mine.” (Acid was LSD, for those who are too young to know that, which is probably just about everyone these days.)
The only gig we ever did was for the USO at Camp Pendleton, for a bunch of very horny soldiers who would have wolf whistled and cheered if we’d just got up there and farted. But of course we were total crap, and we were never asked back.
At that point we realised that we were “The Girls They Left Behind for Obvious Reasons”, and resolved to find a new image. A movie at the local drive-in would deliver it.
The Parmount Drive-In was a local hangout because you paid by the carload, so you could cram in as many of your friends as would fit in your car. You sometimes had to watch the movie with the windshield wipers on and the tinny mono speaker hanging on your car window produced truly terrible sound. But that wasn’t why you went there.
I had my first date at the age of fifteen at the Paramount Drive-In, with my brother’s friend Larry, otherwise known as Bandito Bob (for absolutely no reason I can think of!), and another couple. It was there I learned what the B-movie was for. After sitting through “Valley of the Dolls”, an unbelievably crap movie from an unbelievably crap novel by Jacqueline Susann, the B-movie came on. After a few minutes I noticed there was a disconcerting amount of breathing going on in the back seat. When I turned around to see what was going back there, I caught a glimpse of a guy biting a breast which I assume was not his own. When I turned back, I saw Bandito Bob taking his glasses off and getting ready to dive in at the drive-in. Fortunately, Mrs. Crosland had told me how to handle this situation and Bandito Bob was forced to watch the movie all the way through.
A few months later the featured film playing at the Paramount Drive-In was a biker/girl gang flick called “The Mini-Skirt Mob”. Full of tough talk and big hair, the movie followed the exploits of a girl biker gang who were bent on revenge against the leader’s ex-boyfriend because he had betrayed Bikerdom by settling down with a “nice girl”. The whole thing ends in a hail of Molotov Cocktails in the desert, and Cathie, Carol and I thought it was one of the worst films ever made. So we decided to call ourselves the Mini-Skirt Mob.
This required a whole new image, attitude and theme song, which was duly written:
“The Mini-Skirt Mob,
The Mini-Skirt Mob,
Caused many a heart to flip!
The Mini-Skirt Mob,
The Mini-Skirt Mob,
Caused many a head to split!”
No shrinking violets, us! We were now a girl gang!
Unfortunately no one took us seriously. Even when we kidnapped Dirty Dave and refused to let him go until his friends came up with a ransom in chocolate chip cookies! They were too stoned and needed to hang onto the cookies in case they got the munchies; so finally, after a night of terror, in which he was tied up and held against his will for four hours by three women in mini-skirts, we let Dave go. For some reason, he pleaded with us to stay and we had to kick him out.
We obviously needed to become more frightening, and it was about this time that Cathie had a birthday and was given a Milton Bradley ouija board with a plastic pointer and printed instructions on how to contact the Sprit World. It was our destiny, we realised, to take the Mini-Skirt Mob into the Black Arts and become witches.
Our first experiments with the occult were pretty disappointing. The pointer would either not move at all or just fall off the board. After a while, we could just about get it to answer a question by slowly inching to Yes, No or Maybe. (What’s Maybe about anyway? You need to contact the Spirit World to get a Maybe?)
The Sprit of the Board was just shy, I guess. Because after a while it moved more fluently; and when I asked it when I would next get a letter from my boyfriend Gypsy, it spelled out "Thursday". And you know what? I got a letter from him the next Thursday! Spooky, eh?
Once we got used to the Spirit of the Board, the pointer began to speed up. I asked it if I would marry Gypsy and it said no. I asked it when I would next fall in love and it told me that I would be seventeen and that it wouldn’t work out. It told me that my next love affair after that would be when I was twenty-three! Anything we wanted to know, the Spirit of the Board would tell us!
After a while we became quite chummy with the Spirit. He told us he had been a soldier who was killed during the American Civil War. His nickname, he told us, was Banana which I thought was a completely crap name for a Spirit of the Board, but it was his board I guess. We asked Banana about his experiences during the Civil War and if he ever smoked dope. (Okay, this was the late Sixties, right?) He told us that there was no marijuana but that he did do “Nightshade”.
For a while we liked being witches a lot, and we spent hours on that board. Carol made herself a red witch's robe and Cathie a black one. We learned about spells and Tarot cards and all manner of fortune telling, just in case Banana didn’t have the full scoop. But then we got bored. And sceptical. Until the Spirit wouldn’t talk to us any more and Banana went back into the box.
It was not a wasted exercise, however. A couple years later I had to do a project for Sister Marcellina’s religion class. These were intensely ecumenical times and the assignment was to prepare and give a talk to the class about a non-Catholic Christian religion.
Basically, I just couldn’t be bothered doing a bunch of onerous research about something I couldn’t care less about. So I turned for help to my sisters in the Church of the Latter Day Mini-Skirt Mob. And we invented a new religion: Lethenium Mysticism.
Lethenium Mysticism was born in New England in the Seventeenth Century, when witchcraft had been driven underground by the Salem witch burnings. A small tribe of white witches had converted to Christianity but continued to practice witchcraft in secret, forming the secret church of Lethenian Mystics which is still in existence today as a tiny Christian sect. The cult does not have priests, but priestesses, since women are considered better conduits to the spiritual than men. A priestess is trained from the age of seven in the White Arts, and wears a black robe until, at the age of sixteen, she is confirmed in a “Witching Ceremony” where she is given The Red Robe, symbol of the Lethenian cleric.
See? You’re almost believing this aren’t you? I accompanied my talk with Polaroid photos we had taken, starring Cathie and Carol and even Carol’s unwitting mother, pretending we were at a Witching Ceremony where Carol had been given the Red Robe. I even brought the Red Robe (that Carol had knocked up one bored afternoon on her Singer sewing machine) for the class to examine. What was I thinking of? How could I possibly have expected to get away with that? But I did. I got an A.
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as I child, I thought as a child. But when I became a man (or in this case a woman), I put away the things of a child.” And so we did. By the time we graduated from high school the Milton Bradley ouija board and its plastic pointer had been packed off to some charity shop somewhere (but not a Christian one since such boards are conduits to Satan) along with The Red Robe and the old-fashioned dresses of The Girls They Left Behind. And the mini-skirts. We grew up and grew away, which is the way of things.
Though I thought I had my future all planned out, it worked out different, as I guess it usually does. I didn’t marry Gypsy. Instead I fell in love at seventeen, and again at twenty-three. And, some years later, I was reading about soldiers in the American Civil War, and I discovered that a commonly used drug of the time was Belladonna, derived from Nightshade.
If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.
3 comments:
commenting..to say I've seen it.
Love your blog and thoughts!
-dan
Oh my god were we ever that young. Donna write to me CF socalyoopr@aol.com have we got some catching up to do. Steve C sent your blog to me
Carol is my mom...
Thank you so much for giving me yet another glimpse into why I turned out as odd as I did. It's a wonder I've made it this far!
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