DON'T DO ME ANY SMALL FAVORS

Back in the day, on Saturdays, my wife Teresa, and I got to spin vinyl platters on a public service radio. In order to have some fun as well as listen to some really good music, we decide to visit the various art openings around town and report on the viability of the food served at these gatherings. I wrote "press" on a piece of white cardboard and stuck it into the hat band of my father's hat. This plus a notebook was my uniform, and off we went.

At one place, a women's group art show, I was rushed by a hefty lady saying things like , "What the hell do you think you're doing? No press!" She blathered awhile and then left us to our devices. I don't know what was the matter with her. Did she fear disclosure of some nefarious doing?

We never reported on the art, we always stuck completely to the food served, and funny thing, in those days, the food was really delicious and lots of it. Nowadays you can only get a glass of bad wine and some crackers.

A few years after that I was talking to a woman we knew pretty well from Weatherstone's and I mentioned my get up and she said something that made me ask, "Did you think that I was serious with that Jimmy Olson disguise?" She said, "Yeah."

Good God! If you saw somebody with a homemade press sign in a forties hat, would you think it real? I don't know about some people. But this reminds me of another story along those lines.

My middle son Daryl and I were in his downstairs apartment doing some comic book writing and for some reason he got the idea to go out on the sidewalk and draw a chalk outline of a body. He also drew a chalk outline of a revolver and painted a red blot by the "guy's" head. Teresa got into the act and said, "Wait a minute." She went upstairs and came back with about ten feet of some yellow caution tape which we tied to the corner stop sign post. When we stepped back, it looked kinda neat. We were proud of ourselves.

The next day we heard of people saying there had been a murder there, the murderer had hid in the tree on the corner and waited for his victim. Somebody else had heard it on the TV. A neighbor friend told us that her husband was telling her about the murder and she said she told him that wasn't it possible that those two nuts (meaning me and my son) might have had something to do with it?

It seemed obvious to all of us that it was a joke, but yet...

One night I was sitting on the porch and here came, "thump thump thump" a car with a flat tire traveling very slowly with a cop car with flashing lights following it. Around and around the block for what seemed a long time.

Another day I was again sitting on the porch and a pickup drove into a light pole. Three guys got out and they all ran off in three different directions -- one stopping to throw rocks at a concerned civilian who told them they better wait for the cops.