September 12, 2024 : Wondercab Mini (75A)
THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER
*
REPRISE: FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH
Tomorrow will be Friday, September 13th. Veterans of the Cabinet may remember our piece from back in Issue #62, with its bonkers albeit apparently quite incontrovertible proof that the 13th of the month truly is more likely to be a Friday than any other day of the week. Those who doubt it are invited to revisit the proof here. There you may also revisit Ren’s quarrelsome baby brother Ray’s quibbles in a letter to the editor at the time, contained in the first comment, and reprised here.
* * *
A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE OVER AT RAYBALL
And yes, even more grizzled veterans of this Cabinet will recognize that brother Ray as the very same as the founder, convener and chronicler of the legendary ongoing Berkeley softball game, every Sunday for going on over 27 years now, as profiled in our Issue #20. We raise this coincidence since as it happens, Ray has recently been chronicling a somewhat disturbing wobble in the force of his game (in which, as will be recalled, he himself judiciously recalibrates the team line-ups prior to each game, depending on who shows up). And we thought some of you might like to hear about the kerflutter in question, as detailed in these two of his more recent weekly dispatches:
Dear People,
For the second consecutive week and the third match of the last five, my team quickly jumped out to a dominating double-digit lead—specifically, 16-6 over Chris Fure’s in the 3rd— only to face another harrowing encounter with Premature Early Inning Shot-wad Syndrome (or, as it’s known in the sports med milieu, PEISS; For a germane point of reference, see D.K. Slater’s deeply unsettling portrait of 18th century royal mores, Callow, Yearnful and Always too Fast: The Forgotten Pubescent Beefcakes of Queen Anne’s Court, 1702-1714). To be sure, we weren’t the first to crest too early and we clearly won’t be the last, but given that I had written about all this just last week, the self-fulfilling nature of this wretched curse left me shaken to the marrow.
Still, we didn’t collapse without a fight. Indeed, some of our best fielding came in the middle innings, and as late as the 7th we faced a grueling tie game that could’ve gone either way. Of course fate had its own designs, and as the fearsome Joe Poppas came to the plate in the bottom of the 7th with one out, two on and the aura of aerobic transmogrification lingering in the air, a rare blue-beaked American bushtit brayed plaintively in the distance. Then, suddenly, Poppy unleashed a solid hopper just to the right of 2nd that initially had the inchoate contours of a rally-crushing double-play, and for that last second of quaint athletic innocence, I could still feel the rays of cautious hope.
Unfortunately, and for reasons I don’t pretend to understand, the great Bobby Weinapple was manning the ramparts when he decided to snag the hopper in question with the bony frontal lobe of his perfectly innocent forehead. Needless to say, this is a fairly difficult task to actually pull off, and while I personally avoided fainting, Applehead laid down and woozy for several minutes before rising anew to a hero’s ovation. All good and well, of course, but heroism is no substitute for robust defense, and ultimately, the hit, the RBI, the ceaselessly shifting mo’ and the sudden realization that sociological physics is just one brutally random wench was simply too much to bear, and thus my side went down, and down hard, 25-19. Yeah, curses, and therefore there will be a game at Codornicies this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond
And then the following week:
Dear People,
In one of those provocative gambits that stir the souls of tremulous folk everywhere, my peeps took on Chris Fure’s for the second straight week, and inherent in the match-up was a tacit implication that we weren’t just battling for an individual triumph, but rather we were also testing the very thesis that writing about a curse will only serve to solidify it (for a precise point of reference, see last week’s drivel at https://groups.google.com/g/raysoftball/c/JjtRMmeMxyA). Needless to say, I didn’t set out to test anything outside the potential of my much derided captainship, yet after we jumped out to a dominating 3rd inning 16-6 lead, Stefano gently took me aside and with those gorgeous blue corneas now thoroughly moistened, haltingly whispered “You know we’re doomed, right?” Of course I immediately rejected the premise and told him to find his inner manly man, yet truth be told, I also worried that our very domination was the devil seed of a jinx renewed, and, as you’d expect, soon after an Andean cock-of-the-rock chirped frantically in the distance.
Sure enough, the Furinator’s peeps slowly clawed their way back, but only in unsightly fits and starts. In fact, when the great John McMurtrie was picked off at 2nd in the 6th for a ghastly rallying-killing double play with their team still down by 7, Jim McGuire was so horrified that he insisted I write about this later, for, as he made clear, “That’s how your emails work!” As the journalist in question, I’m not so sure about that, but I do know it was Professor McLoser himself who, just two innings later, popped up to short in the bottom of the 8th to end their transformative 9-run rally, thus stalling their ascent at a bone-chilling 27 up. It was, to be sure, a deeply satisfying development to observe, and yet ominously, a rare blue-beaked satanic nightjar still brayed anxiously in the oaks above.
Indeed, as we entered the 10th still tied, I was feeling guardedly optimistic but with a wary soupçon of dread (admittedly, though, I may have been thinking about the upcoming election as much as the match at hand). In any case, our one run lead in the top of that tranche was simply not enough, and yes, it was Jimmy McVoodoo whose searing walk off single brought his own aerobic atonement as well as his contingent’s disturbingly eerie 29-28 victory. That’s right—my teams have now lost three consecutive games and four of the last six in which we initially took charge with a double digit early-inning lead. No, I’m not whining, but I will seek out an aggressive and highly qualified exorcist, and therefore there will be game at Codornices this Sunday at 11 IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning . . . Raymond
Spooky, is all we can say. Any would-be exorcists are indeed invited to leave their coordinates in the Comments section.
On the other hand, this just in: last Sunday the jinx appeared to break, which is to say Ray’s team built up a ten-point deficit early on from which it never recovered, so, at least it figured out a different way to lose. That’s six losses in a row, for those of you who haven’t been keeping track. “Does it occur to you,” as one of Ray’s teammates commented to him at the end of this one, “that maybe the problem is YOU.”
* * *
ROBERT KRULWICH ON MEL BROOKS
We’ve also been meaning to log a letter we received from longtime friend of the Cabinet Robert Krulwich in response to Ren’s 1978 profile of Mel Brooks, reprised back in Issue #72. So here it is:
Reading your Village Voice profile of Mel Brooks, I want to write down something that happened—at least I think it happened—in the mens' department at Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue around 1963. I was there one afternoon to buy shoes and the salesman was showing me “oxfords,” soft leather footwear with little dots hand punched into the surface, something that a banker or under-secretary of state might wear. The thing was I was in high school so these shoes were a reach for me, but the salesman was saying I was ready, and I was on my feet, looking down at one of those low-on-the-floor mirrors when another customer, an older man about five seats to my left, began looking at me, then at my feet, then at my shoes and began making noises, not words, exactly, but grunts—I'm not sure if he was addressing me or the salesman—but he was shaking his head and saying "No, no, no...." I had no idea who this guy was, but the salesman, instead of being annoyed, looked a little giddy and kept moving his eyes from the man back to me, as if to say, "Isn't this fantastic!!" while I was thinking "Who is this guy and why does he have an opinion about my shoes?" Until, a few seconds later, the man got up, moved four seats over so now he was right behind me sharing my mirror and then he sort of elbowed my salesman aside so he could rummage through the boxes of shoes to announce which ones were out of the question, which were acceptable and, seizing one pair— "This!" he announced is "the best!" trumpeted loud enough for everyone on the sales floor to hear, and he told the salesman to wrap up the pair he liked and make the others all go away.
I don't believe he ever said anything directly to me. What happened after that is a little blurry. I think I retreated, trying to ignore what had just gone on, mumbling something about having to “think it over” and planning, which I did, to come back an hour later when that guy was gone and I could do what I wanted without all this kibbitzing, which, by the way, is what it felt like. I'd been to Grossingers and had stood in the lobby while “tumlers” made fun of guests on the registration line and pulled bananas out of peoples' ears, and this guy, I thought, was one of those, though finding him in Brooks Brothers was a little like finding a penguin in the Sahara. I remember, or think I remember, coming back an hour or so later, getting the shoes I’d wanted, which weren't the ones he liked, and going home though I kept wondering who that man was until.…
Well, two things happened. First the shoes I didn't want, didn't order and didn't pay for arrived at my home, to me, at my parents' address and second, the invoice from Brooks Brothers said the sender was someone named "Mel Brooks", a name recognized by my mother. "Why would Mel Brooks be buying you shoes?" she asked me. I didn't have an answer. I still don't. I don't know how he got my name, though Brooks Brothers had my address, I don't know why they let Mel (I guess I can call him that) use private information to send me a gift and how to explain his interest, my salesman's smile, the free shoes, why or why he was he so adamant? Sometimes, wandering through life, things happen that never get explained, that stay in a fuzzy space between "it happened" and "I'm not sure it happened." And that, Ren, is my Mel Brooks story.
(A thought: maybe he was a distant cousin to the original gentile Brooks Brothers and had family privileges. Maybe they'd let the yiddish Brooks do yiddishkeit things on the salesfloor because....I don't know. I don't even know why I'm writing you this. I guess it was your article that got me going.)
* * *
Speaking of which:
The first installment in what will be growing into
AN ONGOING KRULWICH SAMPLER
Since leaving Radiolab several years back (and in fact already for a few years before that), Robert Krulwich has been incubating a sideline series of collaborations with a succession of inspired young animators, deploying his distinctive reportorial voice across ever more arcane topics—he is anything but retired—though offering them up in far-flung venues of which many of his fans, alas, may not even be aware. So, with his permission, we are going to try to rectify the situation here, by offering up an occasional retrospective selection, starting with this early collaboration with animator Benjamin Arthur (from Robert’s NPR blog at the time) on the burning question of why nobody seems able to walk straight…
{To view, click here.}
…a piece which, it occurs to us, can stand in as both emblematic and representative of Krulwich’s entire reportorial method across the full arc of his illustrious career.
Stay tuned for more such in future cabinets, and in the meantime, see you next week!
Excellent choice of topics!; I approve.