THE PILGRIM GIRL
It’s Thanksgiving Day 1970 in Roselle, NJ. Our family just moved here from Brooklyn, NY a few months ago. I look out the second floor window - and gasp in a combination of disbelief and - horror!
“Ma...Ma! C’mere for a minute! Just a minute...ya GOTTA see this…”
She comes over as we both stare out the window. The girl across the street...she’s dressed as a Pilgrim. Yeah - a PILGRIM! Swear to God! Not only is she dressed as a Pilgrim - she’s carrying a wicker basket full of corn and pumpkin gourds - and is making her rounds to the neighbors!
“What the hell?”
I mean, I have no frame of reference for this kind of stuff...no context. And I’m only barely 10 years old. Even my mother is kind of flabbergasted, although she tries to look for the silver lining in the situation.
I mean - this is 1970, for crissakes! The Vietnam War is still raging! Protesters are still marching! American flags are still being burned! There’s still hippies - and maybe most important - the seething racial tensions that have erupted into riots pretty much all over the country. They were particularly rough in Brooklyn the last couple of years. That’s one of the reasons we left our Italian neighborhood there, and moved out here. My aunt and uncle and cousins came here the year before - and we followed - right over the Verrazano Bridge.
Roselle is only like 19 or 20 miles from our Brooklyn neighborhood, but it might as well be another civilization, y’know? It’s like the 1940’s here, or something...I don’t know how that could even possibly be since we’re surrounded by ghetto towns. Newark, Elizabeth, Rahway...the Negro lawn jockey in front of this house on the drive over here from Brooklyn...man, that’s the first thing that freaks me out - now a Pilgrim girl?!
Her name is Prudence Fink, she lives right next door to my cousins across the street, she’s got this bright red hair, and two inch thick glasses - and apparently, she’s been doing this for years! I am speechless...it’s beyond my ability to understand.
Now, fast forward to Thanksgiving Day 1972 - Prudence is outside her house once again dressed in her Pilgrim finery, ready to make her appointed rounds...suddenly a group of black girls surround her from out of nowhere.
“Shit bitch - you ain’t even no mo’fucking Pilgrim!”
With that, they begin jostling her between them, finally pushing her down on the lawn - and her face in the semi-mud. Change was coming to Roselle, New Jersey
THE CALLING
It was - like - a...a...CALLING! Yeah! A calling - that’s what it was!! One of those rare moments, it maybe happens once in a lifetime....that changes your destiny - FOREVER. I’m talking about me and my cousin Skinny. A divine intervention that could have only occured in the 1970s.
The wig head - that’s how it all starts. Y’know those styrofoam heads they put the wigs on, right? Well, both our mothers wore different wigs for special occasions...we never thought anything of it until this one day. We look at the wig head - and simultaneously we know what we have to do...what we are meant to do!
Borrowing some paint from my sister’s watercolor pad, we paint it like a light brown - it’s already got a nose on it, we find an old pair of reading glasses, one of his mother’s old wigs, and a baseball cap - and - WALA - it is TRULY a Michelangelo moment - DaVinci - maybe. E This surely has transcended anything we have ever done before. Now we need a body.
“Hey - let’s break into the Webb’s house - and steal Daniel’s clothes!!”
I don’t know why exactly we have to take his best Sunday clothes, but it’s pure inspiration! Sneakers and gloves soon follow. When we stuff the clothes full of newspaper to create the body - and then attach the head - well...this is the start of something BIG - really big!
“It’s alive! Alive! We howl with glee. ( Well, actually, that was the scene from the original Frankenstein movie - but we have vivid imaginations).
“What should we do with him?!”
“Let’s lay him down on the side of 3rd Avenue!”
“ Yeah! During rush hour!”
“With a knife in his chest!”
“Yeah! And blood trickling down his chest! We can use Heinz Ketchup!”
“And A bike lying down right next to him!”
“Yeah! Hahahahahaha…..
After causing a HUGE commotion and traffic jam on 3rd Avenue - our wildest dreams come true. An ambulance comes screeching down the street, sirens blaring - and thumps to a halt right in front of our dummy! An older guy - an EMT - with an oxygen tank springs out of the vehicle. Within a second or two, he realizes it’s actually a dummy and an angry, baffled scowl creases his face as he puts his hands on his hips, searching the area for the culprits.
Skinny and me crouch behind the bushes on his front lawn, covering our mouths to suppress our laughter. A minute later, he jumps back into the ambulance and tears away.
Me and Skinny never laughed so hard in our lives.
70s EXPERIENCES - CONTINUED
Buoyed by our success - and the thrill of our mission at the Webb household...the pull is just too much, the high, the rush - it’s totally addictive, besides providing us with so much joy and exuberance. It is literally an adrenaline kick!
With that in mind, me and Skinny get to work creating a very detailed and structured schedule - we must be highly disciplined now - to cause at least some mayhem in the neighborhood every night of the week...I mean, we have the time, y’know? Might as well put it to good use! So we plan out the entire week with an actual schedule, a highly sophisticated chart that we hang up on the wall of the clubhouse - for example: Monday night we will throw acorns at the Dalton’s house - until they come out to see what’s going on. Then, when they go back inside, we will continuously ring their front doorbell - and hide behind the bushes across the street. Tuesday, the schedule calls for ringing all the bells simultaneously in the lobby of the Amsterdam Gardens Apartments - proceeding to watch all of the residents come out at the same time, completely puzzled - and do it over and over again. This is good for multiple laughs, thereby streamlining our output. Wednesday, we go up to Skinny’s room in the attic - and throw water balloons out the window at poor old Mr. Acker, walking his hyperactive little hotdog, Fritz - at exactly 4pm...and, well, you get the picture.
Our favorite activity, however (well, besides eating all the raisins out the Raisin Bran at the Webb establishment, of course!) is our very authentic catfighting noises. Yes - catfighting noises. It goes like this: Every week now for about a month, we hop over the fence to the neighbor’s house behind Skinny’s - the Dobermanns, ironically enough. Now, you have to realize that these people are actually our friends - I mean, they take us to Yankees games with them! And picnics - plus other activities! We know them really well - yet, we just cannot seem to help ourselves.
We hide in the backyard - under the outside of their living room window - and make really loud sounds - like cats fighting. They keep looking out the window, but they can’t see us because we’re hiding. We’re very professional in our preparation for this - it totally disturbs them as they try to watch the Yankees game.
“Oh, those damn cats are back again!!
“Scat! Hiss! Scat!”
Mrs. Dobermann yells out a number of times, as she goes to the window for a fourth attempt.
“How annoying - every week they come back like this!”
‘I can’t even hear Phil Rizutto ( the Yankees announcer) with all that noise! Complain the kids - Ellen and Bobby.
“This is terrible! “ Cries out Mr. Dobermann, now in obvious distress.
Finally, in exasperation and frustration, they sic Petey, their frenetic little terrier on ‘the cats’.
He runs out in a fury, barking and howling, but when he sees us, we shush him and pet him and give him treats, so he stops barking. Now, seemingly with the cats gone, they call him back into the house - with a sigh of relief - and reward him for a job well done. At last, there is some peace!
That’s when we start the catfighting all over again - just a few minutes later.
“Oh no! They’re back!”
THE 70s AND NOW CONTINUED
I don’t know - the ease in which we broke into Daniel Webb’s house to eat all the raisins out of their Raisin Bran? It only seemed to embolden us, make us giddy. It was just so much fun, we decided - oh, we should definitely branch out with our endeavors. I mean, why only eat the raisins out of their Raisin Bran when we were capable of so much more? Intoxicated with our new-found prowess, it was decided between us that we had barely scratched our vast potential up until this point!
We reasoned that they would be gone for hours on Saturday - so why should we restrict ourselves to merely eating all the raisins out of the Raisin Bran? Why not more? At this point, our minds begin to fill with all sorts of delightful ideas! Our next step is to eat all their Cool Whip - and replace it with shaving cream ( back in those days, shaving cream had no menthol smell, or anything - it was just plain), of course, we would continue to spy on them at dinnertime, having ourselves a fabulous laugh when his mother made a strawberry shortcake - using the shaving cream as frosting!
Soon, we begin cooking hamburgers and watching TV at their house while they’re away. Before we leave, lock all the doors from the inside - effectively locking them out of their own house...it is becoming a truly blissful routine, and has the effect of restoring our battered self esteem from the horrors of high school. One by one, we embark on ever more hilarious activities - drinking half their bottle of Schweppes Ginger Ale and replacing it with tap water (they always think it has gone flat), and - finally, removing all the furniture, pictures, rugs and bikes from their front porch - while they were actually home, watching TV in the living room, no less - and hiding it in the tool shed in their backyard. But more on that one later. We’re not finished yet, oh no!
Our crowning, most auspicious activity, however is what we consider our coup de grace - our grand finale
Ah yes - a stroke of pure genius! We decide to do the unthinkable - switching their entire living room - with their bedroom furniture!! Their bedroom was upstairs - we bring down their bed, the bureau with the mirror on top, the night table - EVERYTHING - and bring the couch, the TV, the stereo up to the bedroom! Hahahahaha….I shit you not! We are beside ourselves with glee, doubled over with laughter, for at least an hour. This is the proudest we have ever been of ourselves, as we feel we’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty! We cannot WAIT till they come home so we can see their reaction…
When the time is almost there for them to arrive home - we position ourselves in the bushes so we can get a good view. The car pulls up....Mr Webb gets out, followed by the rest of the family and opens the door to the living room…
“What the hell - ?
These poor people - what did they ever do to deserve this?!