Tee Party Poster

Every year our kids’ Montessori school hosts a big golf fund-raiser. Naturally, I volunteered to do the poster.

Thanks to school administrator Lorraine Scarafile, I got a nice landscape photo of the Bristol Harbour golf course from Rick Stewart, a photographer local to that area. Hmmm... I mused. Nice brochure photo, but as a poster all by itself, both a little low-rez and a little low “zing."

What to do?

I pondered, then remembered Claes Oldenberg, the Swedish sculptor famous for -- Guess what? -- huge renditions of little things. Like a 45-foot steel clothespin that stands near Philadelphia's City Hall.

Okie-doke!

Lorraine gladly supplied me with a handful of their custom-printed golf tees. The toys I borrowed from my kids. I then used a digital camera to shoot each “giant-to-be” element in close-up on a sheet of white seamless paper in my driveway, giving care to match camera and sun angles to the landscape photo. After bringing them all together in Photoshop (faking that logo on my daughter's teapot was fun) -- voila! Giant rubber ducky, giant sand shovel, and a giant "Huzzah!"

I finished up the whole thing using Adobe Illustrator for poster text and page layout.

You like? Personally, I think Claes would approve.

Magnetic Attraction?

Okay... Around here they had a thing last year where somehow you won free gas for a year if your car got spotted "wearing" a magnetic sticker from a Sunoco gas station. (See upper illustration, left.)

A LOT of people put them on their cars.

Well wouldn't you know it: long, long after the contest expired, those rear bumper magnets kept staring me in the face.

Some clever marketing scheme, eh? Folks will slap any old sticker on their car. So what if it promotes lusting after a year's free gas? Who wouldn't want that? And so what if there's only a snowflake's chance in Hell they'll actually get it? By comparison, I wondered, who drives around bearing witness to God's Son in Heaven, the one who's promised us life everlasting, and that completely free for the asking?

Yep. Something about that sticker really got to me. So, finally I succumbed to temptation and got one myself.

However, I didn't put it on my car.

Nope. Instead, I scanned it, traced it into vector art using Adobe Illustrator, and then messed with it to turn the downer logo design into an "upper." (See lower illustration, left.) That is, I flipped the yellow diamond and red arrow to point to the better way. Then, I changed "Sunoco" to read "Sun o(f) God," and also made "Official Fuel of NASCAR" say "Official Goal of THIS CAR."

Fun, fun, fun! Of course, I didn't win any free gas. But I sure did have one. Here's a little video of the two images changing places:

Golf 'n' Me

The first time I ever golfed was back in the '60s, at the Silver Lakes golf course on Staten Island in New York City. My pals humbled me totally. To get even, I went to a driving range and learned how to really wallop 'em. Next time we teed up, I left a soapy ball mark on my driver's sweet spot and the ball sailed 300 yards. It came to rest just on the edge of the green, and I proceeded to drop it right in the hole--fifteen putts later!

Not long after that I dropped the sport altogether. Or so I thought. Little did I know that golf is a lot like Kuru or Scrapie. These slow-onset retroviruses won't manifest any symptoms at all for decades, and then WHAM!

A few years back a twenty-five-years-older me stood at the top of a cliff up in Nova Scotia, Canada, where the geography causes a 30-foot difference between high and low tides. Maybe you've heard of it: the Bay of Fundy.

Anyway, Fundy National Park has a lovely nine-hole golf course, where--like the famous Fundy tides--the path of a golf ball is greatly affected by the tug of the Moon.

This makes sense if you think about it. Just look. Golf balls and the Moon are both covered with lots and lots of shallow craters. Obviously, the Moon thinks golf balls are young planetoids, and wants to reach out and help.

I got a demonstration of this tidal influence at the very first tee. Minutes before, I'd walked into the clubhouse and rented a set of clubs. "I'm a little rusty," I said. "Sell me some balls that know the course." That got a smile from the gal behind the counter. And--call it a premonition--I purchased thirty-six "experienced" golf balls.

Now, out on the first tee, I placed my small sacrifice upon the tiny wooden peg, took up the ceremonial wand, and let fly.

So to speak. Glory be! Just like the old days, my club struck the ball with a most satisfying thwak! Yet this match-strike of satisfaction was promptly dowsed by the rip-sizzling sound of my ball mowing an inch-wide swath through the grass. Oops. A "worm-burner."

Double-Oops, in fact. Like I said, Fundy's first tee is atop a cliff that's a hundred feet high, if it's an inch. So, after scorching the grass like a runaway hair trimmer, my ball had pretty much spent its juice. There was little left for it to do but--with its last gasp of forward momentum--topple limply over the precipice.

With a mix of urgent curiosity and great caution, I dashed to the brink to see what had become of the thing. Needless to say, there was no sign of it on the rocks below. The corpse had vanished!

Thirty-five balls, and counting.

My next shot got airborne, but after bursting like flak it turned kamikaze and dove meteorically straight down to attack some passing twig in the stream far below, just beyond the base of the cliff. Apparently the current was either quite swift, or a passing tuna had snapped it up. I couldn't tell which. In any case, another ball was "history."

Two down; thirty-four still in my bag.

Maybe I should have left them there. I won't recount the many glorious episodes that followed. Let's just say that, like Ponce-de-Leon, I sampled many waters in my quest. Like T.H. Lawrence, I criss-crossed Saharas. Like Dan'l Boone, I blazed woodland trails. And like Ishmael, I alone survived to tell thee. Meaning that--thankfully--except for me and a few hysterically laughing deer, the course was empty.

After nine holes, I had only six very nervous golf balls to sell back to the fair maid at ye olde clubhouse counter. She accepted them with a twinkle in her eye, and asked "Well, at least did you have fun?"

And truth be known--I had.

So that was it. I was hooked. Sliced. You name it. Dormant no longer, golf had broken out in full force. Years' more practice followed, and on a good day I now play "bogey" golf.

So just last week while I was driving in Genesee County with a friend to the Le Roy Country Club, and--well, you see--I mean no disrespect--but upon finding the Calvary Baptist Church on Route 19 just north of town, I just had to pull over in absolute, total awe.

Image based on a photo by Sheila Cahill, 1998
Appeared in "The Wayne Weekly," September, 1998.

VROOM, VROOM VALENTINE!

Ah, Valentine's Day. Most guys give their sweeties chocolates, flowers or candle-lit dinners. My wife, bless her heart, is secretly a barbarian princess--so this year we ended up trading smooches and happily yelling our brains out at the Thunder Nationals monster truck rally. Yee-ee-HAW!

Now, I'm no motorhead. To me, a clutch is what you do to your throat upon first tasting caviar. My wife, the epitome of refinement and civility, knows even less about camshafts and carburetors than I do. Yet, even a modestly jacked-up suspension or slightly oversized tires will turn her head. "Ooo, Look!" and "Honey, I want a truck," are phrases I've heard more than once. "With b-i-g wheels," she'll add. So, you see: in a way, it was her idea.

Thank goodness we took earplugs. The PA system in the Rochester War Memorial was cranked to the max. So was the capacity crowd--a sea of flannel, tattoos and baseball caps. At least half were kids, some throwing popcorn, others waving huge "#1" foam fingers. The hockey rink had no ice, but the protective glass was still up. Towards our end of the U-shaped arena lay a raft of tightly packed Cadillacs, Pontiacs and so on with all their glass removed, in two rows of five cars each. Sacrificial victims. Prey.

"In-tro-ducing..." Boomed the announcer, and the crowd drowned him out, only to be itself overwhelmed by the truly thunderous noise of the five Monster Truck participants.

These babies are BIG--starting with the tires: each five and a half feet high and just over three and a half feet wide. The announcer says they're also used by earth movers. I believe it. Deeply cut "V" treads wider than the span of my hand disappear in a blur as one by one these beauties dance forward from the far end of the rink. Shiny, beautifully painted custom fiberglass bodies seem to float above the whirling wheels on nimbly articulated cats-cradles of struts and shocks and tubular space frames, giving the helmeted drivers a clear view from as high up as the top of a basketball backboard. Undertaker. Rap Attack. Black Stallion 2000. Excalibur. War Wagon. Each nimbly rolls its front tires up onto the pile. It's quite a tableau. Five humongous hunters, poised as if leaning casually on one knee atop the carcasses of these old clunkers. After a brief pause, all dismount and pull back to the far end of the rink. We've had our glimpse. Now, it's time for some comic relief.

The drivers reappear in a set of mini NASCAR racers, squat little squares about the size of Lay-Z-Boy recliners. They do laps and somebody wins, but nobody cares who.

Then, out pops a guy riding on--get this--a jet powered bar stool. A war surplus afterburner about the size of your backyard barbecue's propane tank nestles between the legs of this highchair on wheels. A two-second burn worthy of the space shuttle sends him scuttling around the rink. Every kid in the place is howling with delight. Me too.

More howls as the Monsters make donuts--burning rubber in tight 360-degree turns at high speed. Will they flip over? Not quite. But does the announcer blanche as 5 tons of truck spins rapidly straight at him? I notice the first four rows on that side of the arena are empty, roped off with yellow tape. Tested before each run, there are three ways to kill the engine on these big boys, one of which is by a remote control in the hands of the official. Still, "F=ma." Accidents could happen. But not tonight.

Next is the Green Monster, a jet-powered motorcycle with a roaring funnel of flame so fierce you can feel it hot on your face from the other end of the arena, even though the flame is pointed away from you.

During intermission, none of the designated contestants is able to toss a Frisbee half the length of the rink into the bullseye on the back of the pickup, so it goes un-won.

"Free style" ensues, with Monster trucks leaping, smashing, squashing and spinning to wow the crowd. Excalibur seems to come closest to tagging the suspended scoreboard in the center of the rink, with a near vertical leap and a hang time of almost four seconds. That's a long time to keep 10,000 pounds of wingless fiberglass and metal airborne. "Big air," crows the announcer.

Then it's the moment all the kids have been waiting for. Lights dim as a forklift places a Ford Pinto near center ice. Something like a green Zamboni on steroids lumbers forward. Its roof splits apart, flames leap up, and just like a toy "Transformer," the thing grows and unfolds and turns into Trans-saurus--a monster dinosaur that slowly grabs the hapless Pinto in huge hydraulic pincers, lifts it high, and within several bites literally chomps it in half. Pinto bits fall to the floor as flames leap out of the monster's snout. Then it's back into the box, Jack, until the next show.

Some are now bolting for the exits, not waiting for the side-by side leaping that's the final event. I'm tired too. What was first a wonder has through constant repetition lost much of it's charm. I wonder if maybe that's not how things were even back in the heyday of the Roman Coliseum. Half of any spectacle is its novelty. And I've had my fill.

Next day, however, my wife is still happily crooning, "Vroom, vroom!"

Now I'm afraid I may have to jack up my garage.

Appeared in "The Wayne Weekly," February, 1998.