Song of the Day: Short People, Randy Newman

Randy Newman’s Short People was released in 1977, when there was still the possibility that the song wouldn’t refer to me.

It inspired much backlash from people who I’m ashamed to have anything in common with, even if it’s something as superficial as height. (Short) people burned copies of Newman’s albums in protest and the Maryland Legislature even considered passing a law that would prohibit the playing of the song on the state’s radio stations. I can't imagine how the same folks would have reacted to some of Newman's other songs. Some of them, I'm sure, would embrace this as solid foreign policy.

In addition to prompting protests, Short People also inspired what was perhaps the greatest presentation in a senior-level religion class in the history of my high school, Joliet Catholic Academy.

The task (as well as I can remember it): find a classmate to be your partner, put your heads together to identify some sort of injustice and make a 7- to 10-minute presentation about said injustice. The instructor for the class, a relatively young guy named Brother Raphael, highly encouraged incorporating an audio visual component into your presentation.

My group’s presentation somehow involved the trough-style urinals at Wrigley Field. We held them up as an example of open mindedness because it required people of all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds to stand uncomfortably close, usually on both sides, to men who were drunk and peeing. In a crowded Wrigley Field bathroom we were all equals. Or something like that.

Not only was our presentation shallower than one of those troughs, but it also wasn’t anywhere near as creative as the one done by my classmates Shawn Trusty and Bob Muhich. Shawn had long ago established his bona fides for creative scholarship, frequently inventing outlandish stories and people to help push along the narratives in any class in which we had a) a gullible teacher and b) a written assignment.

“Fortunately for me,” Shawn told me recently, “JCA had an abundance of both.”

He was Jayson Blair before Jayson Blair could even read the New York Times. The more preposterous the stories, the better. In one of our classes Shawn submitted a paper that suggested that a drug addict named Butch Book ingested a pound of acid daily. Usually, the names of his protagonists were more unpronounceable than alliterative.

“I had names of people with 33 letters, 29 of which were consonants,” he said.

His crowning achievement came when he submitted a paper in our psychology class on porn star John Holmes. The paper suggested that at the height of his popularity Holmes appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and stood behind a silk screen, pulled down his pants and revealed his 13-inch penis. He was the porn equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of being incredulous, the psychology teacher seemed genuinely shocked that he missed the broadcast.

“Fascinating!” he wrote in the margin.

Perhaps emboldened by his Holmes experience, Shawn convinced Bob that they should do their presentation in the religion class on discrimination. It wasn’t going to be about run of the mill discrimination, however. There was nary a mention of woman’s suffrage or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in their work. Rather, they chose to focus on some more obscure types of discrimination. Things like height discrimination, for instance, which they claimed was most readily apparent when folks who were 7-foot-tall were confronted with the choice of either bending down to get through a doorway or smash their head into the overhang. There also was the discrimination against people who had gigantic feet who were regularly forced to try to navigate their way down stairs that weren’t big enough to accommodate overgrown phalanges, often resulting in awkward falls down the stairs.

These obviously weren’t the sort of folks Congress had in mind when they passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. Nor, for that matter, were the examples of discrimination in the least bit truthful. But when Shawn and Bob delved into their greatest example of size-based discrimination they used what was likely the only legitimate part of their entire presentation: Newman’s “Short People.” Of course they held the song up as perhaps the most egregious example in the long, sordid history of size discrimination. And then they played it.

There wasn’t much meat on the bones of this presentation, as you might imagine. You can only make up so many stories, it turns out, about discrimination against tall people and those with feet too big to make their way down stairs. Short People, at 2 minutes and 55 seconds, wasn’t helping flesh things out.

“Short People,” Shawn said, with a hint of regret in his voice. “Short song.”

When you added the nearly-three minute song to their presented material it still left them about a minute short of the seven minutes the assignment required. So, rather than bulk up the presentation with some actual research or invent another aggrieved group of people, Shawn and Bob did the next most logical thing: they tacked on to the end of Short People a portion of the Fleetwood Mac song “Tusk.”

This wasn’t a seamless mashup on par with Danger Mouse’s work with Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles white album. Short People is a sparse little song with piano and little additional instrumentation and Tusk is a drum-heavy song that was recorded with the USC marching band.
About the only thing the songs had in common is that they were both released in the 1970s, which, in retrospect, couldn’t have been worse for Shawn and Bob.

“We probably shouldn’t have picked songs that were extremely popular when our teacher was 20 years old,” Shawn said.

Still, he said, they might have gotten away with it had they not been laughing during the entire presentation, especially during the musical portion.

“(Brother Raphael) was not pleased that we did not take the assignment seriously,” said Shawn, who remembered somehow getting a “C” on the project. “He wasn’t as amused about it as we were.”

Every time I hear Short People (or Tusk, for that matter, although it happens much less frequently) I can’t help but be amused. I love the story so much that I shared it with my friend and bandmate, Bill Gillis. Almost 20 years after Shawn and Bob ingeniously combined Short People and Tusk in a presentation on discrimination, Bill immortalized their work when he recorded the song “Short People --> Tusk.”

The chorus says it better than Randy Newman ever could: “Some things just go together/Like Short People and Tusk.”

Running Update:

Tuesday: 8 miles at 67:40
Yesterday: 5 mile recovery in 47:27
Today: 10 (very rough) miles in 88:27
Tomorrow: OFF

Song of the Day: Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars), Stan Getz

One of the best things about having more than 4,000 songs on your iPod is that often something comes up on shuffle that you haven’t heard in a long time. Sometimes, in fact, something comes up that didn’t know you had. Or that you haven’t ever heard.

Corcovado is one of those songs. Its a jazzy number that I have a feeling I got on a mix CD from my friend Tyra. A pretty song, it’s sung half in French, which I’m pretty sure makes it twice as good.

I should probably understand the French portion much better than I do, having taken two years of it in high school and three semesters worth in college as mandated by the University of Missouri. At the beginning of my matriculation there I actually harbored thoughts of getting a minor in the language. That dream, it turns out, was only slightly less realistic than the one I had about playing second base for the Chicago Cubs.

For even after those three classes and the hours spent in the foreign language laboratory practicing my pronunciations into a headset that would have made Judy from Time-Life books envious, the truth is my French is “tres merde-y,” as my friend Matt could attest. He stood next to me at a gas station one night as I tried to get directions out of Athens, Greece, from a woman who spoke French but not English. Our minute-long conversation involved a lot of nodding on my part, as if I was channeling the Bill Murray character from the Saturday Night Live Olympia Restaurant skit. When I sat down in the passenger seat and Matt asked me which direction to head, I sat there dumbstruck.

I was having flashbacks to Bruno Wambi.

Wambi, from Congo, had a name that conjured up images of an African assassin. The freshman French students who had him as their teacher would say that he was. I was lucky. I didn’t land in Wambi’s section for my freshman-year, five-day a week class. I did, however, find my name on Wambi’s hit list when it came time for my oral examination, which had to be administered by someone other than your regular teacher. This ensured that you would be embarrassed in front of at least one more person that semester.

They conducted the oral examinations in the foreign language department, which, on every campus I’ve ever been on, seems to be the equivalent of the high school shop department. That is to say they’re headquartered in dirty places, far out of sight and funded with whatever money is left over after the maintenance folks get paid. Mizzou was no different. Judging by the messy cubicles, they crammed about six teaching assistants into each of them. I imagined the TAs cursing each other in a variety of languages for not maintaining a clean work environment.

It was into this morass that I stumbled in search of Wambi. I was only slightly less nervous than this kid. It was as if I was going to a job interview only it was going to be conducted in a foreign language. And my professor made it abundantly clear that, no matter the circumstances, you weren’t to speak English during the exam. This made my preparation even more difficult because it took me at least 30 minutes to learn to say “I think I’m having a heart attack” in French.

I found Wambi and we exchanged pleasantries, which contained several utterances of my go-to phrase, “Comme ci, comme ca.” As far as I could tell the phrase could be used to answer everything from “How are you?” to “How would you like your steak prepared?”

Then Wambi got to it.

Apparently, the bulk of the exam was going to deal with Wambi asking for directions to places throughout Columbia, Mo. I’m not sure if every examiner asked the same questions, or if Wambi was just new in town. This was a challenge for me, and not just because I was like a 3-year-old when it came to knowing which was “gauche” and which was “droite.”

I’m terrible at directions. I don’t remember street names. I get lost going home on a regular basis. I can’t remember which street places I regularly visit can be found on. My brothers bought me a Garmin GPS for Christmas a couple years ago because they were sick of me getting lost on the way to family functions. You could tell me that something is on the 1000 block of West Addison Street and you might as well be speaking French. I won’t find it.

Complicating matters even more, at least in terms of my conversation with Wambi, was that I didn’t have a car during my freshman year in college, having sold my 1981 Mercury Capri to the junkyard for $50 on the day before I left for school. At that point, I’m not sure that I’d ever been to the mall and if I had, I certainly didn’t drive there. I tried to convey this information to Wambi in my halting French. He, not surprisingly, didn’t understand that while I understood what he was asking, I couldn't tell him how to get to the mall -- in English or in French.

So, Wambi, like anybody who is confronted with an interlocutor who doesn’t speak his language, started speaking slower and louder in French. And here it must be said that Wambi’s mandible seemed to function independently from the rest of his head, almost like Ike, the toddler from South Park. If it was possible to be double jointed in the jaw, Wambi was. So now, as I tried to shuffle through the 40 or 50 French vocabulary words I knew that might help me answer Wambi’s question (“La plage?” Nope, there was no beach in Columbia, as far as I knew. “La bibliotheque?” I hadn’t been to the mall, so I sure as hell hadn’t been to the library. “La fenetre?” The window? Really?), I couldn’t concentrate because I was distracted by this anatomical wonder before my eyes.

I found myself just staring at him in the same way, eight years later, I’d be staring at the woman at the Athens gas station. I could see the disappointment in Wambi’s face as he looked at his clipboard, jotting down notes that I’m sure said something like “Homme est tres stupide,” only in grammatically correct French.

Needless to say, I failed the oral exam. And while I passed the class, my dreams of getting a minor in French, or, for that matter, being able to ask for directions in Paris, died in the Arts and Science building on the campus of the University of Missouri back in the fall of 1992.

I should have taken Spanish.

Running update:

Wednesday: 4 mile recovery run in 37:18

Yesterday: 8 miles (with middle 4@7:06 pace) in 63:40

Today: Off

Tomorrow: 14 miles (Yikes!)

Song of the Day: Rearviewmirror, Pearl Jam

It’s fitting the first blog entry deals with a story having to do with me and my brother Paul, as he’s the one most responsible for my achy knees and my aspirations of running 26.2 miles nonstop. He came to visit me in Jackson in March with his wife and beautiful daughter and practically made his visit contingent on me running a half marathon with him in Nashville. He’s three years my junior and has run 9 marathons, most recently the Boston Marathon, after which he filed this report.

In spite of the fact that the last race I ran was a 5k in 1991 as a member of my high school cross country team, the Nashville half marathon went off without a hitch. Paul beat me by more than 15 minutes and didn’t seem to break a sweat while doing it. I figured if 13 miles didn’t kill me, I could do 26. Math is not my strong suit.

Anyway, back to today’s song. Lately in Tennessee we’ve been experiencing, like much of the country, some oppressive heat, the kind that has my dog Lou panting the moment we step off the elevator and into the foyer of my building, knowing what awaits him.

How hot has it been? It’s 10:20 p.m. as I type this and it’s still 83 degrees with a heat index of 89. Yesterday was the first day of summer, but the lowest high temperature of the last 10 days was 90 and the rest have had highs of at least 93 and the humidity highs have been at least 93 percent each day as well. But still, it’s got a ways to go before it’s as sweltering as the summer of 1995 in Chicago, where 521 people died from heat-related causes during the month of July. I was interning at the newspaper in Joliet, Ill., that summer, writing stories and sweating in my 1985 Oldsmobile Firenza, a gem of a car whose inability to cool air was rivaled only by its inability to attract women. I still blame the hatchback.

That summer Pearl Jam was on their Five Horizons tour. I had attended their show at Summerfest in Milwaukee on July 11 with my friend Brandon. The lead singer for that show's opening band wore a green frog-like suit and gigantic wings. Other than the time we we spent pulled over on the Interstate 90/94 because the Firenza was overheating, it was a great night.

But one Pearl Jam show just wasn’t going to be enough that summer and my brother Paul and I vowed to get tickets to the show at Chicago’s Soldier Field a couple nights later. This was before the days of Stubhub, so we called around to ticket brokers in a desperate attempt to secure the tickets. We finally found one who said he could get us lawn seats for $120. This seemed like a great deal to both Paul, who was getting ready to go off to college in the fall and was working at my mom’s restaurant, and me, with my $8 an hour gig at the newspaper. Neither of us majored in business.

The ticket broker actually had a window in the back of a restaurant and when we arrived we weren’t handed the ducats, but rather told to have a seat and a drink.

“Don’t worry,” a rather harried gentleman told us as he took our $240, cash. “We’ve got the tickets.”

I immediately started to worry.

Eventually, several more people showed up and were told to join us. We all sat there, somewhat puzzled, awaiting instructions. We soon got them. We were all going to be hopping into a small bus and heading to Soldier Field. I was pretty sure that I’d seen a story on 20/20 that unfolded the same way and ended up with the bus riders ending up being sold into sex slavery. We ran to the bus.

My brother and I were trying to figure out what we’d gotten ourselves into and as we pulled into Soldier Field the answers weren’t forthcoming. Our leader hopped off the bus and left me, my brother and a handful of other really gullible people and told us he’d be right back. He wasn’t. And as the minutes passed, our attitudes worsened. One guy in particular was cursing the ticket broker. He was doing his best to organize an uprising on the bus, as if this were 1955 Montgomery. He successfully convinced at least one other person that rather than sit around and wait and be screwed out of money and a chance to see the most popular band in the world, that they'd demand their money back as soon as possible. When the broker returned they did just that.

“Just be patient,” he pleaded, but the angry dudes weren’t having it and walked off the bus, refunded cash in hand, hoping to find a ticket scalper with a bit more legitimacy.

My brother and I started discussing getting off the bus and trying to find another source for tickets. But we didn't have cell phones, hell, we didn't even have beepers, and for some reason we had faith our ticket broker, even though he had done nothing more than smile, take half my weekly paycheck and give us what amounted to a $120 bus ride to the stadium that would have cost us $1.50 on the CTA .

As hope was dwindling, a guy in a yellow security guard jacket pulled up on a golf cart and talk to our ticket broker friend. Two people were grabbed off the bus, hopped on the golf cart and disappeared toward the stadium. Who the hell was this guy? And where the hell was he taking them? And, most important, was he going to come back for us? At that point, I would have ridden anywhere with this security guy, especially if it meant I was getting off the damn bus and closer to the stadium.

A few minutes later, back he came. My brother and I positioned ourselves so we could be next for whatever next was. We hopped on the cart and headed toward the stadium, disappearing into the bowels of Soldier Field. Our escort started giving us instructions.

“Give me your hands,” he said, taping wristbands on us that he said we’d need to get onto the field. I still didn't believe that's where we were actually headed.

“We’re going to come up to a T up here and I’m going to go left and you’re going to go right,” he told us.

And then, like the 16-year-old in a floppy hat and bow tie taking tickets at the local cinema, his last words to us were "Enjoy the show.”

Sure enough, we made the right turn and walked about a hundred feet and suddenly, almost magically, we were on the Soldier Field turf. The entrance we emerged from seemed to close behind us.

We made our way toward the end zone and got about 20 feet or so from the stage and the opening band, Bad Religion. We did our best to avoid the mosh pits where sweaty, shirtless men were beating each other up while running around in circles. Ah, the '90s.

I’ve always wondered whether those angry guys who took off from the bus ever got in. If they didn’t, they missed a great show, a 155-minute masterpiece that still goes down as the best I’ve ever seen.

The story of the actual concert and the near-death experience Paul and I had there will have to wait for another post. The good news is there’s plenty of Pearl Jam on the iPod and about 16 more weeks worth of runs to hear their songs.

For now, here’s a pretty good rendition of Rearviewmirror, a great song about the emancipating feeling that can come from leaving behind a bad relationship. This footage isn’t from that Chicago concert, but judging by the sweat-soaked Eddie Vedder it may have been about the same temperature at this show as it was in Chicago back in July ‘95.

Oh, yeah. This blog is ostensibly about training for a marathon. Here's what I've been doing lately other than listening to music to help in that quest:

Sunday: 13 miles in 1:44:56

Yesterday: Off

Today: 10 miles in 1:26:26

Tomorrow: 4 mile recovery run

Running on Full

An old friend sent me a message the other day after he’d heard that I’d be running my first marathon in the fall in Chicago. (I write he “heard” it as if it led CNN’s coverage that night. He saw it when I announced it on my Facebook page).

His message: “I once knew a guy named Michael Kapellas who told me this when I was training for a marathon: `Why would you want to do that? People shit themselves.’”

If only I could go back in time about 15 years and talk to that guy. He seems so wise.

By the time I got that message, it was too late to back out. Today marked the start of the third week of the 18-week training program that will have me ready for the race on October 10.

Having survived the first 79 miles of the training program, I’ve decided to begin my blog about the experience. These days I think it’s required of all marathon runners, especially first timers. You get the expensive shoes, the durable headphones, a book on running marathons, the running shorts that would make Daisy Duke blush and then you head over to blogger.com to stake your claim to your corner of the blogging universe.

Many of these blogs document the painful experience that is preparing for a marathon. I’m not very interested in telling you about how the training is going. Oh, you’ll get some of that, but the truth is I know it’s going to be hard. I know I’m going to be sore. I know there are going to be ups and downs, good runs and bad. But I’m not the first person to do this, won’t be the last and, frankly, won’t know enough about what the hell is happening to me or my body to offer any valuable insight on that front. Focusing on those inevitable struggles and the corresponding aches and pains seems rather uninteresting and I could imagine my reaction to reading day after day of it. I’d be shouting: “Then stop running!” at the screen.

Of course, it’s pretty presumptuous of me to believe that anybody would be interested in reading the personal stories that I’ve decided the blog will focus on instead. My response to that is, of course, “Then stop reading!” (This is, I realize, a great recipe for a well-read blog. Tell the readers to stop reading before any of them have started. Oh, well. I'm new.)

So while you’ll hear that I ran eight miles today, I’m more interested it writing about what I was thinking about while doing that running and, more specifically, just as the blog’s name suggests, what one of the songs that I heard on my iPod made me think about. The blog will be a running musical memoir in several senses of the phrase. You’ll meet people and events from my life as well as any other type of memory that happens to get, uh, jogged by what I’m hearing in my headphones.

Here’s hoping it’s an enjoyable, poop-free journey, all the way to the finish line on October 10.