Toy (Store) Story + podcast
(link to podcast version at bottom)
No, this has nothing to do with Woody or Buzz. It has everything to do with red ink, Chapter 11 and the loss of places parents could rely on to be tortured by their children.
In other words, it’s sort of sad, but not in an Old Yeller way. The only guns shoot water or air and nothing dies but mom and dad’s sanity.
What’s sparked this HO-sized train of thought is the news that Toys R Us is liquidating. Yes..every Barbie, Monopoly set, pop gun, billion-pack of Pampers, two-wheeler, three-wheeler, Big Wheeler, doll house, swing set, bouncy ball, battery and jump rope..out the door at deep discounts before the giant toy chain closest its doors forever.
That news comes in the wake of the closing recently of beloved Detroit-area Doll Hospital and Toy Soldier Shop and who knows how many other independent toy stores around the country.
Yeah, sure, it’s cool for parents to find something their kids want by searching online or prowling the neighborhood Walmart, and probably spending less money, but what’s missing here is the chance for children..and sometimes adults… to be children. To explore the shelves of cool stuff, pick up a doll or ball or Super Soaker or puzzle and feel it, imagine what it would be like to actually own it and play with it and show it to your friends then beg your parents to buy it, pleading you just HAVE to have this or your life will instantly become meaningless.
My first recollection of going into a toy store was a little place in the line of stores pictured above on Union Turnpike and 248th Street in Queens, where I grew up. Stuck in a strip near a bar, booze shop and deli, It was called Mitchells. Yup. Owned by a guy named Mitchell. Wasn’t sure if it was his first or last name and didn’t care as long as the names he carried included Mattel and Remco and Parker Brothers and Hasbro, Lionel and Ideal and Gilbert. Mitchells wasn’t a big place. It was about the size of a small deli, only instead of pickles and pastrami his shelves were stuffed with toys of every kind. I hardly had more than a buck on me, a week’s allowance, when I’d pop into Mitchells. He knew all I could probably buy was a Tootsie Roll or some tiny water gun he sold for a nickel. Sometimes I’d buy a box containing a couple of rolls of caps for my toy Matt Dillon six-shooter. Bang! Bang! Bang! Those caps were awesome because most anything that made noise was awesome.
Mitchells lasted only a few years before he was bought out by a dry cleaner. How boring is that! But all wasn’t lost. A mile or two down Union Turnpike, just over the city line in Nassau County, was a cool place called Hush-a-Bye. It sold lots of furniture for children’s rooms, but the lower level was all toys. The coolest toys. Toys that wouldn’t fit in Mitchells’s small space. Knock hockey tables, elaborate electric train sets, all sorts of bikes, pogo sticks and Hula hoops. All it took was 20 cents to get on the bus, take it to the City Line stop and walk about three block to Hush-a-Bye. When you’re talking cool toys, that’s a small journey. My friends and I were almost always too broke to actually buy anything, but just plying the aisles of this new wonderland was entertainment in itself.
Fast forward to a time my older brother and I were in college. We decided to go into Manhattan and the flagship FAO Schwartz store where Tom Hanks jumped around on a giant keyboard in “Big.” 
We needed to buy a special toy for one of our cousin’s birthday. But we became hopelessly lost in the giant store, forgot our mission and started tossing around a football my brother picked up from one of the shelves. The other customers were smart enough to realize neither of us were adept at passing accurately…or catching the ball, for that matter and got the hell out of the way. The nonsense finally ended when a smartly suited salesman suggested we remove our sorry selves from the esteemed purveyor of playthings. Ha! We never did get around to buying that gift. The poor kid received a nice card and our best wishes.
By the time my two kids were born in the 1980’s my wife and I never forgot the wonder of exploring toy stores and let our son and daughter take all the time they wanted when we hit the neighborhood Toys R Us.
The stores sold these big plastic playhouses and had the samples lined up like little Levittowns in a center aisle. Our kids would check out every one of them and, like adult lookie-loos, would advise us of which one best suited their dreams. One year we actually bought on of them. It sat in a special corner of our basement and the kids filled it with balloons…naming the plastic cottage the Balloony Goony House. They had a lot of fun in it until they outgrew the three-foot high doorway and we sold it to our neighbors at one of our garage sales.
Maybe it’s true today’s kids would rather bang on a keyboard, fry their eyes gaping at one screen or another or perform every task on their little phones…just like adults. As Joni Mitchell wrote, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” but I hate to think of a time when kids never know of places where fun, exploration, surprise and discovery were were right out there. Not online on a screen. But right there…to touch and see…sitting on shelf..and shipping was always free..because it came home with you, in your parent’s car.
One panelist said he refuses to use the term “fake news,” others, including myself, surmised fake news could be anything from the satire of The Daily Show to maliciously-published falsehoods. A Thomson Reuters report on Fake News released yesterday described the term as being “weaponized” by the current cretin in the White House who launches it every time a story he dislikes is released, whether or not it’s true.
What struck me more than anything about the discussion didn’t actually come from the panel, but from the questions fired at us from the audience. A mostly middle aged crowd brought up reading newspapers and watching Walter, they seemed almost desperate…at loose ends..to find out from us how things got this way. What happened to journalism, where did all the “real” journalists go, how do I find reliable sources of fair and accurate news?
I don’t wanna see their book shelves because some people buy the classics or high-minded tomes but never cracked the covers. It’s all pretentious bullshit. But a person rarely buys music and doesn’t listen to it. Doesn’t matter what the format is. They own the music and when the mood strikes for a particular song, artist or genre, just the right selection isn’t far away. 
I wanna be able to discuss one’s collection. There are often great stories about how a person came to own a particular album, regardless of the medium.
One of high school buddies was a nut for the guitar group, The Ventures. He had every album. I have of few from them as well, but Manny Hershkowitz was thoroughly hypnotized by them…
Then there was Al Schmertz. He only collected comedy albums. Especially live performances. He had ‘em all. Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Rodney Dangerfield. Couldn’t carry a tune. Ever. But he was awesome at saying, “thanks. you’ve been great.”
I do own some strange stuff like the album by the 
I own albums by comedy troupe Firesign Theater, a double LP of early live performances by Woody Allen before he became creepy. 
How about a live double LP from a rock festival in the early 70‘s in Puerto Rico called Mar y Sol, featuring, among others, Long John Baldry
I do own some 45’s including Fabian’s “Hound Dog Man” bought by my brother and a bunch of other singles that were sent to me by various record companies when I was a radio station program director, including this total oddball from actor George Segal called “What You Gonna Do When the Rent Comes “Round.” It was free.
Let’s not forget a bizarre Steve Martin platter called “What I Believe..A Patriotic Statement). I can only imagine. A needle hasn’t ridden its grooves since before the Bee Gees turned disco.
As the Winter Olympics come to a close I ask you this question..do you speak Olympian?It’s more than Greek to me–it’s like a cross between Mesopotamian and Klingon. When I hear the announcers describe what’s going on I wanna call 911 because I think they’re having apoplexies. What do I mean? ok…you flip on the snowboard half-pipe event. the announcer starts getting cranked up, just ready to scream out things that make no sense at all.. ok..here we go, there goes schleppy callaghan, whoa! just did a quadruple grab his ass backwards opposite front reverse rolling in the shit switch fake back side flip us off 1080 canadian bacon mindy method mulekick! That was awesome but the judges may take some points off for the shaky roast beef rusty trombone. 
Right. I can’t tell the method from the madness but i can pretty easily figure out some insane person that’s only 4 feet tall wearing baggy clothes just shot themselves into the air then did a bunch of contortions that made it look like the poor kid just got tased. Then, if they’re lucky, they land on their feet and shoot up the other side of the half-pipe and do something even more crazy that will once again set off the announcer who cries…..ohmygod! that’s the first anyone’s done a quintuple kiss your ass goodbye stiffy stuffy pickpocket …while eating a breakfast sandwich! Uh..yeah..whatever. None of the announcer’s gibberish helps me understand what just happened aside from watching a young person do things that, for most people, would prevent them from becoming an old person. With no hope of emulating what I’ve just seen, I attempt a soft sofa dismount, but lose 3 points for a two-footed landing..and spilling beer and chips on the carpet. I settle for a bronze..just beating an in-law who fell on a Frito. 
I’ve been watching it for decades and to this day, I don’t know the difference between a flip, loop, lutz, salchow or axle. It’s all just skinny people lofting themselves above the ice, twirling, smiling, crying, falling in different ways. 
When I heard Tara and Johnny kvell that some skater landed a triple lutz, all I could think of was what my father would often ask when someone went crazy about something that didn’t impress him. he’d say, “yeah…but is it good or bad for the jews?” Lutz sounds German, so it probably isn’t. In fact, it’s named after Austrian skater Alois Lutz, but Austria’s just next door to Germany so I’m not budging. i suppose in this age of double, triple, quadruple screen viewing I could have webpages open that define all these terms but if my eyes are averted for even a second when i hear the announcer scream, “holy crap..they just landed a 1600pennsylvaniaavenuetrumpiancombover….and i miss it…well that would pretty much send me into a 1280snuffmytorch.
I went to the boat show today. I have no intention of buying a boat, but yet I go to the boat show every other year. I don’t fantasize about buying a boat and I can think of only one time in our lives my wife and I almost seriously considered buying one, but then I got laid off from my job and we decided to buy food instead.
So why do I insist on coughing up the price of a ticket and parking to attend boat shows? Several reasons. Some boats just look pretty cool and they let you climb aboard to look around, sit in nice, cushy seats, plop your butt behind the captain’s wheel and basically enjoy the feeling of being on a vessel you couldn’t possibly afford, care to maintain, have to schlep to and from the water, or put up with people hoping to wangle an invitation.
The other reason I attend boat shows is I enjoy watching the salesmen who wield clipboards ready to write up that big sale. In most cases, they never raise their clipboards past their belt lines since there are so many people at the boat show like me, who just wanna walk on boats but are smart enough not to sink their finances by buying one. I actually heard this conversation between a big-gutted lookie-lou and a clipboard-wielding sales guy.
The only sport in which athletes do not wear gloves is curling, although SOME of the curlers do..others wear just one. Every other sport involves almost every ounce of flesh protected from cold, snow, ice, sun, concussions, being sliced by razor sharp blades or edges, being mistaken for a souvenir when a well-meaning, but seriously drunk spectator seeing the Olympic logos emblazoned on an athlete’s outfit, mistakes him or her for a souvenir and attempts to whack the poor guy or gal’s noggin’ like a bobblehead.
While watching figure skating I often imagine one of them landing the first quintuple lutz, then falling right through the ice and disappearing, resulting in a two-tenths of a point deduction for rousting the fossilized judges from their stupor. The spectacle would spark commentator Johnny Weir and Tara Lapinsky to exclaim, “don’t you love our outfits!”
I really enjoy the insane sports of skeleton and luge, but I think slathering those little sleds in Crisco before the riders lay down on them might make them even more challenging and entertaining.
This is the first Olympics that I’ve found myself watching cross-country skiing. It’s a great sport and I admire the unbelievable strength and conditioning it takes to succeed. But that’s not why I’m watching it. When one skier runs into another, a whole bunch fall like dominoes and you just don’t see that in many other sports. Worth waiting four years to see.
Love, love, love the snowboarding. Those crazy riders keep pushing the envelope in terms of height, difficulty and danger. I look forward to one of them launching themselves up the side of the half-pipe, into the air, and flying off with a flock of pigeons to Pyongyang, defiling every statue of Kim Jong Un.
I think they should replace guns in the biathlon with pea shooters. They’re a lot lighter and it would be fun to see athletes with frozen faces attempt to pucker up enough to blow a pea. I would think that would make the sport even more challenging and less noisy.
Finally, it’s about that torch. The current one doesn’t look at all like the traditional cauldron, but more like a giant flaming goiter.
Cowards are death to any organization that thrives on moving forward, on fostering creativity and bolstering worker morale. Cowards are useless wastes of space and resources and should be swept from the payroll immediately. They will only hold you back and piss you off.
Think about it. If the Cowardly Lion was too scared to join Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow on the Yellow Brick Road to meet Oz, he might never have found the nerve he had in him all along.
edLINES 