You Guys Playin’ Cards?
There is a great scene from the the classic movie, National Lampoon’s Animal House, where the new pledge, Kent Dorfman (a.k.a. Flounder) ,who comes into the fraternity as a legacy based on the membership of his older brother, walks into the house and sees a group of upperclassmen at the poker table and says, “Hi guys……you guys playin’ cards?” It’s a showstopper because its the moment that Flounder establishes himself as the loser, all-too-friendly pledge and the frat boys realize they have been had by their Rush Chairman, Eric “Otter” Stratton. It was that friendly likability of Flounder and his pal Pinto (both named by none other than John “Blutarsky” Belushi), that made the movie work so well with all the dysfunctional Delta Tau Chi upperclassmen like Bluto, Otter, Hoover, Boon and Daniel Day Simpson (the biker with the handlebar mustache played by ubiquitous character actor Bruce McGill).
But the story was about the “bad boys” of Delta house versus the mean and nasty boys of Omega house with Neidermeyer, Greggy, and Chip (Kevin Bacon) and we come quickly to empathize with the Deltas and to loathe the Omegas. The Deltas were your likable collegiate fuck-ups that were out for a good time and didn’t care so much about the quality of their education. It so happens that Faber College is not exactly the center of American educational excellence the way Dartmouth (on which the story is loosely based) has been and with the conniving Dean Wormer working with the Omegas to secure the ouster of the Delta members and the eradication of Delta House from the Inter-fraternity Council. The screw-ups get our sympathy because they are lovable and well-meaning even though they are frat boys to the core. Anyone who went to college in the thirty year span from the fifties through the seventies recognizes some classmate or fraternity mate in the Delta members, the Omega members and/or the sorority women (Babs and Mandy) depicted.
But that was all portrayed in 1978. That was two years into my career as a banker. I was, I can’t even believe it when I say it, twenty-four years old. That is two years younger than my youngest son is now. We were still getting over the 60’s apparently since Animal House didn’t depict anything or anyone that looked or seemed like a hippie, but there were plenty who looked and seemed like “the wild ones” of the fifties and the ROTC draft-avoiding boys of the early 60’s when the highest goal of many young co-ed’s was to become a Pan Am stewardess (as opposed to a flight attendant). Even five years later when The Big Chill got released, we were a much more serious nation when it came to the remembrance of our college days. Indeed, The Big Chill was written by Lawrence Kasden (born in 1949), who is exactly five years younger than the main writer of Animal House, who was mostly Harold Ramis, who was born in 1944. What a difference in psyche five years makes. Its the difference of carefree versus carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.
I am thinking about these movies because I have just written a book for a friend and that book is set in 1963, that period best described as an interregnum in American culture. The best example of a film set exactly in that period is perhaps American Graffiti, which portrays a 1962 version of Modesto, California as it and its high school graduates were coming of age. That movie was also written by a member of the birth-year cohort from 1944, one Mr. George Lucas of Star Wars fame. He was raised in Modesto and was doing what most writers do, writing from his own experiences and perceptions of the world around him, albeit with a very studied eye.
These great writers (Ramis and Lucas in particular) are fully ten years my senior and lived an American life that I witnessed from afar and was very aware of, but was not my own reality. Kasden, with his more serious tone gets closer to my era by half a decade. I am in search of movies written about coming of age a decade after Modesto or Hannover (Dartmouth’s home) in 1962 to better understand how the psyche may differ and how I might be influenced in my perception of the world by that much of a difference. 1971-73 were my early college years and my reality was centered around Ithaca, New York, but it started in the summer of ‘71 in lovely Cleveland, Ohio, where I worked at Case Western Reserve University for the summer, doing menial paper shuffling for the Sociology Department.
It so happens that we are headed to Cleveland tomorrow for my first visit there in fifty years. The summer I lived there, the Cuyahoga River caught fire….for the second summer in a row. That was a pretty big statement about our national state of water pollution. That summer I went to my first rock concert by an up and coming, but not so well-known yet artist from England named Yusuf Islam, a Greek Cypriot who worked under the stage name of Cat Stevens. His Tea for the Tillerman album was roaring on the charts so going to his outdoor concert was a perfect start to my live rock exposure. Tomorrow we will go to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and I will come full circle on Rock & Roll.
That summer I ended my stint in Cleveland by hitching a ride to Ithaca to start college at Cornell. That was my moment of coming of age. I was truly on my own. Today I spoke to my youngest son, Thomas, who at 26 is a Cornell graduate who is spending the weekend with six buddies at my house in Ithaca. We arrive there with Gary & Oswaldo the day after he and his gang leave and he has promised the place will be spic and span. We plan to spend three weeks in Ithaca with my entire nuclear family there with me for July 4th. Given that I began my coming of age there fifty years ago, I suspect there will be a few more stories to come out of my stay there the next month. I will be near my own version of Animal House at my old Phi Sig Ep house on Ridgewood Road. I have had my Big Chill weekend last year in Connecticut after one of my college friends killed himself. And this time, I am arriving by car from California, the land of American Graffiti. So, I am going through my own moment and remembering the storytelling of Ramis, Lucas and Kasden. I trust they will inspire me to storytelling greatness of my own. I just wish I could have played cards with them back then…..