AMANDA’S MUSINGS: The presumption of popularity

Amanda's rockin' nephew, Nicholas, prepares to bomb her with a water balloon. Photo by Amandablu

By Amanda Gillooly

Drawn to the 75-percent off rack at a local department store, I flitted through the various boys clothing and didn’t see much that called out to me. Then I saw it: A small red T-shirt with an awesome, not-too-menacing image of a dragon breathing fire.

It was my nephew’s size, and it was definitely his style. And the price of $2.98 sealed the deal.

Nicholas, who will start kindergarten this fall at Wilson Elementary School in the West Allegheny School District, was enamored with it immediately. While his beaming smile and sunshiny aura made me feel like a cloudless day, his vocal response first struck me funny, then tragic.

“Hey, Bub, do you like this?” I asked him, making him turn his back to me so I could eyeball the shirt to make sure it would fit him.

“Oh, yeah, Aunt Mandy. That dragon is cool. And it might help me be popular,” he responded

There, in the middle of the store, I imagined somewhere a turntable was screeching to a dead silence. Crickets stopped crooning in grasses across the Commonwealth.

“That dragon is cool,” I expected him to say. He’s 5 years old. I didn’t know he even knew what “popular” meant.

And it made me sad.

Nicholas is a free sprit, a free thinker who asks questions like a seasoned reporter with the type of insight you might expect from the book “Tuesday’s with Maury.”

On a drive home he once shared with me: “Aunt Mandy, I don’t know why people like to be grumpy. I like to laugh. Laughing is fun.”

It ain’t Socrates, but I like his style.

OK. I know. Everyone thinks their son/daughter/niece/nephew/granddaughter/grandson is totally uber awesome. But while others in my family recognize Nicholas for his model behavior or verbal skills, I like to focus on the stuff you can't teach -- the most important of which is his ability to see humor even in the most dry situations.

Nicholas is a silly boy. He is the first to joke or tease. He understands sight gags and simple irony. And I guess when he mentioned the P word I thought of my own primary and middle-school experiences, which were punctuated with self-doubt and a longing to emulate the “popular” kids in school.

I never understood how one became “popular.” Some of the popular kids were kind to everyone. Some were jerks. But there was no common denominator. While we all deny it, I think there is a little piece of all of our hearts that wanted, at least for a few fleeting moments, to know what it was like to simply be awed and revered for no other reason than your having had the cool clothes and sat at The Popular Table.

I thought about No Child Left Behind and the emphasis it places on math and reading skills and not necessarily on character or the arts or social sciences. I thought about how it must be even more difficult for a free spirit to retain his splendor in a society that has always unconsciously judged them on his looks, wealth or family reputation. Now the public education system, thanks to that federally unfunded-mandate, further restricts the worth of a student.

Now it depends largely on how well he can retain information and then regergitate it on a standardized test.

While I wish I could say I got over the idea of cliques and discovered the concept of an “over soul” that connects us all with the human experience of high school, I would be lying.

It was actually in college, when I became friends with myriad characters -- grungy, preppy, nerdy, gay, rich or poor. None of that really mattered. The saddest part is that we would often say to each other, laughing: "You know, I don't think we would have been friends in high school."

When you get to know a Candy or an Ean or a Louis Philbert -- when you grow to love anyone (or anything, really), it doesn't occur to you what particular adjective group-think would attach to it.

Popularity, or at least the importance of it, is at last as fleeting as high school itself.

At the end of this brief reflection, I laughed at my nephew and told him simply:

“Nicholas, you don’t need a T-shirt to make you popular. Just be yourself - you are naturally awesome.”

He didn’t look at me when he spoke next. His eyes were transfixed on the dragon’s scales and breath of bright orange fire.

I know,” he said with a little audible sigh -- the kind that clearly meant “Duh!”

Then it was time to laugh at myself. I had no reason to worry about him after all.

The husband-calling contest

Some small-town festivals have pig-calling contests, while others celebrate them with watermelon-eating face-offs.

For the past four years, Waynesburg, Pa.'s, venerable Rain Day festival has thrown a husband-calling contest where the winner is judged for being the most obnoxious contestant.

"The highest scorer is the last woman I'd want to have as a wife calling me," the borough's police chief, Tim Hawfield, told the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa. He thought up the silly affair and serves as one of its judges.

A big honor for a scrappy street

By Scott Beveridge,

WEBSTER, Pa. – At one end of a short street in the heart of my hometown sits the rusting and sagging Donora-Webster Bridge that has been closed to traffic for two weeks over safety concerns.

At other end of this tiny road in Webster, Pa., there are crooked stone stairs leading to an abandoned house that is collapsing at a slow rate of speed.

Yet this road that is the length of two mini-blocks has just been given quite a noble feature and it doesn’t involve the one building sharing its address.

Commissioners in Rostraver Township have renamed the street to honor the late Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Ernest P. Kline who grew up in the village before entering state politics in Beaver County.

It’s a fitting place to call Kline Street because his mother was part of a protest there in the 1970s that local women organized to force state transportation officials to install traffic lights at the intersection. The same confusing signals are still there, even though the traffic has all but disappeared since the bridge closed.

It will surely become more confusing for such people as utility workers and delivery drivers as their likes had trouble finding Webster residences even when the bridge was open.

They had a good excuse.

Kline Street used to be Anderson Street, but that was anyone’s guess because there were no road signs marking the drag until last week. Then Westmoreland County 911 renamed Anderson, deeming it Thomas Street a two years ago when houses here were finally given street numbers. This move was supposed to make it easier and quicker for ambulances to get to emergencies in the village.

A friend tried to get here a few weeks ago for a party and the global positioning system in her van took her to Webster, across the bridge and onto what the GPS gods know as Tenth Street. The same GPS navigators take people to Donora when they try to find my house.

The Kline family must be chuckling at the honor, albeit small, our village has bestowed upon the legacy of Ernie Kline. At least most of its members know how to get here to see their name on three new large street signs in town

Amanda's musings: A Brooke Shields lashing

Brooke Shields Doll, originally uploaded by Barbie Creations.

Dear Brooke Shields,

It was a little shocking when I was abruptly asked: “Are they real?”

While I was blessed with an ample bosom, another guest at the wedding I was attenting wasn’t asking about any augmentation there. She was inquiring about my eyelashes, which had been primped excessively for my cousin Curt’s marriage ceremony. I blushed uncharacteristically, and told her about my painstaking process to lush, ample eyelashes.

After applying two shades of translucent silver shadow, I rimmed the upper lid with a waterproof black liquid liner and completed the look with several coats of black mascara, I told her. What I kept to myself was the exact number of mascara coats (and the fact that while I typically use two types of lash lacquer this occasion required a third).

Brooke, I wanted to share this story with you because it is possible to get your beauty on without prostituting yourself to the folks at Latisse, a prescription eye solution for the treatment of hypotrichosis (which means “not enough lashes”). I think you should know this because you’ve been shaking it on so many commercials that casual observers may get the idea your royalties for the “The Blue Lagoon” have finally sputtered and died.

I understand a woman has to feed her family, but I think all the Crest toothpaste you’ve peddled would have paid for the foodstuffs necessary to sustain you guys. But Brooke, oral health is one thing (plaque is a terrible thing – and a real threat) but to lend your face to a prescription for sparse lashes?

For shame!

Particularly ridiculous is your expanded testimonial at www.latisse.com – where you tell the world about your “personal journey.” Wanting to improve lashes for a medical condition is one thing. “Ripping” your lashes out because of all the theater roles was just silly. You poor thing!

I know you have some personal assistant to help paste falsies up on your peepers – and I am sure you can afford better mascara than the Wet and Wild variety. I wanted to write and tell you that you should be ashamed of yourself because of the gargantuan check you received for singing Latisse’s praises. It only helps to feed into a culture where legitimate drugs are overpriced under the guise of “research and development costs.”

Public watchdog groups have been keeping tabs on just these types of expenditures. I did a story on direct-to-consumer advertisements for prescription meds a few years back and I can tell you that many of the nation’s top drug manufacturers spent more money on their marketing campaigns than those so-called research and development costs.

So, when you see commercials about octogenarians cutting their blood pressure drugs in thirds because they can’t afford the exorbitant monthly cost, please know you could have played a small role in their ensuing heart attacks.

To me, that’s almost as disturbing as “The Blue Lagoon.”

Warmest Regards,

Amanda “one of my prescriptions costs $321 a month” Gillooly

A unique sink

By Scott Beveridge

Lanny Bradley has incredibly gifted eyes that can see a kitchen towel rack in Canadian caribou antlers or a decorative table covering in a grouping of pheasant feathers.

And the Rostraver Township, Pa., man has the hands of a fine artisan that can craft these creations that adorn his rustic home. Yet he’s never spent an hour in any fine arts program. His is raw talent.

My favorite project of his to date is the bathroom sink in the new powder room he is building in his house. It’s made from a flea market find; an old Baltimore and Ohio Railroad copper basin that might have been used to wash up in a caboose or collect coal ash in a locomotive.

Bradley used copper pipes to secure the basin to the floor and general plumping supplies to give it a water source. I can’t wait to see this sink after it takes on a patina, and what this genius dreams up next.

Hot for soft-served custard stand

CANONSBURG, Pa. – Three Pennsylvania boys have found a creative way to spend part of their summer vacation and also attempt to impress the girls who work at an unusual ice cream stand.

The guys accomplished that by producing the cute video, above, of the Turtle Twist, a quirky roadside attraction along Route 980 in Canonsburg, Pa. The owners found the Fiberglass building in the shape of a giant ice cream cone in more than 20 pieces on eBay, and had it reassembled five years ago for their start-up family business.

The actors in the video are Alex Chips, Corey Draganovsky and Nick Carper in a desperate trip to see ice cream girls Victoria Bernardi and Breanna Bakaitis. OK, I admit the video made me chuckle.