Youth Brigade – "It's Not My Fault" (1996)

I can't say who's fault it was 

But I'm sure that it's not me 

[NOTE: I had a hard time picking just one 2 or 3 lines post from November 2015 to feature in this month’s “28 Posts in 28 Days.”  Surprisingly, I picked one that is mostly about someone else instead of one that is mostly about me.]

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Mickey Rivers was the centerfielder and leadoff hitter for the “Bronx Zoo” Yankees teams that won the 1977 and 1978 World Series.  

Here’s a quote that’s attributed to Mickey, who was a real character:

Ain't no sense worrying.  If you have no control over something, ain't no sense worrying about it – you have no control over it anyway.  If you do have control, why worry?  So either way, there ain't no sense worrying."

That actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it . . . doesn't it?

Unlike Mickey Rivers, I worry a lot.  I worry mostly about things I have no control over.  That’s why I prefer to take care of things myself instead of relying on other people to take care of them.  

Just because something isn’t your fault is no guarantee that you won’t get blamed for it.  You often have to pay the price when someone else screws up.  I figure if I’m going to be held responsible for how something turns out, I’d rather do it myself than trust it to someone else.  

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My daughter Sarah works as an event planner for a large company that puts on trade shows and technical conferences at convention centers or large hotels around the country.

I can’t imagine doing her job.  The amount of planning required to put on a successful trade show is mind-boggling.  No matter how good a job the event planner does, there are always last-minute snafus that have to be handled on the fly.  

Those snafus usually aren’t the event planner’s fault . . . but they are always the event planner’s responsibility.  The buck usually stops there.

The last show that Sarah handled took place at a large and well-known Las Vegas hotel – the kind of place that hosts dozens of big trade shows each year.

Sarah got up at the crack of dawn the day before the event opened to meet with a dozen or so of the hotel’s department heads and make sure that everything was good to go for the conference.

But in the middle of that meeting she got a panicked text from a young woman who worked for her.

I’ll let Sarah tell the story:

In case you were wondering what being a conference planner really is like, here is the adventure I had at my last conference.  

One of the biggest exhibits at that conference was housed in a 70-foot-long trailer.  It was basically an enormous mobile kitchen that could be used to put on cooking demonstrations at trade shows and outdoor events.  

I spent hours confirming the measurements of the truck with the exhibitor and with the hotel to make sure it would fit into the hotel’s exhibit hall.  

The truck had to be the first thing into our exhibition space on Sunday, so we scheduled it to move in at 6 A.M.  But it broke down on its way to the hotel, and arrived three hours late.  

When the truck finally showed up at the hotel, I got some very bad news . . . the truck would NOT fit through the exhibit hall entrance.  

I had confirmed the exact dimensions of the truck and trailer and the hotel doors several times, and we should have had plenty of space.  But the CAD (“computer-aided design”) drawings the hotel had provided were wrong – the door opening was six inches narrower than the drawings indicated.

Also, the truck dimensions I had been given were off – the trailer was actually seven inches wider than I had been told.  The bottom line was that it wouldn’t fit through the doors.

I had to tell the owner of the truck, who had spent $30,000 on a sponsorship plus thousands more to get the truck driven across the country, that we might not be able to get it into the exhibit space.  

He freaked out, and started yelling: "YOU NEED TO GET THIS TRUCK IN HERE!  IT’S NOT MY PROBLEM, IT’S NOT THE HOTEL'S PROBLEM, IT’S YOUR PROBLEM!  YOU HAVE ONE HOUR TO FIGURE OUT A SOLUTION AND GET THE TRUCK IN HERE!” 

He wasn’t the only one who was upset.  All of our other exhibitors were waiting to move in and set up, and they were getting unhappy, too. 

One of the hotel employees pulled out a laser measuring tape, and we started making measurement.  It looked like that if we removed the exhibit hall doors, we could get the truck in – with clearance of about half an inch on either side.

The doors weighed about 600 pounds each.  Because it was Sunday, none of the hotel staff who might have been able to take the doors off were working.  Finally, I called the general manager of the hotel, who was at his wife's 50th birthday party.  I insisted that he call in his people and get the doors taken off.  

After a lot of discussion, the hotel finally removed the doors and we got the truck in.  There was a large  crowd watching by that time, and they all clapped and cheered when the driver managed to squeeze through the opening.  

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Don’t you just love a happy ending?

I'm in awe of the way Sarah was able to take care of this situation.  And I was struck by how cool, calm, and collected she was when she told me the story – she made it sound like it was all in a day's work.  (I'll never complain to her about my job again.)

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Youth Brigade is a Los Angeles punk band that was formed by brothers Mark, Adam, and Shawn Stern in 1980.  (Don’t confuse that Youth Brigade with the Washington, DC Youth Brigade, a “harDCore” punk band that formed at about the same time.)  

Click here to listen to “It’s Not My Fault,” which is the first track on their 1996 album, To Sell the Truth.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Amboy Dukes – "You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire" (1968)

What you gonna do 

When the bubble bursts?

On July 22 at 6:00 am, my very pregnant daughter Sarah woke up and immediately knew it was time to eight, skate, and donate to the hospital before her bubble burst and my first grandson fell out.

So she and husband drove to the hospital (which is twenty minutes away if all goes well), dealt with the usual I-need-to-see-your-insurance-card hospital bureaucrats, and got to a labor and delivery just in time for Sarah to deliver my grandson Jack at 7:10 am.

My grandson Jack on the day he was born

There was no time for the hospital staff to give Sarah an epidural anesthetic, so she had to tough it out au naturel.

But she handled the whole thing – as she had handled her entire pregnancy – with total aplomb.  In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Sarah is about the aplombest new mother you ever did see.

I for one was very happy at Sarah and Jack’s timing because I was about to leave town and drive to Cape Cod for my annual summer vacation.  My grandson’s birth delayed my departure by a few hours, but I didn’t complain a bit.  (My mother’s comment on my decision to hit the road: “How could you leave that pretty little boy?”)

The three-week-old Jack

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I thought long and hard about what song to feature in this very important 2 or 3 lines.

I could have featured one of the 89 songs I found with “Jack” in the title: e.g., Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack,” The Who’s “Happy Jack,” Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack,” John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane,” or the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” to name just a few.

Another option would have been to feature a song by a musician who shared Jack’s July 22 birthday: e.g., George Clinton, Bobby Sherman, or Don Henley.

The lyrics of “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire” are very marginally related to the content of today’s 2 or 3 lines, but that’s enough given what a killer song it is.

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The Amboy Dukes are best-known for their 1968 hit, “Journey to the Center of the Mind.”  It was what I like to call a stick of dynamite.

The band’s follow-up single, “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire,” which failed to crack the top 100 in the U.S., is almost as good.  But it had totally escaped my notice until a couple of weeks ago.

“You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire” was never released on an Amboy Dukes LP, but was included as a bonus track when the group’s second album was released on CD.  (Saints be praised!)

Click here to listen to “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire.”

Barbarians – "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl" (1965)

Are you a boy?

Or are you a girl?

My daughter Sarah – who is due to give birth to my first grandchild in August – had an ultrasound on Friday that revealed the gender of her unborn child.

Sarah asked her doctor not to tell her if she was having a boy or a girl.  Instead, she told the doctor to write either “boy” or “girl” on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope.

Sarah then took the envelope to the neighborhood bakery.  She told the baker to wait to open the envelope until after Sarah left, and then bake a cake with either blue or pink icing on the inside depending on what the doctor’s note said.

The families gathered yesterday for a “gender reveal party,” which apparently is all the rage among the cool kids these days.  (You can click here to read an article about different ways to throw a gender reveal party of your own.)  

Cutting the gender-reveal cake

After an appropriate amount of ceremonial buildup, Sarah and her husband cut the cake.  (Since it is the father – not the mother – who determines the gender of a child, I thought it was only fair that he have the honor of cutting the gender-reveal cake.  But does anyone listen to me?)

As you'll see from the next picture, my daughter's first child is a masculine child:

I'm thrilled that my daughter is having a boy, and so is my daughter.

Luca Brasi would have been pleased as well:

But the three of us may be in the minority.

Here's an excerpt from an article that the mother of a young boy wrote for a UK newspaper:

As one of six daughters growing up in the seventies, girls were so little prized compared with boys that a friend of my father even expressed his sympathy rather than congratulations when my youngest sister, a perfectly healthy child, was born.

Can you imagine that happening now?  I rather doubt it.  In an almost complete reversal of attitudes, today's parents long for girls.

As the mother of an only child, a son, I do not think I am exaggerating in saying that I detected something akin to sympathy when we announced that we had a boy.

It is clear that males generally have a much harder time of it than females.  I'll discuss why life is an uphill battle for males vis-à-vis females – beginning in the womb – in a future 2 or 3 lines.

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The T.A.M.I. Show, the legendary 1964 concert movie that I vividly remember seeing when I was 12 years old, featured performances by the Beach Boys, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Rolling Stones, and . . . the Barbarians?

The Barbarians were from Cape Cod, of all places.  The most striking thing about the band was the fact that its drummer, Victor “Moulty” Moulton, had a hook-shaped prosthetic left hand that he modified to enable him to hold a drumstick.  

Moulton had lost part of his hand when a homemade pipe bomb he was holding exploded.  He was 14.  (No, I have no idea what he was doing with a homemade pipe bomb.)

“Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl,” which the Barbarians released in 1965, had nothing to do with gender reveal parties.  If you were a teenaged boy in the sixties who grew your hair long, someone probably asked you whether you were a boy or a girl – not because that person didn’t know, but because he was making a point.

Here’s “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: