Rockin New Years Eve

Mammy has been pestering me; trying to get me to make plans for New Years Eve. She told me that we have to go out since there will be a blue moon. I always said that I go out on New Year’s Eve “only once in a blue moon.” She wants me to keep my promise and doesn’t want to sit at home watching Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year Eve.

Doesn’t she realize that the Pussycat Girls will be performing on the show this year?
Anyway, where would we go?
Mammy gave me an ultimatum. We go out or else.
I tried making reservations at “The Trolley Car,” a local bistro in Wadesville, where I squandered away so much of my youth. I got no answer. Not even a taped message or an answering machine. It would have been the perfect place for a romantic evening, high up on the mountain with a bird’s eye view of the blue moon and stripping pits.
The Trolley was noted for the friendliest bartenders in the greater St. Clair area and, more importantly, it was celebrated for its fine, eclectic menu of bar food – pickled eggs, beef jerky, and Lance crackers. If I am correct pistachio nuts were the signature mark of this mouthwatering bill of fare. Yes! Wadesville would be the perfect location to view the blue moon that would envelop Schuylkill County as we welcomed 2010.*
I remember many places from Schuylkill County’s past but I could not find any in the phone book. The Lame Goose. The SoHo. The Bur Ben Inn. The Gallery. The Con Ja Ka. Rokosz’s. All of these were now all closed.
“I want to dance,” Mammy bellowed repeatedly. I tried to find a place that had music. I remembered a great place in Llewellyn - the Rhinoceros Room. I could not find a listing on SuperPages and I found no website. Panic soon set in. Where would we go?

I then tried contacting the Liederkrantz on Norwegian Street in Pottsville. Apparently that place went out of business when the German music craze in the county petered out.

Fertig! Getan! Geschlossen!
Longo’s, the great Italian Restaurant on Route 61, had also hit the dust. I remember the hours I spent in front of their lobster tank licking my lips trying to decide which crustacean I would eventually devour while the Tony Karpee band played in the background.

There was also no sense in dusting off my old leisure suit as the Disco Alley was caput.
I called the Visitors Bureau and was told that dancing was not popular anymore around here. Young people are too busy on Facebook and MySpace to move their feet. It was recommended that I book a table at the Garfield Diner near a window and watch the Yuengling bottle rise to the top of the city monument at midnight and then hop aboard the Molly Trolley for a ride to the Schuylkill Medical Center to await the announcement of the new year bastard with about five thousand other people under the glow of the blue moon.
I preferred heading to Wilkes-Barre to watch the next government official drop.
All of these festivities are on the internet and we could watch them from the comfort of our trailer, but we finally compromised and decided that we would Hosey Hop. That is, go from firehouse bar to firehouse bar, basking in the blue moonlight along the way.

Just in case there was no music available I told Mammy to bring along her Ipod so that she could dance. I had just downloaded some bootleg Jordan Brothers tunes for her. While she danced with a fireman, I would sit at the bar eat, some pickled eggs (with some horseradish) and watch Dick Clark drool in the new year. The Pussycat Girls are on, you know. But at midnight I will give Mammy a kiss and tell her that she is the best noisemaker I ever had. She loves compliments. I will then retake my bar seat, light up a cigarette, and finish off some more pickled eggs.

Happy rockin’ new years.


*Please refer to the new year as Twenty ten, not Two Thousand and Ten. Make that your new year resolution. Thank you.

East Penn bus memories

Word was out that the pre-release Center would be coming to Pottsville. It would be a match made in heaven. You know, with the Intermodal Transportation Center being opened at the same time. I have to admit that I never quite knew what the word "intermodal” exactly meant. My dictionary defines the word as “Type of international freight system that permits trans-shipping among sea, highway, rail, and air modes of transportation.”
That seemed to clear things up; many thought it would be just a new bus station in the County Seat, trying to bring back the glory days of the old Pottsville Bus Station at the corner of Rt. 61 and Norwegian Street. The bus station featured a top notch restaurant, a photo booth, and a magazine stand. It was always busy. I am not just referring to its photo booth…. four pictures for fifty cents. I am talking about the bus station itself. It was not perfect though. Its biggest drawback was that the transportation there was only “Unimodal,” that is, only one means of transportation --- busses. The new Intermodal will cleverly combine busses with automobiles, SUVs, trains, pogo sticks, balloons, escalators, canal boats and the medivac helicopter.
My favorite busses of the past were certainly not the glamorous Trailways busses. No, sir. My favorites were those big green East Penn Bus Company busses that roamed the county and which reappear in my dreams periodically. They were infamous for the fumes emitted whenever a bus driver placed the key into the ignition. Yes, sir the county seat was surrounded by a big black cloud of diesel exhaust in the 1960s and early 1970s and I loved it. At times, when a bus would travel up Market Street, visibility would be about .o2%, with everyone within a radius of 250 square yards enveloped within the charcoal haze.
How thick was the smog emission? The smog was so thick that many people covered in could not even see the Guers Ice tea cartons they were drinking from and would spill their beverages all over themselves. I know this for a fact, as it happened to me on more than one occasion. If that was not so bad, then get a load of this: the only thing visible in Yorkville was the faint glow of the Burger King sign (which was actually erected with the smog in mind). It was also reported that more than a dozen people actually disappeared, never to be found again; all last seen walking through that crazy, hazy dark spot left behind by a sputtering East Penn bus. The disappearances were all blamed on alien abductions by the law officials. Alien interference always seems to be the excuse for anything unusual that happens around here. Finally, the resident scientists at the City Planetarium held that the pollution from these busses even surpassed the emissions from the last eruption of the county’s only active volcano, Mount Laffee. You all remember that eruption, don’t you? And that eruption was even ten times worse than the one at the Polish picnic's cabbage soup stand back in 1979.
I wonder what ever happened to those East Penn Busses?
I love the smell of diesel fuel in the morning. Don't you?
With the Intermodal Transportation Center in the heart of the historical district, perhaps the busses can be taken out of moth balls, called up to active duty, polished up with some turtle wax and given a new bus lease on life.
They could be to Pottsville as what the Duck bus tour is to Philadelphia.
I am running out of time now as I have to go and find a Christmas tree, Hannakah bush, Secularist shrub, Holiday hedge, or whatever one is supposed to refer to it now a day.

I never even got around to discussing the neat plan to fill Centre Street in Pottsville with prisoners. That will have to wait. I have a bus to catch.