Based on a True Story
Aug. 19th, 2023 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947I have a song to sing, O
(Sing me your song, O)
It is sung to the moon by a love-lorn loon
Who fled from the mocking throng-o
It’s the song of a merry man moping mum
Whose soul was sad, and his glance was glum
Who sipped no sup and who craved no crumb
As he sighed for the love of a lady.
Hey-di, hey-di, misery me, lack-a-day-di
He sipped no sup and he craved no crumb
As he sighed for the love of a lady.
(I Have a Song to Sing O: Peter, Paul, and Mary)
I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in the telling of old family memories – the more the stories are told, the less factual they become, and the more mythical they grow in the telling. This is what happens to memoir. We cobble together recalled scenes and events from the past, and then string them together into a seemingly coherent narrative. These stories make sense to the teller – but they may not be the way other people remember them. The following is one of those stories. It involves my wife Kathleen, her brother Greg Greaney, and her friend Susan (Frosty) Von Tobel, and it occurred in the Winter of 1975.
Of the many guests to our apartment in Santa Monica during those 2 ½ years, the two most frequent were Frosty, a college friend of Kathy’s, and her younger brother, Greg. Frosty had just moved into a nearby apartment on San Vicente Blvd., and Greg was attending UCLA in Westwood. Of all of Kathy’s numerous girlfriends – from her neighborhood, grade school, high school, and college – Frosty was probably her closest at the time we first met in 1973. They met at Mount Saint Mary’s College in 1968 and evolved into best friends after graduation. Frosty was a regular presence at many Greaney family events and Mount parties. So, as I was dating Kathy, I saw a lot of Frosty and grew to accept her as a friend. Greg, on the other hand, I came to know best on my own.
During my dating years with Kathy, I paid more attention to her 7 sisters than to her two brothers, Mike and Greg. The sisters were both curious and wary of me – and since I felt that I needed their good opinion to truly win Kathy’s affection, I worked harder to befriend them. The brothers, on the other hand, remained mildly indifferent to me, and I to them. However, that relationship changed with Greg at UCLA. In the Fall of 1973, Greg enrolled at UCLA as a Freshman, and I returned there as a graduate student under the G.I. Bill. Now with an enrollment of over 3,000 students on a campus of 419 acres, the chances of meeting someone you know is incredibly small (In my undergraduate years at UCLA, I would only run into former high school classmates about once a year). However, through a strange confluence of factors, it seemed I was running into Greg on campus about once a week. Both of us were college commuters driving cars to school. Both of us arrived early to school because Greg had 8:00 am classes, and I had to ensure a free street parking space along Veteran Avenue. Therefore, we both had to catch the early UCLA shuttle bus at the Veteran & Kinross Student Parking Lot. And so it was, on an overcast morning in September, that I spotted someone that looked like Kathy’s brother on the shuttle bus. I’d met him on previous occasions – at Kathy’s family home in Sherman Oaks, at his high school graduation and party, and I’d embarrassed myself at a family beach house party at Capistrano Beach that featured Mickey’s Big Mouth malt liquor. While I was trying to convince myself that the student I spotted on the bus was not Greg, he turned, saw me, and called out: “Hey Tony, what are you doing here?” That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
At first, we simply met and talked while waiting for or riding the shuttle, either in the morning in the parking lot, or on afternoons, on our way home, in front of Ackerman Student Union. Then one afternoon, Greg suggested that we disembark early to browse the book, music, and record stores that abounded in Westwood Village at that time. It was there we discovered our mutual love of 60’s folk and rock, and 70’s country-rock music. I was astounded at the breadth of his musical taste and interests. He would wander through all the sections of the music store looking for bargains: country, jazz, blues, and rock. He was an eclectic connoisseur of music. But more important, I came to appreciate his laughter and sense of humor. What I had at first taken as high school mockery and juvenile satire, clarified itself into a more refined sense of the absurd. Even at his most critical and argumentative, Greg never seemed to take himself too seriously, and he made as much fun of himself as he did about other people and things. We found commonalities about music, television, movies, sports (remember we attended UCLA during its years of NCAA basketball dominance), and cultural trivia. His knowledge of TV and movie trivia was confirmed when, on another occasion, he spotted me riding my Honda 50 to campus, while wearing a night watch cap, and labeled it my “Then Came Bronson” look. Two years later, after Kathy and I married, Greg became a frequent drop-in guest at our apartment – either on weekdays after his UCLA classes, or on weekends.
One Saturday in December of 1975, Greg dropped by the apartment and began chiding us on the absence of a stereo record player as he perused our combined LP collection stacked in the extra bedroom (along with our books). Although we had purchased a TV set and a couch for the apartment, we hadn’t gotten around to a stereo. So, taking advantage of Greg’s musical and technical expertise, we took him shopping with us to purchase one – on the condition that he would set it up for us. We visited a music store in Santa Monica where Greg chose our first stereo player, and then we watched him set it up in our apartment. We kept that stereo for many years after, and Greg always made a point of bringing his recommended record albums as gifts for birthdays and Christmas. I especially recall two of them that became my favorites: Aja by Steely Dan, and The Best of Earl Klug.
At some point during that day, Kathy asked Greg if he would like to join us at a Christmas party Frosty was hosting for her Mount St. Mary’s College co-workers and nuns of the Congregation of St. Joseph (CSJ). Reluctant at first to attend a party with a lot of nuns, we cajoled him to accept and cleared his attendance with Frosty. To pass the time before the party we then decided to play a new Jeopardy board game we had purchased, while warming up with a few “brewskeys”. Each of us considered ourselves masters of this popular television game, so the matches were highly competitive. One would act as the host and judge (ala Alex Trebek) and read the categories and answers to the two contestants (e.g., “He cared for a blue ox”). The contestants would “click-in” with hand clickers, and the swiftest would respond with the appropriate question (Who was Paul Bunyan?). Then we would alternate roles: the winner of the match would then play the host, and the loser would assume the role of reader and judge. We played one complete round with enough time left for one more match between Greg and me. Only this time, Greg suggested that the loser had to pay a penalty of some sort.
Discussion over the criteria of this penalty took as much time as the game itself – with a lot of squabbling, laughter, and crazy ideas. We finally decided that the penalty would be to sing a song of the loser’s choice that had to occur during Frosty’s Christmas party, and it was to remain a secret until the moment it was sung. Also, the song could not be introduced. It had to happen spontaneously; the way songs occur in Broadway musicals. I suspected this was more of a seductive challenge for Greg because it was a penalty he wouldn’t mind paying. I, on the other hand, was definitely not eager to lose.
The match proved a very tight one, with the winner being decided by the Final Jeopardy question. I wish I could remember what it was – but the upshot was that Greg responded with the correct question, and I lost the game and the bet. The penalty was mine to pay. However, I did have a plan. All the discussion over criteria was aimed at making the penalty palatable and fun. While Greg had more advantages because he memorized popular songs and could sing them, I was not altogether unprepared. I had gone through a stage of watching movie versions of popular Broadway musicals, and listening to their recordings on my mother’s vinyl LP’s: Oklahoma, Carousel, The King and I, West Side Story, The Music Man, and South Pacific. I loved the musicals, and I loved the songs, but I never thought of memorizing them until I found a library book containing the music and lyrics of songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein when I was in high school. On a whim I checked out the book and memorized some of them. I had a particular one in mind as we played our final game of Jeopardy.
I was the center of attention as the three of us walked to Frosty’s apartment on San Vicente Blvd. Greg and Kathy peppered me with questions: What song did I pick? When would I sing it? How would I introduce it? I ignored the pressuring questions and told them they’d have to wait and see. I wasn’t sure myself, so I tried putting it out of my mind on our arrival. As to Greg’s early apprehensions of attending a party with so many single women and nuns present, they were immediately assuaged. He was quite the hit of the party, chatting up the nuns and telling them stories of when Kathy was a teenager. However, he always made a point, during his interactions with guests, of catching my attention with a look. Raising his eyebrows, he would give me a questioning and challenging look as if to say: “Are you going to do it? Don’t chicken out!”
And so, in the middle of a conversation with one of Kathy’s former teachers, I said in a loud voice: “You know sister, this party reminds of the first time I met Kathy”, and I started singing:
Some enchanted evening.
You may see a stranger.
You may see a stranger,
Across a crowded room.
And somehow you know,
You know even then,
That somehow, you’ll see her again,
and again.
Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing,
Across a crowded room.
And night after night,
As strange as it seems,
The sound of her laughter
Will sing in your dreams.
Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons,
Wise men never try.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!
I don’t remember much after that. All the guests were quite stunned by the unexpected song, and then they clapped. Greg patted me on the back and congratulated me for not welching on a bet. The performance was the surprise of the party and Kathy, Greg, and I laughed about it all the way back to our apartment when it was over.
(Sing me your song, O)
It is sung to the moon by a love-lorn loon
Who fled from the mocking throng-o
It’s the song of a merry man moping mum
Whose soul was sad, and his glance was glum
Who sipped no sup and who craved no crumb
As he sighed for the love of a lady.
Hey-di, hey-di, misery me, lack-a-day-di
He sipped no sup and he craved no crumb
As he sighed for the love of a lady.
(I Have a Song to Sing O: Peter, Paul, and Mary)
I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in the telling of old family memories – the more the stories are told, the less factual they become, and the more mythical they grow in the telling. This is what happens to memoir. We cobble together recalled scenes and events from the past, and then string them together into a seemingly coherent narrative. These stories make sense to the teller – but they may not be the way other people remember them. The following is one of those stories. It involves my wife Kathleen, her brother Greg Greaney, and her friend Susan (Frosty) Von Tobel, and it occurred in the Winter of 1975.
Kathy and I were married in August of 1975 and immediately took up residence in an apartment complex on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. It was a two-story complex with a long rectangular courtyard in the middle. We lived on the first floor in a two-bedroom apartment with a spacious living room, an adequate kitchen and breakfast table, and a large bathroom. Except for the lack of parking spaces for the tenants, it was the perfect honeymoon flat for a newly married couple, and we were to live there happily for two and a half years.
Of the many guests to our apartment in Santa Monica during those 2 ½ years, the two most frequent were Frosty, a college friend of Kathy’s, and her younger brother, Greg. Frosty had just moved into a nearby apartment on San Vicente Blvd., and Greg was attending UCLA in Westwood. Of all of Kathy’s numerous girlfriends – from her neighborhood, grade school, high school, and college – Frosty was probably her closest at the time we first met in 1973. They met at Mount Saint Mary’s College in 1968 and evolved into best friends after graduation. Frosty was a regular presence at many Greaney family events and Mount parties. So, as I was dating Kathy, I saw a lot of Frosty and grew to accept her as a friend. Greg, on the other hand, I came to know best on my own.
During my dating years with Kathy, I paid more attention to her 7 sisters than to her two brothers, Mike and Greg. The sisters were both curious and wary of me – and since I felt that I needed their good opinion to truly win Kathy’s affection, I worked harder to befriend them. The brothers, on the other hand, remained mildly indifferent to me, and I to them. However, that relationship changed with Greg at UCLA. In the Fall of 1973, Greg enrolled at UCLA as a Freshman, and I returned there as a graduate student under the G.I. Bill. Now with an enrollment of over 3,000 students on a campus of 419 acres, the chances of meeting someone you know is incredibly small (In my undergraduate years at UCLA, I would only run into former high school classmates about once a year). However, through a strange confluence of factors, it seemed I was running into Greg on campus about once a week. Both of us were college commuters driving cars to school. Both of us arrived early to school because Greg had 8:00 am classes, and I had to ensure a free street parking space along Veteran Avenue. Therefore, we both had to catch the early UCLA shuttle bus at the Veteran & Kinross Student Parking Lot. And so it was, on an overcast morning in September, that I spotted someone that looked like Kathy’s brother on the shuttle bus. I’d met him on previous occasions – at Kathy’s family home in Sherman Oaks, at his high school graduation and party, and I’d embarrassed myself at a family beach house party at Capistrano Beach that featured Mickey’s Big Mouth malt liquor. While I was trying to convince myself that the student I spotted on the bus was not Greg, he turned, saw me, and called out: “Hey Tony, what are you doing here?” That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
At first, we simply met and talked while waiting for or riding the shuttle, either in the morning in the parking lot, or on afternoons, on our way home, in front of Ackerman Student Union. Then one afternoon, Greg suggested that we disembark early to browse the book, music, and record stores that abounded in Westwood Village at that time. It was there we discovered our mutual love of 60’s folk and rock, and 70’s country-rock music. I was astounded at the breadth of his musical taste and interests. He would wander through all the sections of the music store looking for bargains: country, jazz, blues, and rock. He was an eclectic connoisseur of music. But more important, I came to appreciate his laughter and sense of humor. What I had at first taken as high school mockery and juvenile satire, clarified itself into a more refined sense of the absurd. Even at his most critical and argumentative, Greg never seemed to take himself too seriously, and he made as much fun of himself as he did about other people and things. We found commonalities about music, television, movies, sports (remember we attended UCLA during its years of NCAA basketball dominance), and cultural trivia. His knowledge of TV and movie trivia was confirmed when, on another occasion, he spotted me riding my Honda 50 to campus, while wearing a night watch cap, and labeled it my “Then Came Bronson” look. Two years later, after Kathy and I married, Greg became a frequent drop-in guest at our apartment – either on weekdays after his UCLA classes, or on weekends.
One Saturday in December of 1975, Greg dropped by the apartment and began chiding us on the absence of a stereo record player as he perused our combined LP collection stacked in the extra bedroom (along with our books). Although we had purchased a TV set and a couch for the apartment, we hadn’t gotten around to a stereo. So, taking advantage of Greg’s musical and technical expertise, we took him shopping with us to purchase one – on the condition that he would set it up for us. We visited a music store in Santa Monica where Greg chose our first stereo player, and then we watched him set it up in our apartment. We kept that stereo for many years after, and Greg always made a point of bringing his recommended record albums as gifts for birthdays and Christmas. I especially recall two of them that became my favorites: Aja by Steely Dan, and The Best of Earl Klug.
At some point during that day, Kathy asked Greg if he would like to join us at a Christmas party Frosty was hosting for her Mount St. Mary’s College co-workers and nuns of the Congregation of St. Joseph (CSJ). Reluctant at first to attend a party with a lot of nuns, we cajoled him to accept and cleared his attendance with Frosty. To pass the time before the party we then decided to play a new Jeopardy board game we had purchased, while warming up with a few “brewskeys”. Each of us considered ourselves masters of this popular television game, so the matches were highly competitive. One would act as the host and judge (ala Alex Trebek) and read the categories and answers to the two contestants (e.g., “He cared for a blue ox”). The contestants would “click-in” with hand clickers, and the swiftest would respond with the appropriate question (Who was Paul Bunyan?). Then we would alternate roles: the winner of the match would then play the host, and the loser would assume the role of reader and judge. We played one complete round with enough time left for one more match between Greg and me. Only this time, Greg suggested that the loser had to pay a penalty of some sort.
Discussion over the criteria of this penalty took as much time as the game itself – with a lot of squabbling, laughter, and crazy ideas. We finally decided that the penalty would be to sing a song of the loser’s choice that had to occur during Frosty’s Christmas party, and it was to remain a secret until the moment it was sung. Also, the song could not be introduced. It had to happen spontaneously; the way songs occur in Broadway musicals. I suspected this was more of a seductive challenge for Greg because it was a penalty he wouldn’t mind paying. I, on the other hand, was definitely not eager to lose.
The match proved a very tight one, with the winner being decided by the Final Jeopardy question. I wish I could remember what it was – but the upshot was that Greg responded with the correct question, and I lost the game and the bet. The penalty was mine to pay. However, I did have a plan. All the discussion over criteria was aimed at making the penalty palatable and fun. While Greg had more advantages because he memorized popular songs and could sing them, I was not altogether unprepared. I had gone through a stage of watching movie versions of popular Broadway musicals, and listening to their recordings on my mother’s vinyl LP’s: Oklahoma, Carousel, The King and I, West Side Story, The Music Man, and South Pacific. I loved the musicals, and I loved the songs, but I never thought of memorizing them until I found a library book containing the music and lyrics of songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein when I was in high school. On a whim I checked out the book and memorized some of them. I had a particular one in mind as we played our final game of Jeopardy.
I was the center of attention as the three of us walked to Frosty’s apartment on San Vicente Blvd. Greg and Kathy peppered me with questions: What song did I pick? When would I sing it? How would I introduce it? I ignored the pressuring questions and told them they’d have to wait and see. I wasn’t sure myself, so I tried putting it out of my mind on our arrival. As to Greg’s early apprehensions of attending a party with so many single women and nuns present, they were immediately assuaged. He was quite the hit of the party, chatting up the nuns and telling them stories of when Kathy was a teenager. However, he always made a point, during his interactions with guests, of catching my attention with a look. Raising his eyebrows, he would give me a questioning and challenging look as if to say: “Are you going to do it? Don’t chicken out!”
And so, in the middle of a conversation with one of Kathy’s former teachers, I said in a loud voice: “You know sister, this party reminds of the first time I met Kathy”, and I started singing:
Some enchanted evening.
You may see a stranger.
You may see a stranger,
Across a crowded room.
And somehow you know,
You know even then,
That somehow, you’ll see her again,
and again.
Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing,
Across a crowded room.
And night after night,
As strange as it seems,
The sound of her laughter
Will sing in your dreams.
Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons,
Wise men never try.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!
I don’t remember much after that. All the guests were quite stunned by the unexpected song, and then they clapped. Greg patted me on the back and congratulated me for not welching on a bet. The performance was the surprise of the party and Kathy, Greg, and I laughed about it all the way back to our apartment when it was over.
