Take Me To The Fair

When I was 14, Diane Henley was the prettiest girl in the class, or the church, or anywhere else. I'll never forget this night:

Take Me To The Fair

I really wanted to go to the Southeastern Fair with Diane Henley. To my way of thinking, I had about as much a chance of doing that as I did learning to swim.
Diane Henley was pretty, funny, flirty, always surrounded by boys, and I was a toadstool. Diane and I went to church together, so we knew each other, were friends, and had even sat besides each other in one of those Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings that were so boring the drapes kept falling asleep.
I even knew her telephone number.
But a date to the fair was clearly impossible. So I moped. Sighed a lot. Kicked sand. Ignored my dog. My father, raking leaves, asked what was wrong.
“Diane Henley won’t go to the Southeastern Fair with me.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did she say when you asked her?”
“I haven’t.”
“You haven’t what?
“Asked her.”
“But you know she won’t go.”
“You know Diane, right?”
“Sure.”
“And you really think that she would even consider going to the fair with me?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t asked her. Why don’t you call her now?”
”She’ll laugh, probably call me some stupid name, and then hang up.”
I kicked some more sand. The dog saw his chance and escaped.
I’ve always been afraid to call the Diane Henley’s of the world. The sales trainers call it “call reluctance.” The psychiatrists call it “paranoia.” Writers call it a fact of life.
Just as I was about to start looking for the dog, my dad said he’d make a deal with me. “You go call Diane and ask her to go to the Fair with you tonight.”
“Tonight?!?”
“You are not to say ‘You don’t want to go to the fair with me, do you?’ or the deal is off. If she says yes, tell her we will pick her up in 30 minutes.”
“What’s the deal?”
“ I’ll give you five dollars for the Fair if she says yes.”
Five dollars was a lot of money in 1958. Heck, it had only cost me a dollar to get an Eagle Scout in Troop 272 to let me pass my swimming test so I could be a First Class Scout.
So I went inside the house and stood by the black, dial phone on the kitchen counter. I stared at it. I read all of the notes on the bulletin board, and was headed for the cookbooks when I thought about Diane Henley and then the five dollars. I turned around and dialed the phone.
It rang. I was dripping sweat. It rang again. I started feeling faint. It rang the third time.
“Hello?” Diane. It was Friday night in the fall. She was home. There was something seriously wrong with this picture. She must have broken her hip, and I hadn’t heard about it.
“Hi. It’s …”
“Oh! Hi!.” She sounded cheerful. Maybe it was the drugs for the broken hip.
“Uh … “ (and then at the speed of sound) “DoyouwanttogototheSoutheasternFairtonight?”
“What?”
“The Fair. Wanna go?”
“Sure. When?”
“Uh … “ Come on, you can do it, she’s already said yes, “tonight.”
“Wow! Really?”
Now I was convinced I had the wrong number.
Then she asked, “Who else is going?” (Dating in 1958 was normally in packs of at least 6.)
“Just us.”
“Great!”
“Diane?” I had to make sure it was her. “We’ll pick you up in 30 minutes.”
“I’ll be ready. And thanks for inviting me.”
The lesson, naturally, was stupidly simple. And I had learned it that night. It didn’t last, of course. Like all writers I have perfected paranoia to an art form. But whenever I’m afraid to pick up the phone, I think about the night with pretty, popular, flirty, outgoing Diane Henley at the Southeastern Fair.
She liked me. I liked her. We held hands the entire night.
And I didn’t even have to tell her about the five dollars.

From "Jim The Wonder Dog and Other Things Worth Knowing." (c) 2005 Mark E. Johnson, Jr.

Alligators, Airboats, and the Greatest Goat on Earth.

This part of one of the speeches I'll be giving to civic clubs, banquets, sales meetuings and conventions. If you'd like to know more about fees and availability, please contact me at mark@mark-e-johnson.net



When I was 8 years old, my dad took me to a place called “Magic Hill,” which was just outside Manchester, Georgia.
For a quarter, you could pull your car down the hill to the bottom, put your car in neutral, and the car would roll up the hill.
Magic.
Later I learned all about optical illusions, and I learned there are Magic Hills all over country.
For me, Magic Hill couldn’t be missed. It was worth seeing.
Disney World? A great but expensive family vacation. Gatorland? 500 alligators leaping up to catch frozen chickens strung 6 feet above them on a clothes line. That’s worth seeing.
At the Texas State Fair there’s a sculpture of Elvis made out of 800 pounds of butter. I’m sorry I’m missing that. But I do have plans to go to the Wooly Worm races in Banner Elk, North Carolina.
So I wasn’t about to pass up a ride through the Everglades on an airboat. One of the reasons is that I’m a fan of CSI:Miami. Everybody gets to ride in an airboat, even the lovely Emily Proctor, who never sweats and whose long blond hair is never out of place.
Second, the Everglades are mostly in Southwest Florida, a section of the state where the word “normal” is rarely used in polite company. Lest you forget – and, frankly, how could you – this is where, in 1948, numerous sightings of 15 foot tall penguins were reported, and no, these sightings weren’t all during Bike Week in Daytona.
Another popular sighting is the Skunk Ape. Legends abound about this puppy, and thousands of sightings have been reported. In Weird U.S., Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman tell the story of 5 archeologists who, while camping in the Everglades,were surprised by an 8 foot creature with a man’s face and shaggy white fur who crashed through the brush into their campsite. The archeologists reported that the “stench lingered.”
It was clearly not Emily Proctor looking for an airboat.
It was also not Stan Gober, who has his own star on the Southwest Florida Walk of the Strange.
When Stan retired, he moved to Goodland, Florida, and bought a restaurant and bar. Goodland is just a few miles from Marco Island. (“Marco Island” is South Floridian for “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a condo on the 33rd floor as long as the Wilson’s keep the Yorkies out of the elevator.”)
In and of himself, Stan is not weird. It’s just the combination of things that make up the public Stan that cause ordinary people to squint a little and say things like “honey, what is that man doing?”
Stan’s is the home of the internationally famous (according to Stan) Goodland Mullet Festival and Buzzard Beauty Queen Contest. A whole bunch of people descend on Goodland the week-end before the Super Bowl for this clearly one-of-a-kind event. There is a significant amount of drinking, Stan tells jokes, Stan sings, and people eat a lot of mullet (which tastes a lot like fish.)
But that’s not why you’ll make the trip.
You see, the bird most often associated with Southwest Florida is the buzzard. So, the highpoint of the Festival starts with the crowning of the Buzzard Queen. This year will be #20. Then Stan , dressed in his buzzard costume, attempts to get 5,000 drunks to do the Buzzard Lope.
The Buzzard Lope is a dance of unknown origin and impossible to describe. There is a lot of arm flapping, and high leg steps and the thrusting of the head out as far as possible over the chest. Beer helps.
There’s a song Stan wrote -- "The Buzzard Lope Song' -- which has its own, uh, rhythm, and it moves some people to, uh, “lope” as has been described above.
I have spent more than a few days in Goodland and have been known to lope on certain festive occasions, like my friend Husk Farnsworth’s birthday, or Tuesdays.
I can hear Stan’s grandchildren now:
“What does your grandfather do?”
“He owns a restaurant and dances like a buzzard.”
Goodland, Stan and Skunk Apes notwithstanding, Rebecca and I were still to take our first airboat ride and to keep our eyes open for Skunk Apes and penguins. We had a day off from a convention in Naples, so we drove from Naples to Everglades City.
We were early for the next airboat ride. Looking around for something weird or inexplicable to do for thirty minutes, we saw the following next to the cash register:
(To quote my hero Dave Barry, “I am not making this up.”) The flyer said: “Come see the largest alligator ever caught at the BP station.”
It was too good to believe. We raced across the street to the BP station and could not stop ourselves from asking about the alligator: Tell us about the mayhem that alligator caused before he (or she) was snagged by the brave attendants. How did they catch him? How big is he? How big was the one before this one? Which service bay is he in?
We learned two things: jokes about misplaced modifiers go over the heads of a lot of people in Everglades City, and, two, the Biggest Alligator Ever Caught At The BP Station is across the highway at the Everglades City Alligator Zoo.
Three dollars later we were standing on a catwalk looking at a huge rancid pond and promising that we would send heartfelt thank you notes to the inventors of “Off!”
“Where’s the world’s biggest …”
“He’s in there somewhere,” the attendant said.
“Does he surface?” I asked, while Rebecca checked one of her cameras.
“Sometimes. He’s shy.”
“Oh.” I saw two bubbles come up through the grime.
“That’s him.”
“Think he’ll come to the surface?”
“Never know.”
“How big is he?”
“Pretty big.”
And so it was. We went back through the gift shop, crossed the street to the airboat place, bought some more Off! and took our trip through the Everglades. It was great. Open lakes, mangrove groves, wild boars, and birds. We didn’t see any alligators sneaking toward the BP station, and we didn’t see another airboat. I guess Emily Proctor must have had the day off.
Just my luck.