Showing posts with label confession. Show all posts
Showing posts with label confession. Show all posts

27 November 2017

Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey

By now, everyone has seen what might have been just another postcard from a fading beach resort



had it not graced the cover of a certain singer/songwriter's first album.

By now, everyone has heard of Bruce Springsteen and someone's claim of having seen him for $1 before he was famous. I swear, it's true!  

One of the great things about getting to be, ahem, a certain age is that the statute of limitations runs out.  You see, when I saw the then-obscure Bruce, the legal drinking age was 18.  Still, I was a few years shy of that.  So were a couple of the youngsters who accompanied me, and their siblings who were just on the other side of that age.

In those days, the Stone Pony was a "dive bar" in what was then a dying town.  If you were in Atlantic City before the casinos opened--or have ventured more than a couple of blocks away from its "strip"--you have an idea of what Asbury Park was like in those days.

It had become so unfashionable, in fact, that this was nearly demolished:



I used to ride through it and, as often as not, have no company besides a pigeon or seagull or two.  Now it houses a bar and a few stores--and you can't ride through it.  Cycling isn't allowed through the promenade, but even if you've spent your life riding criteriums and downhill slaloms, you couldn't have ridden through the crowd I encountered there the other day.

I'm not complaining.  I had a great ride down there, from my place in New York, and back up to Long Branch.  I reckon I did about 120 kilometers in total before taking the train back.



Though it was warmer--about 14C--the air felt almost as chilly as it did during my Connecticut ride on Thanksgiving day, when I started in OC conditions and the temperature didn't get much above 5C.  I wasn't complaining, though:  My seashore ride had the sun and clear skies I saw during my ride to the Nutmeg state.

No, I didn't see Bruce, or stop at the Stone Pony. I did go by it, though. Not surprisingly, it's become a tourist attraction:  While some parts of the city are still worn around the edges and suffer from unemployment and poverty, the beachfront and downtown areas draw strollers, shoppers and others from around the area.



By the way:  Contrary to what some have mis-reported, Bruce was not born in Asbury Park.  He did, however, spend his formative years--at least, musically--in the city.  

On the other hand,"Bud" Abbott of the Abbott and Costello comedy team was born in AP.  So were Danny DeVito and Leon Hess.  And, as much as it pains me to mention her name, Wendy Williams.  

Oh--a fellow named Arthur Augustus Zimmerman also first came into this world in Asbury Park.  In 1893, he won the first World Championship of cycling.  



Finally--You might say that Asbury Park is where the "joy buzzer" went to die.  At least, that's where its inventor--Soren Adam Sorensen--drew his last breath!

18 December 2010

Hipsters Go Back To Their Futures

I must say:  The question never crossed my mind.  But I got the answer to it today.  Here it is:  What if there had been hipsters during the '80's?




Might they have ridden a "fixie" like the Schwinn in the middle of this photo?  


If they had, they might have borne the wrath of all the disdain I heaped upon that decade's young and annoying people:  the yuppies.  


Now, I've never been a yuppie or a hipster.  Couldn't have been either, even if I'd wanted to.  But I'll make a confession:  Back in those days, I wore a cycling jacket in a pink just like the one on that bike.  It was a rather nice jacket, actually.  


You know that anyone who ends a sentence with "actually" isn't wearing a jacket in a color like that!  Likewise, on the day I learned, in Sociology 101, that my family was "working class," I was no longer part of it.  Now, what that's got to do with hipster fixies and yuppies and a jacket I wore twenty years ago, I don't know.


All I know is that if I'm rambling the way I just did after seeing a tacky bike in a shop, I've spent too many hours reading way too many student papers.  Some of them were due months ago; I suppose I've been suffused with the "holiday spirit."  Plus, I don't want to deny any student whose "sob story" may actually be true.  I mean, what if some freshman's grandmother died for the fifth time this year?


If she did, she sure won't be riding that bike in the picture.  Me, I wouldn't be caught dead on it.  But you probably knew that already.