Horrorscope of the Stars

By the Mysterious Professor Zoltar

The Westmoreland News, June 23 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20): This is a week to explore your really wild side.  Consider getting a super-size Grand Poobah Meal at McDonald’s this week instead of the regular size.

Virgo (Aug. 23 – Sept. 22): You really should donate some money to a good cause this week.  One good cause, for example, is me.  So send lots and lots of cash to:

Mysterious Professor Zoltan

c/o The Westmoreland News

Montross, VA. 22520  

Libra (Sept. 23 – Oct. 22): A stranger will tell you that you look like a movie star this week.  Unfortunately, they’re talking about the monster in Vortag the Slag Creature, but it’s the thought that counts.  Avoid Geminis and avoid ever admitting that you used to have the Richard Simmons’ Sweating to the Oldies videocassettes.

Scorpio (Oct. 23 – Nov. 21): This would be a good week to give up that old glue-sniffing habit.  Be careful around volatile Libras and high-explosives testing sites.  Avoid high-cholesterol foods and grumpy people with shotguns this week.

Pisces (Feb. 19 – Mar. 20): Some stuff will happen to you this week.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20): Take time to remember your loved ones this week.  If nobody loves you, then never mind.  If there’s someone who has dumped you and you miss them, then aim lower next time. 

Capricorn (Dec. 22 – Jan. 19): This is a special week for you financially: if you keep your eyes peeled and your nose to the ground and you follow up on a special hint given to you this week … you’ll lose your shirt and end up lying in the middle of the road drinking cheap wine and telling everybody that the squirrels are talking to you.

Aries (March 21 – April 19): Did you know the scientific process used to make these horoscopes?  Psychic Astrologers like myself have mystic dart boards, covered with star signs.  We make up forecasts, throw the darts, and whatever star sign the dart lands in gets that horoscope.  Seriously.  Jeanne Dixon does it all the time.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 21): Your divorce from Catherine of Aragorn this week will cause great distress in the kingdom.  Seek to found an Anglican church by allying with the German princes protesting Pope Innocent VII’s power over the Holy Roman Emperor and his political domination of the Bourbon aristocracy in France.   Also remember to get a haircut.

Aquarius (Jan. 20 – Feb. 18): This is a bad week for financial dealings.  This is also a bad week for arguing with loved ones or even unloved ones.  In fact, this is going to be a just plain stinky week all the way around.  Give up and go back to bed.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22): Look on the bright side.  You’re not an Aquarius.  And that Mickey Mantle card you thought you lost could turn up in an old copy of Playboy you thought your Mom threw away 20 years ago.  

Leo (July 23 – Aug. 22): Do you ever wonder if trees can dream?  Then you have too much free time.  Get a life this week.  Avoid Pisces and drinking moldy eggnog.

Baseball Cards Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore

By Jeffrey Carl

The Westmoreland News, June 20 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

Did you ever collect cards?  For many people, the thought of cards brings to mind afternoons after school, old sports heroes, and those horrible slabs of pink gum that tasted like masking tape that came in each pack of Topps baseball cards.  The packs came with 10 or 12 dull-finished cardboard cards wrapped in wax paper with some stale gum and maybe a sticker of the San Diego Chicken if you were lucky, all for the princely sum of 35 cents.  You wrapped them up in rubber bands, occasionally used them as collateral for loans of video-game tokens and didn’t really give them a whole lot of thought. 

Well, cards are a whole different world now.  Baseball cards sit alongside NASCAR, Star Trek, Batman, and Looney Toons cards.  There are oversized cards and gold cards and cards with holograms on them that come in silver foil-lined packs for $2.50 a pop.  There are cards of mass murderers and suspects in the John F. Kennedy asassination, and there are cards of the Beatles and the Pro Bowlers’ Hall of Fame. And – alas – they don’t come with stale gum anymore. 

You can see what trading cards have blossomed into at Mike Parham’s Collector’s Attic store in Oak Grove, on Route 3.  The small shop is packed with cards, from $1.50 packs of cards that move in and out of the store at a rate of 350 per week, to older, rare cards like a Mickey Mantle card from 1962 that sells for $475.  There are cards and miniature NASCAR models, collecting supplies and comic books, and even a life-sized cut-out promotional display of supermodel/awfulactress Kathy Ireland.

Mike Parham has a down-to-earth reason for why he opened the store: “I was tired of the ride to Fredericksburg after work on Fridays to buy cards,” he says.  Parham only began collecting cards approximately two years ago, and it developed into a passion and then a part-time profession, when he isn’t selling life insurance.

Parham loves collecting the cards as well as selling them, but he’s not too sentimental about his collection – “As far as I’m concerned, everything here is for sale,” he says.  His favorites are basketball cards and his store is primarily devoted to sports cards, but there is no clear winner in terms of which sell the most.  “The popular cards change with the season,” he says.

Right now he is busy collecting a rare sub-set of this year’s Upper Deck basketball cards that come in the packs available now – you can buy a pack for a couple of dollars that might – if you’re lucky – contain a rare superstar card worth a couple hundred dollars.  And then you might get pack after pack of the New Jersey Nets’ towel boys and hot dog vendors.  It’s a gamble as an investment, but to the collectors, the joy of collecting is worth the price alone.

Trading cards have been around since at least the 1890s, originally collector’s cards printed by cigar companies.  Perhaps the most famous trading card of all time is a card of Hall-of-Fame baseballer Honus Wagner from 1906.  Wagner did not approve of tobacco, and he ordered the company to stop producing the cards.  Only a few were made, and today their value exceeds $50,000.  

Indeed, trading cards have been a part of American childhood for generations.  As a zany youngster in a small town in Washington State, I was one of the Baseball Card Lords of Fourth Grade.  I competed with several rival card kingpins, who lived in another housing development, for control over the card-trading rights to our hapless fellow students – which was pretty much the fourth grade equivalent of the U.S. and Soviet Union competing for client states.

The other great Baseball Card Lords once made a fatal mistake and allowed me to buy a coveted Mike Schmidt card from a card store before they could get to it.  This was pretty much the fourth grade equivalent of my parents having gotten me a nuclear weapon for Christmas.  

It was time for me to make my move to establish supremacy, and events conspired in my favor.  My parents decided to take a one-week vacation – the only one they ever took, in fact, which probably had a lot to do with their being too frightened to leave me alone in the house again.  

As soon as my grandparents arrived to take care of my younger brother and me, my parents left and I set to work converting my father’s den into a den of iniquity and rabid card-trading.  Cardboard changed hands in sheet and waves as my grandparents were impressed into service bringing Kool-Aid to my guests and working as bicycle-parking valets whilst I cut deals the likes of which had never been seen before, at least in our neighborhood.  People often speak of ruthless businessmen as “willing to sell their own grandmother.”  I was almost willing to trade her for a Topps ‘73 Tom Seaver and a Fleer ‘61 Ted Williams Commemorative Series card.  

When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I had swindled and savvied my way to become “Mr. Baseball Cards” of Ellsworth Elementary’s fouth-grade class.  My grandparents, on the other hand, were much the worse for wear; as was my father’s den, which had suffered a week of rapid-fire card hustling and Atari-playing; and my little brother, whom some of my friends had taken out and used as a goalpost for soccer.  But for a few years, baseball cards were a tremendous part of my life and my friends’ lives – just as important as soccer and video games, in fact.  But not quite as important as watching “Star Blazers” after school.

Eventually, though, I found myself spending less and less time chasing after rare baseball cards that I couldn’t find and spending more and more time chasing after cute girls who wouldn’t go out with me.  Somewhere in my parents’ old house there probably lies a secret cache of cards that would probably be worth several thousand dollars today, had it not been for the fact that I – just like everybody else I knew – kept my cards wrapped together with rubber bands, which squeezes in the middle and devalues the cards.  Easy come, easy go, I guess.

Industry analysts say that the trading card business has hit its peak and is now in a relative decline.  Saturation of the market with too many kinds of cards and overpricing has drained even the biggest allowances.  

In the late 1970s, the trading card market was fairly compact and was dominated by one company, Topps Chewing Gum.  They produced baseball, football, and basketball cards, and were distributed in dime stores, convenience stores, and Little League clubhouses all around the U.S. and in Canada by its branch there, O-Pee-Chee.  

But in the early 1980s, cards took a step up when two other large producers of cards, Fleer and Donruss, entered the game.  The increased competition took mainstream trading cards into new areas: hockey, soccer, Olympics cards in 1984, movie cards, and special sets for the “more serious” collectors.  The promise of “special” cards that were rarer and consequently more valuable led collectors to buy more cards, and the manufacturers gladly complied.

The trend continued, and in the past five years, the card business has become bigger business than it had ever been before.  More people with more money to spend came to collect cards, and the cards became more diverse, more impressive, and more expensive.  There are numerous major manufacturers, and new card sets come out almost weekly.  It remains to be seen whether the expansion of the card industry, closely paralleling the fast-growing comic-book industry, has choked itself out.

But all of this big-business concern doesn’t bother Parham or his customers at the shop.  For collectors, trading cards are a labor of love.  Over the weekend, Parham is on his way to a giant trading card show in Wilmington, N.C., to sell some of his cards, buy new ones, and trade others.  

Parham plans to continue with his moonlighting in the card business.  “I try to get all satisfied customers,” he says.  “People seem to like it, and they keep coming back.”  He says that he may begin carrying more comic books next year, or expand with a bigger collection for sale.  Who can say what’s in the cards for Mike Parham and Collector’s Attic?     

Horrorscope of the Stars

By the Mysterious Professor Zoltar

The Westmoreland News, June 16 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20): Your agent will call this week with a fantastic offer.  If you don’t have an agent, then hang up because it’s a wrong number.

Virgo (Aug. 23 – Sept. 22): Get in touch with your spiritual self this week.  Watch all of the “Oh, God” movies and reruns of “Amen.”  Take time to keep in touch with faraway loved ones, but do it after 11 p.m. when the phone rates are cheap.  Avoid Leos and hang-gliding.

Libra (Sept. 23 – Oct. 22): In your spare time this week, try designing new interior decorations or a fusion reactor that runs on pizza crusts.  Whatever you do this week, for God’s sake don’t … well, never mind.

Scorpio (Oct. 23 – Nov. 21): By pure chance, the Hollywood screen idol of your dreams will drop by your house this week, but you will be out shopping.  This is a good week to put things off that you don’t feel like doing.  Then again, it’s always a good week to put off things that you don’t feel like doing.

Pisces (Feb. 19 – Mar. 20): Your stars have been in an extraordinary conjunction – it means an incredible opportunity.  It actually means that there was one last week, but you didn’t know about it, so forget it.  This week, avoid Tauruses and Buicks.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20): Indulge your sassy side this week – do something zany.  Just remember that the age of consent in Virginia is 18; anything over $200 is Grand Larceny, which is a felony;  nobody thinks that swallowing live goldfish is funny anymore; and just because I said it doesn’t mean you have to do it.  

Capricorn (Dec. 22 – Jan. 19): Take time to stop and smell the roses this week.  But if you’re standing there, sniffing someone named Rose and they call you a pervert and beat the hell out of you, don’t be surprised.  Avoid Scorpios this week and Ronald Reagan movies.

Aries (March 21 – April 19): This is an amazing week for … hey, if you’re not an Aries, stop reading this.  Yeah, I mean you.  It’s none of your business.  Yeah, sure you’re an Aries.  I believe you.  Stop reading this and go back to your own horoscope.  I’m not kidding.  Alright, fine, have it your way, nosey.  I just won’t tell you.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 21): Take some time this week to spend with your lover.  If you don’t have a lover, then buy an inflatable doll and dress them up and call them “Irving” or “Weezie” and spend time with them. 

Aquarius (Jan. 20 – Feb. 18): I won’t say anything about this week for you except you should remember that the police need to have a warrant before they can officially search your house or tap your phone.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22): Have you had your prostate examined recently?  

Leo (whatever is left over): Whoops.  I ran out of forecasts.  Make something up for yourself.

A Visit To Stratford Hall Plantation

By Jeffrey Carl

The Westmoreland News, June 13 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

The dead still walk the earth in Westmoreland County.

Giants stood on this ground before and their spirits still haunt the land.  And the largest spectre of all radiates from Stratford Hall Plantation.

Stratford was the home of the Lee family.  Built in the late 1730s by Thomas Lee, a prominent planter, the plantation was home to Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, the only brothers to sign the Declaration of Independence.  For twenty years it was home to “Light Horse Harry” Lee, the dashing cavalry general of the Revolutionary War.  Born in the large bedroom on the upper floor of the Great House of the plantation was Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States of America.  And it is this General Lee’s undeniable presence which hangs over the plantation, as it does over much of the South.

Stratford Hall Plantation exists today as not only a monument but as a farm on 1600 of its original acres; corn, wheat, and barley are ground in the wheel of the plantation’s mill and sold at the Stratford Store; there is a Stratford Hall Cabernet Sauvignon wine also sold there.  There is a restaurant that serves lunch, and the Stratford, Va. Post Office and the Stratford Store are tucked between the visitor’s center and the Great House and the small garden.  Children play with goats and chickens that poke their heads out of a pen near the servants’ and workers’ quarters.

The gift shop at the plantation – the Stratford Store – is a little piece of everything that is the heritage and the present of the old South.  There are coffee mugs with ragged Rebel soldiers and children’s books on Martin Luther King, jr.  There are numerous biographies of all the Lees, one called “The Lee Girls,” and there are Civil War coloring books and word puzzles.  There are homestyle cookbooks and low-fat cookbooks.  There are U.S. or Confederate flags. There is china and there are belt buckles.  There are countless portraits of General R. E. Lee – casting him as anything from the stern, frowning Marble Saint to a smiling, friendly, bearded old man, looking much as if Santa Claus had lost weight and joined the army at Manassas.  There is cider and Apple Chutney, there are videotapes and wooden postcards.  If you have a Friend of Stratford card (non-transferable), you get a ten percent discount on items there (except books and Stratford-made pastries), as well as free admission to the plantation (for one year).  

Stratford Hall Plantation is beautiful, but it is not remarkable for its trees or its fields or its view overlooking the Potomac River.  It is remarkable because of the feeling of ever-present history that hangs over the site.  And it is one presence in particular that reaches out from this plantation to cast a shadow over the old Confederacy.  Many people are fully in love with the memory of General Robert E. Lee.  Many think of him as the servant of an evil cause.  Many just wonder what all the fuss is about.

It is difficult to talk seriously about General Lee, because he is no longer a person.  For many people, he became a legendary figure, a super hero.  So many adored him that it seems that he had never actually been made of flesh and blood, but was a pure idea on horseback in a gray uniform, everything that the South had been or imagined itself to be.

When the South lost the Civil War, it lost everything.  It endured a painful reconstruction and never again held as great political or economic influence as it had before it gave up its position in the Union.  The South needed something to keep the last embers of its old spirit alive.  It needed a hero.  And it chose General Robert Edward Lee, C.S.A.

It seems that everyone knows bits and pieces of the Lee legend.  He graduated at the top of his class at West Point.  He thought of secession from the Union as the worst catastrophe that could befall the South.  He was a hero in the Mexican-American War, where he may have briefly, as a Captain, met a young Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant.  He was asked to lead the armies of both the Union and the Confederacy, but felt honor-bound to his home soil of Virginia.  He felt a personal revulsion toward slavery.  He was a brilliant military strategist, tactician, and leader, perhaps the finest old soldier of the war on either side.  He told his generals who wished to continue guerilla warfare after the Appomattox surrender that the war was finished, and the nation must begin to heal.  He envisioned a new breed of Southern education in his years as President of Washington College, renamed Washington and Lee after his death.

Lee was also twelve feet tall, foretold the death of John F. Kennedy, and healed the sick, the blind, and the lepers.  Lee became the “Marble Man” – a character too perfect for flesh and blood, dehumanized and made into the stuff of monuments. The North has never had – perhaps it never needed – heroes like this, and certainly not superheroes like Lee.  Heroes in the North are inescapably human: they have wooden teeth; they intentionally lost baseball games; they drank too much, smoked too much, or slept with Marilyn Monroe.  Yet Lee was none of this – he was perfect.  Not necessarily a perfect man, but perfect for the role of the lionized, canonized, all-but-deified Patron Saint of the Lost Cause.  Streets, churches, schools – anything that could be named took Lee’s.  My college fraternity, the Kappa Alpha Order, was founded on Lee.  The road to Stratford bears a large sign for a Farm Bureau agent named Lee Jackson.  

And in becoming more than human, Lee lost his humanity to the following generations.  Nobody knew or really cared about what he was like as a man; they only knew that he was everything they should be.  And so, with his statues multiplying like shrines and temples, the ghost of General Lee spread over the South in the decades after the Civil War.

Of course, Robert E. Lee is not the only Lee of note.  The Lees of Virginia held great influence in their time.  When Virginia was foremost among the states of the Union, the Lees were among the foremost families in Virginia.  Richard Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, R. E. Lee’s father, was one of George Washington’s favorites in the high command of the Army of the Continental Congress.  A rebellious lot, it would seem, these General Lees.  “Light Horse Harry” later went on to become Governor of Virginia after Thomas Jefferson, but ended up in debtor’s prison.  Most reports indicate that the younger General Lee never visited his father’s grave in Georgia.

But it all seems to come back to one man, known as “R. E. Lee” to reverent historians, “Ole Mas’ Rob’t” in song, “Saint Bob” jokingly to others, but just “General Lee” to most.  But does anyone really know what Lee was like as a human being?

It would seem, after extensive research, numerous biographies, waves of revisionist history, and thorough debate, that the fabled General Lee was actually – a pretty nice guy.  

Lee was a devoted family man, quick-witted and possessed of a dry but not particularly sarcastic sense of humor, gentlemanly to a fault, politically aware but not notably ambitious, amicable, inspiring, down-to-earth, responsible, and levelheaded.  

Praise for Lee is not unanimous by any means.  Although R. E. Lee had always treated the Lee family slaves kindly, he was not an avowed abolitionist.  He was brilliant militarily, but was a general of a bygone era: his orders for the Napoleonic-style Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg probably cost the South the largest battle of the war.  And when Union General Sherman inaugurated his plan of “Total War” in his march through Georgia, Lee couldn’t conceive of fighting that way. Some charge Lee with guilt by association with the racism and closed-mindedness of the Civil War-era South.  The act of congress restoring Lee to American citizenship hangs in the Stratford Hall Visitor Center – passed only as recently as 1975, retroactive to June 1865.

But what is important about Lee is not his shortcomings or disappointments.  Super heroes don’t have human shortcomings.  The presence of General Lee that hangs over Stratford Hall Plantation is not the ghost of the man Robert Edward Lee; it is the Ghost of the Last Hope of the Lost Cause, General Lee.  And everything that was fallible and human about Lee disappeared when he became what the South needed – a great man to call their own.  The plantation is haunted by the idea of Lee, by the ideas of all the famous Lees.

Perhaps, then, the best thing we can do when we visit Stratford Hall Plantation – as anyone seriously interested in history or architecture or even just looking for a fun way to spend a quaint afternoon should – is to discard the image of the Marble Man who stands on Monument Avenue in Richmond and whose visage wallpapers the Stratford Store.  And then we can imagine a  handsome young man in a pressed West Point Cadet uniform or a boy playing in the fields or swimming.  Perhaps we can imagine R. E. Lee – or the rest of the Lee family – as just people, as real and as human as you or me.  No one knows if the Marble Man will remain the symbol of the fading elements of the old South.  But we can imagine Robert E. Lee as a human being, living on the Stratford Hall Plantation, and being someone we’d very much like to meet.

Horrorscope of the Stars

By the Mysterious Professor Zoltar

The Westmoreland News, June 9 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20): Keep an eye on the Prime Lending Rate.  If the Federal Reserve Board moves it below 3.69 percent, move ahead with the GNMA purchases setup and the NASDAQ greenmail sharetrading on the Japanese corporate market, to receive untaxed bonds and diversionary income.  Also, remember to water your plants.

Virgo (Aug. 23 – Sept. 22): You will receive a patent this week for inventing a new kind of margarine that can be used as rocket fuel.  Avoid Scorpios and state police troopers.

Libra (Sept. 23 – Oct. 22): You are moving into a new cycle in your love life: you will soon meet “someone special” and begin a wonderful romance.  However, this will not make your current “someone special” terribly happy.  You will also receive important mail this week.  It will be a lawsuit from the “someone special” mentioned above.  

Scorpio (Oct. 23 – Nov. 21): Let your “sassy” side show this week.  Get a little racy.  Wear some exotic lingerie for that special someone, unless you are man, in which case you’d feel pretty strange wearing a black lace brassiere.  Of course, if you are a man and you don’t feel strange wearing a brassiere, you’ve got bigger problems.

Pisces (Feb. 19 – Mar. 20): This is your lucky week.  Enjoy it, because next week is going to be awful.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20): This is an awful week.  

Capricorn (Dec. 22 – Jan. 19): Do you remember the episode of the Brady Bunch where they are visiting Hawaii and they take a cursed Tiki doll and then everything starts going wrong and Greg wipes out in the surfing competition?  If so, you watch way too much TV.  Get a life.  Avoid Tauruses and rat poison.

Aries (March 21 – April 19): This will be a lucky week if you send me lots of money.  It will be a lucky week for me, anyway.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 21): You probably should not grow a stylish “Hitler” mustache to win friends and impress people.  If you are a woman, you should definitely not grow a “Hitler” mustache.  Your star is in a rare harmonic conjunction with Libra this week; it doesn’t actually mean anything, but it’s interesting.

Aquarius (Jan. 20 – Feb. 18): If you flip a coin this week, it will probably come up “heads.”  Invest in money market accounts, negotiable bonds, and rare Elvis singles.  Absolutely, positively do not do the “Watusi” with anyone wearing fur pajamas and green sunglasses this week.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22): Don’t smoke.  It’s bad for you.

Happy Days Restaurant In Colonial Beach

By Jeffrey Carl

The Westmoreland News, June 5 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

The handwriting on the letter is like a child’s.  Written in blue ink on lined notebook paper, double spaced, it reads like a letter home to parents from a summer camp about what a wonderful place they are at.  The letter is polite and hopeful of a response, because they have a story to tell about someone they know who has great things in mind.

The letter is to the Westmoreland News, from Tom Krohn, an employee at the Happy Days restaurant in Colonial Beach.  It says that Giny Trosclair, the owner – with her husband, Rudy – of Happy Days, is “a real dreamer, always coming up with new and better ideals … Like your story said, ‘Write about someone good.’  I would write about her.  I really admire her.”

Tom Krohn is in middle age, with a wizened but kind face.  When I call up Happy Days to ask about taking pictures, a young voice at the other end of the line says, “They want to talk to Tom Krohn!” with more than a little shock.  I don’t know if many people take Mr. Krohn seriously.  But what he said about Happy Days being a fun place with a dream is very true, and shows a special wisdom.

Walking into Happy Days, the first thing I heard was the Beach Boys’ “Be True to your School,” one of those songs that is so shiny and happy and cheesy that you have to like it.  

It says a lot about the atmosphere at Happy Days, decorated with as many relics of the 1950s as the owners could find in their extensive search for a “Fifties feel.”  Happy Days is divided into two sections, a sit-in restaurant with entertainment and a bar, and a carry-out service and bakery.  There is soft-serve ice cream and yogurt, videos playing, karaoke sing-alongs, dancing and live music at nights.  “A little something for everybody,” Trosclair says.

The bakery has opened up only recently, and features some surprising chefs.  Al and Billy Young, owners of the original bakery in Colonial Beach, have returned to bake for Happy Days.  “We were trying to recapture the way it was,” says Giny Trosclair.  The bakery offers everything from donuts to fresh rolls to making all of the bread used in the restaurant.  “There shouldn’t be anything we don’t have,” she adds.

Trosclair says that the 1950s decor is done to create a friendly atmosphere.  “It’s always been a dream of mine, a family-oriented place,” she says.  Pictures of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley – the 1950s’ most obviously recognizable icons – adorn the walls, conjuring up images of a restaurant stolen from the set of a high-school production of “Grease.”

The pizza is quite good, although the loaf of “French Bread” tasted more like “buttermilk biscuits.”  Maybe it’s supposed to taste like French buttermilk biscuits.

Happy Days is also adding smokehouse barbecqued items and catering to its wide menu.  The pictures on the restaurant walls are being taken down and framed, and Trosclair says she hopes to eventually put a 1950s automobile on the roof of the building.  “There’s a lot we still have to do,” she says.  And it is obvious that Happy Days is a place on the move, never at rest.  “We try to have fun … we try to please everybody,” Trosclair says.

It’s Saturday night, and the band “Wild at Heart” is playing at Happy Days.  It’s mainly Top 40 country, and the music is fine, but not as loud as the singer’s shirt.  “They’re great,” Giny Trosclair says of them, “they’re going to be bigger than Alabama.  We’re really lucky to have them booked until New Year’s.”  The band is talented, and people slowly begin to get up to dance.  At first, it’s two women, doing part of a country line dance that looks like some sort of Malaysian witch-doctor’s ceremony.  Then a couple gets up and cuts a rug, and finally more and more people decide to bounce and sway to the music.  I leave after a while thinking that Tom Krohn really has found a story of something good to write about for a change – something very good.

Horrorscope of the Stars

By the Mysterious Professor Zoltar

The Westmoreland News, June 2 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20): This is a good time for business dealings.  Buy things which will make money.  Don’t buy things which won’t make money.  Avoid Scorpios and foods with lots of saturated fats.

Virgo (Aug. 23 – Sept. 22): Your name may or may not be Edgar.  If it is, you’re in big trouble.  If it isn’t, then don’t worry about it.  Don’t watch too much TV this week: it’s bad for your eyes.

Libra (Sept. 23 – Oct. 22): Avoid starchy foods.  You will soon meet a tall, handsome stranger who will mug you and take all your money.  

Scorpio (Oct. 23 – Nov. 21): This is a time for reconciling with loved ones who you care about, but have fought with.  If you don’t care about them, then to hell with them.

Pisces (Feb. 19 – Mar. 20): Your star is in an unusual position.  This probably means that you will buy either a Village People album or the “Shaft’s Big Score” soundtrack in the next few days.  And then you will feel stupid for having bought them.  Or maybe it doesn’t mean that.  I really don’t know.  And, in fact, I’m not a Pisces, so I couldn’t care less.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20): If your name is George and you’re curious, beware the man in the yellow hat.  Also, remember: there may still be pieces of Skylab floating around out there.  Be sure to floss frequently or tartar build-up may occur.

Capricorn (Dec. 22 – Jan. 19): If you see a large, green, scaly monster with huge, hideous teeth and fangs this week, don’t go near it.  It will probably eat you.  This is also a good time for investing, unless, of course, you go near the monster, in which case it won’t be a good time for anything.

Aries (March 21 – April 19): Romance is entering your life this week in the form of a flashy stranger.  Don’t get too excited, because it is also exiting your life a couple days later.  Renew your expensive magazine subscriptions this week, but give them somebody else’s address.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 21): If somebody offers you fifty bucks this week, take it.  If somebody offers you a moldy old banana, don’t take it, because it will probably make you sick and die, which is bad luck.  Your decision to pursue a career as a human minesweeper may not work out as well as you hoped.

Aquarius (Jan. 20 – Feb. 18): Be careful with your health this week.  This is a bad time for business dealings with Libras or space aliens.  Don’t forget to water your lawn.  Remember that you can save money by calling collect and sticking your loved ones with the bill.  You are lucky this week: your chances of winning the Virginia State Lottery are merely 1 in 6.3 million, down from 7.1 million last week.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22): Don’t smoke.  It’s bad for you.

Passing Thoughts On Death Row

By Jeffrey Carl

The Westmoreland News, May 30 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

Dennis W. Stockton writes a newsletter.  It comes out about every month, give or take.  It is called “Passin’ Thoughts.”  Dennis writes about whatever comes to mind or happens in his life, like a public diary.  He has written about everything from killing ants to running for governor of Virginia to replacing Rush Limbaugh to the history and usage of toilet paper.  Dennis writes on a Panasonic typewriter, sitting alone in his room.  Actually, it’s a cell. Dennis W. Stockton is on Death Row. 

The masthead of “Passin’ Thoughts” bears a parody of the New York Times’s motto, reading “All the news fit to print … and some that ain’t.”  It says, “COMPILED FROM DEATH ROW!” in all-capital letters and is copyrighted to “Dennis Walden Stockton, #134466, Powhatan Correctional Center, State Farm, Virginia 23160.”  Interspersed between stories there are quotations from sources like John Steinbeck, Leon Uris, the New Testament, and, of course, Dennis Stockton. 

“Whether an O. Henry writing his short stories from a jail cell or a frightened young inmate writing his family, a prisoner needs a medium for self-expression.”

– former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as quoted in “Passing Thoughts”

Dennis Stockton’s newsletter is often quite funny.  Stockton and his occasional guest writers take on numerous subjects – it’s something of a writer’s dream, all that space to write and nobody to tell you what to write about.  His humor is a gift-wrapped box, and inside the box holds bitterness, frustration, and madness.  Stockton staunchly maintains that he is innocent, and occasionally invokes Christ to give him the strength to withstand his unfair imprisonment.  The status of his court appeals is kept track of in special updates in “Passin’ Thoughts,” in between stories about his experiences and his plans.

“If you elect me as your governor I’ll put a stop to all this fraud and waste …  I know how to cut the cost of operating prisions in half and will do it as soon as I move in the governor’s mansion … I know you’ve heard them other candidates say over the years how it cost $25,000 per inmate to keep people in prisons … I’ll turn all the prisoners loose and pay them $12,500 a year to stay out of jail.  Just like that I’ve cut prison budgets in half.  If any double-cross me and commit a crime I’ll shoot those and get them out of their and our misery…”

– Dennis Stockton, “Passin’ Thoughts”

This is strangely, ironically funny, coming from a man waiting to be killed by the state.  And sometimes you’re never quite sure what to take seriously and what to recognize as a joke.  All these topics, the ambitious (like Stockton’s gubernatorial candidacy plans) and the mundane (congratulating Dale Earnhardt on his NASCAR Winston Cup win) are handled in Stockton’s fascinating writing style.  Stockton takes the quirks of slang speech – the “hafta”s and the “it ‘uz”s – and puts them in print, just like they sound.  It makes engaging and easy reading, and makes you feel like Stockton is sitting there beside you – behind an iron wall of bars – and talking to you.

“I use to be one of those that used handkerchiefs for nose-blowin’.  Like many, I had a habit of blowin’ my nose into a handkerchief and foldin’ it up carefully and then shovin’ it into my back pocket and walkin’ around with a pocket full of sneeze.  That was before I learned handkerchiefs were suppose to be kept clean so’s you’d have one handy when you ran into a beautiful lady in tears and could diplomatically pull it out and offer it to the distressed one so she could dry her tears and blow her purty little nose in it.  Then, if she returned the handkerchief, you could walk around with a pocket full or her carefully wrapped sneeze, but prob’ly wouldn’t mind for by then you’ve done got a date with the purty little thing you were such a comfort to.”

– Dennis Stockton, “Passin’ Thoughts”

The stream-of-consciousness writing of the newsletter is also broken up by photocopies of letters written by Stockton to the prison warden, complaining that his television has not been returned since it was broken by guards in the last “lockdown for a shakedown” or decrying the infrequent showers allowed to the men on his cell block.  It’s a little like reading the mutant offspring of Andy Rooney’s columns and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”: the funny stories about life are contrasted with an obsession with the tiniest elements of life: the television set, the toilet paper, the shower, the bugs on the wall.  There is not much to do on Death Row.  And Stockton tells you in vivid detail what it’s like to do a whole lot of not much: the tiny details of existence that are no more than annoyances to people on the “outside” are maddeningly major events to a prisoner.  Stockton talks for pages about killing the ants in his cell – he not only kills them, but counts them, and marks when he kills flies on his calendar.  Time passes slowly there, and the smallest images become important.

“The same ain’t so for ribbons.  I got 28 1/2 pages outta my last ribbon.  27 of them were double-spaced kind while the other 1 1/2 were single-spaced … like this’n.  Before startin’ this issue I put ribbon #12 in that I’ve used so far, since gettin’ this machine in late August.  They charge me $4.35 for each ribbon in the Canteen …”

– Dennis Stockton, “Passin’ Thoughts”

Postcards from the edge.  Notes from the underground.  Confessions of the condemned.  Voices from beyond.  Straight outta Compton.  Federal Express from hell.  Pick your name for these testimonials.  Here they are called, simply, “Prisoners’ Warnings.”

Stockton’s notes above, and the following letters are prisoners’ warnings to young people of the area.  The letters are accompanied by a letter from the organizers of this project.  The introductory letter says the prisoners’ warnings are “written by reformed inmates who are willing to share the hard life of prison survival,” according to Lethia A. Johnson and the Reverends C. Long and F. Brooks.

“A life where it doesn’t matter that your days are spent in a cell with only enough room to sit, stand and sleep.

“These young people are now labeled as numbers.  They have searhed their souls and are willing to share the price they had to pay for the mistakes they made.

“Their hopes and prayers are that young people would read their story andthink twice before commiting a criminal act.

“These writers are involved in community projects and are trying to find themselves in Christ, although they sometimes fail due to the lack of faith, leaderhsip and guidance.”

Lethia Johnson notes that Siloam’s pastor Reverend Long and his wife Margaret are working together with young men gathered by Keith Jones, Roger Brooks and Myron Johnson, the church’s deacons, and New Jerusalem’s Pastor.

“The theme of their first meeting, which might be considered suitable for the entire project, is You Are Your Brother’s Keeper.  I am asking the community to join in and help us preserve our next generation,” Johnson adds, and the letter ends neatly with the names of Johnson, the Rev. Long, and the Rev. Brooks.  The letter is sparsely punctuated and is typed in all-capital letters.

Joseph R. “Poncho” Brown writes that as of March 21, he was feeling “fine and very blessed, growing stronger with the Lord ever day.”  His letter is pure evangelical testimony– an account of faith and how it is often the only thing left for some when all the other things have fallen apart.  It is easy to forget sometimes that prisoners have families, too, and that time does not stand still for them while a sentence is being served.

“It’s more apparent to me now – more than ever – that my calling is to touch as many young lives as possible.  When my sons came, my youngest (nine years old) asked me why I was in here.  I don’t know just why he’s questioning me about, but Iwas very honest with him.  I will not rest until I know that their lives have bypassed the life I’ve been living for the last 12 years.  School is the key right now for them, and they enjoy it very much…”

The top of the letter is signed, “Carlton Ford #156984.”  The handwritten letters on the page are tidy, looping whorls, like Thomas Jefferson’s.  The words are crammed together on the page, like the terse writing of someone who has something to say and doesn’t know if they’ll get a chance to say it unless they can write it fast enough.  It tells a story about a life that has gone wrong, about a boy who started out “straight” but became a product of an environment where hope had packed its bags, left, and forgotten about them.  It talks about living in a world of crime that is like some incomprehensible, faraway parallel universe to some, and the deadly everyday world to others.  

“All I wanted was to do was just make my grandmother the happiest grandparent in the world.  I remember promising to her that I would never drink liquor, beer, or take drugs, but most importantly I promised to her that I would never go to jail and leave her alone.  In return, she gave me a strict curfew, rules and regulations, attention and affection, but most importantly she gave me unconditional love … I gave her good grades in school, discipline, respect, and was on my way to becoming that young man that I promised her I would be… But some thing drastically changed in me, and I didn’t even see it coming.

“In the seventh grade, I moved to live with my mother in a project unit in Alexandria.  The children my age seemed like little adults to me, and I felt as though I had nothing in common with them or the envirnment, where crime, drugs and sex seemed to be the major focus.

“I had to somehow achieving ghetto mentality.  Peer pressure is addivctivefor a mind tatdoes’t know how to us its reflectfulness or be toughtful in decison making.  I got inolved in all types of crime: stealing cars, breaking into houses became a routine type of thing for me.  All we did was shoot basketball and get high in daylight; at night, we traveled the streets looking to commit some larceny.  i dropped out of school impregnated a girl and had a few brushes with the law, but the worst was about to come.

“That night, four of us had stolen a car, and a police car started chasing us.  We hit the wall.  All of them died except for me.

“For my part, the judge sentenced me to six months in a boys’ home.  Upon my release, I immediately got back into my old scene, peddling drugs, burglaries, and anything else that would put money in my pockets.  I was ducking and dodging like that all the way to this present incarceration.

“I’ve gone down for four and one-half years on this charge, but more importantly, I have done a lot of thinking.  Never in all my life have I ever done such deep-rooted reflecting on my past and future.  Where did I go wrong?  How did I go wrong?  What happened to that little boy who wanted to grow up and make his grandmother proud?  Surely he is still within me somewhere.  I’m still going to make her happy, God rest her soul…”

What do you say about these letters and writings from reformed prisoners?  They are like sermons from fallen angels, ghostly messages on the important things in life from those who have lost their lives in the “real world.”  But, aside from repentance, what are these testimonials really about

Dennis Stockton’s writings are funny and bleak and riveting and disorienting.  But most of all – they show what life is like, waiting to die.  They show what is there waiting for you at the end of the universe: nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  Nothing to do but kill flies and count them on the calendar.  Nothing to talk about but the petty torments inflicted in imprisonment.  Nothing to think about but the tiniest details of your life, or to make up grandiose stories about the world outside to live through the actions of others.  Dennis Stockton writes indirectly about what stares at you when you are sitting, waiting for the end: nothing.  And the cold stare of boredom – the empty eye-sockets of nothingness- are worse than the curse of fear, or the sting of pain, or even the icy gaze of evil.  There may be another world waiting for Dennis Stockton, but for right now there is nothing to do but wait and – to make something happen, if only in imagination – to tell stories.

“I died last night.  It was sometime after I went to bed.  I’m not sure of the exact time, and since I was dead I couldn’t open my eyes and look.  But sometime after 11 o’clock I went to bed.  My bed is in a cell for I’m (or was) a prisoner.

“… But the way it turned out is I suppose what’s in the dark recesses of everyone’s mind about what being dead is like.  There’s only one thing for a dead person to see and you don’t need eyes to see it.

“I don’t know whether to tell you I’m sad or glad that I died.  At least I’m no longer in prison for something I didn’t do …

“One of the best points of being dead is that I’m free from worry, persecution and ridicule along with all the little things that made my last 13-plus years on earth the low points.  The high points also include I know now – that God is real and that when I was baptized on 3/1/1991 He did indeed do all the things His book taught me He would. 

“I miss all (too many to count) the friends I came to know after I was baptized.  If I could say one thing only to them it’d be, ‘Stay the course and never doubt God’s promises in the least.’

“I wish I could write these lines and send them to everyone on earth, but I can’t for the dead these days can’t talk to the living.  For the fact I’ve learned since dying is that the dead, like me,  know nothing.”

– Dennis Stockton, “A Short Story” 

Russia On 6,000 Rubles (About Five Bucks) a Day

By Jeffrey Carl

The Westmoreland News, May 14 1994

Working at the Westmoreland News in 1994 was the best summer job I ever had. I worked for peanuts and had a two hour drive each way from Richmond, but I got to do it all at a small county newspaper where I was a reporter, feature writer, copy editor, layout editor and photographer (because there was nobody else to do those things). Best of all the paper’s editor, Lynn Norris, gave me the freedom to write whatever I wanted – way more journalistic and comedic freedom than anyone should rightly give a know-it-all 21-year-old writing for a weekly in the deeply rural Northern Neck of Virginia.

“Russia on 6,000  Rubles (about five bucks) a Day,” or “Moscow Does Not Believe in Decent Chinese Food”

by Jeffrey Carl

Staff Writer

Having traveled to Russia last summer, I was asked to write up a brief guide for those intrepid souls who might wish to visit there themselves.  This is fine with me, because it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.  The following is a listing of basic “Dos” and “Don’ts” for visiting – a condensed version of “Everything You Wanted to Know about Going to Russia but Realized You Don’t Know How to Ask the Locals.”  And if you’re as incurably American as I am, you’ll have a lot of questions.  Good luck, happy trails, and don’t forget to write if the economy over there gets work.

First Rule: Have a good time.  All of the sarcastic little attempts at humor aside, it’s a wonderful place.  The people are friendly, conversational, and generally kind.  Saint Petersburg is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen, and the “White Nights” in June – when the sun never fully goes down – are gorgeous.  Moscow’s “Stalinist Gothic” architecture is breathtaking.  Leggy Russian girls stroll by that would make heads spin in any country of the world.  Georgian Champagne is excellent and cheap.  And, being an American, you know that you’re automatically the coolest person within a 50-yard radius.

Leigh Pezzicara and Kim Roberts in Red Square, 1993
Friends at St. Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square, Moscow, 1993

Second Rule: The domestic Russian beer tastes like WD-40 motor oil.  Try to avoid it if at all possible; if you’re in a major city, there will probably be plenty of nicer bars or pubs run by foreigners, set up specifically for (comparatively) money-laden travelers like yourself.  Not that alcohol can’t be bought anywhere: when I was there, Stolichnaya vodka could be bought for about 1200 Rubles (95 cents) per liter at any kiosk along the street in Moscow or St. Pete’s.  Absolut Vodka, imported from nearby Sweden, could be bought for about four bucks per liter.  And the most expensive vodka – costing eight dollars a bottle, or about half the average Russian’s monthly wage of 15,000 Rubles – was Smirnoff, which is bottled in exotic Hartford, Connecticut.  If you’re looking for Jack Daniel’s, you aren’t seeing any until you get back on the plane.

And while we’re on the topic of sin and its accomplices, American cigarettes are cheaper in Russia than they are here.  Marlboro or Lucky Strike brands – the status symbols among younger Russians – go for about 90 cents a pack.  The cheapest native Russian cancer sticks, called Byelomorkanal, cost about four cents a pack.  They are fat, stubby, and filterless, and taste like you’re smoking plutonium.  Considering that some of the tobacco probably comes from around the Chernobyl area, you probably are. 

Third Rule: Bring your own Ny-Quil. The only time I really feared for my life was when I caught a cold, and the Russian family I stayed with decided to suggest their favorite home remedies.  The mother of the family was a chemist, and the father was a physicist.  And their respective cures for congestion were warm milk and inhaling steam, and vodka. I half expected them to pull out a small reserve box of Red Army-issue leeches with multiple warheads.  So bring your own medicine, unless you happen to be particularly fond of the vodka cure.

Jeffrey Carl at the St. Petersburg Artillery Museum, 1993
The author sits atop a ZSU-23 at the Artillery Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1993

Fourth Rule: Bring your own Won Ton soup.  I went to every Chinese restaurant in Moscow and St. Petersburg (three).  It seems that even though they had both been Communist nations for a long time, the Russians and the Chinese never got along, because apparently none of the Chinese stayed around long enough to explain how to make a decent egg roll.  In my mind, an advanced civilization is marked by the availability of good Chinese food.  There may be some somewhere in Russia.  Elvis may also be working in an Iowa laundromat.  But there is very little evidence for either.

The native Russian food is actually quite good, but due to a poor availability of supplies (a national tradition), the basic menu repertoire almost always stays the same.  I mean, I like beets as much as the next guy, but after the fifteenth serving of borscht and black bread (judging by the taste, it is made just like regular bread, but the wheat in the recipe is replaced by dirt), you can be ready to kill people for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

Which brings me to the slow infiltration of American food into the Russian culture.  Since last year, I have been told that the number of McDonald’s in Moscow has increased from one to three, and in St. Petersburg from zero to one.  But it isn’t quite the same: there are two hamburgers on the menu: the “Beeg Makh,” and the hamburger.  There is one size of fries (small), and one size of Coke (small).  And don’t worry about telling them to only put a little ice in the drink – nobody in Russia puts ice in anything.  Lunch in McDonalds will run you about three bucks, or what was then about 20 percent of the average Russian’s monthly wage.  There is also a Pizza Hut in Moscow (they’ll deliver before the next ice age or it’s free) and a Baskin Robbins in St. Petersburg.  Thankfully, not one of the 33 flavors is “double-dip vodka borscht fudge.”

To make a long story short (probably too late), after five weeks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I had a horrible desire to go home – not for Democracy, or Home, or Freedom or the Statue of Liberty – but for American food and my girlfriend.  And don’t tell my girlfriend, but I could have delayed coming home even longer if someone had brought me a bucket of Extra Crispy chicken from KFC.

Friends in Moscow, 1993
Friends in Moscow, 1993

Fifth Rule: Don’t hang around the hotels too much.  For one thing, you miss out on the real Russia.  For another thing, the foreign hotels are ridiculously expensive, and you still probably can’t get ice in your drink.  The Russian hotels are cheap, but are decorated like the Waldorf-Astoria after a limited-scale nuclear war, and the staff is hindered by the fact that apparently nobody in Russia has realized that a “service economy” has something to do with “service.”  

The first night we stayed in Moscow, one of the other students on the trip and I were up late.  Wondering what to do, I realized the only proper thing for a journalist to was to go drink in the hotel bar.  My friend ordered a screwdriver and was greeted with blank looks that seemed to say, “the poor American fool thinks he’s in a hardware store.”  No one had heard of the drink because the Russians had plenty of vodka but apparently orange juice just doesn’t grow on trees there.  His bar tab was itemized: four dollars for the vodka, and ten for the orange juice.

Sixth Rule: Learn a little Russian before you go.  Specifically, learn “nyet,” or no.  Practice saying it frequently, and in a loud voice with a stiff-arm gesture and a menacing sneer that says, “We won the Cold War, so back off.”  As soon as you are recognized as an American – which usually takes about three seconds – you will be approached by everyone from wizened old pensioners to tiny Slavic versions of the Little Rascals, trying to sell you anything from “genuine Soviet military pins” to “real American baseball caps,” bearing the logo of the Cleveland Redskins or the New York Cowboys.  

Eventually you develop a reflex for saying, “No, thanks, I don’t want any, and sorry, I don’t speak English anyway.”  It’s about that time that you look at the sixty- and seventy-year-old retired women, standing on the streets, selling cigarettes and trying to augment their average 9,000 Ruble (eight dollars) monthly income any way they can.  Their lined, thin faces show a mixture of pride and fear.  Pride in being Russian, pride coming from surviving a life of strife and turmoil, pride which keeps them from begging like so many of their countrymen have been reduced to. And fear that they may not be able to survive a new capitalist age that they neither fully understand or have any real place in.

I wasn’t a smoker, but I bought a pack from an old woman on a street corner in St. Petersburg.  She was selling them for 150 Rubles; I gave her a 200 Ruble bill and as she fumbled through her one and five Ruble bills, I told her, “Nyeh nada” – to keep the change.  She almost cried.  “Spaceba, spaceba,” – thank you – she told me again and again and blessed me.  All for about five cents.

And then all your pride in being a Buick-driving, VCR-watching, I-floss-my-teeth-with-small-countries, capital “A” American breaks down.  You realize just how bad things are there: a country that is just ending one of the darkest of dark ages and trying to rejoin a world that feared it – and left it behind.  They are trying to be reborn as a capitalist economic power – and it’s a painful “I-was-in-labor-with-you-for-three-weeks” birth.  You don’t feel superior; you just feel sorry for the people who have to live with the bitter fruits of the past. 

While I was there last summer, the Ruble exchange rate went from 1,000 to a dollar to 1,300 per dollar – 30 percent currency inflation – in five weeks.  It has stabilized much since then, but in many ways the situation is a thin veneer of order over a lot of misery and people who feel like they’ve just moved to a new planet.  Granted, it comes pre-furnished, but it’s still a new planet.  

Much has stayed the same: most of the mid- or lower-level civil servants are still the old Communist “apparatchiks” who were running things before.  The State still owns almost all of the land (accordingly, most Russians still pay less than a dollar a month for rent and utilities) and almost all of the businesses.  

And yet it has all changed: the main streets and parks are home to countless beggars.  These people have lived their entire lives under a government that watched everything, that controlled everything.  And now their government can barely take care of itself, let alone the people who have always depended on its insulating their world.  It will take Russia a long time to change, and it will involve many sacrifices.  And when you walk past these sacrifices, selling their cigarettes, you can’t help but taste the tiniest part of their pain.  And you become very glad that there is a home to go back to.

All things considered, Russia is a wonderful place to spend time.  My friends and I walked along the riverfront of St. Petersburg at two a.m. without any worries – something you probably shouldn’t attempt in a large city in America without bringing along a Mechanized Infantry batallion.  I had a wonderful time haggling in street markets, making offers in my poor Russian, and getting responses in much better English.  Russia is a country that reads: book vendors were everywhere, and a bound volume of Shakespeare’s tragedies in Russian cost me 55 cents.  You haven’t laughed until you’ve seen “The Karate Kid” in a movie theater with dubbed-over Russian voices.  And you can go to Russian dance clubs, recycle old dances like the “Twist” or the “Mashed Potato,” and everyone will think you’re a disco god.