Sonny, We Hardly Knew Ye
Boston Outsider / Humor
Diary, February 17, 1970:
Our first class of the day is gym, which is always a barrel of laughs. We’re the boys of section 8-A, supposedly the smartest class in eighth grade, but the gym instructor hates our guts. He has us twice a week, and sometimes he gets a kick out of pitting us against one of the juvenile delinquent sections in a game of “kamikaze basketball.” He’s a swarthy guy of about five-feet zero, and he was a high school hoop star for the city in the late 40s. At that height, he didn’t have much of an inside game, and so he was an outside shooter with the nickname, “Sal the Set Shot.”
Today Sal outdoes himself. After we suit up, he tells us to sit in the bleachers. Then he goes out to mid-court and sings several choruses of, “Is That All There Is?” a popular and depressing song about the pointlessness of existence. I don’t know if Sal is just having more fun with us, if he’s had an eye-opener of cheap whiskey for breakfast, or if he dresses up like Peggy Lee in his spare time, but the whole thing is bizarre. The show goes on for so long that we don’t even get any exercise.
Our second period English teacher is a substitute, a young, longhaired guy. At first the rumor about him was that he was a crazed Viet Nam vet, as in, “That guy had a nut blown off over there. Don’t get him mad!” But then it turned out that he was just another hippie out of U.Mass., and now all the burnouts ask him if he can get them any weed.
Marijuana is the subject of a documentary that we’re shown at an assembly in the auditorium during last period. And, be still my heart, the narrator of the film is a famous Italo-American, a great role model for Yours Truly. Is it the writer Mario Puzo? Is it Frank Malzone from the Red Sox? Is it Sinatra? No, it’s. . . Sonny Bono. Boy what a corny flick this is.
“Yes, cigarettes are bad,” Sonny intones in his nasal twang. “But would you rather have the pilot of a plane you’re on smoking Marlboros or maryjane?”
In one dramatized sequence, a kid attends a party and takes his first toke of smoke ever, and he goes straight to Psychedelic Hell. He looks in a bathroom mirror and sees a man-sized iguana staring back at him. He goes into the living room to find it occupied by dwarfs with their heads on backwards, and he’s menaced by flying, fanged teddy bears.I’m guessing that a beer company secretly financed this project: Drink Schlitz! It will only wreck your liver!
Diary, February 18, 1970:
That Sonny Bono propaganda worked like a charm. Today at lunchtime, the schoolyard reeks of cannabis fumes. I’m thinking that all the first-time stoners are going to be pissed off that they aren’t hallucinating like the kid in the movie. And it’s freezing out. I can’t wait for winter to be over. Maybe when it warms up, the school will show us a documentary about the dangers of miniskirts.
jim@onlineoffbeat.com
