MEANWHILE, IN THE NEWSPAPERS.COM ARCHIVE: 
Perverts and Flashers and Drugs, Oh My!

April 15, 1982 was evidently a busy day for sexual deviants in Ferdinand, Indiana. One creeper was seen kissing children at the Ferdinand Elementary playground. A few blocks away, another guy appeared to be stalking a local housewife. And finally, over at the high school, a dude clad only in a jockstrap was exposing his naughty bits to the girls' tennis team.  

I love how colloquially this article is written. "Give the girls a show"? "Bent over for a rear view"? "Playing with himself"? Absolutely no pussyfooting around with vagaries like "committing a lewd act," and such. I applaud that choice. Sometimes, it's good to be blunt. 

I do take umbrage with the author's assertion that "these incidents turned out to be harmless." I mean sure, no one was kidnapped or killed, but I wouldn't call a mental case running around a school playground kissing small children "harmless," or, for that matter, some degenerate incel in a jockstrap flashing his dick and asshole at teenage girls. 

Looking at stuff like this, it's easy to see how my fellow GenXers, free-range kids raised by the "Eh, you'll be fine," school of child-rearing, went on to become hyper-vigilant control freaks once they had children. While I am eternally grateful that I grew up before helicopter parenting was a thing, still, I understand how and why it came about. 

We've seen and heard some shit, y'all.        

Speaking of some shit, this little item is from the July 29, 1982 edition of The Ferdinand News:

Heheheheheheheh, "marijuana trip." I kinda want to read Dr. Curt Scarborough's Basics on Abused Drugs, because anti-drug literature from the 1970s and '80s is a hoot! It's often peppered with phrases like "smoking grass" (I love it when old people call it "grass"!) and "all hopped up on the dope." Totally reminds me of the scene in Better Off Dead where Lane's dad, reading from a book titled Youth and the Drug Explosion, attempts to "rap" with his son.    

Of course, seeing as it was 1982, the warnings in Dr. Scarborough's book would soon be rendered obsolete on the day Nancy Reagan launched her "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign. Sure, people scoffed at the time, but you know what? Her efforts totally paid off. She single-handedly eradicated all drug abuse and addiction in the United States. Everyone immediately quit doing everything all at once. Kids started going to church and doing their homework instead of smoking doobs and hanging at the arcade. Strung-out yuppies flushed all their cocaine down the crapper and drank herbal tea. Famous punk artists quit heroin en masse and joined various religious orders. It's all completely true. 

So hey -- thanks, Nance!

The '80s were a trip, man.

 For S.V.B. 
Rest well, bro.

"All those you thought you lost now circle you

And you are free of pain and heartbreak.

Don't look back, keep going.

We will carry your memory here, until we join you

In just a little while, in one blink of star time."

-- Joy Marjo

VISIT TO MHA 
5/23/2026

John and I took a trip to MHA (my old boarding school) over Memorial Day weekend. We stayed at an adorable bed and breakfast in Jasper, reminding me how much nicer and cleaner B&B's are than mid-range hotels. 

The campus is as beautiful and serene as ever. While the dormitory is now gone--MHA closed in 2000--most everything else there is still the same, aside from the old art department building, which now houses a charming little on-site brewery. 

When we visited last summer, I noticed an abundance of painted rocks placed around the monastery grounds, so I thought I'd bring some of my own.

I painted a giraffe for Angela--she loved giraffes....

....and left it in the grotto...

Church bells signaling Saturday evening mass in downtown Ferdinand
echo throughout the campus. 

Poignant sign among the vigil lights.

I painted a few rocks bearing the old MHA logo....

(NOTE: the school was called Academy Immaculate Conception until the early '70s, 

when they rebranded as Marian Heights Academy.)

Ancient yearbook pic for reference, with the old dorms in the background.

I left my heart in Ferdinand, Indiana....

...along with a few strawberries.

The final resting place for the sisters of the monastery.

We took a stroll over to the colonnades, and I posted up on the wall overlooking the nuns' cemetery and the town of Ferdinand. Not gonna lie, this exact spot where I'm perched right here? Probably one of my top three favorite locations on earth. As a student, it's where I used to steal away for some "me time" when I wanted to journal, think, or just be. Nearly 40 years later, the feels are the same.   

Aerial photo of the campus, taken not by me.

 

 "I am KING SHIT of FUCK MOUNTAIN!"

"WHY would you FUCK with ME?"

God, I love Mr. Show. And yes, I'm still sick. Mask up and pass the Purell, kitties. There's something nasty going around out there. 

Also, "WHAT IS UP SATAN'S ASS?!?"

 

 I am one sick puppy.

Literally! Well, almost literally. I am sick, but I am not a juvenile canine. What I'm saying is that I look and feel like hammered shit, laid up with some kind of horrible sinus-y/upper respiratory/cold thingie with all the usual trimmings: a disgusting phlegm-y cough, achy muscles, and a pounding head. (It's not COVID. I checked.) At the moment I am "bed-rotting" as the kids say, chugging water and OJ and popping Zicam (proven to shorten colds...but we'll see) every two hours. 

At least it's given me a chance to binge all four seasons of Mr. Show--the entire series is now streaming on HBO Max!--because weird comedy is my comfort food. And one of my all-time favorite Mr. Show sketches is the whacked out, spot-on H.R. Pufnstuf parody "The Altered State of Drugachusetts," where instead of Freddy the Flute they got Gurgle the Bong, costumed characters who are either tripping balls or trying to come down from tripping balls, and David Cross sporting a bad pageboy wig and doing a brilliant Jack Wild, complete with those weird, jerky dance kicks he used to bust out during the musical numbers. 

Bonus: a little-known version of the HR Pufnstuf song, recorded by The Murmurs and featured on the 1995 compilation Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits, an album with mid-90s mainstays like Liz Phair, Matthew Sweet, Juliana Hatfield, and Collective Soul covering theme songs from 1970's kids' shows. It's a lot of fun, and probably one of the best things to come out of the nineties' obsession with seventies pop culture.

And with that, I think it's time for me to down some Nyquil and pass out. 

 MORE AI NONSENSE

I'm not as charmed by automatically-generated Spotify word salad as I used to be. The new "Roast My Listening" feature is pretty bad. This is an example of what the app vomited up for me when I gave it a whirl. 

Remember when they tried to convince us that the inevitable robot uprising would be a good thing for everyone? Yeah, I ain't buying it.

 McCARTHY MONDAY 

The standout memory I have of this movie (Class, 1983), involves watching an episode of Siskel & Ebert at my grandmother's house. (Pretty sure my grandmother was the one watching, I was just sitting with her.) The guys were discussing this new teen movie about a boarding school student who has an affair with an older woman who turns out to be his roommate's mother. They showed a scene from the film wherein the main character and Roommate's Mom are about to start going to town on each other in an elevator. My grandmother harumphed at the depravity occurring on the TV screen and promptly ordered me out of the living room. "You don't need to be watching that kind of trash," she said, giving me a look. I reluctantly got up and shuffled out of there, wondering what the big deal was. I watched way worse stuff at home all the time, since my parents and everyone else in the neighborhood had gotten cable a few years prior. Along with getting to see all the sex and violence we could handle on HBO (we were mainly interested in stuff like Friday the 13th and "naughty" teen sex comedies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High), there was a steady supply of porn magazines--some of the more explicit rags, like High Society and Oui--hidden out in the woods that bordered my friend Caroline's house, the same woods that on the other side happened to border the playground behind John Strange Elementary, my school. In hindsight, I really want to believe that the culprit was some horny kid who was forced to stash his stroke books where his parents wouldn't find them, i.e. the wooded lot off of North Ewing Street....because the idea of some pedo-vert strategically placing hardcore porn rags in and around the woods behind an elementary school is too disturbing to contemplate. Also, that probably should've been two paragraphs. My apologies. 

I eventually did see Class a year or two later when it was in heavy rotation on HBO, and it turned out that my grandmother--a very wise woman, by the way--was 100% correct. I didn't need to be watching that kind of trash, but not because of the (lame) sex scenes and the (mostly lame) teenage boy hijinks. It's because Class, well....it kinda sucks.  

The movie takes place at an all-boys boarding school outside Chicago. The bros on the dorm engage in your typical raunchy teen movie antics; pulling endless pranks on one another, smoking copious amounts of weed, and trying to get off with the girls at the neighboring all-female prep school. Sensitive guy Jonathan (Andrew McCarthy), journeys to Chicago on the advice of his roommate Skip (Rob Lowe), hoping to lose his virginity to some worldly big-city gal. Jonathan meets Ellen (Jacqueline Bissett), an older woman who picks him up at a bar. Suddenly the movie shifts gears and morphs into a tender-yet-inappropriate romance that comes to a screeching halt when Ellen discovers that Jonathan is only seventeen (not a grad student as he'd led her to believe) and she wisely "nopes" it out of there. Jonathan is depressed for a while, and then, after the inevitable "Hey I'd love to spend the holidays with your family, Skip. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. HOLYSHITIVEBEENFUCKINGMYROOMMATESMOMALLALONG." If that weren't enough, it soon becomes clear that Ellen is battling a raging alcohol addiction that disgusts her husband, Skip's father (played by Cliff Robertson). And boom! Now we got a tense family drama. 

Jonathan and Ellen rekindle their relationship after the boys return to school following Christmas break. Skip eventually tracks Jonathan to a local motel, finds him in bed with Mom, and goes predictably apeshit. Back at school, Dad arrives to inform Skip that Ellen has voluntarily checked herself into a psych hospital (offscreen)--and, with that--she handily disappears from the movie and is seen nevermore. Tensions between Jonathan and Skip boil over, culminating in a vaguely homoerotic wrestling match in the woods. The boys end up back at the dorm, covered in leaves and mud, all pissed off and exhausted. Skip makes a wisecrack. Jonathan turns to him. They both start laughing, and....freeze frame! The End. I guess the message is, "bros before hos," even when the ho is yo mama.

Well, like I said, Class is a bad movie. And not the fun kind of bad--it's the not-good kind of bad, with all those weird tonal shifts and Rob Lowe trying too hard to be the manic funny guy. The film also lowkey hates women; the female characters are either snotty, shallow bitches (the girls from the neighboring prep school), boozy trainwrecks (Ellen), or pointlessly cruel cunts (the lady who tricks Jonathan into marking up his face with a coin).  

One thing the movie has going for it, at least, is an impressive cast. Besides Lowe and McCarthy, Class is teeming with soon-to-be familiar faces in supporting roles. You got John Cusack, Virginia Madsen, Cameron from Ferris, one of the girlfriends from Weird Science, Lolita Davidovich, and a kid who I vaguely remember from some other Reagan-era flick. There may be more, but you'd have to look closely. 

Upside: Andrew McCarthy is frickin' adorable in this.

Verdict: I give it half a Blane. 

Class can probably be found somewhere on streaming, but seriously, why bother?

 I STEPPED ON ANDREW McCARTHY'S FOOT
AT THE CARMEL CLAY PUBLIC LIBRARY!

He was really nice about it, though.

Andrew is explaining.

Andrew is fixing his hem.

Andrew is listening.

Andrew is amused.

Andrew is pointing.

Andrew is thinking.

Andrew is happy.

I'm reading his new book. It's really good so far, and I highly recommend it.
More importantly -- SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY! The book-banning fascists want to cut library funding. 

Lots of GenX gals go nuts over Blaine from Pretty in Pink, but I prefer Andrew's character in St. Elmo's Fire. I liked his vibe and his cynical attitude, plus he had a much better wardrobe in that one (I love PiP, but I didn't dig Blaine's preppy threads). I know St. Elmo's is generally disparaged nowadays, but fuck it. I love bad movies, and anyway it's pretty to look at and endlessly quotable. (When I met Andrew I should've said, "Quick, what's the meaning of life?" but I didn't. I clammed right up because I was all nervous and excited. Oh well, maybe next time.)

Always loved this scene with him and Emilio: 

I've been toying with the idea of turning this blog into something else. Perhaps an Andrew McCarthy fansite? Maybe I'm kidding, but maybe I'm not.

 J A M  T H E  C O N T R O L S 

 Run + tell all of the angels

Those who could hear the music 

It's a vibe

 Stay Hydrated

 Menopause, amirite?

 Hear them shout across the land

 Pulling threads

Guarding the moon

 

blinked + u were gone 

Jeremy Spoke

 

 Surprise 'em with a victory cry