Day 12: Vintage Entertainment

July 26: New York City

Soundtrack: Hootenanny Hoot

For weeks I had studied maps, large and small, but maps are not reality at all – they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to a rail.
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

Despite listening to screams and arguments off and on all night from Brokeback Mountain, Sister Laura managed to get up and go to work at BBC America. I moved the car into a garage up the street and got coffees from the Starbucks down on Third Avenue. But even the house blend wasn’t strong enough to get Laura Anne and me out of the air-conditioned apartment before noon.
Luckily there was an entertaining film on tv: the 1963 Hootenanny Hoot, starring Peter Breck and Ruta Lee with vintage performances by Johnny Cash, Sheb Wooley, Judy Henske, and the Brothers Four, pumping up the folk craze for all they were worth. This was a period I remembered as the time I tried to get my father to buy me a guitar so I could be cool, but he got me a bigger accordion instead. I tried to play the requisite Bob Dylan and Highwaymen and Peter Paul and Mary material on my grandmother’s mandolin, but it wasn’t sufficiently cool for high school. (Forget the accordion!) So I learned the folk repertoire well enough I could host a radio show later at Pacifica Houston. Hootenanny Hoot was quite a flashback for me and Laura dug it since she was a big Johnny Cash fan. I think Charlie would have made us change the station; he didn’t have much tolerance for folk or country.
We decided to maintain continuity by checking out some more vintage entertainment at the Museum of Radio, Television, and Film. The trek uptown was a bit grueling in 90-degree heat, but the place was blessedly air conditioned and we spent the rest of the day watching Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, a Dick Cavett show with Bob Dylan, a Frank Lloyd Wright documentary narrated by Anne Baxter, and screenings of I Love Lucy and All in the Family, with guest star Sammy Davis Junior.
After happy hour at the Rodeo, taquitos and quesadillas, virgin and not-so virginal margaritas, I moved the car out of a parking garage in time for the free street parking. Laura and Laura and I looked over the Rand McNally maps to get an idea of New England so we could approximate the first leg of Steinbeck’s trip. We knew Connecticut was on the itinerary and then Massachusetts and as close as we could get to Maine. Making it to Maine would be quite a feat in the three-day weekend we had ahead, since the next day was dedicated to having a picnic at the Cloisters with Laura’s friend Barb and a taking in a free screening in the evening.
Our Daddy would have drawn a red line for the route like Kerouac had tried to at first, and he would have held to it; we’d been there for the first 20 years of family vacations and that was one thing we were sure we DIDN’T want to do.