Sting-Ray Afternoons

That they did so in Cincinnati is why my mom is now partial to Tide detergent and—just debuted in time for John’s arrival—Bounce fabric softener. There is nothing P&G doesn’t make, so our toothpaste is always Crest with fluoride—“clinically proven to fight cavities”—and we’re occasionally allowed as a treat at Red Owl to pick out a tube of Pringles. It’s also a P&G product, which is why Fredric Baur will be buried in suburban Cincinnati in the Pringles can he designed.

Mom hadn’t wanted to move from Cincinnati, where Dad first took a job with 3M, to Columbus, Ohio, to which Mickey Mining dispatched him and where Jim was born. She hadn’t wanted to move at 3M’s behest from Ohio to greater Chicago, where Tom and I were born, and after ten years in Palatine and Lisle, she hadn’t wanted to move from Chicago to Bloomington. Through all these moves, she held fast to the polestar of Cincinnati: to Graeter’s ice cream and Ohio State football and the Big Red Machine of Johnny Bench and Pete Rose.

There are a few exceptions to Mom’s Cincinnati loyalty—she sometimes buys Hills Bros. coffee instead of P&G’s Folgers and only ever buys Dial soap, from the Dial Corporation. It is clearly the gold standard of bath soaps, literally a gold bar, wrapped in gold foil, with DIAL carved into the center. I run my hands across those letters in the bath, tracing them with my fingers, digging my nails into the soap. Tom is passing gas in the tub; I’m scrubbing my “business,” which is one of Mom’s many euphemisms. We’re also to say “tinkle” and “BM,” so that when she buys B&M brand baked beans—or, worse, B&M brown bread in a can—we make gagging sounds while carrying the groceries in from the garage.

Since there are five of us, one of those grocery sacks now always contains a receipt that is three feet long and curled up on itself like a lizard’s tongue.



With the birth of John, our family is complete. We have moved again, into bigger digs, three minutes by bike on the other side of South Brook, to 2809 West 96th Street. Before Dad moved us to Bloomington in the first place, he house-hunted alone during a few idle hours away from the Mickey Mining campus and bought the house on Southbrook Drive. Mom never saw it until she moved in, but Dad knew she would love it, that it was perfect for her. She hated it instantly and immediately began looking for another in the neighborhood, part of a pattern of Dad thinking he knows what she wants, with the best intentions, while not really having a clue. When Mom begins driving across town to the Normandale Racquet Club to walk on a treadmill three mornings a week, Dad buys her a treadmill and puts it in the basement. “Now you don’t have to drive all the way across town,” he says. “You can walk on the treadmill at home.” From the day she receives it, Mom uses the treadmill only as a coatrack and continues to drive across town to walk on the racquet-club treadmill. Some days it is the only escape from her manifold domestic duties.

I am now the middle of five children, but Mom and Dad are only keeping pace with the neighbors. It’s not unusual for families at Nativity to have five children, or nine. At least a dozen families at school consist of seven or more kids. Already there are more kids enrolled in school in Bloomington than there ever have been before, or ever will be again—twenty-six thousand of us. Bloomington is in peak bloom, and now so is our house. None of these entities—our town, our school, our house—will ever be fuller than they are now, never as loud or eventful or brimming with life.

This youthful vitality, this animating energy, seems to suffuse the entire country. For the first time in American history there are 25 million teenagers in the United States—kids aged twelve to seventeen—every one of them teeming with a life force in search of an outlet. Toward that end, Playboy will sell 8.5 million copies of its November 1972 issue, a record that will never be broken. And while I am too young to see Swedish brunette Lena S?derberg dressed for the day in nothing but a sun hat and feather boa, I am evidently old enough to see my first grown-up movie.

With five children aged three months to eleven years to look after, Mom deserves a relatively quiet evening at home, and Dad orders Jim, Tom, and me to pile into the Impala. We are going—at long last and with great ceremony, and for the first time in my life—to “the movies.” We’re seeing The Poseidon Adventure, which sounds like a madcap nautical escapade on the high seas. More momentously, I’ll finally set foot in Mann’s Southtown Theatre, which Dad pronounces “thee-AY-der.” He has a fondness for the entire oeuvre of Abbott and Costello and the swashbuckling adventures of Errol Flynn, but otherwise Dad is not a movie buff. His favorite film of the last quarter century is the TV movie Brian’s Song, about the dying Chicago Bears running back Brian Piccolo, which annually airs on ABC and triggers Dad’s annual tear, which always puts me in mind of Iron Eyes Cody.

The Southtown Theatre is a magical non sequitur, a place whose very existence is a mystery and a miracle, as if a Manhattan movie palace circa 1947 has fallen from the sky onto Penn Avenue South in suburban Minneapolis, between the Putt-Putt mini golf course and Wally McCarthy’s Oldsmobile dealership.

Southtown’s klieg-lit marquee runs for miles, wrapping around the entire pebble-dashed exterior, which glows from its own footlights. Should Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine step out of a stretch limousine and onto a red carpet at any moment, as I fully expect they will, the Southtown Theatre is better prepared than that other great movie palace in this same chain, Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

The mid-century modern lobby of the Southtown is dominated by a fountain filled with coins and live goldfish, and a refreshment stand stocked with comically large boxes of Mike and Ike and Sno-Caps. Jim and Tom and I fog the glass cases with our breath before reluctantly moving on. Everything smells headily of fresh popcorn and carpet disinfectant. Advancing past the box office and beyond the red velvet ropes of the ticket takers standing sentry above slotted gold boxes, I see the framed poster for The Poseidon Adventure. Bodies dressed in formalwear are raining down inside an inverted cruise ship. The tagline reads HELL, UPSIDE DOWN. I feel a dull pulsing of dread in my stomach, but it’s still competing for attention with all that surrounds me.

Inside, the theater itself is vast, at least the size of the Montgomery Ward across the parking lot. The screen alone is seventy feet wide and thirty-six feet high—a foot shorter than the Boston Red Sox’s famed Green Monster, the left-field wall whose height I have committed to memory and use to gauge the height of every other earthly structure. There are, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom, twelve hundred seats in the theater. With five daily screenings, it can accommodate 7 percent of the population of Bloomington every single day. Even in central Bloomington, a place of finite entertainment options—there’s a hobby shop in the Southtown strip mall, and Howard Wong’s restaurant is across the street—twelve hundred seats seems a tad overambitious.

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