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Last bit of little-guy-birthday business (I think): last night I started pre-heating the oven to cook our Friday night pizza, and after a few minutes I started to smell smoke. I've certainly been guilty many times in the past of starting the oven without looking inside first, and thus accidentally cooking an empty pan that was being kept in the oven due to lack or storage space, or something along those lines, but I swear I had cracked the door and taken a peek before setting the dials. I opened the oven door all the way and then I spotted a chunk of birthday cake under the heating element. My wife had been forced to cook the birthday cake in two disposable 8-inch circular pans instead of one 9x13 because all our 9x13's have been loaned out to friends we've delivered casseroles to. In any case, I was on the phone with my wife when I noticed the smoke and when I spotted the hunk of devil's food I said, "OK, gotta go, there's some stray cake in the oven and it's on fire, ha ha." My wife let me go, I got a fork to stab the cake, and in that span of time, the chunk of cake ACTUALLY CAUGHT ON FIRE. I still managed to harpoon it and transport it, flaming, to the sink where I doused it in water. Never a dull moment on Friday nights in our house!
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This week there was a staff Q&A discussion in The A.V. Club about time travel. If you could go back in time to live through one continuous five-year period any place on Earth, with enough local knowledge and disposable funds to basically do whatever you want, but you had to stay within a five mile radius of the spot you appeared for the whole five years, when and where would you go? I settled on my answer pretty quickly, and I was a little surprised no one else on the AVC staff hit upon it or some variation on my major reasoning (which is mostly pop-culture related, but this started with AVC so of course it's all pop-culture related). In any case, my choice: New York City (specifically the Bronx) mid-1961 to mid-1966.
The more I thought about it the more I realized there were several reasons why that would be rad as hell. Maris chasing Ruth, for example. I could go to the actual game at Yankee Stadium where Roger Maris hit his 61st home run for the 1961 season (on my birthday, no less). For that matter I could watch the Yankees win two world championships (and make four World Series appearances total but I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy the two they lost, particularly '63).
I'd also get to see Camelot first-hand and actually have an answer to "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" Not that I have any kind of morbid wish to bear witness to a senseless assassination, but I think living through that period of transition and upheaval would be fascinating.
And as far as pop-culture entertainment ... come on. A world where everyone from John Lennon to Elvis to Johnny Cash to Miles David is still alive and making music is tough to beat. Hollywood wasn't doing too bad, either, and in 1963 alone I could see How the West Was Won, Dr. No, and The Great Escape all on the big screen. But the biggest reason to start out in 1961 would be (I need a stronger phrase than OF COURSE) comic books.
Marvel Comics rolled out the first issue of Fantastic Four in November of 1961 and most geeks agree that's when comics changed forever. I was actually thinking about that very idea just the other day and musing how it might be interesting to survey what was coming out on newsstands throughout 1961 before Marvel shook everything up with their new style. It truly wouldn't be too hard to track down a good-sized sample of old back issues from that era, especially if all I'm concerned with is the content and not pristinely preserved collectibles, and it would probably be more of an expenditure of time doing the research to line up the publication dates than money. If I'm time-travelling anyway, it would be much less effort to just wander down to the corner drugstore every week or so and buy a few 10- or 12-cent mags. And then once the Marvel Era began, it's not so much reading the comics that I'd be most into (though obviously I would be totally into that but honestly I've already read the vast majority of those early 60's comics in various reprints over the years) but observing the way the new was received and perceived against the old, and determining first-hand if the seismic change really was seen and felt or if it simply ushered in the very first debates over whether or not Superman could beat up Thor.
But in order to really do that I'd have to befriend actual people reading those comics for the first time, which means in order for all this to be non-creepy I would need to be like twelve years old on top of being able to time travel, which kind of fits with the whole mainly-obsessed-with-comics-and-baseball-and-rock-n-roll thing and also is not a shocking departure from anything else in this blog in the slightest way.
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Today got away from me, mostly due to some college football I couldn't tear myself away from (Go Blue!) so that will have to suffice, but if all goes well tomorrow I may be back with the first Sunday Special in I don't even know how long. I gotta make up for my Labor Day Weekend of Slackitude somehow.
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