Poodles and Tabloids (excerpt from War and Peas)

     As a hobby, our grandmother ran a kennel of world class show poodles. Show dogs tend to attract an eclectic group of kennel employees and my grandmother’s help was no different. We used to like to hang out in the kennel for 2 reasons. First, we liked to spy on the dog people - the women dressed in skin tight leopard pants that did not accentuate their best features and they had frizzy red permed hair. The men were flamboyant and effeminate. They all used colorful language and although we were not always sure what they were talking about, we knew it was naughty and we were skilled at faking an understanding.

I never knew quite what to make of the quirky dog people, but they were a source of curiosity not found elsewhere.….. Second, the dog pens were lined with a grand variety of tabloids like the National Enquirer, and tabloids were difficult to come by in our family of intellectuals. My cousin Stain and I would peruse the paper stacks and sneak the very best articles back to our homes where we would refer to them often. My clothing bureau had a secret drawer and I kept them there for safekeeping. 
     Stain acquired his nick name from being an energetic little kid who put far more enthusiasm into his activities than his appearance. He generally ate on the run and usually had some evidence of grass, ketchup, mustard, or chocolate on his shirt and face.

We both hated reading - our distaste applied especially to the weak selections chosen by our teachers - books with way too many pages burdened with words too long to fit aesthetically on them, and far too few pictures….I was of the opinion that even a really bad picture was better than the written word. These assigned books were by authors with names like Kipling and Melville. It would seem as though the characters could only land a part in the book if they had a strange name like Mowgli or Ishmael. Any hope of setting the hook in my fragile attention span was lost the moment the characters commenced speaking in strange dialects. Controlling my imagination was like herding cats and under the best of circumstances reading was way too structured and confining. But the tabloid periodicals were special. They had just the right mix of pertinent news and photos, and the really important stories used color pictures. Stain and I would enter the kennel with the same intellectual curiosity others had when they entered a library. We were on a mission to catch up on the news that we were not regularly exposed to on network Tv or in our local newspaper.

Today, tabloids focus mainly on celebrity news. In the 60’s celebrity news was found in magazines at your hair salon. Tabloids had much broader coverage of the news. When they were not covering the major stories like Jackie Kennedy, people being run over by trains or of grizzly  murders complete with low resolution color photos, they focused on human encounters with aliens. The aliens would perform cruel experiments on their abductees and steal the women’s eggs which would be used to cross-breed with aliens. This is because aliens had a natural curiosity about Earthlings. The stories included interviews with the victims and they were quoted saying things like “When he paralyzed us with his ray gun, I thought it was the end of time”.

 Barney and Betty Hill were 2 Americans abducted by aliens during my childhood. Accounts of their horrifying experience, were published by all of the tabloids. After the Hill’s came forth, many other alien abductees did as well. Thanks to the hardnosed journalism of the tabloid reporters, they were able to procure and publish actual photos of the whole terrifying experience. The daily papers like the Washington Post and New York Times had 2^nd rate reporters who unlike aliens, had no natural curiosity, so they never covered these stories. The possibility that our fake grandfather could be the spawn of an alien having his way with an abducted Earth woman, was not lost on this nine year old.

       I chose the Hill’s alien abduction, for my current event report in school. My report was thorough and well documented. While my classmates were appreciative and full of questions, my teacher Mrs. Riley was not impressed.

Next to the “D” she put at the top of my paper, she made a list of acceptable resources. It did not include a single tabloid. I believe that I was one of the first to identify the shortcomings of our educational system.