In my Junior year of high school I got the nickname “Papa Smurf” in chorus. We were on a trip to Washington D.C. to participate in a mass chorus thing called “America Sings”. I still have my “America Sings” sweatshirt hanging on the wall in my bedroom, bedecked with a variety of buttons and pins. I think I became known as “Papa Smurf” because somebody on the big charter bus asked, “How much farther?” and, in my best Don Messick, I replied “Not much farther now my little Smurfs!”
That Washington trip spawned the “Papa Smurf” nickname and another popular chorus quote, “Look! The Washington Monument!” when our bus driver got stuck in some kind of roundabout and passed the monument 7 or 8 times.
I tell you these stories now because literally nobody remembers them except me. Such is the shelf life of inside jokes. Well, usually.
My friends Dangerous Dave and Herr Kroheim used to be my employees, back when I was in charge of KCOW part-time announcers. There was a period where the office manager of the radio station was charged with striking fear into the hearts of our part-timers. It was clear I was inept at that particular skill. So every week the kids would gather in the lobby for 30 minutes of being yelled at, threatened, cajoled and otherwise smacked around. (I’m not sure any technique, from violence to sweet talk, did a whole lot of good. These were high school students with infirm craniums. We probably should have just been glad none of them ever set the place on fire. I should point out that we had some really smart, really great students working for us. We also had some space cadets.)
So anyway, my friend Pat Adriance who worked at KCOW then, would try to offer comedy relief at the meetings–the “good cop”, if you will. At one meeting his comedy relief was an impersonation of me hosting “Open Mic”, our buy/sell/trade call-in show. It was basically him saying, in a high-pitched voice, “And the cost of the curling iron is 60 dollars.” Or something like that. I genuinely don’t remember him saying it. Probably because he spent about 4 1/2 hours a day giving me the Razz so it all kind of blended together.
But Dangerous Dave…he thought “the cost of the curling iron is 60 dollars” was hilaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarious. And so he started throwing in “$60” references in everyday conversation. Kalin Krohe picked it up from Dave and kept the ball rolling after DD went into the Navy. Eventually my community theater friends picked up on it (Dave has been in lots of shows). Other part-timers picked it up from Kalin.
Let’s search my Facebook page for “$60” and see what comes up.
This took all of 35 seconds. There are TONS of them. And for a while I made visual tomfoolery for everyone’s amusement on My Space.
Sometimes The Sensational Sum makes its way to the airwaves, either on Open Mic or during our radio auction My usual reaction is a subdued “And boom goes the dynamite.” Once in a while I will be asked to explain the joke to someone, usually by Kalin, and I am always hesitant to do so. There’s no “there” there. It is ethereal, of a moment, and explaining does not make it funny to people who aren’t in on it. Which the preceding blog should prove quite decisively.