You'd be forgiven for thinking this, but you'd be wrong. I know because last Thursday I attended a doo-wop show in Coney Island, featuring Dion and Frankie Valli. I was still pretty scabby that night, and sitting out in a mosquito-drenched field was probably not a smart move, therapy-wise. But it was my friend's last night in town before he left for his last year of law school, and he is a big fan of the oldies, so I made the scene anyway. It was an interesting crowd, with a surprising number of Not Ancient people in the audience. And yet, it was so unbelievably Old School Brooklyn I thought a stickball game was gonna break out. That, or John Travolta would strut through the crowd, paint can in each hand. I don't know how quite to describe it, except to say that there was just a feeling of the air, that this one little park in Brooklyn contained all the remaining people who employ the word youse non-ironically in regular conversation.

The show was hosted by Jay Black (of Jay and the Americans), whose job as MC, it seemed, was to see exactly how far he could tread the Racial Joke plank and not fall off into the Sea of Inappropriate. We listened to his words the way that Nascar fans watch the tight turns, wondering when disaster would strike, and he would say something unmistakably racist. Votes were taken on who he would be most likely to slur first (Asians won, followed closely by Jews). For the most part, though, he toed the line, and instead obeyed one of the cardinal rules of bad stand up comedy: When in doubt, make fun of The Gays. Nothing like a few McGreevey "jokes" to warm up a doo-wop crowd.

But his Don Rickles schtick paled in comparison to that of Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, who hogged the stage in every conceivable way. Even though I sat a good 200 feet from the stage, I'm pretty sure he wasn't using a microphone. He was just yelling REALLY LOUDLY, as he did at my Brooklyn College graduation earlier this year. Borough president, as an office, holds little real power, though the officeholder is expected to be a vocal advocate and cheerleader for his home turf. If he had not attained this office, Markowitz would certainly have been a used car salesman, or owner of an unfinished furniture outlet, or any other kind of business that has badly made commercials aired at 2 in the morning on local cable stations. He bears more than a passing resemblance to the wig store owner in Goodfellas. ("Morty's wigs never come off!") Once Marty hit the stage, to thank sponsors and say "Rah rah Brooklyn!" at the top of his lungs, not even Sandman Simms could lodge him from the limelight. He rattled off a dizzying array of promos for diners, hardware stores, butchers, etc., some of which I suspect were not sponsors, merely places he likes to visit. He spoke of Brooklyn in such angrily superior terms that I thought any second he would launch into a speech about the Master Race, and how Queens must be cleansed to provide lebensraum for the (god)fatherland.

The space between performances by Dion* and Frankie Valli was excruciatingly long, and rather than play some oldies over the PA, someone decided it would be a good idea to have Marty and Jay scream at each other for 40 minutes. It was like watching The McLaughlin Group, if all the panel members were John McLoughlin, and if they were all ten times crazier. I now know that the line separating Marty Markowitz from a raving lunatic is paper thin. At one point, for reasons too stupid to recount, he started wishing everyone in the audience holiday greetings for every holiday between now and next summer--HAPPY THANKSGIVING! MERRY CHRISTMAS! HAPPY NEW YEAR! He sounded like Howard Dean rattling off the states he would soon conquer.

During this whole grotesque display, I was keeping my eye on a woman of a certain age, laying on the grass to our right, whose behavior was puzzling to say the least. Her platinum blonde hair was done up the way a tough chick's do woulda been circa 1957. From the angle at which I sat, it looked as if she thought she was posing for a calendar, laying on her side, one leg crooked on top of the other. At other times, she simply lay splayed across the grass, legs wide open (facing away from us, thank god). A half-empty 40 of Colt 45 stood within arm's length. Some cops came over to rouse her to her feet. She was clearly tore to the core, and stumbled over to a group that looked like a family, sitting on a nearby park bench. At first, I thought she was hassling random strangers. But it soon became evident that these people were either family or friends. Her associates were neither embarrassed nor scolding; they simply yelled at her, in a ball busting way, about her drunken posing. It was at the same time amusing and highly upsetting.

Frankie Valli's appearance on stage was preceded by a Jumbotron presentation--a five-minute montage of his long musical career that looked as if it was produced for an episode of the Donnie and Marie Show. When he emerged from the curtain, he looked like a dwarf compared to his gargantuan backing band, which, by my count, had about 45 people in it--including a horn section, percussionists, bassoon quintet, and E-flat triangle. His backup singers resembled N-Sync, only not so butch looking. During the show, each one of them made some crowd-pleasing remarks regarding New York. One, however, made the mistake of saying something nice about the Yankees, and got a chorus of boos (FYI: It's not as strictly true as it once was, but thanks to memories of the Brooklyn Dodgers, large swaths of Brooklyn remain Mets Country, or at least fierce Anti-Yankees Country).

One thing I like about old songs, even ones I don't really like, is the relative sloppiness in them, since they come from an era before drum machines, at a time when doing dozens of takes was prohibitively expensive. You can tell that actual human beings played those notes. There was not one bit of sloppiness in Mr. Valli's show--it had more polish than a shoeshine stand. At no point were you surprised--except during some new-ish song, or at least one I'd never heard before, when I was treated to a bass solo. Look, I know you gotta let the boys in the band get a little, and I am very much pro-bass, but Christ on crutch, Frankie Valli concert + bass solo = SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER HAPPEN EVER NEVER EVER DOUBLE DOG NEVER. A friend of my friend put it best, saying "Dude, this sucks so hard," in a voice that was full of more awe than mockery. He was amazed that anything could suck so profoundly.

Mr. Valli introduced one of his newer songs by speaking over a slow vamp, in a speech that began "You know, ever since September 11th..." To paraphrase Mission of Burma (and Goebbels), whenever I hear someone say "ever since 9/11," that's when I reach for my revolver. I haven't the slightest idea what Frankie said. It was hard to hear him over the grumbling of the crowd. Also, I'm pretty sure my ears shut it out as a defense mechanism. I do know that he went on for filibuster lengths along the lines of "we all gotta get together," until me and all my companions were on the verge of tears.

And then the song started. I never caught the title, but my guess is it's called "Harmony," since he sang that word roughly nine million times during its endless stretch. Even more amazing, it was accompanied by yet another Jumbotron montage that looked like it was prepared by a third grade class. Remember this: you are in elementary school, and you're in art class, and the teacher is burned out or hung over, and they just hand out some magazines and tell you to make a construction paper collage of things you like. Now imagine that in video form, and you will get an idea of this half-assed monstrosity foisted upon the crowd. Pictures of Martin Luther King, protest marches, JFK, Gandhi, intercut with pictures of kids jumping rope, playing catch, dogs snagging Frisbees in their mouths. It was like being pummeled by a bakery-size sack of sugar. I'm pretty sure I have diabetes now. To cut through the treacle, my friends joked about what disturbing images we would put up there to mix it up a bit: Kent State, Vietnamese kids fleeing from napalm, Hiroshima. Such evil thoughts were the only thing that made the experience bearable. We all cope in our own way.

Soon after Frankie Valli abandoned Romper Room and returned to his Moldy Oldies, there was a slight commotion to our right. Blond Nutshell had recovered from her coma, and was up and dancing--topless. Actually, not strictly topless, since she merely rolled up her tube top enough to free her pendulous boobs, and restrained herself from removing the fabric all together. She danced along one of the park's paved walkways, quickly establishing a No Fly Zone within a 15-foot radius of herself. Two minutes later, when I dared gaze over in her direction to chart her progress, she was once again passed out on a bench, with her top still adjusted for maximum exposure.

We fled while Frankie Valli launched into "Grease," the better to avoid a stream of Baby Boomers dragging lawn chairs onto the F train. I went home knowing that some things a man simply can not know until he has experienced them. No one could possibly have prepared me for the horror that was Frankie Valli at Coney Island. I have done myself to prepare you, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation, but I know deep down that you will have to learn the way I did--through painful exposure.

I am constantly amazed by the happy veneer now attached to doo-wop. During PBS Pledge Time, they always show that awful Doo Wop Special, wherein 1/8 of the original members of a band sway back and forth listlessly while fat grandparents and near-grandparents clap off-beat. Watching this, you would think doo wop was the most harmless music ever devised, even if you couldn't hear its falsetto tones and oh-darling lyrics. But back in the day, doo wop was total JD music. I won't go so far as to say it was gangsta, but it was definitely the kind of music that, circa 1956, you woulda been listening to while you tried to mug somebody. Like hip hop, doo wop was born in the Bronx, sung on street corners. Rival gangs would compete against each other for who had the best sounding group, disputes that often ended with the flashing of blades. And then there's the sad end of so many doo wop singers--especially the black ones, who got their tunes stolen by crooked DJs and managers, were pushed into grueling touring schedules, pumped full of amphetamines to stay awake onstage, fed dope to keep them docile when offstage, and thrown the wolves when the musical tide changed. Not to mention the whole Payola scandal, whose sole purpose was to ruin Alan Freed, great doo wop/rock n' roll DJ, and the interracial interaction fostered by his big dances at the Brooklyn Paramount. When all is said and done, this cheery genre has a pretty sordid history.

Slowly, I am realizing just how many things I need two hands for--or need my right hand for, my dominant or Alpha Hand, if you will. You'd think my left hand would pick up the slack, be ready to hit the field when the starter went on the DL. But I think my left hand is less like an eager rookie and more like an aged veteran, who mostly sits on the bench to bat DH now and then. And he doesn't like getting in the game, if his performances thus far are any indication. Just switching all the vital items to my left-hand pocket (wallet, keys), and constantly reminding myself that they're there, has taken a Herculean effort. My continuing struggles with stowing change (see below) have multiplied ten-fold. I can't button my shirts. And I won't dwell on what this means for bathroom rites, but I assure you, it is not fun. Put it this way: I plan to eat lots of cheese and similarly constipatory foods, because for the next week or so, I'd like to take a dump as infrequently as possible.

I am reminded why I seldom go to the doctor, even when I'm truly sick. Going to the doctor leads to prescriptions, which ultimately forces a New Yorker to go to Duane Reade to get them filled. Ah, Duane Reade, the black hole of Gotham retail. Nothing can escape them. Yesterday, when I went to pick up my prescription, I was surrounded by a half dozen grumpy, scaly people like myself waiting for their meds. A tall, wispy man who kinda looked like a blond version of George Jefferson's English neighbor DEMANDED to be seen immediately, and demanded this in the least demanding voice I've ever heard. And as I watched a mini-hissy fit unfold between Bentley and the horizontally challenged Duane Reade employee, I wondered, who do I root for here? The snotty douche in the Polo, or the enormous woman who left the pharmaceutical counter unattended for 10 minutes while half a dozen people were waiting? I tried to kill time by wandering around, but have you ever tried to wander around a Duane Reade? It's like trying to wander around your own living room--you know where everything is, and there are no surprises in store. No, actually, it's much worse. In my living room, I could watch TV, or play Fake Baseball, or read a book that wasn't Doris Roberts or Dianetics or Lucky magzine. The wait became so intolerable that I actually went back to work, answered some emails, returned some phone calls, checked up on everything that went on hold when I went on my doctors appointment, and came back--and I still had to wait another 15 minutes for my order. Every second in Duane Reade is like an eternity in a dentist's office.

Since every Duane Reade is identical, in its complete lack of customer service savvy and general incompetence, how the hell do they stay in business? How did they conquer the NYC drug store market, when wandering into one on your lunch hour, just to buy a bag of Sun Chips, looks like you stepped onto Ellis Island circa 1900? Economics says that, in capitalism, the market steps in to fulfill demands. If something is ubiquitous, that surely means there is a large scale demand for it. Can there possibly be a demand for a place where trying to get your medication is a baffling Kafka-eque ordeal? Where the purchasing procedures resemble nothing so dismal as a Soviet bread line? Where everyone who works the registers was rejected by the DMV for being "too cheery"? If there was only one or two Duane Reades, you could chalk these things up to being an anomaly on the city's landscape. In fact, they might become legendary "how not to" examples of retail, like the Soup Nazi. But at last count, I think there are approximately 80 million Duane Reades in Midtown Manhattan alone. And every single one of them is a steaming pile. Explain that, Greenspan.

08.18

02:31pm: Wow, I'm having a fantastic birthday week. What really sucks is that every day that passes makes it less likely I will be able to milk the whole birthday thing for any sympathy (ie, free beer). First, I had to work until 7:30 on the day itself. Then, I had to work pretty damn late yesterday, too, nearly endangering my weekly bout of Holy Goddamn! (I made it to the studio just in time; clips will be posted later this evening) Now, I think I have leprosy.